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I have previously argued that when film 'fan'magazines first emerged in the United Kingdom in October 1911, in the shape of motion picture story magazines, one effect was to press picturegoers to revise their perception of the film experience to incorporate the idea of an isolated and private 'reading' subject interacting with the unfolded privacy of fictional equivalents.1 This article will examine the array of causes behind the emergence of the 'fan' magazine - the major component of the UK's first uniformnational popular film culture-in the first place. While the various trades involvedinfilmhad produced trade magazines solely devoted to film since October 1908, these had no popular readership, and whereas specific films had attracted uniform coverage in the national press prior to October 1911, these were usually news event films whose contents were newsworthy regardless of having been filmed.2 In The Pictures a newly popular film discourse for which cinema itself was the object of popular discussion had its first institutional home. This article will ask why this publication, with its new form of 'moving picture fiction', was established in the UK. It will look at the circumstances of its emergence and scrutinise the impact of its immediate forerunner, as well as the role of conflict among American production companies, the publication's relationship to narration in film, the short-story culture of late-Victorian and Edwardian Britain, changes in film distribution patterns, and the status of American imports in the UK.
The American 'invasion'
Jon Burrows has recently unearthed evidence suggesting that fall-out from the February 1909 Paris Film Congress was crucial in first bringing about the dominance of American films in UK cinemas or 'picture theatres'.3 In 1908, he explains, Vitagraph was the only American film production company regularly exporting significant numbers of its films to Europe. The largest US producer at the time, it had established a subsidiary company for the sale of its films in London in 1906.4 On 20 August 1908, Kinematograph and LanternWeekly's summary of producers with films currently available in the UK included only one American producer - Vitagraph - alongside sixteen British, French and Danish brands.5 The Edison Company was added to this list the following week, but made only intermittent releases in the UK until April 1909. In the...