Make It 1911 Again

I long had this bug in my head that said nickelodeon shorts
were hopelessly primitive, and so were folks that went to see them. The image
is persuasive, dirty sheets or chipped paint upon walls they watched, stench of revolving unwashed come to be loud or sleep off disease/drunkenness. Fewer, it seems, rhapsodized for a “Golden Age” of nickel theatres. Maybe they weren't so nostalgia-soaked as us, being buffeted by constant change that kept recall at bay. Myth suggests no one but then-outliers liked
flickers. To that, I now come much enlightened, thanks to You Tube and
elsewhere exam of 1911, a time not altogether spent bending backs over a plow
until typhoid or whooping cough took you out. Survival was still an only coin
of the realm for most, but what of Little Old New York as captured by a Swedish
camera crew that year, footage kept pristine since, and lately upscaled by You
Tube magicians to 4K at 60 frames per second, subdued color and sound effects added
for the trip back. I’ve never seen historic footage so vivid, nor arrived at such
understanding of lives lived modern during what too long was thought a fallow, at least deprived, period (tough times, and then down goes the Titanic). Here is a closest to stepping among these people and seeing how
they lived, fit humbling to knock me off a century-later high horse. Watch this
enough and you may merge a la Twilight Zone into time past and view from the
screen a formerly smug self who thought times were in all ways improved since
then.


I wanted to look at the 1911 tour several times and then watch a film
from that year, my choice a Griffith-Biograph called The Battle (a Civil War reel), these toward understanding what kind of people were
going to movies and what sort of circumstance at least some of them lived in. Gotham
at the time had streetcars plenty, elevated rail service, motor vehicles passing
alongside horse drawn carriages. I was surprised by how here-and-now they
seemed, a reaction helped by amazing clarity of these images and addition of color,
latter muted to pleasing and authentic effect. There was unhurried grace to 1911,
at least it seemed so with men in straw boaters, all wearing suit/tie, women kitted with glorious hats and some with parasols. I waited for Judy and Fred to walk down
the avenue and join their Easter Parade. We could envy the era for sights like
these alone, but all is not quaint. This is life racing toward what it would
become for us, startling to realize that here too were folks going to nickelodeons well along a takeover of leisure hours spent. I sat looking at this passerby parade knowing most of them had at least sampled movies. 1911 was fifteen years into public-attended shows. Infancy were arguably behind the picture industry. Single reels, sometimes two, were
still the norm, features waiting around a corner. Informality of filmgoing helped
the habit along. You could go and stay, make it a day, or pass a lunch hour,
relax from shopping or having your hat blocked. Shorts being short effected a
same needle-drop mentality as vaudeville, a dud segued to something good because nothing lasted long. Here were penny arcades grown up, with everyone sat before a
same strip of celluloid. That drew crowds unprecedented, and the more movies
improved, the more intense loyalties got. Each year was a vault over ones before. Critics disdainful of film knew they would
have to take it seriously … and soon. Companies like Biograph were delivering
goods to command attention, and woe betide a press ignoring them, lest you become irrelevant
as competing entertainments soon would be.


Trade paper columnists were earliest to regard films
seriously. Many moved from industry boosting to individual review of reels
thought a humblest of fare even by those who made them. Frank Woods was one who
early-understood the power of film. He wanted and got his own New York Dramatic Mirror
column, starting in 1909. Within a year he’d know a “strange power of
attraction possessed by motion pictures.” Woods observed the “impression of
reality the motion picture exerts on the minds of the spectators, an influence
akin to hypnotism or magnetism by visual suggestion.” Woods took his position a
bold step further by citing this influence as “more powerful … than is possible
in any sort of stage production or in printed fact or fiction.” As Woods saw
it, and few followed the “mental attitude” of early screen spectators so
closely, there was more than casual viewing at play, the average nickel patron “looking at what his mind accepts as reality.” So far as Woods saw it, the
stage could not, would never, exert such impact. I like how he avoids arguing for film as art, proposing it instead as a conductor for emotions unique to this developing format. By classifying the appeal of movies as magic,
which certainly it was, still is, Woods relieved himself of further duty
to explain broader meaning of what audiences saw in 1911. Maybe we would have been better off leaving it at that rather than strangulating over "art" aspect of movies. Woods backed his radical position by writing
scenarios for the Biograph Company he so admired, eventually becoming a close
associate to D.W. Griffith. His foresight stood Woods well, Griffith’s wife
reporting years later that his accumulated wealth enabled purchase of an entire
California town, called “Linwood,” after Mrs. Woods. Frank Woods clearly had
realities figured out far ahead of most.



The Battle was sure instance of movies as magnet, reality of Civil
warring shown full on and outdoors as opposed to a stage thing that had to be
accepted on imagined terms. D.W. Griffith directed The Battle for Biograph. Many
thought it his best so far and remembered it so right up to opener day for The
Birth Of A Nation. In fact, The Battle was tabloid warm-up to Birth, with not a
little of power fuller realized by the four years later epic. I watched
The Battle and visualized customers stepping off trams, or maybe a horseless
carriage, to attend. Films had matured by 1911, were more
ambitious. The Battle serves its title with big scale action, constant movement
in foregrounds, plus more to the rear of principal focus, so that eyes are
engaged by multiple levels of drama. Almost offhand is troop marching and
parades beyond a fence where Blanche Sweet says farewell to her
departing sweetheart, Griffith spectacle incidental to the
narrative rather than dominating it. If someone told me Matthew Brady shot
newsreels in addition to his Civil War still photos, I might swear it was him
behind Griffith’s camera, the whole thing happening in 1863 rather than recreated for 1911. The Battle turns on events unique to our war between
states, such as men gone to fight a foe mere miles away, or closer. A highlight sees Blanche Sweet confronted by combat right off her front porch,
the man to whom she has pledged troth fleeing for refuge behind Sweet skirts. Balance
of action is him clearing the yellow stain through a heroic mission to secure
ammo. The Battle tells a fast, crisp story, and movement is profuse, staying in
no one place too long. This was the kind of subject that justified nickelodeons
raising admissions to a dime, or more, at venues less rattle-trap than real
theatres they would become. Product at a level of The Battle made such upgrades
supportable, movies pulling up even with advances other aspects of modern life
were achieving. So I got much from my You Tube visit to 1911, and recommend the
twenty or so minutes to anyone inclined to make a similar jump. “A Trip Through
New York City in 1911” is here, and The Battle, also HD and very nice despite a
bar code in the frame, is here.