Historical behaviour of cinema audiences (was: tips for teaching)

From: Leo Enticknap <[email protected]>

> Mike Frank writes:
> 
> ...but i find myself wondering whether, or to
> what extent, an ability to focus on one thing for two hours is a
> necessary or important ingredient in the mix we call education . . .
> perhaps ADD is just considered a "disorder" because it contradicts a
> peculiar cultural habit developed in the western world in the 19th
> century . . . did shakespeare's rowdy audience's focus on those plays
> without distraction?

Interesting point. In relation to which, a few
years ago, I came across a comic record from 1926 in a secondhand store,
which appears to parody the culture of cinema attendance as it then
existed. I'd be interested to know if some of the behaviours it
describes (especially reading intertitles aloud) were widespread. About
the only other evidence I've found from the inter-war period (relating
to the UK, at least) relating to audience behaviour is from what one
might now label the religious right (the Robsons, Burnett, 'The Devil's
Camera', etc.), a little Mass Observation stuff and J.P. Mayer's two
books from the 1940s, which, though claiming to represent impartial
sociological studies, embody similar ideological assumptions. There are
also several references in histories of Third Reich cinema to the SS
having sent observers into theatres in large cities in order to observe
the responses to (and thus gauge the effectiveness of) major
state-sponsored proaganda films. I'd be interested to know if these
reports survive in significant quantities, and if they record audience
behaviour more generally. If so, comparing them to their British Mass
Observation counterparts would be interesting to say the least.

The
1926 record can be downloaded from
http://www.enticknap.net/leo/audio/mrsiggins.mp3 if anyone's interested.
This is a direct link to an MP3 file, meaning that you'll have to
download and save it first if your browser doesn't have an MP3 plugin
installed. Apologies for the excessive surface noise: the record was
clearly a favourite with its previous owner(s), and had been more or
less worn out by repeated playings with a steel needle before I got it.
For the transfer I used a .0030 stylus (i.e. slightly wider than is
normal for an early consumer electric pressing) and rolled off the
surface noise with an order 10 Cherbychev curve from 5KHz in Adobe
Audition afterwards: anything more aggressive than that and the dialogue
becomes hard to hear.

Leo


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