Global Cinema

Series Editors Katarzyna Marciniak Department of English Ohio University Athens, OH, USA

Anikó Imre Division of Cinema and Media Studies University of Southern California Los Angeles, CA, USA

Áine O’Healy Department of Modern Languages and Literatures Loyola Marymount University Los Angeles, CA, USA The Global Cinema series publishes innovative scholarship on the transnational themes, industries, economies, and aesthetic elements that increas- ingly connect cinemas around the world. It promotes theoretically transformative and politically challenging projects that rethink film studies from cross-cultural, comparative perspectives, bringing into focus forms of cinematic production that resist nationalist or hegemonic frameworks. Rather than aiming at comprehensive geographical coverage, it fore- grounds transnational interconnections in the production, distribution, exhibition, study, and teaching of film. Dedicated to global aspects of cinema, this pioneering series combines original perspectives and new meth- odological paths with accessibility and coverage. Both ‘global’ and ‘cinema’ remain open to a range of approaches and interpretations, new and traditional. Books published in the series sustain a specific concern with the medium of cinema but do not defensively protect the boundaries of film studies, recognizing that film exists in a converging media environ- ment. The series emphasizes a historically expanded rather than an exclusively presentist notion of globalization; it is mindful of repositioning ‘the global’ away from a US-centric/Eurocentric grid, and remains critical of celebratory notions of ‘globalizing film studies.’

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15005 Daniela Treveri Gennari • Danielle Hipkins Catherine O’Rawe Editors Rural Cinema Exhibition and Audiences in a Global Context Editors Daniela Treveri Gennari Danielle Hipkins School of Arts and Humanities Department of Modern Languages Oxford Brookes University University of Exeter Oxford, UK Exeter, UK

Catherine O’Rawe School of Modern Languages University of Bristol Bristol, UK

Global Cinema ISBN 978-3-319-66343-2 ISBN 978-3-319-66344-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66344-9

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018957010

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Cover credit: Russell Kord / Alamy Stock Photo

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Contents

1 Introduction: Rural Cinema Exhibition and Audiences in a Global Context—Not Just a Slower Transition to Modernity 1 Daniela Treveri Gennari, Danielle Hipkins, and Catherine O’Rawe

Part I Space, Place and Cinema-Going Experiences 15

2 The Use of Geographical Categories in Cinema Studies: An Ontological Examination 17 Elisa Ravazzoli

3 Kanda’s Grounds and the Ritual Experience of Rural Cinema in Narok, Kenya 31 Solomon Waliaula

4 The Business of ‘Wholesome Entertainment’: The Mascioli Film Circuit of Northeastern Ontario 47 Jessica L. Whitehead

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Part II Early Cinema, Itinerant Showmen and the Lure of Modernity 71

5 Spaces In-Between: The Railway and Early Cinema in Rural, Western Canada 73 Paul S. Moore

6 Rurban Outfitters: Cinema and Rural Cultural Development in New Hampshire’s North Country, 1896–1917 91 Jeffrey Klenotic

Part III Oral Histories and the Social Experience of Rural Cinema-Going 115

7 Oral Memories of Cinema-Going in Rural Italy of the 1950s 117 Danielle Hipkins, Daniela Treveri Gennari, Catherine O’Rawe, Silvia Dibeltulo, and Sarah Culhane

8 Belgian Film Culture Beyond the Big City: Cinema-Going in the Provincial and Rural Periphery of Antwerp 135 Philippe Meers and Daniël Biltereyst

9 The Social Experience of Going to the Movies in the 1930s–1960s in a Small Texas Border Town: Moviegoing Habits and Memories of Films in Laredo, Texas 155 José Carlos Lozano, Philippe Meers, and Daniël Biltereyst

10 The Social Geography of ‘Going Out’: Teenagers and Community Cinema in Rural Australia 171 Karina Aveyard Contents vii

Part IV Shaping Cinema Audiences for Educational and Ideological Purposes 185

11 Projecting Modernity: Sol Plaatje’s Touring Cinema Exhibition in 1920s South Africa 187 Jacqueline Maingard

12 Controlling Rural Cinemagoing by Appropriating a Film Format: The Catholic Adventure of ‘Pathé-Rural’ in Interwar France 203 Mélisande Leventopoulos

13 UNESCO, Mobile Cinema, and Rural Audiences: Exhibition Histories and Instrumental Ideologies of the 1940s 219 Ian Goode

14 Reconsidering Post-Revolutionary Cultural Change: Rural Film Projection Teams in Shaanxi Province, 1949–1956 237 Matthew D. Johnson

15 Silence under the Linden Tree: Rural Cinema-Going in Czechoslovakia in the 1950s and 1960s 261 Lucie Cesálková̌

Part V Film Programming Strategies, Exhibition Practices and Reception 281

16 Language and Cultural Nearness: Film Programming Strategies and Audience Preferences in Big Cities and Small Towns in the Netherlands 1934–1936 283 Clara Pafort-Overduin viii Contents

17 Post-war Thai Cinema: Audiences and Film Style in a Divided Nation 303 Mary J. Ainslie

18 Youth, Leisure, and Modernity in the Film One Summer of Happiness (1951): Exploring the Space of Rural Film Exhibition in Swedish Post-war Cinema 325 Åsa Jernudd

19 Cine Centímetro: Memories and Cinemagoing Practices in an MGM Replica Cinema in the Rio de Janeiro Countryside 339 Talitha Ferraz

Index 357 Notes on Contributors

Mary J. Ainslie is Assistant Professor in Film and Media at the University of Nottingham Ningbo Campus, China. Her research specialises in culture and media throughout the Asia region, with specific emphasis upon Thailand and Malaysia, as well as the wider intercultural links between the East and Southeast Asia regions. She has published in numerous journals and edited collections and has received funding for projects from a variety of international organisations. Karina Aveyard is a University of Sydney postdoctoral research fellow and senior lecturer in the School of Art, Media and American Studies at the University of East Anglia, Norwich. She is author of Lure of the Big Screen: Cinema in Rural Australia and the United Kingdom (2015) and has published numerous journal articles on contemporary rural cinema exhibition and audiences. Daniël Biltereyst is Professor in Film and Media Studies at the Department of Communication Studies, Ghent University, Belgium, where he teaches film and media history and media studies. His work deals with media and the public sphere, more specifically with screen culture as sites of censorship, controversy, public debate, and audience’s engage- ment. He is editor of various edited volumes and special issues, including recently Silencing Cinema (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, with Roel Vande Winkel), Moralizing Cinema (2015, with Daniela Treveri Gennari), and a special issue on oral histories and cinema-going for Memory Studies (2017, with Annette Kuhn and Philippe Meers). He is working on The Routledge

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Companion to New Cinema History (2018, with Richard Maltby and Philippe Meers) and Mapping Movie Magazines (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, with Lies Van de Vijver). Lucie Česálková was Assistant Professor at the Department of Film Studies and Audiovisual Culture of Masaryk University, Czech Republic, and is head of the National Film Archive Research Department, and chief editor of the peer-reviewed film journal Iluminace. Her research focuses on the history of film exhibition and cinema-going, and the history of useful media about which she wrote a monograph, and published a number of studies in both Czech and foreign journals (Iluminace, Film History, The Moving Image, Memory Studies) and anthologies. She is engaged in research projects about Czechoslovakian screen advertising, multimedia theatre Laterna Magika, and trends in contemporary reality- based media. Sarah Culhane is a PhD graduate in Italian studies from the University of Bristol, UK. Her PhD, Beyond ‘belle e brave’: Female Stars and Italian Cinema Audiences (1945–1960), combines the disciplines of audience studies and star studies to analyse the audience-star relation as evidenced among Italian cinema-goers in the post-war period. She is working as a research assistant on the ‘Italian Cinema Audiences’ follow-on project, ICAMAP (2017–2018). She holds an honours degree in Italian and Film Studies from Trinity College Dublin, Ireland (2010) and a Master’s in Italian Studies from University College Dublin, Ireland (2013). Silvia Dibeltulo is Senior Lecturer in Communication, Media and Culture at Oxford Brookes University, UK, where she previously worked on the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)-funded ‘Italian Cinema Audiences’ project. She is part of the BA/Leverhulme-funded project ‘European Cinema Audiences’, in collaboration with the universities of Leicester, UK, and Ghent, Belgium. Her work centres on film genre theory and history, audience and reception studies, cinema heritage, and digital humanities. Her publications include the article Family, Gang and Ethnicity in Italian-themed Hollywood Gangster Films, which appeared recently in Film International (2015) and the book chapter Old and New Irish Ethnics: Exploring ethnic and gender representation in P.S. I Love You (in Ireland and Cinema: Culture and Contexts, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). Her co-edited volume Rethinking Genre in Contemporary Global Cinema is forthcoming (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xi

Talitha Ferraz is Assistant Professor at the Escola Superior de Propaganda & Marketing (ESPM) in Rio de Janeiro and head of the Ways of Seeing Research Group (ESPM-CNPq). Simultaneously, she serves as associate researcher at the Coordenação Interdisciplinar de Estudos Contemporâneos (CIEC-UFRJ) and the Laboratório de Estudos de Memória Brasileira e Representação (LEMBRAR-ESPM). She holds a PhD in Communication & Culture from the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), Brazil, with a doctoral internship at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal. Talitha Ferraz did postdoctoral research at the Centre for Cinema and Media Studies of the Ghent University (CIMS-UGent), Belgium, between 2015 and 2016. Her investigations are focused on topics such as media and nostalgia, cinema-going memories, and cinema reopenings. She is author of the book A segunda Cinelândia Carioca (2012). Ian Goode is Lecturer in Film and Television Studies at the University of Glasgow, UK. His research interests concern the relationship between 16 mm films and television, histories of non-theatrical, rural cinema-going and the specificities of its exhibition and experience, community cinema, and those other cinemas that surround the permanent cinema of 35 mm. He is Principal Investigator of the AHRC-funded project: The Major Minor Cinema: the Highlands and Islands Film Guild (Scotland 1946–1971). Danielle Hipkins is Associate Professor in Italian Studies and Film at the University of Exeter, UK. She is author of Italy’s Other Women: Gender and Prostitution in Postwar Italian Cinema, 1940–1965 and co-editor of Prostitution and Sex Work in Global Cinema: New Takes on Fallen Women. Åsa Jernudd is Senior Lecturer at the Department of Media and Communication Studies at Orebro University, Sweden. She has published on cinema space and film programming in the early film period and more recently on memories of cinema-going in a rural, post-industrial region in Sweden and on film exhibition in rural areas of Sweden in the post-war period. Her latest article was written with Mats Lundmark (2017), Cinemagoing in Sweden in the 1940s: Civil society organisations and the expansion of rural film exhibition, in Thissen, J. and Zimmermann, C. (eds.) Cinema Beyond the City: Small-Town and Rural Film Culture in Europe (Palgrave Macmillan/BFI, 2016). Matthew D. Johnson is Head of School, School of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Taylor’s University, Malaysia. His academic research has focused on China’s propaganda system, transnational aspects of US-China relations, xii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS war and society, early film culture, and independent documentary film-mak- ing. He is a co-founder and director of The PRC History Group. Jeffrey Klenotic is Associate Professor of Communication Arts at the University of New Hampshire, USA. He is a founding member of the History of Moviegoing, Exhibition and Reception (HoMER) project and the principal developer of Mapping Movies (http://mappingmovies. com), a web-based Geographic Information System for exploring cinema’s social and spatial history. Mélisande Leventopoulos works in the Film Studies Department of University Paris 8, France. A shortened version of her PhD dissertation entitled Les catholiques et le cinéma La construction d’un regard critique (1895–1958) has been published in 2014 by Rennes University Press, France. She has published numerous articles in French academic publications and has contributed to Moralizing Cinema Film, Catholicism and Power edited by Daniël Biltereyst and Daniela Treveri Gennari (2015) and to Cinema Beyond the City Small-Town & Rural Film Culture in Europe edited by Judith Thissen and Clemens Zimmermann (Palgrave Macmillan/ BFI, 2016). José Carlos Lozano is a media and communication researcher affiliated to Tecnológico de Monterrey, Monterrey, México. He is a fellow in the Mexican Academy of Sciences and a research fellow level 3 at the Mexican National System of Researchers. He is also affiliated to Texas A&M International University, USA. Jacqueline Maingard is Reader in Film at the University of Bristol, UK. Before moving to Bristol in 1998, she taught film and television at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. She is the author of South African National Cinema (2007) and has published in a variety of academic journals including Screen, Journal of Southern African Studies, and Memory Studies. She has also published in several volumes, most recently in African Filmmaking: Five Formations (ed. Harrow, 2017). Her research is on cinema’s globalisation in South Africa from the 1920s to 1960s and the cinema-going experiences of black audiences. She is an honorary research fellow at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. Philippe Meers is Professor in Film and Media Studies at the University of Antwerp, Belgium, where he is Head of Department and Deputy Director of the Visual and Digital Cultures Research Center. He publishes NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xiii regularly on historical and contemporary film culture in venues such as The Journal of Popular Film and Television, Screen, Communications, Javnost/The Public, Critical Studies in Media Communication, Participations and in readers such as The Contemporary Hollywood Reader (2009). With Richard Maltby and Daniël Biltereyst, he edited Explorations in New Cinema History: Approaches and Case Studies (2011) and Audiences, Cinema and Modernity: New Perspectives on European Cinema History (2012). With the same co-editors, he is preparing The Routledge Companion to New Cinema History (forthcoming). Paul S. Moore is Associate Professor of Communication and Culture at Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada, and past-president of the Film Studies Association of Canada. His histories of early cinema in North America have focused on intermedial relations with newspaper reading, appearing in Early Popular Visual Culture, Canadian Journal of Film Studies, Companion to Early Cinema, and Explorations in New Cinema History, among other fora. His new research maps the creation of regional markets out of rural, itinerant ‘circuits of cinema’. Catherine O’Rawe is Professor of Film and Italian Culture at the University of Bristol, UK. She is author of Stars and Masculinities in Contemporary Italian Cinema and co-editor of The Femme Fatale: Images, Histories, Contexts. Clara Pafort-Overduin is a lecturer and researcher within the Department of Media and Culture Studies and the Institute for Cultural Inquiry at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. She works on popular film in the Netherlands. She published several book chapters and articles on the pop- ularity of national films. Together with economic historian John Sedgwick and marketing economist Jaap Boter, she published on the peculiarities of the structure and development of the Dutch film market in the 1930s. Together with Douglas Gomery she wrote the student handbook Movie History: A Survey. (2012). Elisa Ravazzoli is a human geographer, working as a senior researcher at the Institute for Regional Development at the European Academy of Bozen/Bolzen (Eurac Research), Italy. She is experienced in the spatial and temporal examination of phenomena using Geographical Information System and spatial analysis as main instruments of investigation. Recent publications include The geography of film production in Italy: A spatial analysis using GIS in Locating the Moving Image: New Approaches to Film xiv NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

And Place (ed. by J. Hallam and L. Roberts, 2013); Cinemagoing as Spatially Contextualised Cultural and Social Practice in Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media. Daniela Treveri Gennari is Reader in Film Studies at Oxford Brookes University, UK. She works on post-war Italian cinema and her particular interests are audiences and popular cinema, film programming, and exhibition. Her publications include, among others, her monograph Post-war Italian Cinema: American Intervention, Vatican Interests (2009), the edited volume (with Daniël Biltereyst) Moralizing Cinema: Film, Catholicism and Power (2014), and the article ‘If you have seen it, you cannot forget!’: Film consumption and memories of cinema-going in 1950s Rome, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television (2015). Daniela has recently been working on the AHRC-funded project ‘Italian Cinema Audiences’, in collaboration with the universities of Bristol and Exeter and is leading the AHRC-funded project ‘European Cinema Audiences’, in collaboration with the universities of Leicester (UK) and Ghent (Belgium). Solomon Waliaula is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Languages, Linguistics, and Culture at Maasai Mara University, Kenya. He is an Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellow hosted at the Department of Anthropology and African Studies at Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, Germany. His research is on the popular cultural forms that are performed in the context of electronic media audiencing of European soccer. He is also interested in the popular cultural performances of cinema audiences in Kenya. Some of his work has been published in Soccer and Society, Journal of African Cinemas and he has contributed book chapters in a number of publications on twin subjects of the audiences of African cinema and European Football. His current project is on the ethnography of Kenyan audiences of European Football. Jessica L. Whitehead is a PhD candidate at York University, Canada, and her dissertation explores the history of cinema-going in Northeastern Ontario and the rise and decline of the Mascioli film circuit. Her research has been featured in the Timmins Daily Press, Timmins Today, and CBC’s Up North radio show. She is the recipient of the prestigious Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship, has a recent publication on movie star contests in the journal Transformative Works and Cultures, and several forthcoming publications concentrating on the history of moviegoing and exhibition in Canada. List of Figures

Fig. 4.1 The Palace Theatre Box Office (1947). RG series 56–11 Ontario Archives. From ‘Blind Pigs’ to Cinemas: The Transformation of Cultural Life in Timmins 48 Fig. 4.2 Photograph of Timmins Theatre’s accounting ledger from 1933 53 Fig. 4.3 Graph of Timmins Theatres overall income from all operations from 1933 to 1936 54 Fig. 4.4 Graph of income from theatre operations from 1933 to 1937 59 Fig. 4.5 All Feature Films shown at the Goldfields Theatre from April 1930 to February 1936 61 Fig. 4.6 All Feature Films shown at the Palace from March 1936 to December 1936 before the contract with FPCC 62 Fig. 4.7 All Feature Films that played at the Palace from January 1937 to June 1938 after the contract with FPCC 63 Fig. 5.1 Richard A. Hardie with his Projecting Kinetoscope in 1897 (Winnipeg Free Press, 20 August 1921) and a reference image of the machine (www.victorian-cinema.net/machines) 79 Fig. 5.2 ‘Living Canada’, exhibiting ‘ranching scenes, logging scenes, harvesting, King Edward’s visit to Paris, The Delhi Durbar &c. &c.’ (Revelstoke Herald, 13 August 1903) 85 Fig. 6.1 NH Counties and Towns. Map drawn by author. Small inset map sourced from Map Data © Google 2017 93 Fig. 6.2 Halcyon Theatre. Postcard, circa 1914, from author’s personal collection 102 Fig. 8.1 The presence of cinemas per population density in Flanders (1924–2000). Source: Biltereyst and Meers 2014 138 Fig. 8.2 Number of cinemas per town/village in the province of Antwerp, 1924 to 2003 140

xv xvi List of Figures

Fig. 8.3 Map of cases and cities in the province of Antwerp 143 Fig. 13.1 c/o IISH/Stefan R. Landsberger Collections; www. chinesposters.net 226 Fig. 13.2 c/o IISH/Stefan R. Landsberger Collections; www. chinesposters.net 227 Fig. 13.3 c/o The Australian National University 230 Fig. 14.1 Reconstruction of a rural screening ground, Shaanxi province (Source: Christian Hess, Sophia University, 2005. Used with permission) 240 Fig. 14.2 Political map of People’s Republic of China indicating location of Shaanxi (Source: Location of Shaanxi province, uploaded by user Jowww on 14 May 2008, Wikimedia Commons, https:// commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/%E9%99%95%E8%A5%BF#/ media/File:China_Shaanxi.svg, accessed 28 March 2017) 242 Fig. 14.3 Film projection unit in Hebei as shown in publication dated 23 September 1955 (Source: Modern Chinese Literature and Culture Image Archive, http://mclc.osu.edu/rc/ imagearchive/image.htm, accessed March 10, 2014) 248 Fig. 14.4 Establishing fixed projection routes. The map is of Helan county in Ningxia Self-Governing Region, also part of China’s Northwest region. Distances between screening sites of between 8 and 50 li are indicated, as well as transportation features and physical terrain (Source: Dianying fangying ziliao [Film projection materials] 2, January 1954) 252 Fig. 16.1 Clusters with the highest share (percentage) per cinema divided in the number of inhabitants 291 Fig. 19.1 Cine Centímetro 347 List of Tables

Table 3.1 A reconstruction of a typical Kanda’s Grounds’ audience reception performance 38 Table 8.1 Socio-demographic information (gender, age range) of the respondents per location 144 Table 14.1 Yearly statistics for Xi’an municipal projection units, 1949–1954 245 Table 16.1 Programming clusters in Dutch cinemas, 1934–1936 287 Table 16.2 Number of cinemas per place with dominant clusters 289 Table 16.3 Film cluster density amongst Dutch cinemas 290 Table 16.4 The top ten most popular films premièred in the Netherlands, 1934–1936 292 Table 16.5 Local ranking of national top ten films 293 Table 16.6 Week of arrival after the film’s premiere in the Netherlands 295 Table 16.7 National POPSTAT ranking of the most popular German films screened in Heerlen, 1934–1936 297 Table 16.8 Top 13 films in Geleen, 1934–1936 299

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