TOEFL Reading Practice
Reading Task 1
Factual Information,
Vocabulary, Reference, Summary and Insert
Questions
EARLY CINEMA

The cinema did not emerge as a form of
mass consumption until its technology evolved
from the initial "peepshow" format to the point
where images were projected on a screen in a
darkened theater. In the peepshow format, a film
was viewed through a small opening in a machine
that was created for that purpose. Thomas
Edison's peepshow device, the Kinetoscope, was
introduced to the public in 1894. It was
designed for use in Kinetoscope parlors, or
arcades, which contained only a few individual
machines and permitted only one customer to view
a short, 50-foot film at any one time. The first
Kinetoscope parlors contained five machines. For
the price of 25 cents (or 5 cents per machine),
customers moved from machine to machine to watch
five different films (or, in the case of famous
prizefights, successive rounds of a single
fight).
These Kinetoscope arcades were modeled on
phonograph parlors, which had proven successful
for Edison several years earlier. In the
phonograph parlors, customers listened to
recordings through individual ear tubes, moving
from one machine to the next to hear different
recorded speeches or pieces of music. The
Kinetoscope parlors functioned in a similar way.
Edison was more interested in the sale of Kineto-scopes
(for roughly $1,000 apiece) to these parlors
than in the films that would be run in them
(which cost approximately $10 to $15 each). He
refused to develop projection technology,
reasoning that if he made and sold projectors,
then exhibitors would purchase only one
machine—a projector—from him instead of several.
Exhibitors, however, wanted to maximize their
profits, which they could do more readily by
projecting a handful of films to hundreds of
customers at a time (rather than one at a time)
and by charging 25 to 50 cents admission. About
a year after the opening of the first
Kinetoscope parlor in 1894, showmen such as
Louis and Auguste Lumiere, Thomas Armat and
Charles Francis Jenkins, and Orville and
Woodville Latham (with the assistance of
Edison's former assistant, William Dickson)
perfected projection devices. These early
projection devices were used in vaudeville
theaters, legitimate theaters, local town halls,
makeshift storefront theaters, fairgrounds, and
amusement parks to show films to a mass
audience.
With the advent of projection in 1895-1896,
motion pictures became the ultimate form of mass
consumption. Previously, large audiences had
viewed spectacles at the theater, where
vaudeville, popular dramas, musical and minstrel
shows, classical plays, lectures, and
slide-and-lantern shows had been presented to
several hundred spectators at a time. But the
movies differed significantly from these other
forms of entertainment, which depended on either
live performance or (in the case of the
slide-and-lantern shows) the active involvement
of a master of ceremonies who assembled the
final program.
Although early exhibitors regularly accompanied
movies with live acts, the substance of the
movies themselves is mass-produced, prerecorded
material that can easily be reproduced by
theaters with little or no active participation
by the exhibitor. Even though early exhibitors
shaped their film programs by mixing films and
other entertainments together in whichever way
they thought would be most attractive to
audiences or by accompanying them with lectures,
their creative control remained limited. What
audiences came to see was the technological
marvel of the movies; the lifelike reproduction
of the commonplace motion of trains, of waves
striking the shore, and of people walking in the
street; and the magic made possible by trick
photography and the manipulation of the camera.
With the advent of projection, the viewer's
relationship with the image was no longer
private, as it had been with earlier peepshow
devices such as the Kinetoscope and the
Mutoscope, which was a similar machine that
reproduced motion by means of successive images
on individual photographic cards instead of on
strips of celluloid. It suddenly became
public—an experience that the viewer shared with
dozens, scores, and even hundreds of others. At
the same time, the image that the spectator
looked at expanded from the minuscule peepshow
dimensions of 1 or 2 inches (in height) to the
life-size proportions of 6 or 9 feet.