Obviously, one should say “the lady and the gentleman in the stalls.” As feminist research on spectatorship during the early years of living pictures, by scholars such as Miriam Hansen, Lauren Rabinovitz and Heide Schlüpmann, has demonstrated, women constituted an important, if not the major part of the audience at the turn of the last century. Indeed, to take just one example from the earliest years of the new medium, among the spectators depicted on posters advertising the Cinématographe Lumière we see numerous women seated among the spectators. However, when the French film historian Georges Sadoul, in his Histoire générale du cinéma, declared that Georges Méliès's films represented “le point de vue du monsieur de l’orchestre,” that is the point of view of the gentleman in the stalls, he did not necessarily want to claim that audiences at that time were predominantly male. His purpose, in fact, was to raise quite a different kind of issue, one which is, in the first place, aesthetic.

Discussing the work of Méliès, Sadoul explains that the owner of the Robert-Houdin theater adopted a camera position that created a unity of both space and, literally, point of view:

This unity of point of view, according to Sadoul, was preserved even when Méliès started making longer films – which were in fact among the longest and most elaborate of this period around 1900. The difference being simply that he moved from one frame of reference – the rather small Théâtre Robert-Houdin – to another: the Théâtre du Châtelet. The latter was one of the biggest Parisian stages, specializing in spectacular productions, and in particular féeries, that is to say fairy plays, which did indeed have many formal and aesthetic traits in common with Méliès's films.

Sadoul's point here is, of course, that Méliès's films were inextricably bound to a stage aesthetic and thus did not fully realize the artistic potential of moving pictures.