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  • Movies at the Met?Space and Meaning in Early Film Screenings
  • Erin M. Brooks (bio)

In the summer of 1915, audiences streamed through the doors of Chicago's venerable Orchestra Hall, filing under the façade's frieze inscribed with the names of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, and Wagner. Upon taking their seats, attendees heard performances by twenty-five members of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, vocal soloists, and the hall's celebrated Lyon & Healy organ. The Orchestra Hall stage—redecorated as an "Italian garden" complete with greenery and fountains—featured a large screen, on which spectators gazed at Paramount feature films, travelogues, comedies, and Strand Topics of the Day. Advertised as "lending tone to cinema art," the interspersed film and music events attracted a mixed crowd, from Chicago high society to the city's middle class, from movie fans to dedicated music lovers.1

The 1915 Orchestra Hall photoplay season was not an anomaly. In the early twentieth century, opera houses and concert halls often cohabited with the emerging film industry. Alongside symphonies, chamber music, or opera, musical spaces hosted screenings of travelogues, educational pictures, single-reel story films, and feature attractions. From the Philadelphia Academy of Music, which hosted Henry Renno Heyl's [End Page 3] phasmatrope in 1870, to New York's Carnegie Hall, which screened travelogues on the main stage and feature films at the downstairs Carnegie Lyceum in the 1910s, the efforts to uplift motion pictures and the practicalities of sharing space prompted a rich and varied history of film screenings at early twentieth-century music venues.2 These cohabitations reveal complex bonds between space, social hierarchy, genre, and media, narratives shaped by distinctively American factors ranging from desires for cultural legitimacy to mechanisms of subsidizing musical institutions to national and local strategies of motion picture exhibition.

In this study I examine three such cases from the 1910s, an important era of expansion for both U.S. symphonic institutions and the motion picture industry.3 I begin with cinematic initiatives in Chicago's Orchestra Hall from 1914 through 1916; I then turn to a single motion picture screening in Boston's Symphony Hall in 1915, followed by multiple failed attempts to open New York City's Metropolitan Opera House to the movies from 1914 through 1918. In each case, a preexistent, prominent music venue's particular meanings shaped the successes (or struggles) of sharing space with the emerging motion picture industry. In spite of the carefully constructed cultural position of classical music in the United States—dominated by "sacralized" approaches to instrumental music and elite audiences for foreign-language opera—film made inroads into nearly all these spaces during the 1910s.

Screenings Onstage: Motion Pictures in Musical Venues

Mark Clague has argued that in the American context the "prime mover of culture is not the patron, composer, performer, or even listener, but rather the institution that brings these actors into relation to one another. … [T]hese institutions develop and propel a particular use of culture for a particular purpose in a specific place."4 As Clague's study of Chicago's Auditorium Building illustrates, institutions work in tandem with meanings generated by space and place. In the development of performance studies—shifting from textual analysis to performance events—Richard Schechner called attention to the relationship between the production and the "space(s) where it takes place."5 While musicological attention to place was once quite rare, music scholars across subdisciplines have drawn on philosophy, sociology, cultural geographies, and studies of urban spaces to forge a new attentiveness to the phenomenology of music as experienced in social space. Robert Fink described this as a shift from a paradigm focused on an "imagined historical time"—the "when" of music—to a paradigm attuned to the "where" of music.6 Considering this shared spatial zone in the early twentieth century helps us continue to jettison disciplinary constraints focused on texts and composers—or for film, an overemphasis on searching for surviving prints—recentering [End Page 4] instead on a complex network of space, institution, genre, performance, and audience experience and interpretation.7

Theater historian Marvin Carlson has discussed how every element of a theatrical space communicates meaning, from lobbies...

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