# THE 1910s: PIONEERING INSIGHTS INTO AUDIENCES STUDIES

Frédéric Gimello-Mesplomb

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Frédéric Gimello-Mesplomb. THE 1910s: PIONEERING INSIGHTS INTO AUDIENCES STUDIES. Frédéric Gimello-Mesplomb. The Invention of the Spectator: How has Early film Spectatorship shaped Audience and Reception Theory. Selected Writings (1900s-1910s), Openculture Academic Publishing, pp.11-19, 2024, Media and Cultural Studies, 9791043111785. 10.5281/zenodo.14315753. halshs-04830093

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Foreword

THE 1910S: PIONEERING INSIGHTS INTO
AUDIENCES STUDIES

Frédéric Gimello-Mesplomb

This book endeavors to unearth the earliest texts, often over-
looked or obscure, about the discourse on cinema audiences. We
aspire to challenge the prevailing notion that views these pio-
neering texts from the pre-1920s era as rudimentary attempts,
primarily focused on either compiling lists of cinema spectators
or delineating their socio-demographic profiles. Contrary to this
perception, we aim to demonstrate that these initial writings on
audiences have significantly shaped subsequent endeavors, ulti-
mately contributing to establishing a comprehensive theory of au-
diences—a still delineating and defining field.

Drawing from key texts such as Elsaesser and Barker's *Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative* (1990), we argue that these early efforts were deeply intertwined with the immense social, economic and cultural transformations reshaping the fabric of modern life in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The rise of industrial capitalism, urbanization and new forms of industrial labor reorganized experiences of work and leisure in profound ways. Meanwhile,
technological innovations from mass printing to photography and
moving pictures gave birth to new mass media forms and con-
sumer products catering to emerging urban populations.

In this heady milieu of social flux, the introduction of cinema
sparked intense debate across many spheres. On one hand, movies
were embraced by some progressive reformers as a powerful poten-
tial tool for mass education, enculturation and even social control
of the working classes and new immigrant populations. Advocates
highlighted cinema's ability to transmit ideas, cultural values and
modes of behavior in an attractive entertainment format resonant
with modern urban sensibilities.

Simultaneously, moralists and conservative voices, as discussed
in Hansen's *Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film*
(1991), sounded alarms about movies' potential to corrupt and de-
grade public tastes, spur delinquency, and undermine traditional
social structures - a fear particularly potent when it came to their
impacts on children and lower classes seen as susceptible to such
influences. Gunning (1986) suggests that early cinema was a site
of negotiation, where audiences, filmmakers, and exhibitors inter-
acted to shape the medium's conventions and possibilities.

Musser (1990) further argues that the cinema was not just a pas-
sive receptacle for the audience's gaze, but an active participant
in the construction of meaning. The cinema was a space of social
interaction, where audiences could engage with the film and each
other, shaping the viewing experience and the film's interpreta-
tion. Staiger (2005) highlights the role of the cinema as a site of cul-
tural exchange. The cinema was not just a place to watch films but
a space where different cultures, classes, and genders could inter-
act, negotiate, and influence each other. This aspect of the cinema
experience, often overlooked in traditional film studies, is crucial
to understanding the complex dynamics of early cinema audiences.
This polarized context, situated within the birth of consumer
capitalism's reorganization of private and public life, spurred so-
ciological, psychological, cultural, and even anthropological in-
quiries into cinema as a vital new social force and emergent
moviegoing as a pattern of modern life.

Scholars across disciplines interrogated who was attending
movies, why they were drawn to this new mass experience, and
what psychological, ideological or behavioral effects could result.

Starting in the 1910s, pioneering academics explored this new
movie audience's social composition and motivations through
ethnographic methods, providing foundational studies of
moviegoing habits that would lead to more complex interdiscipli-
nary analyses during the subsequent peak periods of widespread
movie attendance in the 1930s-1940s. These later landmark studies,
such as the Payne Fund research, investigated how different types
of films influenced the psychology, identities, worldviews, and
even delinquent behavior of specific audience groups like children/
adolescents or marginalized communities. Such inquiries drew on
an interdisciplinary array of emergent theoretical frameworks
from sociology, psychology, anthropology, and nascent communi-
cation studies.

Notable examples include the works of sociologists like Her-
bert Blumer (1900-1987), as well as pioneering ethnographic stud-
ies by Emilie Altenloh and the Payne Fund Studies, conducted
in the 1920s-1930s, which examined the effects of movies on chil-
dren and adolescents from integrated psychological, sociological,
anthropological and emerging media effects perspectives (Jowett
et al., 1996; Butsch, 2000).

The very coining of the terms “sociology of the cinema” and “so-
ciology of audiences” by a handful of prescient academics in the
1910s reflected this inherently multidisciplinary approach to grap-
pling with the new phenomenon of movies as modern life. How-
ever, this initial caution in narrating disciplinary boundaries was
rapidly transcended as audience research quickly evolved in tan-
dem with the swiftly commercializing film industry's own eco-
nomic interests and the exigencies of the World War era. Early
scholars' keen observations regarding nuances of audience demo-
graphics, differing reception strategies, and the commercial impor-
tance of accurately studying and incorporating spectators' desires
into marketing, promotion and narrative strategies displayed a so-
phisticated understanding of the emerging spectatorial dynamics
at play.

Groundbreaking works like Emilie Altenloh’s “Zur Soziologie des Kino” (1914) mined Veblenian theories of status and leisure consumption, ethnographic methods from anthropology, and avant-garde aesthetic concepts like the “cinema of attractions” to anatomize working-class movie spectators’ experiences in Mannheim. This landmark study highlighted how movies provided an affordable escape into fantasy and insight into aspirational lifestyles, theorizing their power to both subvert and reinscribe class and gender norms. Influential texts like the British Cinema Commission Report (1917) consolidated moralistic, educational, psychological and national security perspectives in assessing the social impacts of movies and regulation through censorship (Rae, 2019; Staiger, 1992).

The overarching goal of this volume is to establish a critical in-
tellectual genealogy linking these early, interdisciplinary attempts
at theorizing the new subjective experiences and social dynamics
of movie spectatorship, to the subsequent canonical works and
robust conceptual frameworks advanced by pioneering film theo-
rists of the 1920s-1930s like Hugo Münsterberg, Rudolf Arnheim,
Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin and others. Too often, the
historiography of film theory leaps from recognizing Münsterberg's seminal 1916 psychological study “The Photoplay” to crediting the later Weimar and Frankfurt School philosophers with first grappling with cinema as a consequential modern art form worthy of rigorous aesthetics, perception theory and ideology critique.

However, this book seeks to recuperate and highlight the crucial, if underexplored, proto-theoretical groundwork and interdisciplinary foundation laid by the scattered writings, ethnographies, psychological studies, economic analyses and reception surveys produced in the 1910s by researchers across academia, industry and government. While inherently limited by their pragmatic aims and lack of coherent unifying frameworks, these hard-to-classify exploratory texts provided vital early framings of spectators' pivotal roles as active meaners in the cinematic experience. They advanced germinal theoretical concepts like the “attractions” model of viewer engagement, established methodologies for empirically studying audiences, and began articulating how movies could serve as dreamworlds channeling desires, shaping socialization, and constructing new cultural subjectivities beyond mere demographic categories.

A significant factor long obscuring these proto-theoretical contributions has been the decidedly uncanonical, “grey literature” nature of the primary sources - overwhelmingly comprised of doctoral dissertations, commissioned industry marketing surveys, educational pamphlets, local censorship rulings and limited-circulation reports by civic groups. Nevertheless, closely analyzing these first-hand records of how audiences were consuming, interpreting and even contesting movies in their initial decades reveals a rich genealogy of thought that should be engaged with and built upon by any comprehensive study of the dynamic
spectatorial phenomenon, rather than treated as a mere historical preface.

Over the past half-century, academic film studies and histories of cinema have produced an immense body of invaluable scholarship tracing the technological innovations, artistic movements, industry practices, and key works and figures underlying the evolutionary development of movies into a mature mass art form and commercial behemoth. However, the intellectual history charting the diverse origins and progression of theories grappling with the spectator's changing roles and relationships to those cinematic forms has remained relatively underdeveloped. This volume aims to enrich that parallel history of spectatorship theory as an interdisciplinary trajectory uniting disciplines like aesthetic philosophy, psychology, sociology, anthropology, and political economy around the pivotal social and cultural implications of movie-going as a modern experience.

This thematic inquiry engaged pioneering thinkers in tangential fields since the 1910s, accelerating after World War 1 as movies transitioned into a dominant mass entertainment tied to new practices of commercialization, marketing, and questions of propaganda. It necessarily intersected with economic interests surrounding the rapidly-consolidating and internationalizing film industry, the technological standardizations allowing for streamlined systems of production and distribution, as well as pressing institutional issues around regulating audience access and the need to empirically study movie impacts on attitudes and behaviors.

Well before figures like Münsterberg, Walter Benjamin, or the Frankfurt School thinkers, interdisciplinary scholars had initiated research programs theorizing moviegoing habits through ethnographies and surveys, studying Hollywood marketing's appeals to spectatorial desires, analyzing censorship rulings for how they con-
structed systems of representation, and attempting to map cin-
ema's ideological dimensions by examining its effects on specific
demographic groups. While limited by empiricist methods, lo-
calized data sets and lack of unifying paradigms, this scattered
proto-theory cumulatively displayed an emerging recognition that
movies necessitated understanding the spectator's critical role in
constructing experiences and meanings.

For instance, the pioneering works of figures like the poet Vachel Lindsay in “The Art of the Moving Picture” (1915) and Terry Ramsaye’s seminal history “A Million and One Nights” (1926) explored cinema’s artistic, cultural and industrial dimensions through the lens of emerging fan cultures and shifts in working-class leisure patterns enabled by Fordist capitalism - foreshadowing theoretical interest in ideology, reception and media’s socio-economic contexts (Koszarski, 1994; Staiger, 2005).

By excavating and interweaving these historically overlooked or
marginalized sources, the present volume reconstructs an archaeol-
ogy of early interdisciplinary efforts to account for the subjective
experiences, psychological dynamics and socio-cultural impacts
of cinema as an unprecedented media-technological phenomenon
provoking fascination and anxiety. Collectively, these writings by
academics, educators, social critics, journalists, policymakers, and
industry insiders laid the vital conceptual groundwork for the-
orizing the spectator’s pivotal positionality and meaning-making
role before such inquiries cohered into more sustained disciplinary
paradigms.

The book's three-part structure illuminates how interdiscipli-
nary strands coalesced into tendrils of audience theory:

* Part I chronicles the perceptual shift from conceiving spectators as passive recipients to recognizing their agency as
interpreters actively co-creating cinematic meaning, as de-
lineated through early script manuals, writings on visual
pleasure by figures like Vachel Lindsay, and psychological
studies of film's immersive effects on attention and identifi-
cation.

* Part II explores how public institutions' concerns around cinema's potential social impacts catalyzed initiatives to regulate and educate audience behavior, merging discourse strands from public policy, educational theory, cultural criticism, religious censorship advocacy and other normative spheres contending with movies' semiotic construction of representations.

* Finally, Part III's case studies showcase pioneering attempts at systematic, empirical audience research transcending purely demographic surveys, as in sociological fieldwork on moviegoing cultures and studies of films' ideological functions across marginalized communities. Works like Emilie Altenloh's pathbreaking "Zur Soziologie des Kino" and the exhaustive survey "The Audience" presaged central methodologies and theoretical paradigms of later reception studies and effects research.

By critically recuperating these buried genealogies, the book elucidates how scattered, uncoordinated lines of interdisciplinary inquiry coalesced into the intellectual foundations for theories of audiences, spectatorship, subjective engagement, and reception that remain vital for comprehending the viewers' pivotal role in constructing meanings, ideologies, and identities within evolving media experiences. While inherently rudimentary, limited by empiricist methods, and lacking unifying theoretical architecture, these pre-disciplinary investigations laid the conceptual bedrock
for grappling with cinema as a new modern phenomenon neces-
sitating new analytical frameworks for the spectator's meaning-
making agency as an active, interpreting subject within larger
social, economic, technological and ideological matrices. Recog-
nizing and building upon such overlooked proto-theoretical ori-
gins enriches understanding of the diverse, interdisciplinary roots
informing subsequent traditions of audience and reception theory
and media studies.

Notes:

• Elsaesser, Thomas, and Adam Barker, eds. *Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative*. London: BFI, 1990.

• Gunning, Tom. "The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde." *Wide Angle* 8.3/4 (1986): 63-70.

• Hansen, Miriam. *Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film*. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991.

• Musser, Charles. *The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907*. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.

• Staiger, Janet. *Media Reception Studies*. New York: NYU Press, 2005.