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REEL PLEASURES
SERIES EDITORS: JEAN ALLMAN, ALLEN ISAACMAN, AND DEREK R. PETERSON
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The thrills and spectacles offered by this new visual medium were not its only draw; equally enticing was the ability to vicariously travel to exotic places and explore new surroundings, to access news and information, and to learn about people and customs different from one’s own. Again, readers must appreciate the limited availability of other forms of mass media at that time. Prior to the 1920s, radio broadcasting was extremely limited even in Europe, and many people in the world did not gain access to wireless transmission or affordable receivers until well after World War II. Newspapers and magazines were relatively inexpensive sources of news and information, but most of the world’s population was not literate, making access to print media irrelevant to most. American journalists frequently referred to movies as “the workingman’s college” and lamented that more people got their knowledge of the world beyond their doorsteps from film rather than newspapers.65 In Tanzania too, the desire to learn about new people and places and see how others lived was one of the common reasons respondents cited when asked why they went to the show. An old Swahili maxim said, “Travel to learn/open your mind.” Film offered a slice of the traveler’s vision to those who never left home.
Movie houses also offered patrons access to modern splendors and delights. Inaugurated in Europe in the 1910s, picture palaces swept the globe in the 1920s as the industry sought to cultivate a “higher-class” audience and distance itself from the urban working classes who comprised the majority of viewers during its first two decades.66 Picture palaces evoked glamour and opulence, encouraging patrons to identify with the dream world on the screen.67 I grew up hearing stories from my great-aunt and great-uncle about their adventures dressing in their finest clothes and taking the streetcar downtown to the Tivoli Theater or the Chicago, while courting in the 1930s. For them, these were rare adventures, and their reminiscences focused on the exotic: the opulent theaters with their gilded ornamentation and antique statuary, as well as the extravagant use of electrical lighting—three thousand bulbs in the marquee that spelled Chicago and the largest chandelier in the world in the theater lobby—all of which was a world away from their working-class tenement and single-bulb daily life. Going to the movies allowed them not only to see films but also to physically and emotionally experience a life of affluence and plush indulgence, if only for a short time.
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