Which was the first cinema hall and the first giant picture palace in the world?
The first CINEMA of any permanence was the 400-seat Vitascope Hall, opened at the corner of Canal Street and Exchange Place in New Orleans by William. T. Rock on 26 June 1896. Admission was 10c and patrons were allowed to look in the projection room and see the Edison Vitascope projector for another 10 c.
The first PROJECTIONIST was William Reed. Most of the films were short scenic items, including the first English film to be released in America, Robert Paul’s Waves off Dover. A major attraction was the film May Irwin Kiss, which may be said to have introduced sex to the American screen. A typical programme shown during the autumn of 1896 consisted of the following :
The Pickaninnies Dance
The Carnivel Scene
The Irish Way of Discussing Politics
Cissy Fitzgerald
The Lynching Scene
The first of the GIANT PICTURE PALACES was the 5,000-seat Gaumont-Palace which opened in Paris in 1910. Formerly the Hippodrome Theatre, back projection had to be used as there was no room for a projection-booth behind the auditorium. It was one of the first cinemas to employ the use of two projectors for the continuous showing of multi-reel films. The extraordinary capacity of the Gaumont-Palace at this early date can best be understood by comparison with the largest cinema ever built, the Roxy Theater in New York, which had 6,200 seats, and the currently largest cinema in Britain, the Odeon Leicester Square with a mere 1,983 seats.
In Britain The Mohawk Halt, Upper Street, Isiington, opened as a cinema by the Royal Animated and Singing Picture Co. on 5 August 1901 with a programme that included The Rajah’s Dream or The Enchanted Forest, billed as ‘the finest mysterious picture ever placed before the public’, a number of primitive ‘talkies’ featuring music hall stars, and scenes from the war in South Africa. Admission cost 6 d-3 s, considerably higher than the 3 d or 6 d most cinemas charged at the time of World War I.
The first PURPOSE-BUILT CINEMA was the Cinema Omnia Pathe, Boulevard Montmartre, Paris, opened on 1 December 1906 with Le Pendu. The world’s first LUXURY CINEMA, and the first with a raked floor so that everyone could see above the heads in front, it was decorated in classical style with columns and Grecian friezes. The 20 x 13 ft screen was one of the largest installed in any cinema at that time.
The first cinema in Britain with SLOPING FLOOR AND PROJECTION-BOOTH was the Picture Palace at St Albans, Hertfordshire, opened by Arthur Melbourne—Cooper of the Alpha Trading Co. 1908. It was also the first cinema to depart from the standard theatre practice of charging more to sit in the front stalls than at the back.
Contrary to the popularly held view that the cinema was an infrequently encountered novelty prior to World War I, figures that the growth of film entertainment was so spectacular from c. 1909 in the USA, and 1908 in most parts of Europe, that within three or four years it had achieved the status of a major industry. In Berlin alone 300 new cinemas were opened during 1908. The same year saw a rapid expansion throughout the industrial Midlands and the northern regions of Britain, with public halls, warehouses, shops and variety theatres being converted into cinemas in every major city. By 1912 it was estimated that there were 4,000 cinemas in the British Isles, a figure that had remained virtually unaltered when counts were made in 1921 and 1934. Many, it is true, had small seating capacity, and nearly all attracted an almost exclusively working-class clientele, which probably accounts for the lack of attention paid to the phenomenon at the time. Middle-class cinema-going came in with World War I, and was due to a combination of circumstances: the relaxation of chaperonage, the provision of better-appointed and more luxurious cinemas. the feverish desire for entertainment by officer’s home on leave, and not least, the vastly improved standards of film-making after 1914, which saw the widespread introduction of full-length features starring ‘name’ actors and actresses.
