A silent night for film

MOVIEGOERS’ tastes really haven’t changed in a century. Witness 1905’s favorite themes and genres: sex, fantasy, documentary, thrillers, dramas.

That year, audiences flocked to such titillating titles as “Peeping Tom in the Dressing Room,” “Airy Fairy Lillian Tries on Her Corset” and “Rube in the Opium Den,” broad comedies such as “The Whole Dam Family and the Dam Dog” and “The Little Train Robbery,” the socially conscious drama “The Kleptomaniac” and travelogues such as “Coney Island at Night.”

These films are among the highlights of “A Century Ago: The Films of 1905,” presented by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences on Monday at the Linwood Dunn Theater. Most prints are from the collections of the academy, the Library of Congress and the UCLA Film and Television Archive.

Until 1905, audiences viewed films in machines called kinetoscopes at arcades, as the closing “act” of a vaudeville show, at fairs or in storerooms. But in 1905 nickelodeons began springing up all over the country, and films had a place to call their own.

Academy programmer Randy Haberkamp says no one is certain where nickelodeon theaters began. “Basically you had some enterprising people who realized there was money to be made. Movies could hold their own, and nickelodeons were cheaper than [seeing them] on the vaudeville circuit.”

For a nickel, moviegoers could see a cluster of films accompanied by a pianist.

“They would have a program of a certain length, and it would repeat,” Haberkamp says. “It ran all day. You went in when you went in, and you came out when you came out. It wasn’t like a show started at 7:30.”

Though the running times of films expanded in 1905, “two reels was about it,” says Haberkamp. “That was considered a feature at that point. A lot of the stuff on the American level was still very primitive.”

That wasn’t the case in Europe, especially France. “The French were clearly ahead of us at this point as far as artistic expression,” says Haberkamp, who will be screening Georges Melies’ hand-tinted extravaganza from 1905, “The Palace of the Arabian Nights,” with live narration.

“With the Americans, you look at the ‘Dam Family’ and they were starting to play around with their jokes a bit more, making them a little more elaborate. But the French spent a lot of money on sets and costumes and things like that. Americans really didn’t concentrate on that. It was a little bit too highbrow.”

People like Melies who were doing films in France, says Haberkamp, came from magic, vaudeville or theater backgrounds, but “American filmmakers like Edwin S. Porter were gadget guys and inventors. They were much more into the visceral effect of this stuff and the technology than they were with the ‘artistry’ of it. That’s why D.W. Griffith made such an impact – because he did come from a theatrical background, and he looked at things with more of an artistic eye.”

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`A Century Ago: The Films of 1905’

Where: Linwood Dunn Theater, 1313 N. Vine St., Hollywood

When: 7:30 p.m. Monday

Price: $3 to $5

Contact: (310) 247-3000 or www.oscars.org