Hollywood in the Neighborhood. Historical Case Studies of Local Moviegoing

by Kathryn H. Fuller-Seeley
University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, 2008
276 pp. Trade, $60; paper, $24.95
ISBN: 978-0-520-23067-5; ISBN: 978-0-520-24973-8.

Reviewed by Jan Baetens
University of Leuven

jan.baetens@arts.kuleuven.be

This collection of historical case studies, carefully edited and usefully completed by a well-informed introduction and two more theoretical contributions that open and close the volume, is an important contribution to the new tendencies in audience research in film studies. After the structuralist period in which film had been studied as ‘text’ and the spectator had been considered a universal and disembodied figure (this was how the famous ‘apparatus theory’ built up an ahistorical and widely generalizing reflection on the experience of moviegoing), film studies have been rediscovering the ‘real’ spectator for more than two decades now, and this shift has been as important as the rediscovery of the so-called ‘early cinema’ (also called the cinema of attractions).

Yet the historical approach of historical practices of movie exhibition and film viewing, that combine in a certain sense these two major methodological and theoretical changes, does much more than just linking the poetics of the first cinema and the sociological approach of the audience. The focus put on the way cinema has found its place in ‘local’ communities, i.e. smaller non-urban communities, in the first decades of the cinema, challenges in a very radical way all we thought we know about moviegoing in that period. Corollarily, and most importantly, it shatters also one of our deepest convictions on the cultural meaning of cinema, namely the fact that cinema is mainly an expression of modernity, both as a consequence and as a trigger of modernization.

There are of course many reasons why one should stick to this ‘modernity theory’: first, the practices of filmmaking itself, with Hollywood catering in the first place to the urban audience that generated the most immediate profits (the first-run theatres were all located in the bigger cities, and it was the box-office of these theatres that made the success of a movie); second, the influence of a certain number of film theoreticians like Walter Benjamin who emphasized the role of cinema in modernization of urbanized modernity; and thirdly, but not least, the rather deceptive way in which the U.S. census of the first decades of the 20th Century made a distinction between rural and urban communities (as soon as a community gathered more than 2.500 people, the government statistics labelled it as ‘urban’, with all the sociological and cultural distortions that such a qualification entails).

What this and similar collections show us instead (and it should be stressed that most of the contributors to this volume have realized already very important work in the field), is that the traditional union of cinema and modernity can no longer be maintained. Not only because moviegoing was not a dominantly urban practice (people living in the country and in small towns have had from the very beginning of the new medium access to film), but also and most significantly because cinema was not necessarily experienced as something that shattered tradition and fostered modernization and urbanization of small town life. Obviously, modernization was an aspect of film exhibition and moviegoing, but all the studies of Hollywood in the Neighborhood proves that the relationship between the new medium and older forms of life was much more complex than film theory and even film history have always believed.

The cultural studies approach of moviegoing in this period has demonstrated since the 1990s that the notion of a unified urban audience is a myth: gender, ethnic, racial and other differences played a crucial role in the reception of cinema. What this collection lays bare is that is now high time to take into account the most forgotten of all audiences: the public that was drawn to the movies in travelling cinema exhibitions, in small town theatres, in church halls, and so on. First of all, Hollywood in the Neighbourhood shows that even in quantitative terms this public was not to be neglected. Second, it makes obvious that this small town public was no less fond of the cinema than the urban one (an important remark, for many scholars tend to overstress the resistance to cinema in non-urban communities, for instance for religious reasons); third, it also and most convincingly argues that the big difference between urban and non-urban film culture was the community aspect: local exhibitors as well as local moviegoers considered the cinema as an element of community building, the first trying to offer a certain number of services hold in great esteem by the local public, the latter assessing the films shown in the theatres or elsewhere correspondingly to their own values.

If diversity is now a key word of cultural studies – and the study of culture and society in general–, this collection makes very clear that the meaning of this word cannot be reduced to the more ‘urban’ triad of class-sex-race. Although racial, sexual, and class differences are of course also very present in the film culture of local places and small towns during the first decades of the cinema (whose specific forms continued in some areas till the 1940s or 1950s), Hollywood in the Neighbourhood makes a strong plea for another and no longer dismissed form of diversity: that of the filmgoers of the theatres on Main Street.