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  • Marketing Modernity: Victorian Popular Shows and Early Cinema
  • Peter Bailey (bio)
Marketing Modernity: Victorian Popular Shows and Early Cinema, by Joe Kember; pp. viii + 296. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2009, £47.50, $85.00.

A well-known shot from early film is that of a rapidly approaching train engine viewed head on, looming ever larger until it appears to hurtle out of the screen to crash into the audience. Here was a sensational alienation effect produced by two of the most powerful vehicles of modernity and its dehumanizing technologies, a spectacle that contributed to the alarm and repulsion expressed by some commentators on the new medium. Not so the Times, which having duly noted the first public moving picture show at the Regent Street Polytechnic in 1896 in its detached role as journal of record, lapsed into silence over the new phenomenon for the next eight years. By then the new cinematograph was playing across the country to a mass audience untroubled by its alienating properties or the mix of scorn and indifference it met with from upper-class opinion. Joe Kember explores the success of the new industry in engaging its public; he considers the ways in which cinema knowingly incorporated styles of address and performance from the existing forms of popular entertainment that were the original sites for early film before the development of the purpose-built cinema—panoramic and magic lantern shows, the fairground, and, most prominently, the music hall and variety stage.

Panoramic and magic lantern shows in public halls offered the familiarizing rudiments of cinematic technology with commentary from professional lecturers. Their typically didactic but accessible style effected a bond between performer and audience, which exhibitors carried through in the commentaries that accompanied early film, providing a humanizing sound and discourse to what was of course a silent medium, almost sinisterly so. More congenially inflected was the address of the showman who accompanied fairground showings with the demotic patter of his historic trade. Kember deftly deconstructs the archetypal careers of Albert Smith, celebrity performer from the 1850s who remained a model for entertainers throughout the century, and the American visitor Artemus Ward, demonstrating that the personae of lecturer and showman might merge. Both Smith and Ward learned from P. T. Barnum how to sell their conceits and deceptions to an audience by inviting complicity, generating an agreeably conspiratorial knowingness that flattered both parties with the sense of a common competence in reading the world at large.

Knowingness was the definitive idiom of the late-Victorian music hall and its comic stars and, as Kember shows, a key discursive element in the emollient commentary accompanying early film showings. The particular milieu and programming of the music hall industry and its intertextuality with a larger world of popular cultural production is also germane to understanding the reception of early film. That first showing at the Polytechnic spoke to the educational mode of early film; its debut a few months later in West End music halls embedded it in the world of modern showbiz. And for all its later sentimentalisation as a deeply traditional form, contemporary music hall was feverishly modern. Spectacular presentations boomed the era's new technological wonders of the bicycle, motorcar, and aeroplane. The stars embraced the new inventions, photographing and interviewing in the popular press aboard the new machines (or on the telephone); they registered their stylish presence in the vanguard of modern living. On stage, humorous sketches showed ordinary citizens tangling with, negotiating [End Page 596] with, surmounting, and exploiting the hazards and opportunities of an increasingly technologized modernity. Film, we may conjecture, was only one of several competing wonders that were accommodated to the emotional and psychic economy of the modern consumer subject. Incorporated as they were in the variety format of the halls, early film shorts were part of a readily assimilated "world of miscellanies," to recall Michael Chanan's earlier foray into the territory in The Dream that Kicks: The Prehistory and Early Years of Cinema in Britain ([Routledge, 1996], 25). Miscellany as genre was typified by Titbits, the weekly magazine digest emblematic of the new journalism that, like the halls, served and constructed a modern mass...

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