Frederick Hodges on Piano
Lecture by Russell Merritt

A tour of the kinds of movies and performances that were shown in America's first permanent movie houses. Nickelodeons lasted for less than a decade (their heyday extended roughly from 1906 to the First World War), but by mixing short movies with live acts, sing-alongs, and illustrated lectures, they attracted the motion pictures' most durable audience. The lecture will analyze the strategies used to lure the middle class into a working-class entertainment; PFA will then be transformed into a nickelodeon theater, featuring authentic sing-alongs, complete with original hand-colored magic lantern slides, a re-creation of Winsor McCay's lecture that accompanied his animated Gertie the Dinosaur (1914), the demented Pathé one-reeler The Dancing Pig (1907), and two D. W. Griffith shorts, The Lonedale Operator (1911) and-making its Bay area debut-The Informer (1912) with Mary Pickford.