• 1 D. Bordwell, J. Staiger and K. Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Production (...)
• 2 See A. Horton, ed. Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, for a (...)
• 3 H. Jenkins, “‘This Fellow Keaton Seems to Be the Whole Show’: Buster Keaton, Interrupted Performanc (...)

1This article will focus on a peculiar practice of US film theatrical exhibition, particularly active in the years 1919–1926, the so-called “fade-in prologue.” It will argue that such theatrical presentations of films, aiming to seamlessly, but theatrically, guide the audience into Hollywood film worlds, present evidence of a non-illusionistic, active mode of spectatorship well into the early years of Hollywood’s classicism1 – a mode of spectacular address to the audience that plays upon dramatically materializing on stage the diegetic border between films and spectators to better cross it, revealing film as an illusion both flimsily distant and theatrically present. As in one of the most quoted and analysed sequences in film history, the projectionist’s dream in Buster Keaton’s 1924 Sherlock Junior,2 a sequence where the theatrical logic of vaudeville interruptions comes to clash with the classical film’s aesthetic of narrative integration,3 fade-in prologues in the 1920s dramatize the tension between illusionistic, classical filmmaking and the demands for a more vaudeville, theatre-based and self-reflexive spectatorship that aims to take its audience in on the joke played.

• 4 C. Ames, Movies About the Movies: Hollywood Reflected, Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 199 (...)
• 5 M. Cerisuelo, Hollywood à l’écran: essai de poétique historique des films: l’exemple des métafilms (...)

2Keaton’s film, and the projectionist’s sequence in particular, remains an active reference for film history, often analysed as part of a double tradition: part “behind-the-screen” movie, and part “rube” film. As a “movie about a movie,”4 it demystifies filmmaking, by showing Keaton’s character caught in a frenzy of editing that has him “jump” from one space to another without warning – a tongue-in-cheek play on the operations of editing that classical filmmaking had sought to render all but invisible. Yet typically for a “metafilm”5 Keaton’s film does not just debunk Hollywood illusion-making by laying bare its mechanics, but it also, and conversely, stays within the conventions of Hollywood “bunk” by having the hero, in the end, win the girl – with help, it should be noted, of the very hokum love-scene, complete with happy family life, being played out on the screen under his perplexed eyes as part of the Hearts and Pearls serial. Is the film world, the sequence suggests, real or fake? Life-lesson or mirage? The answer suggested here, paradoxically (but in line with other “behind the screen” movies), is neither, precisely because it is both: caught in the artifice, the audience can have its cake (the illusion) and eat it too (the self-reflexivity).

• 6 T. Elsaesser, “Discipline through Diegesis: The Rube Film between ‘Attractions’ and ‘Narrative Inte (...)
• 7 S. Bottomore, “The Panicking Audience? Early Cinema and the ‘Train Effect,’” Historical Journal of (...)

3Keaton’s film is also, as Thomas Elsaesser has shown, part of the “rube” film tradition – films from the early years of cinema where typically unsophisticated characters, falling prey, as Keaton’s character does in his dreams, to the realistic illusion of cinema, seek then to intervene in the film fiction, often to comical effect.6 As he argues, these films represent a disciplining of audiences that happens in the transition years 1900–1910: the “primitives” that have not yet learnt the correct code of distanciation from the narration effect are duly chastised by being mocked by those (us?) who have mastered the new code. “Rube” films, indeed, may have become far less frequent in subsequent decades, suggesting that such disciplining of audiences is an accomplished fact by the establishment of classical modes of storytelling in Hollywood in 1917. Yet, as a trope of reception discourse, the image of the “rube” remains, at least throughout the 1920s, a classic of publicity texts, and, beyond, a constant of fan discourses, marking the difference between “naïve” spectators and those “in the know” – those who can navigate the specific kind of distanced fascination that Hollywood films demand for maximum engagement, and the simpler ones, whether too old or too young, too emotional or too “primitive,” who will be “taken in” by the increasing illusionism of film fictions. The “rube” trope, thus, marks a continuously evolving frontier straddling spell-binding fascination and sophisticated incredulity, with modern audiences continuously defining themselves in opposition to fictional “other” more “naïve” ones, whether past audiences – as in the myth of the “train-effect” decisively debunked by Stephen Bottomore7 (1999) – or more contemporary but exotic film-goers in distant lands and cultures (as in numerous tales brought back by travelogue filmmakers). Keaton’s crossing into the diegetic world, thus, exhibits this perilous balancing act common in classical Hollywood spectatorship: the projectionist is a “rube,” mistaking the film-fancy for reality – but in the film, this is couched in the more sophisticated, 1924 language of irony, where the “mistake” is relegated to a dream sequence.

• 8 Elsaesser, “Discipline through Diegesis.”

4There is, I would like to suggest in this essay, a third tradition in this American silent film culture that plays so openly and dexterously with the fiction/reality border and that is referenced by this sequence: the theatrical practice of the fade-in prologue. In Sherlock Junior this is revealed by the very wilfulness apparent in the staging of Keaton crossing the diegetic frontier as a series of deliberate steps, from the projection booth, down the centre aisle, to the front seat, then over the head of the pianist, and finally across the proscenium stage. The sequence, in other words, shows the boundary between film and fiction as more than just a limit (a flimsy screen), as a space that extends from the diegetic film world to at least the projection booth (and indeed beyond, into the character’s most intimate dreams). The deliberate staging thus points to the physical nature of film’s reception space – the space that needs to be crossed if the audience, dreaming or not, is to engage with the film fiction. What this suggests is that illusion-making takes place not just in the Hollywood studio, but also at the point of reception, during the exhibition of the film, in the material organization of a theatre space that operates as a continuum between film and audience. The space the Keaton character crosses, in other words, is more than the mere physical space of the theatre, although it is also that. It is already a space inhabited by fiction generated from both sides, from the film world and from his own fancy. And it is this inscription of film fictional space within theatre space in the culture of 1920s reception that I would like to analyse here, as an example of the “diegetic space” that Thomas Elsaesser has proposed as the key concept of cinema studies (2006).8

• 9 M. Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film, Cambridge, MA, London: Harvard (...)
• 10 R. Grusin, “DVDs, Video Games and the Cinema of Interactions,” in J. Lyons and J. Plunkett (eds), M (...)
• 11 M. Hansen, “Early Cinema, Late Cinema: Transformations of the Public Sphere,” in L. Williams (ed.), (...)
• 12 R. Altman, Silent Film Sound, New York: Columbia University Press, 2004, 280.
• 13 Ibid., 388.

5Such inscription of film space within theatre space has been analysed before in the exhibition of early silent films, remarkably in relation to the years of the first cinema of attractions, a cinema where film text meant little without its experience in a theatre, as Miriam Hansen has demonstrated,9 and where film and theatre spaces were not “segregated.” The models developed in much recent work on film spectatorship that has focused upon early cinema have been put to exciting use in the analysis of film spectatorship in our own age of the spectacle-driven, attraction-loaded blockbuster and remote- (computer-) controlled DVD (streaming) navigation of films, what Richard Grusin calls a “cinema of interactions” that would “return” us to the pre-classical cinema of attractions.10 Yet this renewal of the discourses of spectatorship has been kept at arm’s length from classical cinema. Worse, it is often constructed, and explicitly so, as anti-classical Hollywood, with Hollywood spectatorship being equated with a “discipline of silence, spellbound passivity, and perceptual isolation.”11 In this way, classical Hollywood spectatorship has become, in recent scholarship, a parenthesis, an unwelcome, and increasingly unknowable, 80-year hiatus. Before 1917 and after 1970, audiences are modelled as active and participatory, the cinema of attraction is analysed as also a cinema of interactions, screen space and theatre space are not segregated. During the Hollywood classical period, audiences are invariably prisoners of the gaze apparatus: they are inscribed in narration, ideologically sutured into the film, isolated in the dark of the auditorium, spellbound – with the negative, passive connotation of the term being emphasized. Attempting to strike the right balance between the requirements of classical narrative integration and the remnants of vaudeville in the programme of many movie houses in the 1920s, Rick Altman describes the effort to provide standardized music for silent films in the 1920s as “the silencing of audiences”12 – especially when compared with the rich intermediality of early cinema practices in the 1900s. Yet he must also note that many practices such as the use of popular songs or audience participation did not disappear during the 1920s, but were “shunt[ed] to specific genres and to designated portions of the new program that was developing as a compromise strategy.”13

• 14 J. Staiger, “Modes of Reception,” in Gaudreault, A., G. Lacasse and I. Raynauld (eds), Le cinéma en (...)
• 15 Ibid.
• 16 J. Staiger, Perverse Spectators: The Practices of Film Reception, New York and London: New York Uni (...)
• 17 M. Carbine (1990), “The Finest Outside the Loop: Motion Picture Exhibition in Chicago’s Black Metro (...)
• 18 L. M. Debauche, “Reminiscences of the Past, Conditions of the Present: At the Movies in Milwaukee i (...)
• 19 I. Breakwell and P. Hammond (eds), Seeing in the Dark: A Compendium of Cinemagoing, London: Serpent (...)
• 20 To be clear, Keaton’s film does not offer an example of an on-stage prologue (and no film, to my kn (...)

6In 1999, however, Janet Staiger argued for a bolder direction in reception studies, one based on “the proposition that the entire history of cinema in every period (and likely every place) witnesses several modes of cinematic address, several modes of exhibition, and several modes of reception.”14 Such studies, she claims, would start by recognizing that “it is not at all clear […] that the conditions of exhibition for the classical narrative cinema are uniformly environments to promote a voyeurist cinema, an absorption into an illusion, and a ‘static,’ passive spectator.”15 In line with other historical case-studies of reception that support Staiger’s hypothesis of “perverse” modes of spectatorship16 (notably Carbine 199017 or Debauche 199918), and in the search for what Ian Breakwell, introducing a collection of testimonies of 1940s-1960s cinemagoers, calls the “uncanny interplay between screen image and real-time events in the auditorium and in the world beyond the muffled doors,”19 this essay would like to offer one limited example of what a configuration of a non-voyeuristic, non-passive reception might look like in the middle of 1920s theatre exhibition in the US – a practice that, as Staiger suggests, offers a more active possibility of audience engagement with film fictions – a self-reflexive mode of spectatorship very much active even in the first decade of Hollywood classicism in which audiences, like Keaton’s projectionist character, are invited to experience reception space as a continuum between theatre and film space: the practice of on-stage, “fade-in” prologues.20

• 21 B. M. Hall, The Best Remaining Seats: The Story of the Golden Age of the Movie Palace, New York: Br (...)
• 22 R. Koszarski, History of The American Cinema: T. 3, An Evening’s Entertainment, the Age of the Sile (...)
• 23 Ibid., 61.
• 24 P. Wagner, “‘An America Not Quite Mechanized’: Fanchon and Marco, Inc. Perform Modernity,” Film His (...)

7The rich and colourful history of theatrical practices in US movie houses of the 1920s has, of course, been recognized before, most notably in Ben Hall’s study of motion picture palaces and their exhibition practices.21 Stage presentation acts, their grandiose excesses and their integration within exotic big palace architecture, along with the commercial infrastructures that are developed in the late 1920s to allow more theatres to offer on-stage entertainment of a diverse nature before, or after the film, are profusely studied and illustrated in his seminal study of 1920s big palace exhibition practices. Richard Koszarski, in his authoritative and wide-ranging introduction to 1920s Hollywood cinema and film culture, notes the disruptive potential of such stage presentations, with famous examples of film premières where the film is shown almost as an afterthought, after several hours of rich, multi-sensory, and not necessarily coherent on-stage shows.22 Indeed, even when recognizing the grandiose specificity of US film reception in the 1920s, film history has, by and large, struggled to reconstruct some sort of coherence in the 1920s context. Koszarski, for instance, devotes an entire chapter to colourful exhibition techniques in the 1920s, a sign of their importance in understanding the pleasures of classical cinema. Yet he also reacts to the mutilations of films at the hands of enterprising showmen (from accelerated projection speeds to unwarranted cuts to fit into the evening programme) by wondering if “even the most nostalgic viewer [would] wish to exchange current viewing conditions for those of the silent era.”23 At best, as is shown in the detailed work of Phil Wagner on the presentation acts of Fanchon and Marco,24 the theatrical component of the show is analysed in its relationship to the larger 1920s culture but, as far as film is concerned, as a separate discourse, essentially unrelated to the films shown. The question of the understanding of 1920s cinema pleasures, thus, remains largely unanswered, and the impact of exhibitors’ theatrical efforts on the reception of films largely untested, leaving historians who rely on film texts only with a meagre understanding of what pleasures audiences could take from silent film shows in which film was but one component of the whole programme. And yet this is precisely the issue that Keaton’s film suggests should be raised: the tantalizing possibility that film reception, well into the classical period of the 1920s, happens in a space in which audiences should be understood not just as (passive) viewers of film, but as active users playfully engaged with fiction film as fiction and as visual artefact through the self-reflexive co-construction of the theatre space as diegetic space – a space where any fictional border comes to be dissolved, crossed, and crisscrossed.

• 25 Poll published in Motion Picture News, November-December 1922, 26 (21–25). The poll was jointly con (...)
• 26 R. Koszarski, “Laughter, Music and Tragedy at the New York Pathé Studio,” Film History 14 (1), 2002 (...)
• 27 See, for instance J. Harrower, “Small Town Houses,” The Film Daily 38 (55), 1926, 26.
• 28 For the sake of clarity, I have restricted myself to sources that explicitly deal with the fade-in (...)
• 29 B. Klinger, “Film History Terminable and Interminable: Recovering the Past in Reception Studies,” S (...)
• 30 Ibid.

8Though possibly limited (a 1922 poll by the exhibitors’ magazine Motion Picture News estimates that a mere 3% of movie houses in the US staged prologues – and not just fade-in ones – on a regular basis),25 the practice of prologues remains important as it opens the door to an understanding of the culture behind film presentations that, in exhibition discourses at least, were popular until the late 1920s when Vitaphone and other synchronized sound shorts replaced most stage presentations.26 In their columns advising exhibitors, trade magazines such as Motion Picture News, The Exhibitors’ Herald and Film Daily, offer regular examples of the practice, emulations of the larger New York or Los Angeles shows (staged by showmen Sid Grauman or Roxy Rothapfel), often in much smaller movie houses, with all the problems inherent in adapting expensive, big-house prologue ideas to small, budget-tight movie houses, far away from Los Angeles or New York.27 Clearly, and in spite of the costs involved and the frequent criticisms directed against them, stage prologues to films remain a “best practice” of theatre management, a horizon to be emulated by enterprising showmen around the country, and an integral part of the 1920s understanding of film reception. As such, fade-in prologues, a sub-category of prologues staged in the 1920s (although the difference between the two is not always clear in 1920s exhibition discourse),28 are useful less as a historically unconvincing attempt to “pin the viewer down”29 or reconstruct concrete contexts of film shows, than as an example of discursive practice that provides “a sense of what the historical prospects were for viewing at a given time by illuminating the meanings made available within that moment.”30

• 33 A. Griffiths, Wondrous Difference, New York: Columbia University Press, 2001.

12Reminiscent of the tradition of “tableaux vivants” active in nineteenth century museology33 and evocative of both the rural atmosphere of the then well-known melodrama and its stage version, this prologue also shows a remarkable effort to provide a seamless transition into the film: both a sensory transition (“the picture cut in at the dimming”), and a diegetic one, as its representation of the winding-down of the day points to the first shots of the film where Anna and her mother are shown sitting in the evening light. It could also echo a later scene in the film and function as a delicate and distanced preview of the first dinner scene at Bartlett Farm, where the bucolic atmosphere is thrown in jeopardy as Anna meets the Squire again. Beyond these references to the film, the echo further points to a more general positioning of the audience as fiction-ready, offering, as it does, a representation of the “story-telling” moment: just like the farming family “washed up” at the end of their day, ready to share anecdotes around the dinner table. In all of these senses, such prologues bridge the gap between film and audience, with a suggestion of further potential. Modern copies of the film open with a flurry of moralistic intertitles in which Griffith situates his story within what he presents as a millennial, moral fight to make men practise monogamy – a moral position clearly seeking to establish some sort of common ground with the audience. With its emphasis on dimming the lights and transitioning into the picture, this description of prologue further suggests that Manager Wagoner of the Beldorf may have done away with such intertitles and “cut in” the film to transition with his stage view of rural domestic peace – thus establishing a common, fictive ground with the film’s audience through an appealing dramatic evocation, rather than a moralising discourse.

• 35 Ibid.

14The suspenseful scene will thus be seen twice in the same evening: once on stage, with added sound effect, once in the film, in a logic that harks back to The Great Train Robbery of 1903 and the shot of bandit Barnes shooting at the audience – the logic of an attraction that can be displayed for its own power. An added kick to this prologue, it should be noted, may also come from the fact that the audience will recognize a recent winner of a local beauty contest as the actress playing “the girl.’35

• 37 Motion Picture News, 29 April 1922.

17In this borderland between the film and the audience, prologues are intermedial affairs, whether they reference a spectacular scene of the film by quoting a film image as a background to the staged scene (as in a prologue used at the Strand theatre in Seattle, Washington, for the 1921 Cecil B. DeMille film, Fool’s Paradise, where the key fantasy attraction in the film, the ice-ballet sequence, is re-enacted on stage “with a large drop painted especially to represent the scene in the photoplay” with “snow [falling] on the dancers during their entire performance”37), or whether they literally interrupt the film, transposing whatever scene was taking place on the stage, adding a moment of theatrical display, then allowing the film to resume. In the pursuit of this attraction-based and theatrical logic, narrative interruptions are indeed frequent, and come under the heading of the fade-in prologue not so much as “prologues” (since they may take place before the film but also, intriguingly, during the projection) but rather as “fade-in” transitions from the film and back into it with little, if any, visual break. Some of the examples that one may find in the trade press and its best-practice examples suggest that the requirement of having prologues precede the film is not as stringent as the name would seem to imply. Thus, at the Strand in Brooklyn (New York), Edward L. Hyman, the manager, offers a fade-in prologue that interrupts the film projection, even though the scene referenced in the staged event is merely the fourth shot of the film – so that a more general prologue could safely have been staged before the start of the film without losing its relevance, but without the fade-in and fade-out effect that seems to have been very much the key to the success of this particular presentation. The film in question is Maurice Tourneur and Clarence Brown’s Last of the Mohicans (1920):

• 41 S. Olcott and S. Grauman, “Do Prologues Make or Mar a Picture,” Motion Picture Director 2 (10), Jul (...)

22That such prologues question some of the basic tenets of classical spectatorship can be further seen in the debates that exist around them in the 1920s. An exchange of views between director Sydney Olcott and showman Sid Grauman, published in The Motion Picture Director, sums up the main lines of debate between film production and exhibition in 1926.41 Olcott, one of the important commercial directors of the 1920s, makes three main points against the practice: prologues are bound to be inferior to Hollywood films as they cannot compete with the skills or finance of Hollywood products; prologues (and all presentation acts in general) will further ruin the film by imposing cuts so that it fits into the programme schedule; and, most importantly, prologues are basically redundant:

• 43 The expression “putting it [the film] over” is frequently found in 1920s theatrical exhibition lite (...)

24Prologues, thus, give away the plot and decrease the suspense of films, interrupt the narrative flow, embody it in concrete live bodies and objects on stage, force cuts in the film unwarranted by the narration, and, in general, make short shrift of the intention and auteur debates in filmmaking. But in their insistence that film be an experience, and a full sensory one at that, they point to a remarkably coherent theatre culture which strives to have films meet their audience, to put, in the parlance of the day, “the film over” the stage barrier43. The questioning and foregrounding of the border between the real and the fictive, a border that Hollywood classical filmmaking had learnt to subdue and render transparent, is thus a central activity of spectatorship that such theatre culture proposes.