The Vertigo Years

by Philipp Blom

  12

  1911: People’s Palaces

  Here comes the New Man, demoralizing himself with a halfpenny newspaper. - George Bernard Shaw

  Reality seems valueless by comparison with the dreams of fevered imaginations. - Emile Durkheim

  The search for archaic authenticity in art was the obsession of a brilliant few. Meanwhile, many millions of people rushed into the arms of an age of unprecedented comforts and excitements, of things previously beyond their reach. Intellectuals might dream of a rejuvenation of culture from its ancient roots, for ways out of capitalist society, but most of their contemporaries were looking for a way in: to get enough to eat, better lodgings, a decent job, a good wage, a suit, a car, a novel entertainment. And they got entertainment, nowhere more accessible than in the rapidly developing movie theatres that went from little backrooms and converted cafés and pubs to great palaces, temples of popular diversion.

  The greatest of these was a converted hippodrome in Paris, the 3,400-seat Gaumont Palace on the place de Clichy, which opened its doors to the awed public in 1911. The excitement was captured by Abel Truchet, a genre painter who specialized in Paris and Montmartre street scenes. Wonderful contrasts are at the heart of this image: the greatest sanctuary of film as the subject of an oil painting; the façade illuminated by electric lighting; the horse-drawn cabs unloading their passengers; the black of the streaming crowd against the sulphur tones of the brightly lit cinema. Through the large windows in front one can almost see the sky-blue decoration of the vast audience hall with its long curved rows of seats and its enormous balcony, its orchestra pit in which a full complement of musicians not only played during intermissions, but also accompanied the films, and with sound effects produced by specialized bruiteurs, or noise-makers.

  The façade of

  cheap dreams:

  the Gaumont

  Palace cinema

  in Paris, the

  largest in the

  world.

  Léon Gaumont (1864-1946) and his competitors, the Pathé brothers, were the biggest players in French cinema, and, in fact, the biggest worldwide producers of films and photographic equipment, as well as the owners of the largest chains of cinemas. Before the War, cinema - a newfangled entertainment that quickly developed an audience in the tens of millions - was almost exclusively French. Moving pictures had been invented and developed in several places, and in parallel: Edison’s kinetoscope had been presented in Chicago in 1893, the cinématographe designed by the brothers Lumière, and the bioscope constructed by the Skladanowsky brothers in Berlin had astonished their paying public in 1895. For a year or so, this new scientific attraction had thrilled those who had money enough to pay, but as more projectors and more reels were produced, these first cinemas had quickly become a working-class entertainment with an itinerant existence, setting up in cafés, music halls or fairground stalls to show short films for an entry fee of a few pennies. Film was a kind of animated magic lantern - a brief glimpse, a few minutes only, of people in movement, people like the workers (mostly women) seen streaming out of the Lumière factory in Lyon - hardly a subject of great drama, but an astonishing sight, nonetheless. Soon, humorous episodes, such as a man drenching himself by looking into a garden hose that suddenly comes to life, Edison’s Fred Ott’s Sneeze (1894) and magic tricks joined the repertoire. Other reels showed music hall performers, boxers or circus artistes, and for a decade or so, the ragtag world of cinema projection was regarded as a kind of vulgar reality peep show for the uneducated masses.

  The main attraction of these early movies had been movement itself, but the attraction soon wore off (prompting the enterprising Louis Lumière to the exasperated sigh, ‘Cinema has no future’) as the audience began to demand films with more plot, more elaborate décor, more spectacle, an entertainment beyond sprinklers and sneezes. To survive against competing fairground offers, film would have to become more exciting, and more expensive to produce, leaving the field to the few larger players with enough money to pay for a director, professional actors, an elaborate set, special effects and throngs of extras. Gaumont and Pathé-Frères had developed mainly as producers of technical equipment such as cameras, projectors and film, and had established a healthy dominance in a rapidly expanding market.

  These early silent movies seem curious to us with their theatrical, hammed-up acting, the frightening makeup, the obvious sets, and particularly because of the famously wooden, jerky movement with which early movie stars, troops and crowned heads stagger, puppet-like, across modern screens (almost inevitably accompanied by jolly ragtime piano). Even so, the sped-up, manic atmosphere of old films would have been familiar to contemporary audiences around 1910: while producers tended to slow down the rate even further in order to save precious film stock, projectionists and cinema owners often sped up their reels in order to cram in more people more quickly, and in the last showing many cinemas were notorious for their extra jerkiness, as bored staff cranked the handles faster to get home earlier. Very probably, the world as it appeared on the screen was a frenzied, overexcited affair, and even projectionists with the best of intentions would have to be artists in order to be faithful to their material. In an age before effective standardization, every film and every cameraman had his own, individual speed.

  The rise of Pathé-Frères, the larger of the two competitors, is exemplary of these early years. Having begun by importing Edison’s phonograph and then producing their own rip-off version of his kinetoscope, the wily brothers were selling 200 cameras and projectors per month as well as 12,000 metres of film per day in 1905. In 1906 they were already selling 40,000 metres of film a day, producing a dozen short movies a week at 75 copies each, and were in the process of creating a worldwide distribution network for their films. Pathé-Frères agencies opened in Moscow, New York and Brussels in 1904; in Berlin, Vienna, Chicago and St Petersburg in 1905; and in Amsterdam, Barcelona, Milan and London in 1906, and were soon spreading throughout the world along colonial routes to India, South-east Asia, Central and South America, and Africa. By 1908, 200 copies of each Pathé film were shipped to the United States alone, and an empire of 200 cinemas in France and Belgium ensured control of the home market. In or around 1910, cinema had become a million-franc industry with huge audiences and an even bigger potential. In the United States, the nickelodeons, cheap cinemas, had quickly become a popular phenomenon, an anarchistic cut-throat industry that took off practically overnight, as an American journalist observed in 1907:

  Three years ago there was not a nickelodeon, or five-cent theatre devoted to moving-picture shows, in America. To-day there are between four and five thousand running and solvent, and the number is still increasing rapidly. This is the boom time in the moving-picture business. Everybody is making money ... The nickelodeon is tapping an entirely new stratum of people, is developing into theatregoers a section of population that formerly knew and cared little about the drama as a fact in life ... Incredible as it may seem, over two million people on the average attend the nickelodeons every day of the year, and a third of these are children.

  The nickelodeon is usually a tiny theatre, containing 199 seats, giving from twelve to eighteen performances a day, seven days a week. Its walls are painted red, the seats are ordinary kitchen chairs, not fastened. The only break in the red color scheme is made by half a dozen signs, in black and white, NO SMOKING, HATS OFF, and sometimes, but not always, STAY AS LONG AS YOU LIKE …

  As might be expected, the Latin races patronize the shows more consistently than Jews, Irish or Americans. Sailors of all races are devotees …The enterprising manager usually engages a human pianist with instructions to play Eliza-crossing-the-ice when the scene is shuddery, and fast ragtime in a comic kid chase. Where there is little competition, however, the manager merely presses the button and starts the automatic going, which is as apt as not to bellow out, I’d Rather Two-Step Than Waltz, Bill, just as the angel rises from the brave little hero-cripple’s corpse.

&n
bsp; Europe had its own wave of small, fly-by-night cinemas, but this craze was already dying out. A new generation of movie theatres spread like wildfire. In 1912, London counted some 500 cinemas and Manchester 111, and 350 million movie tickets were sold annually in Britain alone. Even rural Hungary had 270 cinemas, 92 of them in Budapest, and European movies were watched as far away as Rangoon, Shanghai and Melbourne. ‘The age of cinema had dawned, a new cult, penetrating Europe and conquering the world,’ wrote René Doumic in 1913. This was the time of the rising empires, particularly Pathé-Frères and Gaumont, giants who lured audiences with longer, more spectacular films and with ever-bigger cinemas in which screenings were no longer anarchic and uncontrolled, but grand and grandly decorated people’s palaces, a communion with a world of glamour and of aspiration, with heroes down on their luck and stars in the social stratosphere. The 3,400-seat Gaumont Palace in Paris was the biggest and most spectacular of these.

  The last chapter has shown how artists reacted to this feeling of fragmentation in general, but there are also direct parallels between cinema and other arts. As nickelodeons were drawing in millions of curious punters every day, newspapers began to react to the demand for quick, punchy, graphic stories by publishing comic strips. Krazy Kat, the Katzenjammer Kids and the Teenie Weenies became regulars in American newspapers and developed their own expressive vocabulary.

  POW! Krazy Kat, one of the first cartoons, on

  the receiving end of a trademark brick.

  Starstruck

  The new breed of screen heroes soon captured the popular imagination, and none more so than Max Linder (Gabriel-Maximilien de Leuvielle, 1883-1925), the archetype of the French cheeky chappy, whose adventures were followed with rapt delight across the globe. The cheerful, mustachioed Max did his utmost to succeed in life, but he was surrounded by chaos. If he sat by the fire his shoes would go up in flames; his stiff collars would be impossible to do up; every situation into which he got himself would inevitably end in social ruin and hilarious embarrassment. In 1912 alone, Linder made thirty-four films, and this headlong rush of slapstick netted him a salary of one million gold francs.

  In the soup: the Frenchman Max Linder, the first movie star,

  in one of his films, 1907.

  This was stardom of a new dimension, and it functioned differently from old-fashioned fame. During the nineteenth century, if you wanted to partake of the legend of the great Sarah Bernhardt (1844-1923), la divine, who was already a star before the 1900s, you had to buy a ticket in an expensive theatre in Paris, or in the United States, St Petersburg or London, during one of her tours. If you wanted to see her after the turn of the century, still playing young roles at over sixty years, you only had to wait until one of her new movies came out and you could experience what was thought to be the summit of theatre - no matter whether you were in the capital, in a village in the Pyrenees, or in a back street in Lisbon, Cracow or San Francisco. Bernhardt’s fame originated in the nineteenth century, aided by her tempestuous performances on and off the stage, but it grew larger in the twentieth, fuelled mainly by her off-stage notoriety - and it had all the ingredients of fame that the fans expected.

  No star before Bernhardt (whose career apogee coincided with the appearance of mass-circulation newspapers and photographic reproductions such as postcards) had been as present in the public eye with personal details, idiosyncrasies, and all the delicious ingredients of private mythology. Bernhardt’s occasional habit of sleeping in her coffin (and having herself photographed in it) attracted as much comment as her exotic menagerie, which included, at different times, a lion, a lynx, a baby alligator which was accidentally killed by being fed too much champagne, a boa constrictor which committed suicide by swallowing a sofa cushion. The exotic colours of her animals, however, paled before the star’s notoriously slight figure and princely train of life, and before her countless and highly publicized affairs, pursued with almost missionary zeal, and later embroidered and further embellished through rumours and biographical accounts. ‘You know, she’s such a liar, she may even be fat!’ quipped the French novelist Alexandre Dumas fils. Among her scores of lovers were Edward, Prince of Wales, the artist Gustave Doré and the Italian novelist Gabriele d’Annunzio, the French writer Pierre Loti, and, as Robert Gottlieb put it, ‘the ultra-homosexual Robert de Montesquiou, Proust’s Charlus, whom she mischievously initiated into heterosexual sex, reducing him to twenty-four hours of vomiting’.

  The power of seduction: the many lovers of actress

  Sarah Bernhardt were legend; among them was

  Edward VII.

  These fleeting affairs were only minor roles played out between more substantial engagements, notably with the famously virile Jean Mounet-Sully (‘Up to the age of sixty I thought it was a bone,’ he was heard musing in his old age) of the Comédie-Française and with a handsome young Greek, Artistides Damala, whom she worshipped and married, and who cheated her out of her fortune. He might have ruined her altogether, had he not had the grace to die of a morphine overdose. Bernhardt mourned him as grandly and as theatrically as she had loved him. All this was part of the legend that had grown around Sarah Bernhardt, the great tragedienne, the great ambassadress of France, the incarnation of French art, of dramatic art, of womanhood of the most scandalous and grandest kind. Her personal motto had always been Quand-même, despite everything, very much the spirit in which she appeared as Hamlet in French on the London stage, prompting one of her harshest critics, George Bernard Shaw, to call her ‘a worn out hack tragedienne’. Shaw was part of a very small minority who did not admire her, writing acerbically, ‘I could never as a dramatic critic be fair to Sarah B., because she was exactly like my Aunt Georgina.’

  Unlike the aunt-hating Shaw, newspaper editors loved Sarah Bernhardt. Any story about her boosted circulation, as people obsessively wanted to know more about ‘their Sarah’, about her beauty, her makeup tricks, her predilection for trouser roles and her spectacular death scenes, her spend-thrift habits and devotion to her illegitimate son Maurice, the truth about her lovers - and later the tragedy of her amputated leg and her courage in reciting poetry to soldiers at the Front. Bernhardt was consumed by her millions of admirers - they devoured the newspapers and magazines that featured her, flocked to her films, bought photographs, fashion and fans associated with her, and wrote to her for autographs; they hung Alphonse Mucha’s famous posters of her as Hamlet or Gismonda on their walls. Long after she had conquered the stage, the divine Sarah was a media celebrity.

  Fame on the scale of a Max Linder or a Sarah Bernhardt was the symptom of a new kind of culture that was rapidly transforming both the public sphere and the nature of personal experience. Until the advent of mass communication, of cinema and gramophone, each and every experience had been unique. You could go to the opera or to a music hall, knowing that (in fact, not even questioning whether) tonight’s experience was unique and unrepeatable. Another evening would be different, with other vocal inflections, gestures and reactions. Life was a precious good slipping through one’s hands, and nothing in the world could stop time even for a moment. The new media changed people’s relationship to experience. Enrico Caruso, the miraculous tenor of the century, or the great soprano Amelita Galli-Curci might sing differently every night at New York’s Metropolitan Opera or at La Scala in Milan; they might be in form or not, might give a new nuance to a tried-and-tested interpretation. But on their gramophone recordings they sounded the same every time. Caruso’s spectacular 1907 recording of the aria ‘Vesti la giubba’ from Leoncavallo’s opera Pagliacci was the world’s first gramophone record to sell a million copies. A new market was born, and with it a new way of appreciating art. It was no longer necessary to be in an opera house, with all the social baggage that implied, to appreciate the singer. Instead of forking out for a ticket, you only had to buy a cheap disc. You could sit in your shirt sleeves and listen to the maestro at home, when you liked and as often as you liked - and every time the great man would be
in top form, and every time you would feel that familiar thrill at the same points in the recording. Cinema and recordings made experience repeatable.

  The tenor Enrico Caruso

  was the star of the

  Metropolitan Opera and

  produced the first record

  selling more than a million

  copies.

  Another innovation had a different, almost magic quality: it could stop time itself, freeze experience. First introduced in 1900, George Eastman’s simple Brownie camera, little more than a cardboard box with a lens, was sold for just one US dollar. The six-exposure films cost 15 cents. Within one year of their launch Kodak, the inventor’s firm, had produced and sold 150,000 of these little cameras, cheap and easy enough for a child to use. Professional photographers and well-heeled amateurs had been producing pictures for more than a generation, but the wave of cheap and simple cameras around 1900 changed the entire game. Everybody could now be photographed - not only formally, in a studio and surrounded by large drapes, painted backdrops and fussily decorated furniture to lean upon, but outside, during their daily lives, in the most casual and unexpected situations. We have already encountered the boy photographer Jacques Henri Lartigue and his love of speed, and tens of thousands of (mostly less gifted) amateurs shared his fascination. Moments that last but a flash were preserved here, their energy still vibrating in their hazy light. Reproduced in newspapers with editions of up to a million copies (in 1913, 16 million newspaper copies were printed every day in Germany alone), press photographs gave immediacy to realities otherwise so remote that they might as well be fairy tales. Photos made the world a smaller, faster place, and at the same time they carried the enchantment of time suspended in full flight.