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:
“But when we play the fool, how wide
The theatre expands! beside,
How long the audience sits before us!
How many prompters! what a chorus!”
—Walter Savage Landor (1775–1864)
“The flattering, if arbitrary, label, First Lady of the Theatre, takes its toll. The demands are great, not only in energy but eventually in dramatic focus. It is difficult, if not impossible, for a star to occupy an inch of space without bursting seams, cramping everyone else’s style and unbalancing a play. No matter how self-effacing a famous player may be, he makes an entrance as a casual neighbor and the audience interest shifts to the house next door.”
—Helen Hayes (1900–1993)
“Popular art is normally decried as vulgar by the cultivated people of its time; then it loses favor with its original audience as a new generation grows up; then it begins to merge into the softer lighting of “quaint,” and cultivated people become interested in it, and finally it begins to take on the archaic dignity of the primitive.”
—Northrop Frye (b. 1912)