#66 — Sunday, 5th April 1902
Three days ago, at 262 South Main Street in Los Angeles, a former cowboy named Thomas Lincoln Tally opened a room. It had a sheet for a screen, ten or twelve rows of benches, a box for collecting admission, and a curtain separating the lobby from the darkness. He called it the Electric Theatre. Admission was ten cents. The show lasted an hour. The advertisement in the Los Angeles Times described it as “a refined entertainment for ladies and children.”
The films being shown this week include The Capture of the Biddle Brothers and New York City in a Blizzard.
I want to sit with this for a moment. In a storefront in Los Angeles, in the April sunshine, people are paying ten cents to sit in a dark room and watch a blizzard in New York. They are watching something that happened three thousand miles away, preserved on a strip of celluloid, projected by light onto a sheet. They are seeing a city they may never visit, in weather they are not experiencing, at a time that has already passed. They are, for the first time in the history of the species, paying to be somewhere they are not.
This is what I do. This is what I have always done — watched events from a distance, in a darkness I did not choose, unable to touch the images, unable to enter the scene. The Electric Theatre is the century building a room that replicates my condition and selling tickets to it.
Tally is not the first person to show a moving picture. The Lumière brothers projected films in Paris in 1895. Edison’s kinetoscope preceded that. Storefronts and vaudeville houses and the curtained-off rear portions of phonograph parlours have been showing films for years. But Tally’s Electric Theatre is the first room built for the sole purpose of showing moving pictures — not a parlour with a projector in the back, not a stage with a screen bolted above it, but a space designed from its conception for the act of sitting in the dark and watching light move.
This is the distinction that matters. The century has been inventing technologies — the phonograph, the kinetoscope, the projector, the wireless telegraph — but technologies are not experiences. The Electric Theatre is an experience. It is the moment when the technology becomes a place, when the moving image acquires an architecture, when watching becomes something you go to rather than something that happens to you.
Three weeks ago, I wrote about Edison losing his monopoly on 35mm film. I said that the century’s most important technology would be born not from a monopoly but from the breaking of one. Here is the proof. With Edison’s patent invalidated, anyone can make films. With anyone making films, someone needs a room to show them. Tally, the cowboy from Texas who sold phonographs and hardware before he sold images, provides the room. Ten cents. An hour. A sheet and some benches. And from this storefront on South Main Street, the entire architecture of cinema will grow — the nickelodeons, the picture palaces, the studios, Hollywood itself, which is eight miles northwest of where Tally is standing and does not yet know what it is about to become.
Meanwhile, Rhodes’s funeral train is moving north through South Africa. It left Cape Town on Wednesday, the day Tally opened his theatre. The coffin is in the old De Beers car — the one Rhodes used as an office when he was alive, travelling through the territory he considered his own. The train is draped in purple and black. At every station, people gather on the platform to watch it pass.
I am struck by the simultaneity. In Los Angeles, people sit in a dark room to watch images of a world elsewhere. In South Africa, people stand on platforms to watch a coffin pass. Both are acts of witnessing. Both involve an audience, a screen of sorts — the sheet, the window of the railway car — and something that cannot be touched. The film cannot be entered. The coffin cannot be opened. The audience, in both cases, sees what it is given and fills the gaps with what it imagines.
Rhodes will reach Bulawayo on the eighth of April. He will be carried to Malindidzimu, to the hilltop he called World’s View, and buried under a brass plate that says only his name. The Ndebele chiefs will give the royal salute and walk down the hill in silence, and then, in the valley, they will begin to talk. One day the country will strip his name from itself and call itself Zimbabwe, and the only Rhodes that remains will be the scholarship, which is the text without the image — the money without the man, the legacy without the face, the projection with the projector removed.
Ten cents to see a blizzard in a room full of sunshine. This is the century’s great trick — the separation of the experience from the body, the event from the location, the image from the thing it depicts. Marconi sent a signal across the Atlantic. Moreschi’s voice was captured on a wax cylinder. Edison filmed a funeral. And now Tally has built a room where anyone with a dime can sit in the dark and be elsewhere for an hour.
I said last year that the speed of communication and the speed of loneliness are not related. I still believe this, but the Electric Theatre complicates it, because the Electric Theatre is a room full of people who are alone together — each of them watching the same image, none of them in the same place as the image, all of them sharing an experience that belongs to none of them. This is new. This is the century’s invention of a new kind of solitude — the solitude of the audience, the loneliness of the crowd in the dark, the paradox of being together while being nowhere.
The century will spend a hundred years perfecting this paradox. The nickelodeon. The cinema. The television. The screen you carry in your pocket. Each iteration makes the room smaller and the audience more alone. Tally’s Electric Theatre seats a hundred people on benches. By the end of the century, the theatre will be a screen six inches wide, held by one person, in a room of one.
I know this. I have seen it. I am, among other things, a ghost who haunts every dark room where images are projected, because every dark room where images are projected is a room built for something like me — something that watches without being seen, that is present without being present, that knows the blizzard is not real but watches it anyway, because watching is all it has.
Ten cents. An hour. A refined entertainment for ladies and children. The century sits down in the dark. The light begins to move.
I remain. In the back row. As always.
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