Reel Pleasures. Laura Fair
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Mithun Chakraborty, who starred in Disco Dancer (Shubash, 1982)—not those of John Travolta or the Village People—that inspired. As Brian Larkin has persuasively argued, twentieth-century media cultures were transnational phenomena with multiple, shifting metropoles.59 We can only understand transnational media by appreciating Africans’ roles in making them truly global.
The mechanical technology of moving-picture display was nearly identical across the world, yet how this technology was negotiated as a social practice was incredibly diverse. Technology is always imbedded both in space and in society. To say that moviegoing was a global twentieth-century phenomenon is not to say that it was the same everywhere. James Burns’s recent book on cinema across the British Empire brilliantly reveals some of the key similarities and profound differences in the cinematic experience during the early twentieth century.60 Likewise, Lakshmi Shrinivas’s House Full and Sudha Rajagopalan’s Indian Films in Soviet Cinemas profoundly destabilize Western moviegoing habits as the norm. A host of factors affected the social practices of exhibition and moviegoing. I situate the Tanzanian experience within this global context.
Figure I.3 Dar es Salaam Cinema ads. Sunday News, May 8, 1966
At the turn of the twentieth century, moving-picture technology was a revolutionary invention. It mesmerized audiences the world over. Inventors in the United States, Germany, and France were all experimenting with different ways of displaying moving pictures in the 1890s, but the Lumière brothers, Auguste and Louis, are generally credited as giving birth to “cinema” with their first public display of moving pictures on a screen in Paris, in 1895. Unencumbered by patents and pushed by demand, the new technology quickly enveloped the globe, as regional artisans and inventors built on and combined various initial designs.61 Photography itself was fairly new, having been refined only in the late 1870s, and many who went to see moving pictures at the turn of the century had actually never even seen a still photograph. The ability to seemingly capture people on film was deemed magic; watching people and objects move on a screen was spellbinding. When editors of the East African Standard ran a two-part article explaining what a moving picture was and how it worked for their English-speaking, literate audience in 1911 and 1912, the obvious assumption was that few of their British readers had yet experienced this novelty themselves. Though itinerant shows were by then somewhat common in caravan towns and ports in Tanzania, isolated British settlers living on rural farms in Kenya could only imagine what such a spectacle was like. The technological mysteries of moving pictures remained unfathomable to many, even for those who had seen films. In 1917, the swadeshi “father of Indian cinema,” Dhundiraj Govind Phalke, made a short documentary, entitled How Films Are Prepared, to educate the public. He included footage from some of his earlier features as well as shots illustrating the physical and technical processes involved in making these films. In the early decades of the twentieth century, Europeans, Africans, and Asians all marveled at this new technology with equal delight.62
Quickly, however, moviegoing grew from an utter novelty to a mass form of leisure and one of the most popular “cheap amusements” found in burgeoning cities across the world. During the first decades of the twentieth century, urban populations exploded, and mass entertainment was born. Initially, the mass in mass media did not refer to a message pegged to the lowest common denominator; it referred to the huge publics that gathered to see a show. Nickelodeons—so named in the United States because of the nominal fee required to go inside—spread like wildfire in American cities in the first decade of the 1900s as millions of new urban immigrants flocked to the show.63 A similar phenomenon could be found in China, Japan, Thailand, Iran, Egypt, Turkey, Tunisia, Lebanon, Singapore, Jamaica, and India.64 By the time of World War I, overflowing nightly shows were just as common in Zanzibar and Dar es Salaam. The fact that the first films were silent and thus intelligible no matter where they were shown aided the spread of moving pictures. The standardization of film technology and projection equipment furthered the ease with which films circulated: it made no difference, technically speaking, whether the films imported into Zanzibar were produced in India, France, Japan, or Britain. The cheap cost of entrance—typically just a few pennies—made it possible for the working poor in cities from Calcutta to Chake-Chake and Chicago to indulge in an evening’s delights at the moving pictures.
The thrills and spectacles offered by this new visual medium were not its only draw; equally enticing was the ability to vicariously travel to exotic places and explore new surroundings, to access news and information, and to learn about people and customs different from one’s own. Again, readers must appreciate the limited availability of other forms of mass media at that time. Prior to the 1920s, radio broadcasting was extremely limited even in Europe, and many people in the world did not gain access to wireless transmission or affordable receivers until well after World War II. Newspapers and magazines were relatively inexpensive sources of news and information, but most of the world’s population was not literate, making access to print media irrelevant to most. American journalists frequently referred to movies as “the workingman’s college” and lamented that more people got their knowledge of the world beyond their doorsteps from film rather than newspapers.65 In Tanzania too, the desire to learn about new people and places and see how others lived was one of the common reasons respondents cited when asked why they went to the show. An old Swahili maxim said, “Travel to learn/open your mind.” Film offered a slice of the traveler’s vision to those who never left home.
Movie houses also offered patrons access to modern splendors and delights. Inaugurated in Europe in the 1910s, picture palaces swept the globe in the 1920s as the industry sought to cultivate a “higher-class” audience and distance itself from the urban working classes who comprised the majority of viewers during its first two decades.66 Picture palaces evoked glamour and opulence, encouraging patrons to identify with the dream world on the screen.67 I grew up hearing stories from my great-aunt and great-uncle about their adventures dressing in their finest clothes and taking the streetcar downtown to the Tivoli Theater or the Chicago, while courting in the 1930s. For them, these were rare adventures, and their reminiscences focused on the exotic: the opulent theaters with their gilded ornamentation and antique statuary, as well as the extravagant use of electrical lighting—three thousand bulbs in the marquee that spelled Chicago and the largest chandelier in the world in the theater lobby—all of which was a world away from their working-class tenement and single-bulb daily life. Going to the movies allowed them not only to see films but also to physically and emotionally experience a life of affluence and plush indulgence, if only for a short time.
East Africa’s first picture palace, the Royal, opened in Zanzibar in 1921, the same year that the Tivoli and the Chicago debuted. (See fig. 1.2.) Following global aesthetic standards, Zanzibar’s picture palace encouraged patrons of every class to enter a space where they too were royal. According to Mwalim Idd Farhan, a teacher and musician from Zanzibar who attended the theater in his youth, “The way you were treated at the cinema made you feel proud, like you were someone. Just being in the building made you feel like a Sultan.,” He added, “At home we had no electricity, or even a chair. The cinema was lit up both inside and out, and the chairs were upholstered, something unknown to us Swahili back in those days.”68 The American movie moguls A. J. Balaban and Sam Katz, who operated the Tivoli, the Chicago, and one of the first national chains in the United States, would have been proud of the theatergoing experience in Zanzibar. In the 1920s, they were among the first in the United States to inaugurate an elaborate corporate policy of treating moviegoing patrons as kings and queens, which was part of their effort to attract wealthy and middle-class audiences to the picture show.69 Mwalim Idd recalled that “at the cinema everyone was treated like royalty. You had an usher, like a servant, who politely guided you to your seat. He called you sir or madam, and made certain you were comfortable. Nowhere else were you treated so grand.” The fact that the Royal also boasted box seats for the sultan of Zanzibar’s large extended family and the British resident’s entourage further enhanced the feeling of moviegoers like Mwalim Idd that there, if nowhere