Lexington's Early Nickelodeons

Potamianos | Lexington's Early Nickelodeons George Potamianos University of Southern California Lexington's Early Nickelodeons Gregory A. Waller. Main StreetAmusements: Movies and Commercial Entertainment in a Southern City, 1896-1930. Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995. (342 pages. Cloth, $49.00) hen social historians conceptualize commercial amusements of the early twentieth century, their attention invariably turns to the ethnicworking classes in the largestAmerican cities. Mass culture, they argue, was a product of the dynamic socia! forces transforming work and leisure in cities like New York and Chicago. Yet through the 1920s, most Americans did not live and work in these large urban centers. Gregory Waller addresses this analytical oversight with an examination of commercial entertainment and, specifically, the role of moving pictures in Lexington, Kentucky from their initial 1896 exhibition to the coming of sound in the late 1920s. Ultimately, Waller calls into question the power of mass culture to obliterate class, racial, and ethnic boundaries. Unlike large American cities, Lexington was neither a major industrial center nor was it filled with foreign born immigrants. Here, mass culture emerged and flourished in a much different context because race mattered more than class and ethnicity. From 1896, Waller argues, moving picture exhibitions attracted audiences that cut across class, gender, and racial lines. The town's middle classes embraced the movies as a legitimate amusement from the start. Lexington's early nickelodeons were not the familiar dingy storefronts in ethnic neighborhoods but theatrical venues located in the town's central commercial district. Moreover, both Black and White residents attended the first film exhibitions together but in segregated seating arrangements. The inclusive nature of commercial amusements—according to Waller—informed local debates over film censorship in the 1910s. Unlike large metropolitan areas, Lexington's movie reformers were less concerned with making die movies "safe" for the middle classes than they were in protecting all local spectators from die pernicious influences of screen entertainment Conceptions that women and children flocked to the theaters on Sunday, for example, shaped local efforts to enact a Sunday closing law. Such efforts ultimately failed, as the city government favored placating local amusement entrepreneurs over catering to the censors. Commercial entertainment in Lexington may have attracted mass audiences, but the venues themselves stressed variety and diversity. The homogeneity that most historians identify with mass culture simply did not exist in Lexington. Movies rarely stood alone on the bill, as theater owners offered a plethora of regular cinematic attractions. Yet such heterogeneity was most prominent in Waller's discussion of Lexington's Black experience. The theaters in the center of town segregated their seating, but during the 1910s at least three Black owned establishments emerged which catered to neighborhood residents. These theaters booked films from the major distributors but also tried to obtain all Black productions that played to large audiences. Diversity even characterized Black approaches to mass culture. Waller uses the Birth ofa Nation controversy to illustrate that class strata among African Americans divided their interpretations of the dangers of cultural texts. Waller's study contributes greatly to our understanding of the complexity ofmass culture. It stands as a warning to - article continues page 105 102 I Film & History Regular Feature | Book Reviews seven lengthy chapters, the book concentrates a large variety of critical approaches (from history to sociology to feminism to ideological critique.) This is, at time, slightly distracting and confusing. The diversity currently required ofscholarly studies in film and literature is certainly intellectually healthy, but one would like to see more theoretical consistency between, for instance, Chapter 3 ("Women's Cinema") and Chapter 4 ("Literature into Film.") Chapters 5 ("Québec Film as a Mirror ofSociety: The Couple; The Family; Encounters with Death; Children") and 6 ("Québec Film as a Mirror ofSociety: Institutions) also reflect this whirlwind approach to theoretical analysis. There is no doubt that gender and politics are important ideological mooring-points for any valid discussion, but Pallister's categories often appear as somewhat arbitrary. This tends to turn her approach into a hodgepodge discussion of all and everything in which sections dealing with essential questions, such as the influence ofCatholicism on Québécois culture, should perhaps have been fleshed out. Incidentally, these categories also...