The Gentleman in the Stalls: Georges Méliès and Spectatorship in Early Cinema

Obviously, one should say “the lady and the gentleman in the stalls.” As feminist research on spectatorship during the early years of living pictures, by scholars such as Miriam Hansen, Lauren Rabinovitz and Heide Schlüpmann, has demonstrated, women constituted an important, if not the major part of the audience at the turn of the last century. ¹ Indeed, to take just one example from the earliest years of the new medium, among the spectators depicted on posters advertising the Cinématographe Lumière we see numerous women seated among the spectators. However, when the French film historian Georges Sadoul, in his Histoire générale du cinéma, declared that Georges Méliès’s films represented “le point de vue du monsieur de l’orchestre,” that is the point of view of the gentleman in the stalls, he did not necessarily want to claim that audiences at that time were predominantly male. ² His purpose, in fact, was to raise quite a different kind of issue, one which is, in the first place, aesthetic.