Conclusion

Summary

Finally, from these five case studies I want to draw some conclusions about exhibitionary entertainments in the early decades of the twentieth century. I will return now to those research questions I asked in the introduction to this book, which have informed my archival research, and attempt to draw out some of the more general concepts and principles that define what I have called colonial modernity.

A central strategy in my re-imagining of the fluid media landscape of the early twentieth century has been to revive Frank Hurley's quaint and now largely forgotten term, ‘synchronized lecture entertainments’. Recovering this term has helped us to see that in the early decades of twentieth century, media such as photography and cinema, which we now tend to think of as distinct, were in fact bound together in the kinds of mixed or multimedia ‘platform’ performances described by Charles Musser and Carol Nelson in their pioneering book, High-Class Moving Pictures (1991): these include lectures, travelogues, magic lantern shows and gramophone concerts. Some of the media used in these synchronized lecture entertainments belonged to the new century, while others had deeper roots in the long nineteenth century and beyond. They include lantern-slide projection, early cinema (now incorrectly called ‘silent’ cinema, as Rick Altman has shown in Silent Film Sound), musical accompaniment and sound effects (both live and pre-recorded), ethnographic displays, photographic exhibition, newspaper and book publication, and – centrally – the presence of the celebrity lecturer and his narrative, anecdotes, stage patter and humbug.