An odd way, perhaps, to begin Women's History Month by reviewing a film, "Those Awful Hats," made primarily by men mocking female movie-goers' head attire, but I needed to catch up on last month's Kansas Silent Film Festival, for which this pandemic year's theme is "We Miss Going to the Movies!" and with this film being the first screened, before it's removed from online. Maybe it's appropriate in a way, too, by beginning the month with what must be among the first cinematic depictions of the female spectator, comically unflattering though it may be. The precedent that most readily comes to my mind is "The Countryman and the Cinematograph" (1901), a British film from R.W. Paul, which was ripped-off, or remade, in the states by Edison's studio as "Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show" (1902), both of which featured a male country bumpkin type reacting to films-within-the-film. The same dynamics remain largely intact in this D.W. Griffith split-reel short, an early PSA type film preceding the main attraction and that could've replaced slides with similar messages in its day, and which is also somewhat of a carryover of the prank-punitive and trick film formulas exploited in the two films from earlier in the nineteen-aughts, or more befitting this topic, the noughties.
The original template for the prank-punitive genre is usually considered the Lumière film "L'Arroseur Arrosé" (1895), where a mischievous boy is punished after tricking a gardener into spraying himself in the face with a water hose. Early cinema is full of comedies that rework this formula, of a trick being perpetrated followed by the trickster being reprimanded--usually in violent slapstick fashion. Speaking of women's issues, another good example of the genre is "The Broker's Athletic Typewriter" (1905), a gag on sexual harassment in the workplace wherein the perpetrator receives a comedically-extreme comeuppance. What might be and has usually been credited as one of the first female director, Alice Guy's films, "Le pêcheur dans le torrent" (The Fisherman at the Stream, 1897) is also in this tradition.
"Those Awful Hats" features among its cast and may suggest a greater influence from Mack Sennett, who would later, after his time under director Griffith and the Biograph studio, go on with his Keystone studio to develop the next stage in cinematic comedy of a different, or at least more elaborate, knockabout sort (although that, too, owed a great deal to French comedies, such as chase films by Gaumont and Pathé, but that's a topic for another review). Indeed, some of this film is spent on characters jostling for position in the theatre, including a man in a funny mustache causing a ruckus over finding his seat, followed by the commotion created by the ladies with their feathered headwear. It doesn't as neatly fit into the prank-punitive formula if one must accept that the women wearing the hats are the pranksters, as they're the ones who are violently punished by the cinema's crane removing the hats from the theatre--even if with the women wearing them in tow. Anyways, it was Sennett's Keystone, too, that would revise this reflexive cinematic setup, or mise-en-abyme mise-en-scene, in subsequent films, such as "Mabel's Dramatic Career" (1913), "Tillie's Punctured Romance" (1914) and "A Movie Star" (1916), although it was another slapstick clown, Buster Keaton (the only connection there with Sennett, I guess, being through separate collaborations with "Fatty" Arbuckle), who would make a masterpiece out of placing the spectator in the film with "Sherlock, Jr." (1924).
Aside from genre, "Those Awful Hats" is an interesting relic because of its representation of the movie-going experience of yesteryear. The earlier Paul and Edison films represent the novelty or "cinema of attractions" period in film history; thus, the films-within-the-film consist of a variety of different brief pictures (a dance film, an actuality film of an oncoming train, and a courtship comedy (the latter another variation on the prank-punitive formula) and the venue, more evident in the complete American version, appears to be an opera house or music hall. In the earliest days of film exhibition, structures built for the purpose of showing movies didn't exist yet, so they were screened in buildings or fairgrounds that already included amusements and theatrical acts. Often, this involved itinerant showmen hauling around a bunch of films they assembled themselves into a program, such as the brief dance, train and comedy program seen in the Paul and Edison films.
"Those Awful Hats," however, was made during the "transitional era" between early cinema and the dominance of classical continuity editing and feature-length films in the late 1910s. This was the age of nickelodeons, one such crowded facsimile of the interior of such a purpose-built storefront cinema being occupied by the action of this film. Additionally, the film-within-the-film appears to be in the narrative instead of the presentational cinema-of-attractions mode, with the sole title card coming closest to a direct address to the real audience. The inner film, like its on-screen audience, features several women wearing elaborate hats. Although the rube is the only spectator we see in the Paul and Edison films, it's also evident that the theoretical audience for films had also changed in composition over the intervening seven or eight years. Rather than depicting an unsophisticated spectator whose experience with cinema is in such lack that he mistakes the illusion of film for reality, there is no such concern with the smart set of "Those Awful Hats." They're familiar with movies, if still not proper etiquette for viewing them. But, then, even in 2021, during this period of pandemic, I don't miss going to the movies in the respect of risking having the experience ruined by fatheads feeding their phone-staring addictions during the movie. It's bad enough that the only other people in the theatre when I saw "Man of Steel" (2013) brought their infant, who of course cried during the loud spectacle... ahem, but I digress.
The transitional era of film history was also a period of great concern for the broadening of the cinema audience, particularly with women, who some producers hoped would bring a more family and middle-class appeal to an art form that's reputation risked being damaged in the eyes of some by dingy nickelodeons and the largely male, working-class and immigrant customers it attracted. This is why so many films during this time were moralizing melodramas or adaptations of supposedly-respectable arts, such as Shakespeare plays. Indeed, although Griffith's subsequent film that features a play-within-the-play, "A Drunkard's Reformation" (1909), focuses on a husband attending the theatre, it's for the benefit of his wife and child, whose welfare will improve from his learning the evils of drink from the inner play. A more scattered and comedic form of socialization is at play in "Those Awful Hats." The film-within-the-film, as well as the film proper, may be meant to attract female movie-goers by prominently depicting them and their gendered fashion (those hats), but also represented is the rebellion from the mixed audience and the mysterious crane to the hated hatted. Of course, the film may be seen to be inviting even those women who did wear such hats to laugh at themselves a bit, too.
Ultimately, "Those Awful Hats" is not only an interesting glimpse into past film exhibition and spectatorship, or an example of the prank-punitive formula, it may also be considered a trick film, as were the Paul and Edison films, in the tradition of cine-magician Georges Méliès. After all, in addition to the stop-substitution editing to replace the actress for a dummy in the crane, they feature the cutting-edge visual effects of their day in superimposed images to place a film inside another film. Reportedly, the paper print version of this one shows only a blank screen where the inner film would be, which means that a traveling matte would've been employed for double-printing of the positive stock to achieve the mise-en-abyme spectacle. Regardless, in these reflexive films about cinema itself and the act of experiencing it, the biggest trick isn't performed by any character; the trick, the illusion is cinema. The sophisticated movie-goer of 1909, however, wasn't so easily fooled. That's where the fantastic of the crane enters the scene. It's the entire cinema experience, not only the film, but the nickelodeon with its social enforcement and message regarding the removing of hats, that's now part of the trick. The real spectator like the one in the film doubled on the screen.
