Screening Europe in Australasia

Front matter

EXETER STUDIES IN FILM HISTORY

Transnational Silent Film Before and After the Rise of Hollywood

JULIE K. ALLEN

Part I: Film Distribution and Exhibition in Australasia before World War I

Distribution and Exhibition of Early Film in Settler-Colonial Australasia

2 ‘The Anglo-American Fathers of the Australian Combine Cosens Spencer, T.J. West, and J.D. Williams

3 Trans-Tasman Cinema Traffic Film Distribution and Exhibition in New Zealand

Part II: European Film on Australasian Screens through 1917 4 “THEIR WORK STANDS SUPREME’

Pathé Fréres, Sarah Bernhardt, and French Art Films

5 “The most important event in the annals of the biograph in Australia’

The Triumph of Italian Historical Epics

6 ‘Like the hallmark on silver The Unquestioned Quality of Nordic Films

7 The Female Faces of German Film Abroad Asta Nielsen, Henny Porten, and Madame Saharet

Clement Mason's European Film Imports in 1913 vii xii

Part III: European Art Cinema in Competition with Hollywood

9 ‘Films as Foreign Offices’ 321 Mason Super Films’ Promotion of Swedish and Italian Art Film in Interwar Australasia

10 The Rise of UFA, Cinema Art Films, and Anglo-German

Solidarity Against Hollywood 362 Bibliography 405 European Film List 417

Index 431 viii

3.2

3.3

Illustrations

Map of New Zealand, c.1930 Map of Australia, c.1930

A map of the submarine telegraph cable network connecting British territories in 1902

Photograph of the Sun Picture Gardens cinema audience in Broome, WA, c.1920

Photograph of Spencer’s Theatrescope, Lyceum Theatre, Sydney, April 1908

Cartoon of T.J. West in The Bioscope (London),

22 September 1910

Photograph of West’s Queen's Hall cinema, 99 William Street, Perth, c.1910

Photograph of J.D. Williams in Film Fun, January 1921, p. 14

Advertisement for Greater J.D. Williams Amusements Company, Referee, 8 January 1913, p. 16

Postcard of Hayward’s Empire Theatre in Auckland, c.1914 Photograph of Ben Fuller, John Fuller Sr, and John Fuller Jr in the Otago Witness, 29 March 1905

Photograph of Fullers’ Pictures boarding in Nelson, advertising the 1910 Ambrosio film La vergine di Babilonia/The Virgin of Babylon

4.1

4.2

6.3

6.4

7.3 7.4

SCREENING EUROPE IN AUSTRALASIA “THEIR WORK STANDS SUPREME’

Pathé Frères publicity poster, 1898. Designer: Adrien Barrére

Still of Sarah Bernhardt in Film d’Art’s La dame aux camélias/Camille (1912)

“The most important event in the annals of the biograph in

Australia’

Frames from Ambrosio’s Nerone/Nero, or the Fall

of Rome (1908)

Still from Cines’s Quo Vadis? (1913)

Bartolomeo Pagano, publicity still for the Itala film Cabiria (Giovanni Pastrone, 1914)

Francesca Bertini and Gustavo Serena in La signora dalle camelie/Camille (Tiber Film, 1915)

Drawing of J.D. Williams’s Colonial Theatre No. 2, later the Empress, Sydney, Film Index, 31 December 1910

Still of Gerda Christophersen, Valdemar Psilander, and Clara Wieth in Nordisk’s Den farlige alder/The Price of Beauty (1911)

Still of Clara Wieth and Valdemar Psilander in Nordisk’s Ved fengslets port/ Temptations of a Great City (1911)

Still from Kinografen’s De fire djevle/The Four Daredevils (1911)

Still of Asta Nielsen in Deutsche Bioscop/PAGU’s Das Madchen ohne Vaterland! The Girl Without a Country (1912) Still of Asta Nielsen as Jesta Muller pretending to be

the student Mr Klett, seducing her boyfriend’s intended fiancée Sophia Schultz (actress unknown), in Deutsche Bioscop/PAGU’s Jugend und Tollheit/In a Fix (1913) German publicity postcard of Henny Porten, c.1912 Photograph of Madame Saharet in Tażler, 17 April 1912

162 171

255 261 266

8.1

8.2

8.3

8.4

8.5

9.6

ILLUSTRATIONS

Photograph of the audience at the Garden Picture Palace in Maitland, NSW, ¢.1912

Still from Nordisk’s Dadsflugten (aka Nihilisternes dodsflugt)/The Nihilist (aka The Flight to Death) (1911) Photograph of West’s King’s Theatre on Dixon Street in Wellington, exterior, c.1930

J.D. Williams Theatres newspaper ad for Ermete Zacconi in Itala’s Padre/Father (1912) at the Crystal Theatre

in Sydney

Photograph of Clement George Mason and his second wife Mary Norton, c.1916

Thornton Fisher cartoon of Paramount’s Zukor annexing Australia in Moving Picture World, 10 March 1917, p. 1551 Photograph of Mary Norton Mason in The Lone Hand,

Publicity photograph of the filming of SF’s Terje

Vigen/A Man There Was (1917)

Still of Lars Hanson riding a log in SF’s Sången om den eldréda blomman/The Flame of Life (1919)

Still of Alf Bliitecher as Dr. Krafft and Gunnar Tolnes as Captain Avanti Planataros in Nordisk’s Himmelskibet/

A Trip to Mars (1918)

British & Continental Films ad for Francesca Bertini

in Bertini/Caesar Film’s La contessa Sara/Countess Sara

(1919), NZ Truth (Wellington), 11 December 1920

10 The Rise of UFA, Cinema Art Films, and Anglo-German

Solidarity Against Hollywood

10.1 Newspaper coverage of UFA representative Kurt Hubert’s arrival in Australia, Sydney Daily Telegraph, 25 June 1927

10.2 Cinema Art Films poster for UFA’s Der heilige Berg/Peaks of Destiny (1928)

10.3 Cinema Art Films poster for SF’s German-Swedish co-production Hans engelska fru/Matrimony (1927)

xi

Acknowledgements

Writing this book has been a multinational adventure requiring the support and assistance of scholars, librarians, archivists, colleagues, and friends in nearly a dozen countries over the course of a decade. The project was able to become what it is in large part because of the people who have helped me write it. Stephen Bottomore’s presentation at the ‘Importing Asta Nielsen’ conference in 2011 on finding traces of Nielsen in Australia and New Zealand through Trove and Papers Past planted the idea. The enthusiastic reception that my first look at Nielsen’s reception in Australia received at the German Studies Association of Australia conference in Sydney in 2014 was decisive in making me commit to pursuing this project. However, it might never have got off the ground without Professor Katie Sutton and the Research School for the Humanities at Australian National University in Canberra.

While I was a visiting fellow at ANU in late 2016, my original project about the reception of Asta Nielsen’s groundbreaking feature films in Australia in the pre-World War I era exploded into this survey of the whole landscape of European narrative films in Australia and New Zealand in the silent era. Horizon-expanding conversations with such brilliant scholars and historians as Ina Bertrand, Jill Julius Matthews, and Deb Verhoeven helped me see the bigger story that needed to be told and find the courage to tackle the telling of it. I also have Deb to thank for introducing me to HoMER (History of Moviegoing, Exhibition, and Reception) and persuading Paul Moore to squeeze my paper into the 2017 HoMER conference in Toronto well after the submission deadline. Finding such a welcoming, productive, innovative intellectual community to keep me company on this journey gave me invaluable access to the archival, scholarly, and, most importantly, human resources I needed to see this project through.

‘The scope of this project required the assistance of many organizations in several countries, to all of which I am greatly indebted. In terms of financial support, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and the Department of Scandinavian Studies at the University of Wisconsin—Madison funded the first few years of my research, while the College of Humanities and the Department of Comparative Arts and Letters at Brigham Young xii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

University (BYU) funded the remainder, in part through the Donald R. and Jean S. Marshall Endowed Professorship, which I held from 2017 to 2020, and BYU’s Humanities Center, where I was a Faculty Fellow during the same period. I also had the honour of being awarded an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Experienced Researcher Fellowship for 2019- 2021, which allowed me to complete my research and write the book while on sabbatical at the Johann Wolfgang von Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany. For archival materials and guidance, I am indebted to the staff and collections of the Australian National Library, National Film and Sound Archive, State Library of New South Wales, State Library of Queensland, State Library of Victoria, State Library of South Australia, State Library of Western Australia, and the National Archives of Australia; Nga Taonga Sound and Vision, the National Library of New Zealand, and Archives New Zealand; the German Federal Archive, German Film Institute, and the German National Library; the British Film Institute; the Danish Film Institute; the Swedish Film Institute; the EYE Film Institute; the Fondation Jérome Seydoux, Cinémathèque française, and Bibliothéque nationale de France; the Archivio Museo Nazionale del Cinema, Cineteca di Bologna, and the Biblioteca Luigi Chiarini at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia.

Although the digital archives Trove, Papers Past, and these many physical archives provided the puzzle pieces of this story, the generosity of dozens of individuals has made it possible for me to assemble them into a coherent picture. I owe sincere thanks for suggestions, advice, insights, and assistance to Dylan Walker, Tom O’Regan, Stephen Gaunson, Jill Julius Matthews, Vinzenz Hediger, Karina Pryt, Martin Loiperdinger, Yvonne Zimmermann, Stephan Michael Schröder, Christoph Schobel, Christoph Wirth, Heidi Kempener, Christina Schaudel, Janni Dahl Astrup, Birgit Granhoj Dam, Lisbeth Richter Larsen, Isak Thorsen, Thomas Christensen, Lars Martin Sørensen, Claire Thomson, Jon Burrows, Stephen Bottomore, Niki Mewilliams, Stéphanie Salmon, Agnes Bertola, Carla Ceresa, Anna Fiaccarini, Elisa Uffreduzzi, Richard Abel, Marc Silbermann, and Daryl Lee. I appreciate the able assistance of my research assistants Hannah Wooster Strauss, Frederik Bak Christensen, and Brennan Hunt; my editors Anna Henderson, David Hawkins, and Sara Magness; the series editors Richard Maltby, Helen Hanson, and Joe Kember; and the anonymous peer reviewer of my manuscript. My husband and children have been wonderfully patient and supportive throughout the whole process, enjoying the journey (both metaphorical and literal), even though they didnt always understand or share my enthusiasm for the minutiae of figuring out which film corresponded to which title, finding a scrap of information about an xiii obscure theatre or exhibitor, and spending hundreds of hours scrolling through digitized century-old newspapers.

While this book is an entirely original work, preliminary versions of a few of the chapters have appeared in print elsewhere. Elements of Chapter 6 were published in both ‘Mapping Cinema Ghosts: Reconstructing the Circulation of Nordic Silent Film in Australia’ in Anna Westerstahl Stenport and Arne Lunde (eds), Nordic Film Cultures: A Globalized History of Cinematic Elsewheres (Edinburgh University Press, 2019), and ‘Selling Scandinavia at the Ends of the Earth: Nordic Silent Film in Australasia’ in Rethinking Scandinavia, CSS Web Quarterly 2.1 (2018). Some parts of Chapter 7 appeared as “To Be or Not To Be (German): Asta Nielsen and the Contested Circulation of German Silent Films in Australasia, 1910-1915’ in Andrea Bandhauer, Tristan Lay, Yixu Lu, and Peter Morgan (eds), Die Welt auf Deutsch: Fremdenbilder und Selbstentwiirfe in der deutschsprachigen Literatur und Kultur (The World Within: Self-perception and Images of the Other in German Literature and Culture) (Rohrig Universitatsverlag, 2018), while some information that now appears in Chapters 5 and 7 was originally published as ‘Divas Down Under: The Circulation of Asta Nielsen’s and Francesca Bertini’s Films in Australian Cinemas in the 1910s’, Studies in Australasian Cinema 11.2 (2017). Finally, there is also some overlap between the content of Chapters 4,5,and 7 with two articles on Asta Nielsen and early female film stardom I contributed to a special issue of Early Popular Visual Culture that was still forthcoming as this book went to press.

xiv

Aotearoa New Zealand

—— Railroads in 1930 Auckland

Pukekohe.

o New’Rlymouth

Whanganui Palmerston North Feilding n Nelso (a

Inangahua

Greymouth © ~°Christchurch Leeston

Queenstown

Oamaru

Lawrence o

Dunedin Invercargill

Whangarei

Napier Taradale Hastings

Waipukurau Dannevirke Pahiatua

Wairarapa

250 Miles

Gisborne

Map of New Zealand, c.1930, showing towns where European silent films were frequently screened. © Julie K. Allen and ThinkSpatial, Brigham Young University

Australia .

—— Railroads in 1930

NORTHERN Broome, TERRITORY WESTERN AUSTRALIA o Laverton Leonora?

pe eg a eres Broad Arrow; 5 Kalgoorlie

Coôlgardie Boulder ©Mount Morgan

Perth Fremantle ®Darling Downs

Narrogin gBunbury

Bendigog o Mount Alexander

Goleraine Ballarat

Melbourne Prahran

Laverton St Kilda Colac

O Hamilton

Map of Australia, c.1930, showing towns where European silent films were frequently screened. © Julie K. Allen and ThinkSpatial, Brigham Young University

State Abbreviations

NSW - New South Wales NT - Northern Territory QLD - Queensland

SA - South Australia TAS - Tasmania

VIC - Victoria

WA - Western Australia

Cairns S Pas

Townsville Charters Towers oMackay QUEENSLAND 6@Mount Morgan Maryborough SOUTH AUSTRALIA ; Warwi ; ee Mullumbimby NEW SOUTH Tenterfieldo,. }o% Byron peony Lismore “Bay Glen Innes. Gratton E 4 WALES Manillao Armidale Broken Hill MEE Tamworth Port Pirie Singleton . l Dungog K p Orange ERIR adina Forbeso d Maitland3o Newcastle Moonta \ Lithgowe Katoomba Port Adelaide a GrenfellO sCowra Parramatta © Sydney \ x Wollongong VICTORIA Canberra ae, PONE Safe F Millicent, ] gega b i pe Bairnsdale

Launceston TASMANIA

Franklin Hobart

The Transnational Circulation of European Silent Cinema

From its earliest beginnings, cinema has been a transnational system of production, distribution, and exhibition able to bring countries and people closer than ever before possible. Even as moving picture cameras and projectors were first being developed simultaneously in France, Germany, Italy, the UK and the USA in the 1890s, the nascent film industry was already global. Unhampered by linguistic divisions, silent films moved along existing networks of trade, entertainment, migration, colonization, and communication between cities, regions, and countries; by introducing audiences to the same stories, the same stars, they created a shared cultural vernacular across vast distances. Although American films have maintained a dominant position in most national cinema markets for much of the last century, the film industry has remained intertwined with the global mobility of the people involved in making and watching films, as well as the movement of the films themselves.

In traditional film history narratives, the transnational dynamics of cinema are often overshadowed by a focus on national cinemas that privileges a history of production, producers, and authorship in a particular country. This approach is problematic at best, since film-making has always been multinational, with financing, production, acting, filming, special effects, and sound handled by people and companies from many different countries. It gets even more complicated when film distribution, exhibition, and reception are considered, for it turns out that audiences outside of the United States have always watched films from other countries. While national cinema histories are often selective accounts of the most artistically innovative or financially successful productions a country has offered the global market, what viewers actually consume generally has ‘almost no relationship to the national agenda or the general quest for a national cultural identity in the cinema’.’ Particularly in the days before streaming, audience expectations and preferences were limited by what films people had access to in a particular time and place, but audiences still made their preferences known.

The New Cinema History approach to the social history of film recognizes the need to account for consumption as well as production. Studying film consumption illuminates the role of the cinema, in Richard Maltby’s formulation, as a ‘site of social and cultural exchange’, where films contribute to cinemagoers’ understanding of the world and their place in it.? Determining the nature of such exchanges requires knowing what kinds of films people were watching in each place and time. Joseph Garncarz reminds us that every cinema audience consists not just of individual people watching a specific film in a single theatre at the same time, but also of people ‘who have seen a particular film in a particular area within the same period of time, or simply those who have chosen to go the cinema, regardless of which films they have seem.’ The collective experience of watching the same films within the same general time frame provides audience members with a cultural lens through which they can evaluate their own lived experiences. Seen from this perspective, the details of a film’s transnational movement matter as much as its formal qualities—knowing the kinds of audiences who might have watched it, when, where, and even why, can help us understand not just an individual film’s significance and possible effect on audiences, but also its place within larger patterns of transnational communication and value formation. Instead of considering national cinema traditions as isolated phenomena, New Cinema History looks at film as a global phenomenon that connects countries and peoples in powerful, albeit often unseen, ways.

While Australasian film production has received considerable attention from film historians, film consumption in the Antipodes has been studied much less, particularly with regard to the silent period. Such a history of distribution, exhibition, and reception is necessarily very different from a history of film production in the same place, but it offers uniquely valuable insights into what people were actually watching and what kinds of cultural norms the films they watched reflect and/or challenge. Already by the turn of the twentieth century, audiences in Australia and New Zealand were avid consumers of silent films, but high consumer demand and low domestic production meant that most of these films came from overseas. In documenting and analysing the circulation of European silent films in Australia and New Zealand (for which I use the regional terms Australasia and the Antipodes interchangeably), Screening Europe in Australasia takes a transnational approach to film distribution, exhibition, and reception in a region of the world where the cinema was a tremendously popular form of entertainment with far-reaching economic and social implications.

The Circulation of Nationally Diverse Films in Australasia

The overwhelming dominance of the American film industry in production, distribution, and exhibition from the late 1910s onward has tended to obscure the fact that early cinema was highly nationally diverse, driven by innovative producers in France, Italy, Denmark, Sweden, Germany, and Britain as much as by American studios, first on the East Coast and later in Hollywood. European production houses including Pathé Fréres, Gaumont, Cines, Ambrosio, Itala, PAGU, Nordisk, and Swedish Biograph assiduously cultivated foreign markets for their films. Kristin Thompson's foundational study Exporting Entertainment maps the networks of global distribution that the US film industry developed in the silent era, but nothing comparable exists for the major European producers,* so the scope and sociocultural impact of the international circulation of Continental European films in the silent era is largely unknown.

Although exact numbers are difficult to come by, European films appear to have made up around a quarter of all films screened in the Antipodes in the pre-World War I era, with disproportionate representation in the category of multi-reel narrative films. Audiences in Australasia in the early 1900s and 1910s were exposed to French literary adaptations, Italian epics, Danish social dramas, Swedish historical dramas, and German cross-dressing comedies as well as British and American films. By the 1920s, the total market share of non-American films dropped to around 4%, but several dozen notable European features—primarily from Italy, Sweden, Denmark, and, in the second half of the decade, Germany—still made it to the Antipodes in the interwar period before the advent of sound film, establishing a niche market for European films perceived as artistically superior to the average American product.

Challenging the widespread but erroneous belief that Hollywood has always dominated the global film industry, Screening Europe in Australasia uses the cinema landscape of the Antipodes in the era of silent narrative films, c.1906—1930, to investigate the multi- and transnational politics of film circulation and reception that brought disparate cultures into contact with each other in competitive and complementary ways, with a particular focus on films from major Continental European producers from France, Italy, Denmark, Sweden, and Germany. Attributable to obstacles ranging from fragmentary records to multiple language barriers, the general lack of knowledge about the global distribution of European silent films represents a major gap in our understanding of the film industry. Nationally focused studies such as Ivo Blom’s work on the Dutch distributor Jean Desmet, Isak Thorsen’s thorough analysis of the first two decades of Denmark’s Nordisk Films Kompagni’s involvement in the global film industry, and Richard Abel’s work on French silent film in the USA have contributed to filling that gap.° Unfortunately, little comparative work has put such studies of individual European national cinemas in dialogue with each other, with the exception of Rudmer Canjels’s Distributing Silent Film Serials.’ Using Australasia as a case study for analysing both the representation of various European film industries and their competition with the American film industry in the silent era, this book illuminates the dynamics of the global circulation of European silent film and its economic and cultural repercussions for distributors, exhibitors, and audiences in Australia and New Zealand.

When cinema historians discuss the struggle between American and British/European companies in the silent film era for control of the global film market, Australasia is rarely mentioned. Yet focusing on film circulation in this corner of the world offers unique insights into how the competition between European and American producers played out in a neutral third space, in the era before sound film restricted the cultural adaptability and universal accessibility of films, while simultaneously demonstrating how outsize a role the Antipodes played in the market. The general trends of the global film industry’s development hold true for Australasia: while rapid innovation among producers in Europe, Britain, and the USA led to robust competition on a fairly level playing field before World War I, constraints caused by the war, coupled with Hollywood’s exploitation of American neutrality and its large domestic market advantage, led to American market dominance worldwide during and after the war. A steep decline in European production and exports undermined the possibility of any real challenge to American hegemony, aside from a brief but determined attempt by Germany, with cooperation from France and Britain, to restore market balance. However, the specific conditions of cinema distribution and exhibition in the Antipodes allow us to reconstruct in vivid detail how this story played out and analyse not just the facts of the rise and fall of European film in the silent era, but also the social and cultural significance of the homogenization of the global film industry.

By treating Australia and New Zealand as a single region, the trading links that bound them together in this era become much clearer, as do the differences between their cinema markets. Tom O’Regan argues,

Australia and New Zealand are identified and brought together by the idea of the Antipodes, a term which traditionally refers to the places of the globe which are diametrically opposed to Europe. In cultural terms being Antipodean means to be other, displaced, a reflex of European metropolitan culture and yet part of it elsewhere. The Tasman Sea, often colloquially referred to as “The Ditch,’ both links and separates Australia and Aotearoa (New Zealand). On the one hand, the two countries retain distinct political, social, economic, and cultural characteristics, which are reflected in their different positioning in the global market. But they also participate in an economic system, trading relationship, and cultural economy that is progressively more integrated and characterized by the free exchange of both capital and labour.’

Given its much larger size in terms of territory and population, Australia tended to get more films and sooner, many of which were then handed down to New Zealand, as to a younger sibling, after a few months, although in several cases, films circulated much longer or exclusively in New Zealand. Such deviations from the norm should remind us that nothing about the circulation of films was automatic or inevitable but was always the outcome of the shifting parameters of product availability, audience response, transport logistics, cost, and, after 1916/17, government censor approval.

Both Australasia and New Zealand were early adopters of cinema technology, whose exhibition sectors expanded rapidly from travelling cinemas in the mid-1890s to purpose-built picture houses in the mid-1900s to extravagant cinema palaces by 1910. By 1913, there were about 650 cinema theatres in Australia (250 of them in New South Wales, 180 in Victoria), and Australians were, according to Diane Collins, ‘as regular in attending picture shows as in having breakfast’, with approximately one-eighth of the population spending every Saturday night ‘at the pictures’.'? Despite such robust consumer demand, the early Australian film industry was not able to realize its considerable potential for domestic production on a large enough scale to meet demand, while the film industry in New Zealand started late and stayed small throughout the silent era." This combination of low domestic production and high consumer demand made the Antipodes a lucrative market for American, British, and Continental film producers, as well as for enterprising local and regional distributors and exhibitors, especially before the centralization of distribution and exhibition under the Combine after 1913.

Since, as Graeme Turner notes, ‘gaining access to the right cinemas in sufficient numbers, and at the right time—is ... the key to a film’s success’,’* the people who decided which films to import and where to screen them played an outsize role in shaping this market. The history of the distribution and exhibition of European silent film in Australasia is a tale of such legendary showmen as Clement Mason, Cosens Spencer,

TJ. West, Henry Hayward, John Fuller, and J.D. Williams, of larger-thanlife stars, and cut-throat competition on three continents and across at least nine countries, at a time when the cinema industry as we know it today was hardly a dream in the most ambitious pioneer’s wildest imagination. Women played an influential role in many capacities as well, not just as actors like Lottie Lyell and directors like the McDonagh sisters, but also as distributors such as Mary Mason, exhibitors like Ettie Wilmott, and even projectionists, as Sefiora Spencer demonstrates.

A Note about Methodology

Very little tangible evidence remains from the early Australasian cinema industry—precious few company records, distribution contracts, cinema logbooks, or publicity materials have survived. Cinema programming was an ephemeral thing, with individual films screened for anywhere from one night to a few weeks, then replaced by a similar product. The problem of missing circulation records is systemic; as Maltby explains, the film industry was built on a model in which ‘motion pictures were understood to be consumables, viewed once, disposed of and replaced by a substitute providing a comparable experience’. Fortunately, since newspapers offered one of the cheapest and most reliable ways for exhibitors to advertise upcoming films and report on films just screened, the open-access digitization of hundreds of Australian and New Zealand newspapers and magazines going back more than two centuries on the websites trove.nla.gov.au and paperspast.natlib.govt.nz has made it possible to reconstruct what was going on in the Antipodean cinema landscape to an astonishing degree. Print media also played a pivotal role in fostering movie star culture, particularly from the 1920s on. These digitization projects are ongoing, so the results reported here could increase in the future, but the record is still fragmentary, with gaps, repetition, and inaccuracies, which means that some parts of the story may never be known, particularly for cinemas that did not advertise their screenings in newspapers.

Despite these limitations, Australasian print media coverage of popular entertainment venues makes it possible to establish a baseline measure of which films were imported and (sometimes) by whom, where they were shown, and for approximately how long. Based on these listings, it becomes clear that anywhere between one and seven prints—on valuable, highly flammable silver nitrate film—of hundreds of European films were shipped from Continental ports or London to Perth, Melbourne, Sydney, Auckland, or Wellington, then remained in circulation for up to several years, after which the prints were either too worn out to be screened, destroyed, or, in some cases, stolen. Most cinemas changed their programmes once or twice a week, giving each film a run of only a few days in each city, but the sheer size of the Australasian market generated several different cinema circuits on both sides of the Tasman Sea—first in metropolitan areas, then in smaller cities, and finally in tiny rural towns—which meant that films had a potentially much longer life in Australasia than they did at home.

The major initial challenge in writing this book was figuring out which European films had even been imported and screened in Australasia. Although a few European production company archives have survived from this period, no comprehensive local, regional, or national, let alone international, registers of silent films exist—no one thought to keep records of which films were screened, nor where they came from. Since so few of the films themselves have survived, determining which film listed in an ad is which European original, particularly when many films had similar titles and the translated titles of foreign films were frequently changed (and sometimes the same film was run under different titles), has been a daunting task. Using plot summaries and cast lists included in many newspaper reviews of the time, archival records in each of the relevant countries, published registers of various companies’ and countries’ film output, and crowdsourced databases like the Internet Movie Database (imdb.com), I have been able in most cases to identify the original titles of the films that were imported, as noted in the Film List at the end of the book. Still, there will inevitably be some errors and omissions, for which I apologize.

Another major obstacle in attempting an Australasian reception history of silent films is that few if any first-hand accounts from cinemagoers in the first decades of the twentieth century have been preserved to tell us what viewers thought of the films they saw. Newspaper mentions can offer some clues to how audiences reacted to various films, though the profusion of exclamation points, all-caps declarations, and bombastic language common to many listings can make it seem like a film was a bigger success than it was. Ads and reviews in trade and popular papers illustrate not only how far and how long individual films were able to circulate within Australasia, but also how the films were marketed and what kind of information about them was conveyed (or not) to potential audiences— company names, country of origin, star names, plot summary, references to other films by the same company, particularly admirable attributes of the lead actor/actress or of the screenplay, and so on. I have paired the quantitative data from newspaper listings with qualitative analysis of the films themselves, the discourse around them, and the contexts in which they were exhibited to paint a broader picture of the cinema landscape in Australasia at the time. Including narrative data from fan magazines, correspondence, and personal memoirs transforms a potentially dry catalogue of film titles and screening dates into a dynamic web of connections and conversations within Australasia and across the world. The circulation of European silent film in the Antipodes proves to be an intriguing part of a much larger but mostly forgotten story of cross-cultural contact, cooperation, and competition.