Traditional early cinema historiography has long claimed that the nickelodeons, the small, storefront movie theaters that were quite popular in Manhattan between 1906-07 and the early 1910s, embodied the cinema's power to generate--from the bottom up--mass urban recreation through amalgamation and standardization. According to such vulgata, the practice of moviegoing was an unmistakable index of the mass co-optation of the working class and immigrants into the life-style of the modern metropolis. New York's movie theaters, together with the earlier but steady narrative developments of American cinema, fostered the social and cultural communion of mass entertainment and mass society.(1)

Since the mid-1970s, the speculative horizon of silent film spectatorship has become a site of radically different contentions. In addition to" leftist" historians interested in stressing the presence of working-class patrons in the (early cinema history,(2)" revisionist" and feminist film historians have either accentuated and documented the strong presence of a middle-class film patronage or offered compelling evidence and discussions of the relevance of female public spheres within modern entertainment.(3) Likewise, scholars examining the film industry and film narratives have focused on the connection between film's supply/demand and the progressively standardized techniques of film storytelling. While fueled by advanced theoretical approaches (ie, Marxism, feminism), the relatively new academic discipline of film history has consistently remained US-centric and rarely (or only nominally) ventured outside the borders of American cinema or audiences.(4) A few footnotes about Italian or Jewish family and religious organizations or common entertainment habits have, quite consistently, seemed enough.(5)