Women Duck their Heads

“The pictures of battleships in action were so real that every time a shot was fired the women would duck their heads to let the thirteen-inch shells pass over” (Gomery, 12). [Quoted in Edward Lowery, “Edwin J. Hadley: Traveling Film Exhibitor.” Journal of the University Film Association 28, no. 3 (Summer 1976): 6]

Adventures In Music : Toot, Whistle, Plunk And Boom

Similar to Will Eisner’s discussion of the evolution of the medium of comics (or “sequential art” as he calls it) is this 1953 Disney cartoon which rehearses the evolutionary history of music as a medium.

Those Awful Hats

This 1909 D. W. Griffith short has a different take on the film spectatorship scenario:

Noone here is naive. Instead, modern (some might even say decadent) female fashions spoil the potential absorption of the (mostly male, or masculine coded) spectators enjoying the show. decadence

Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show

The Awakening (1928) movie poster promises a rape scene

Perhaps this is what the censors objected to when they noted that the posters advertising the films are often more objectionable than the films themselves. For example, in one of the Russell Sage Foundation sponsored reports (The Motion Picture Problem, 1921) Charles Lathrop writes: "utterly false impressions as to the character of a film are frequently given by the advertising. If the pictures were as bad as the posters sometimes indicate the conditions would be much more serious" (8).

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