Silent film era and marginalised spectatorship

What did ‘a night at the movies’ mean to audiences during the 1920s? What sort of pleasures did cinema offer to star-struck fans removed from us now by more than a century? Film historians have been asking these very questions, with increased frequency, since the late 1990s. This is true especially when it comes to the habits of early cinemagoers in the Global North, and in the United States more specifically. At times, this increased scholarly interest generated controversy: the identity of the early moviegoers – their economic stature and linguistic ability – has been debated and, at times, contested. Historians such as Judith Thissen (1999, 2014), Melvyn Stokes and Richard Maltby (1999) and Giorgio Bertellini (1999, 2005), among others, discussed the myriad of ways in which European immigrants in American metropolises made sense of their adopted country, and the role that the movies played in navigating their urban surroundings. By 1908, American reformers saw photoplays as a ‘universal language’, capable of communicating with foreign residents who came to the United States with little or imperfect English (Abel 1999, 120–121; Staiger 1992). If these new populations could immerse themselves in the moving pictures, they could also be taught lessons about civic duty and the Protestant values. Essentially – or so the story went – cinematic apparatus had the potential to serve as a tool to assimilate various groups into the ideal of American society. This narrative has been incorporated, to great effect, into the first generation of film histories. In fact, it was central to Lewis Jacobs’ (1939, 12) first large-scale study of the American film industry: