Reform and Entertainment: Film Exhibition and Leisure in a Small Town in Sweden at the End of the Nineteenth Century

K athryn Fuller has shown that the culture of early cinema has different meanings for the American metropolis compared with small-town America. In contrast to the disruptive and fleeting experiences of early exhibition in the big cities, she proposes that movies as an entertainment form slipped easily into the culture of small towns because motion pictures combined new technology with the already familiar entertainment forms of the travelogue slide show and travelling theatre troupes. Successful travelling film exhibitors offered programmes that appealed to the conservative culture of small-town America; they operated in the town’s social centre, and were endorsed by respectable civic groups with their ‘high class’ programmes. Fuller has also emphasised the regional diversity of nickelodeon culture. Gregory A. Waller’s local case study of the first three decades of film exhibition in the Southern regional centre and city of Lexington foregrounds the importance not only of the regional but also of the local in the understanding of film history from a social and cultural stand point. In the following pages, I shall steer away from discussing the teeming metropolis of early film culture in favour of examining the local and regional venues of film history in an attempt to tease out a workable framework for such a historiography in theSwedishcontext.Waller’sandFuller’s studies are my companions on this venture, with some of Miriam Hansen’s ideas on the ‘public dimension of cinematic reception’ lurking in the background. In the introduction to his book on Lexington, Waller makes clear how different ideas of leisure produce different stories of film exhibition. Waller himself approaches leisure during the first three decades of film exhibition by emphasising commercial entertainments in a case study that tests the hypothesis of cultural standardisation and homogenisation on a national level. Much of the American research on this topic examines how ethnic culture and older forms of working-class culture reacted to the cultural homogenisation that followed industrialisation and modernisation. Early American cinema, Miriam Hansen writes, was strongly associated in public discourse with its working class and ethnic audiences that ‘endowed a random leisure-time activity with a specific social meaning and implicit Film History, Volume 17, pp. 88–105, 2005. Copyright © John Libbey Publishing ISSN: 0892-2160. Printed in United States of America