Recent Book on Early Film in Toronto

Now Playing: Early Moviegoing and the Regulation of Fun. By Paul S. Moore. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008. ISBN 978-0-7914-7418-1

This book was a bit late getting to us, but it was worth the wait. There are lots of books about the early days of film, but most of them focus on the United States. Does it matter if we gaze outside U.S. borders? That’s one of the questions Moore, a sociology professor at Ryerson University in Toronto, seeks to answer. Where better to look than in Toronto itself, Canada’s largest city and cosmopolitan metropole, but one close to the U.S. border and susceptible to the lure of U.S. popular culture? Proximity to the border is an inescapable factor in Canadian film studies; as Moore notes, there was almost no indigenous filmmaking in the pioneering days of cinema. So do things change if we cross the border? Moore’s short answer is yes and no.

The conventional part of Moore’s book come in the first and last chapters, appropriately titled “Rendezvous for Particular People” and “Everybody’s Going;” that is, the evolution of film-going from a niche to a mass audience. Early film audiences in Toronto, as in most U.S. cities, came largely from the working class and contained large numbers of recent immigrants. Theaters were often impromptu, sometimes seedy venues located in working-class precincts, and content ran the gamut from mundane to risqué. There were differences, though. Nickelodeons—called “theatoriums” in Toronto—preceded movies, but their content was a bit different and many were not stand-alone attractions. Toronto film-going also had a shorter non-regulatory period than in many U.S. cities; from the start, middle-class Torontonians expressed concerns about probity and safety, the latter sometimes a thin ruse masking middle-class values discomfort. As in the United States, the concerns of the puritanical notwithstanding, movies proved so seductive to the middle class that would-be guardians of public morality shifted their tactics from raising alarm (and, in some cases, attempting to ban films) to regulation and censorship.

This may sound familiar, but Moore adds twists. For example, he pays attention to the use of fire laws in regulatory efforts, an understudied phenomenon given the combustibility of celluloid and the hazardous nature of early projection equipment. There is also a tendency to treat film as discrete, a mistake Moore avoids by placing movie regulation within the sweep of broader efforts to regulate society that extended to everything from poolrooms to peanut vendors and fortunetellers. He also calls attention to another understudied group: film promoters. Moore argues that the effort to make cinema conform to civic ideals also entailed shifting control from individual amoral profit-seeking exhibitors to “showmanship,” (75) an ideal in which tastes were shaped, not merely catered to, and one that involved active promotion, the enlistment of journalists, and the enforcement power of local bureaucrats.

Moore’s approach is simultaneously historical and sociological, but he gets full marks for offering a readable text rather than one encumbered by minutiae or theory. Most U.S. readers will delight in the subtle ways in which Toronto differs from cities south of the border. There are, for instance, approaches to moral issues that are laden with British sensibilities that had long since been cast aside in the United States, and there was (is) a much more highly developed sense of civic standards in Ontario. As Moore shows in his conclusion, the British Empire is also made manifest in earlier forays into the use of film for patriotic purposes. (The British Empire entered World War One nearly three years earlier than the United States.) Moore also makes superb use of Chicago school urban sociological theory to show the ways in which Toronto did and did not conform to developing models of urbanism.

Moore doesn’t pretend that Toronto is typical—not even in comparison to other Canadian cities. And this may be his biggest contribution of all. His is a reminder that most new forms of popular culture involve action and reaction that are battled out in local contexts upon which greater national and transnational values are imposed.

Robert E. Weir

University of Massachusetts Amherst