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Okay folks, you did so well with that last request, how about one more...!?

I am also on the hunt for silent films (ideally pre-1916) that depict film audiences. Bonus points if we get to watch the same movie that the on-screen audience is watching...

Well, there's the Biograph THOSE AWFUL HATS from 1910 I believe.

Too many Keystones to list. Tillie's Punctured Romance and Mack Swain's A Movie Star come to mind.

You might want to peruse this older thread about depictions of movie theaters in films.

Some that have been mentioned on the first page of that thread:
Lukes' Movie Muddle (1916)
A Movie Star (1916)
Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show (1902)
Wo Ist Coletti (1913)
Mabel's Dramatic Career (1913)
Revenge of the Kinematograph Cameraman (1912)
Tillie's Punctured Romance (1914)
Those Awful Hats (1909)
Les Vampires (1916)
Hoodoo Ann (1916)

And yet another previous thread on the topic:

viewtopic.php?f=3&t=6556

Some further pre-1916 titles found in that one:

The Countryman and the Cinematograph (1901)
The Picture Idol (1912)
Those Love Pangs aka The Rival Mashers (1914)

Maciste (1915). The audience is watching CABIRIA.
Der Golem und die Tänzerin ( (1917) The audience is watching-Surprise!- DER GOLEM.
Henry Nicolella

Are you looking for audiences in nickelodeon-type set-ups? Because those are quite plentiful. However, shots of audiences in large theaters and picture palaces that started to become prevalent after 1911 are particularly rare, because of lighting issues. There are, however, many films that were taken at the time of audiences LEAVING theaters that were to be screened at a later performance or evening shows so that they could see themselves on the big screen.

Well Dr. LAura, these stills from "Maciste" (1915) are more revelant for this thread than for film directors.

http://community-2.webtv.net/BigSilentFan/Maciste1915/" target="_blank

Thanks guys! Sorry I didn't catch those previous threads, but thanks for bringing them to my attention. Thanks, too, for all the new suggestions!

I am most interested in early representations of the picture palace, and particularly films that seem to reflexively display their own exhibition.

(I want to contextualized Mauritz Stiller's VINGARNE, which has a framestory about Stiller getting the idea for the film, casting it, etc., and also shows the actors going to see the film's premiere, in the same location where the film did in fact premiere.)

Which leads me to a related question... Other examples of films that have some kind of prologue that introduces the film's director? I know it was fairly common to introduce the actors, but what about the writer, director, and/or producer? WO IST COLETTI is a great example, as is HIMMELSKIBET. Others?

Best,
Laura

Laura Horak wrote:Which leads me to a related question... Other examples of films that have some kind of prologue that introduces the film's director? I know it was fairly common to introduce the actors, but what about the writer, director, and/or producer? WO IST COLETTI is a great example, as is HIMMELSKIBET. Others?

Best,
Laura

When the Clouds Roll By, a Douglas Fairbanks production of 1919, has a brief prologue which introduces the film's director, Victor Fleming (who happened to be making his directorial debut), as well as the cinematographers.

That same year, director Ernst Lubitsch appeared in an amusing prologue to his film Die Puppe ("The Doll"), in which he can be seen preparing a dolls in a dollhouse. When they come to life, the story begins.

Awesome, thanks!

At the beginning of "Ein setsamer Fall" (1914, an adaptation of "Jekyll and Hyde") Director Max Mack enters the Vitascope offices and tells the production bosses that he has an idea for a movie. He then pulls actor Alwin Neuß out of his pocket!
"Unheimliche Geschicten" (1919) begins by showing director Richard Oswald posing (awkwardly) with stars Conrad Veidt and Reinhold Schünzel. It looks like a bad home movie.
Henry Nicolella

Laura Horak wrote:(I want to contextualized Mauritz Stiller's VINGARNE, which has a framestory about Stiller getting the idea for the film, casting it, etc., and also shows the actors going to see the film's premiere, in the same location where the film did in fact premiere.)

Which leads me to a related question... Other examples of films that have some kind of prologue that introduces the film's director? I know it was fairly common to introduce the actors, but what about the writer, director, and/or producer? WO IST COLETTI is a great example, as is HIMMELSKIBET. Others?

The Douglas Fairbanks film The Mystery of the Leaping Fish has a frame story where Doug comes into the office -- I'm not sure if it's the producer or the director -- with an idea for a film. As he tells his idea, we see the film (easily one of the trippiest films of all time), and at the end the authority figure from the frame story tells him that no way is this film being made. Which, of course, it was. There's a W.C. Fields talkie with a similar kind of "star has a bad idea" framing.

In the German context, the practice of showing the director at the beginning of the movie was a direct product of the 'Autorenfilm' movement, and was intended to introduce the movie which followed as a 'unique, authored' creation rather than a mere 'mass-produced product' born of new technology.

The movie which effectively started the entire movement, DER ANDERE (1913), opens by showing a still photograph (!) of lead(ing stage) actor Albert Bassermann, writer Paul Lindau and director Max Mack posed together while preparing the script, while the surviving American edit of DER STUDENT VON PRAG (1913) opens with lead(ing stage) actor Paul Wegener and writer Hanns Heinz Ewers (who was also billed as the director on the original release!) on location in Prague during the shooting of the movie, a sequence that has long been missing from German prints.

There was a brief period of considerable playfulness with regard to these openings, best represented by the aforementioned WO IST COLETTI? (1913) and EIN SELTSAMER FALL (1914), but over time they became far less intricate - a simple ill-posed shot of the film's creators waving or smiling often sufficed, with the device now less a loftily intended 'sign of authorship' than a generic marker of a 'quality' production. There was also a shift away from including the writer, with the director and/or the lead(ing stage) actors in each movie now the only ones introduced as its 'creators'.

Thus, director Richard Oswald poses uncomfortably by Schiller's grave at the beginning of HOFFMANNS ERZÄHLUNGEN (1916), director Joe May leers at the screen while thumbing through the script in an easy chair at the beginning of HILDE WARREN UND DER TOD (1917) and, to borrow Henry Nicolella's apt phrasing from above, Richard Oswald and his lead(ing stage) actors pose 'like a bad home movie' at the beginning of UNHEIMLICHE GESCHICHTEN (1919). Lubitsch's doll-house opening to DIE PUPPE (1919) remains a rare good example of this opening device in late 1910s German cinema.

One finds a few murmurings of discontent in the trade press at the beginning of the 1920s, bemoaning these 'leering faces' at the beginning of some movies as 'old-fashioned' and 'stilted', and the practice soon seems to have died out; evidently (and I say this with my tongue slightly in my cheek) audiences were now sophisticated enough to recognize 'quality' without such a heavy-handed signifier. Interestingly, this is in turn the reason for the absence of Ewers and Wegener's walk together in Prague at the beginning of all German prints of DER STUDENT VON PRAG; it was lopped out, doubtless regarded as too old-fashioned, for the 1925 re-release, from which all these prints derive.

Rodney wrote:The Douglas Fairbanks film The Mystery of the Leaping Fish has a frame story where Doug comes into the office -- I'm not sure if it's the producer or the director -- with an idea for a film. As he tells his idea, we see the film (easily one of the trippiest films of all time), and at the end the authority figure from the frame story tells him that no way is this film being made. Which, of course, it was. There's a W.C. Fields talkie with a similar kind of "star has a bad idea" framing.

The same basic premise, perhaps borrowed from Doug, was used in a Roach two-reeler from 1926 with the bizarre title Don Key (Son of Burro), a play on the Fairbanks feature Don Q, Son of Zorro, although the films were otherwise unrelated. Stuart Holmes is a screenwriter who relates his "bad idea" to producer Max Davidson, a disjointed tale involving Jimmy Finlayson, Vivien Oakland, some kids and a pet monkey. It makes no sense at all, and in the end Davidson throws Holmes out of his office.

From what I gather, the Finlayson/Oakland material was originally going to be a more conventional short, but it turned out so poorly it was considered a total bust. Supposedly it was Stan Laurel, working behind the scenes, who came up with the "bad scenario" framework, and saved the day. I wonder if Stan recalled seeing The Mystery of the Leaping Fish, and decided to re-use the premise. And then, fifteen years later, perhaps W.C. Fields ran into difficulties with Never Give a Sucker an Even Break, remembered seeing one of these things, and decided to try it yet again . . .

Thanks everyone!

Here's the review I did of a film screened at Pordenone 4 years ago. It makes extensive use of inside shots and I'd say would be a film almost indispensable in a serious exam of how the film experience was related to the venue it was shown in for the years you mention. Here is the review;

One of the most pleasant surprises of the festival was the showing of a relatively unknown film, The Stolen Voice (1915). This film was made in Fort Lee, New Jersey, which was the original American movie-making capital before the appeal of sunny skies and a healthy distance from New York patent attorneys enticed studios to move to southern California. Directed by Frank Lane, The Stolen Voice is the story of a famous opera singer, Gerald D’Orville (Robert Warwick) who, under a hypnotic suggestion by Svengali-like Dr. Von Gahl (Giorgio Majeroni), loses his voice. Completely mute, Gerard leaves for Europe for a cure. Told his case is hopeless, Gerard returns to America, where he is befriended by an old friend, Dick (Bertram Marburgh) an alcoholic whom Gerald had previously rescued from the gutter.

A reformed Dick is now a movie producer, and has a job for which Gerard never needs to say a word — he is cast as a movie matinee idol. With only a few exceptions (like The Hunchback of Notre Dame) silent films rarely had a character who was mute or deaf — perhaps there was a fear of calling attention to the fact that everyone in a film made in that era, is in effect, mute. That is, silent film is not ‘silent’ (there is almost always music playing with the images) but the key element that defines the art form is that silent film has no synchronized dialogue. In a silent film, characters may communicate by title cards, but words cannot be spoken aloud. The Stolen Voice brilliantly disregards the silent film taboo of a mute character, and Gerard finds himself with a second career — a film actor — working in a medium in which his disability is in many ways an asset.

When Dr. Von Gahl, (who made Gerard mute because he was jealous of Gerard’s success), goes to the movies, he is shocked to find that his archrival, Gerard, is the star of the film, now more popular than ever. The enormous, dominating image of Gerard is too much for Dr. Gahl to take, and he tries to run out of the theater. But in a exceptionally clever shot, in an almost literal coup de cinema (“blow of the cinema”), the bad doctor collapses directly underneath Gerard’s image on the screen, thus lifting the hypnotic spell, allowing Gerard’s voice to return. The Stolen Voice is a wonderful, entertaining film, and a terrific example of the level of sophistication already reached by filmmakers in 1915.

That is a very enjoyable film. And the great thing is that anyone can watch and/or download THE STOLEN VOICE from the George Eastman House website, although it is presented completely silent with no music score and there's also a big logo superimposed in the bottom corner.