 First Movie Theaters: Nickelodeons
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A Nickelodeon in 1906.
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In European countries, notably in France, where pioneer work in moving pictures was even more advanced than it was in the United States, developments followed a quite different course. There was nothing comparable to the nickelodeon madness of this country. Instead of appealing to a mass market, the movies essayed the rôle of sophisticated entertainment.
Although foreign producers at first made far better films, their efforts to maintain artistic standards lost them the world-wide market that American producers eventually built up because their pictures had a universal appeal. American movies would never have become the outstanding popular entertainment they are to-day had foreign precedents been followed, while a limited market would also have prevented their attaining the technical perfection which has been Hollywood's real contribution to this world-wide amusement. Moving pictures became a leading feature of American recreation because they represented the culmination of the democratizing influences in the field of urban entertainment which had been at work for over a century.
The films shown in the nickelodeon era represented a striking advance over the flickering glimpses of dancing-girls first seen in the penny-arcade kinetoseopes. Practical difficulties were hard to surmount, and the demand for pictures often outstripped the ability of the producers to supply them, but there was steady progress. With the filming of longer pictures at the close of the century, incidents (man sneezing) had first been elaborated into themes (employer flirting with stenographer).
Further stretching out of the picture, to perhaps a thousand feet, then gave a universal popularity to endless variations on the chase motive. The cowboy hero began to track down the western bad man, the city sleuth to pursue bank-robbers and hold-up men. In the simplest form of the latter, the thief was chased through streets crowded with city traffic until the inevitable collision with the fat woman, who felled him with her umbrella and sat on him until the police arrived. The only rival of the chase in this early period was comic relief. The more subtle uses of a banana-peel, of a precariously balanced can of paint, of a small boy with a hose, were developed. The custard pie made its triumphant appearance.
Prize-fights and religious pictures were also introduced, two outstanding events in motion-picture progress being the filming of the Corbett-Fitzsimmons fight and the Oberammergau Passion Play. News and travel had a wide appeal. For Hale's Tours of the World the theatre was darkened, a whistle blew to announce the start of the trip, the seats began to sway through an ingenious system of rockers and brakes, and on the screen were flashed scenes of some distant part of the world taken from the rear platform of a speeding train.
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