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  • Americanizing the Movies and "Movie-Mad" Audiences, 1910-1914
  • J. Andrew Ross
Richard Abel. Americanizing the Movies and "Movie-Mad" Audiences, 1910-1914. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2006. xvii + 373 pp. ISBN-13, 978-0-520-24742-0, $65.00 (hardcover); 978-0-520-24743-7, $29.95 (paper).

Richard Abel argues that in the period from 1910, when the motion picture "revolution" succeeded and the American film market was emancipated from French domination, to 1914, when foreign films were nearly eliminated from the U.S. market, the American film industry was characterized by widespread experimentation and [End Page 981] innovation, especially in the areas of promotion practices, distribution strategies, content refinement, and audience development. Six chapters of Abel's Americanizing the Movies bring to the foreground the battle of independent producers against the Edison trust, the shift from the single-reel variety programs of the nickelodeon era to multiple-reel features with subjects (westerns, Civil War dramas, detective films, and animal pictures) that drove new production, distribution, and consumption practices, and the emergence of a new publicity and promotion system that emphasized the lives of "motion picture personalities."

Borrowing the format of his previous monograph, The Red Rooster Scare: Making Cinema American, 1900-1910 (1999), Abel inserts five "entr'actes" between the chapters to illustrate the other concurrent transformations in moviegoing, including changes in exhibition practices, development of venues and audiences, the role of songs, the place of nonfiction (news and documentaries), and finally the emergence of a mutually beneficial relationship between newspapers and movies. In addition to the dense citation (94 pages of notes), Abel reprints primary documents (mostly articles from the trade press) selected to highlight his themes, and also effectively intersperses poems, song lyrics, and illustrations of promotional materials and newspaper advertisements to complement the text.

Abel sheds new light on several important film history problems—the supposed decline of the western, for example—and reinterprets them to support the central argument of the book; the notion, carried over from The Red Rooster Scare, that concerns about constructing a distinctive American national identity "continued to frame early cinema's institutionalization as a popular mass entertainment" (p. 3). In Americanizing the Movies, he applies an additional theoretical framework: Benedict Anderson's notion of the nation as "imagined community." Extending Anderson's analysis to film audiences, he goes further to consider how the films themselves presented an "imagined community of nationality" onscreen; in other words, Abel shows how moviegoing as a consumption activity promoted a common American identity, but also that the content of American movies reflected a coalescing American identity that was negotiating contemporary discourses of race, gender, ethnicity, and "foreignness." Using the example of westerns, Civil War pictures, and thrillers, the author shows how they both represented and helped resolve the ambiguities of American modern identity, often through the creation of a "usable past."

To address these issues, Abel moves beyond the ordinary textual and discursive content analysis tools of film historians. He examines [End Page 982] the broader distribution and exhibition practices, using not only film prints and trade press discourse, but also newspaper ads, stories, and columns, arguing that they are crucial in illustrating the variance in exhibition practices, programming formats, audiences, and moviegoing patterns. He also pays most attention not on the usual urban metropolises, but on three regions (eastern Massachusetts and Rhode Island; northern Ohio; upper Midwest (Missouri through Iowa to Minnesota) whose different settlement histories, industrial bases, and immigrant populations provide a nuanced comparative framework.

While Abel adroitly uses this method to provide rare insight into the often ephemeral world of moviegoing audiences—addressing the central question of who attended motion pictures and why—despite the density of detail, some of the arguments about the strategies of national production and exhibition companies might have been strengthened by more attention to the production side. The role of the entrepreneur and the national firms are less prominent in the narrative and the archival source base than they could be. That said, it is always a challenge to balance the production side and consumption side in industrial histories, and the author has done a great service in pushing the two closer together...

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