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Americanizing the Movies and Movie-Mad Audiences
1910-1914
by Richard Abel
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This engaging, deeply researched study provides the richest and most nuanced picture we have to date of cinema-both movies and movie-going-in the early 1910s. At the same time, it makes clear the profound relationship between early cinema and the construction of a national identity in this important transitional period in the United States. Richard Abel looks closely at sensational melodramas, including westerns (cowboy, cowboy-girl, and Indian pictures), Civil War films (especially girl-spy films), detective films, and animal pictures-all popular genres of the day that have received little critical attention. He simultaneously analyzes film distribution and exhibition practices in order to reconstruct a context for understanding moviegoing at a time when American cities were coming to grips with new groups of immigrants and women working outside the home. Drawing from a wealth of research in archive prints, the trade press, fan magazines, newspaper advertising, reviews, and syndicated columns-the latter of which highlight the importance of the emerging star system-Abel sheds new light on the history of the film industry, on working-class and immigrant culture at the turn of the century, and on the process of imaging a national community.
Press Reviews:
“An especially notable achievement.”
— Film Quarterly
“A wealth of exceptional information.”
— Film International
“[Conveys] a sense of the excitement that fans of the era experienced.”
— Journal Of The Gilded Age And Progressive Era
“Valuable.”
— Nineteenth Century Theatre & Film
“Provides rare insight into the often ephemeral world of moviegoing audiences.”
— Enterprise & Society
“This is a book every scholar of early American (and other) cinema should want: it is not a grand overview of the subject, but thanks to Abel’s depth of knowledge and historical ability it is a volume that will have a substantial influence.”
— Early Popular Visual Culture
"Like all of Richard Abel's previous works, this book is characterized by careful marshalling of data and the exploration of new sources. There is a wealth of extremely important, instructive information, and the book provides an encyclopedic treatment of film exhibition in the early 1910s and the key film genres of the period. This will be an important book for film studies."—Lea Jacobs, University of Wisconsin, Madison
See the publisher website: University of California Press
> From the same author:
Our Country/Whose Country? (2024)
Early Westerns and Travel Films as Stories of Settler Colonialism
by Richard Abel
Subject: Countries > United States
Movie Mavens (2021)
US Newspaper Women Take on the Movies, 1914-1923
Dir. Richard Abel
Subject: On Films > Movie magazines
Menus for Movieland (2015)
Newspapers and the Emergence of American Film Culture 1913-1916
by Richard Abel
Subject: Silent Cinema
Early Cinema and the National (2008)
Dir. Richard Abel, Giorgio Bertellini and Rob King
Subject: Silent Cinema
French Film Theory and Criticism 1907-1939 (1988)
vol.1: 1907-1929 - vol. 2: 1929-1939
by Richard Abel
> On a related topic:
The Transformation of Cinema 1907-1915 (1994)
History of the American Cinema vol.2
Subject: Silent Cinema
The Dream That Kicks (2017)
The Prehistory and Early Years of Cinema in Britain
Subject: Countries > Great Britain
Before the Nickelodeon (1991)
Edwin S. Porter and the Edison Manufacturing Company
Subject: Director > Edwin S. Porter
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