This selection of films illustrates the interaction between the two great mass entertainment industries of the late 19th and early 20th centuries: film and the music hall. It includes several types of early film, including footage of famous music halls, music hall personalities and related actualities and films of actual music hall acts.
Early experiments with sound and film, such as the Gibbons' Bio-Tableaux or the De Forest Phonofilm, typically used music hall celebrities of the day to demonstrate the economic potential of their system,
and now stand as a record of those acts. Captured on thse experimental formats are famous music hall names, such as that legendary survivor of the golden age of music hall, Arthur Roberts (Topsey Turvey, 1926), and purveyors of the comic song such as Lesley Sarony (Hot Water and Vegetebuel, 1928) and Billy Merson (Desdemona, 1927). There are early films of the giants of the Pantomime, such as Herbert Campbell (long time partner of Dan Leno) and Will Evans, who also became important in musical theatre, as did Percy Honri (Mister Moon, 1901; Quick Change Act, 1908) and the great Lupino Lane, before his career in Hollywood. Lupino Lane and Will Evans' nephews Fred and Joe Evans transferred their acts neatly to the film comedy, which began to move ahead in the teens.
Many types of film are represented: the direct recording to film of a music hall turn (e.g. Deonzo Brothers, 1901; Gaiety Duet, 1909; Will Evans, the Musical Eccentric, 1899; Herbert Campbell as Little Bobby, 1899) by early filmmakers eager to film the celebrities of the age; actualities of the music hall and related events (Comic Costume Race, 1896; Hoxton - Sat July 3rd Britannia Theatre, 1920); 'Entr'acte' films (Mister Moon; Quick Change Act; Lettie Limelight in her Lair, 1900) - primarily promotional films which could be also be used during theatre performance too cover difficult scene or costume changes - and the above mentioned sound experiments, which enabled the artiste to be seen and heard.
The nature of early film is not obvious to us today, so it is important to have some knowledge of the music hall, the predominant popular entertainment at the time of film's invention, in order to properly interpret it. The two entertainment industries existed side-by-side for decades, and had a considerable impact upon each other both commercially and in their content: an aesthetic, personalities and programme structure. Indeed, for many years, film and variety were seen by the same audience, in the same programme, at the same theatres, sharing the same stage, as well (since the films were silent) as making use of the same orchestra.
So, in the 1890s, film was a music hall turn itself. Programmes of films, in running time about the same as any other act, were shown as part of the music hall bill. The selection of films reflected in microcosm the music hall programme itself, with its mixture of topicals, interest items, novelties, humorous and dramatic songs and recitations. The films and music hall acts
shared similar forms of low comedy, from the individual performer singing a comic song, to the antics of the traditional pantomime characters. They were populated with cockneys, suffragettes, policemen, mischievous boys and so on. Film and music hall audiences shared a fondness for popular music, dance, novelty, spectacle and colour, for fantasy and storytelling.
Film, then, was simply a new format, a novelty among the many novelties - technical, acrobatic, dramatic - that made up the variety programme. Music hall had been absorbing and accommodating such novelties for years. Even after film
developed as an autonomous industry with venues of its own, the music hall, popular theatre, musical comedy and revue continued to maintain an important relationship with the screening of films.
'Cinema' developed and eventually overtook music hall as the pre-eminent mass entertainment sometime around the time of the First World War. The rise of the longer 'feature' film, which would become the predominant product of the film industry, necessitated the wholesale move to purpose-built cinemas. These longer films no longer fitted into the music hall structure and were sufficiently popular to stand on their own, even though 'live' entertainment was widely considered superior for a long time to come.
Even after the split, the film and music hall continued to be closely related through the continued mixing of variety acts and feature film, which was a favoured strategy of major theatre chains such as the Stoll Moss circuit. The managers experimented with different combinations of live and filmed product during the '20s, in an effort to provide variety and thereby maximise profit
from their huge, expensive to run theatres. It was, of course, the arrival of sound that put paid to the mixing of live acts with the film show. Once the orchestra was paid off this became impractical and uneconomic. The music hall industry depended utterly on resident, specialist bands to mount the programme and so the variety programme retreated to a smaller number of theatres that had
not been converted into cinemas, and to the metropolitan clubs and cabarets. Variety continued to feature strongly in the cinemas' supporting programme, particularly in cine-magazines and, perhaps ironically, in the feature film, for which the old time music hall became a favourite subject - see, for example, Champagne Charlie (d. Alberto Cavalcanti, 1944).
Bryony Dixon
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