Audience
Early writers on American cinema history assumed that audiences at nickelodeons were primarily working-class people who could not afford a higher ticket price. More recent historians, however, claim the importance of middle class audiences throughout the nickelodeon era and into the later 1910s. At the heart of the image of nickelodeons in traditional histories is the belief that movies were a proletarian amusement and that the "proper" middle-class stayed away until after World War I. This idea is reflected in Lewis Jacobs' 1939 survey, where he writes: "Concentrated largely in poorer shopping districts and slum neighborhoods, nickelodeons were disdained by the well-to-do. But, the workmen and their families who patronized the movies did not mind the crowded, unsanitary, and hazardous accommodations most of the nickelodeons offered." In his recent research, however, Robert C. Allen has debated that movies attracted a middle-class audience as illustrated by the location of earlier movie theaters in traditional entertainment districts. Allen writes that "In terms of social class, more nickelodeons were located in or near middle-class neighborhoods than in the Lower East Side ghetto."
Read more about this topic: Nickelodeon (movie Theater)
Famous quotes containing the word audience:
“The Taylor and the Painter often contribute to the Success of a Tragedy more than the Poet. Scenes affect ordinary Minds as much as Speeches; and our Actors are very sensible, that a well-dressed Play has sometimes brought them as full Audiences, as a well-written one.... But however the Show and Outside of the Tragedy may work upon the Vulgar, the more understanding Part of the Audience immediately see through it, and despise it.”
—Joseph Addison (1672–1719)
“There are some who speak well and write badly. For the place and the audience warm them, and draw from their minds more than they think of without that warmth.”
—Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)
“We are born at the rise of the curtain and we die with its fall, and every night in the presence of our patrons we write our new creation, and every night it is blotted out forever; and of what use is it to say to audience or to critic, “Ah, but you should have seen me last Tuesday”?”
—Michéal MacLiammóir (1899–1978)