Exhibiting the City – Wilhelmine Early Cinema(s)

Nora Gortcheva, Yale University

In 1913 the German film journal Lichtbild Bühne summarized current cinema developments: “The films are becoming longer and longer and the cinemas bigger and bigger.” A closer look at the establishment of cinema in Berlin proves that both the expansion of the movie theaters and the emergence of the long feature format provoke wide-ranging discussions that reflect a strong ambivalence towards the new medium. Gender, age, and class distribution, alongside with cinema’s problematic relation to theater and literature become defining themes in the cinema debates (Kino Debatte) and cinema reform (Kinoreform) movements in Germany.

This paper will focus primarily on the changes of exhibition practices around 1913 and on the discussions that accompany the emergence of the movie palaces in Berlin. I will argue that the very question of what cinema is and how it relates to its audiences becomes immersed in a debate on where cinema takes place. By focusing on the exhibition and constitution of cinematic spectacle critics discover a platform for addressing cinema’s status as a novel technological, social, and cultural practice. At the same time, the recurrent opposition between early stationary cinemas (Kintopps) and subsequent movie palaces suggests an attempt to promote the cultural legitimacy of the medium, reflect on its institutionalization, and devise a teleological model of its relatively short history. While Siegfried Kracauer’s analysis of the movie palaces has been instrumental in understanding Weimar exhibition models, I will propose that the cult of distraction and surface splendor define also the earlier Wilhelmine period. Thus, cinema exhibition becomes a diagnostic site that exemplifies not only cinema’s struggle for legitimacy but also the very workings of modernity and overall commodification of public life.