The 'Picture' habit: Bad decorum and delinquents at the Silent Cinema

To broaden our idea of audiences, in this article I will posit how we need to examine the ways that audiences were being discussed in the news press during the formative period of the cinema exhibition industry. How, where and when were audiences being written into the narrative of the cinema experience? By asking such questions, we can begin to appreciate the cinema's supposed bad influence on the impressionable including, for instance, children, and young women. In this article I am centrally interested in how the cinema audience was represented by the news reporters across the period of the silent cinema in Australia. How did silent audiences behave? How did this behaviour (and reportage on audience behaviour) establish a social context for cinema watching? Because different showmen had different methods of convincing audiences to attend their theatres, there was no single code of decorum when it came to cinema behaviour, and as this article will discuss, there were many different ways in which cinema was experienced by audiences.