Traces of the new in the old: distribution and exhibition in early and late film culture

ABSTRACT

Screen Australia's report Beyond the Box Office: Understanding Audiences in a Multi-Screen World (2011) identifies the resilience of established access points for distribution and exhibition despite expanding access to new avenues of engagement with screen content and participation with digital screens. Whilst much research seems to respond to a perceived threat about the open windows and unmapped territories of the digital signalling the demise of celluloid film culture, the broader spectrum of multimedia forms creating deep and broad audience engagement are not specific to the new millennium.

One hundred years ago, a collection of early experiments in cinema – The Corrick Collection – was one of the first film programmes to tour Australia. Beginning with an examination of contemporary patterns of distribution and then considering the pathways forged by The Corrick family, this article aims to explore how early distributors developed innovative approaches to attracting audiences and exposing them to this new attraction. The Corrick Collection toured capital cities, regional Australia and ventured into South East Asia and Europe. An examination of the innovations developed in early film culture will reveal resonances with contemporary distribution. This historical project will not imagine the new supplanting the old, nor will it account for the emergence of film culture in evolutionary terms, instead, it aims to use contemporary approaches to historiography to highlight the intermediality of early film and to display the presence of celluloid behind digital culture.

KEYWORDS:

• Exhibition
• distribution
• Australian film
• early cinema
• film history
• digital culture
• the Corrick collection

Acknowledgments

Thank you to the staff at the National Film and Sound Archive in Canberra and Melbourne for providing access to The Corrick Collection.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Wendy Haslem teaches and researches the intersections of film history and new media in the Screen Studies program at The University of Melbourne. She is the author of A Charade of Innocence and Vice: Hollywood Gothic Films of the 1940s (2009), the co-author of Experimenta: Playground (2007) and a co-editor of the anthology Super/Heroes: From Hercules to Superman (2007). Recent research projects include ‘Chromatic Frankenstein's Monsters: Restoration, Colour and Variants of George Méliès' Voyage dans la lune’ (Senses of Cinema, 2012), an exploration of the impact of digital restoration on early experiments in filmmaking.

Notes

1. Whilst Paolo Cherchi Usai identifies the ‘silent period’ as 1893–1927 identified by ‘the recording of the first photographic images on 35mm perforated film in the Edison Kinetograph, and the first public projection of Alan Crosland's The Jazz Singer’ (2010, xvii), this article narrows its focus to the years between 1897 and 1914, an era that encompasses the beginning and ending of the distribution, exhibition and eventual production of films by the Corrick family in Australia.

2. In regional locations like Clunes, this was the first time that electricity was generated within the town. In 1906 Clunes was the first location to use the Parisian 8 horse power de Dion engine and generator, enabling the Corricks to present their films ‘with city quality at any location to which they could transport the equipment’ (King 1995, 8). The electric arc light was preferred because it was ‘independent of the vagaries and dangers of gas and oxygen supply and was able to provide a brilliant, relatively flicker free picture on the screen’ (King 1995, 8). Light attracted audiences into the town and many stayed to watch the films exhibited. Light was part of the attraction to the event, with a range of sources used to light the façade of the buildings, the auditoriums, the stage and to provide the intensity of light required for projection. King details the process:

 The outside of the halls were lit with arc lamps suspended on 12 metre poles and could be seen for miles around. It was a splendid example of showmanship. The inside of the auditorium was also lit with arc lamps and the stage by over 100 incandescent lamps. Initially, these were carbon filament lamps which provided a distinctly yellow light, but within a few months the importers were able to supply 144 of the new tantalum filament lamps, which as well as giving a much whiter light, provided three times the brightness. (1995, 8)