Americanizing the Movies and “Movie-Mad” Audiences, 1910–1914 (review)

Appropriately enough, Richard Abel begins his meticulously researched and richly illustrated history of the “movie-mad” days of early cinema with a scenario: in Des Moines Iowa, a young woman, let’s say a store clerk or a stenographer, at any rate a modern working girl looking for amusement, perhaps a bit of culture, or maybe just a place to dream with eyes wide open, heads for a local movie theater after work. She can chose from a variety of entertainments, since the shows change daily and public tastes have not settled into predictable patterns. She might be in the mood for a one-reel western with an enticing title like The Crazy Prospector or a two-reel melodrama promising to reveal Her Sister’s Secret. She might be dying to see the new spectacular five-reeler, Satan or “The drama of Humanity . . . from Creation to the Present Time.” These longer reels, with their foreign provenance and promise of sensationalist treatments of historical or legendary figures, were a rare, and quite pricey, treat. Indeed her choice of what to see and where to see it, would be determined by the price of admission: she could take in a variety genre piece for a nickel, but it would cost twenty five to fifty cents to see Sarah Bernhardt in the title role of Queen Elizabeth (1912). Such indulgences were generally beyond her means.

This young woman is the “ordinary” moviegoer who Abel places at the center—and as the object of—an epochal transformation of the motion pictures into a distinctly American as well as popular art form. Abel’s previous work, Red Rooster Scare: Making Cinema American, 1900–1910 (1999), covered the first stage of the Americanization of early cinema. This book looks more closely at how changes in film distribution, the rise of feature films and serial programming, the commercial and artistic consolidation of American genres, especially the western, and the increasingly cozy relationship between newspapers and film promotion combined to shape the fledgling movie industry commercially and, in ways less studied and understood, ideologically as well. Benedict Anderson’s notion of how communities are “imagined” as a “nationality” provides Abel with the conceptual backdrop for his panoramic account of these crucial years between 1910 and 1914 when foreign films, especially French thrillers and Italian historical spectacles, yielded to more robust and morally reliable American fare—westerns, Civil War dramas, thrillers that made the detective rather than the criminal the star attraction. These movies, Abel contends, taught their audiences, especially immigrants, women (particularly working, unmarried women), and children what it meant to be an American. They were ideological crucibles for forging a distinct American identity; in watching them, movie goers, otherwise unsure of their place in modern America, could literally see how to look, act and thus be American.

Abel calls upon the pioneering work of Tom Gunning, Miriam Hansen, Judith Mayne, Kathryn Fuller, Janet Staiger, Shelley Stamp, Jennifer Bean, and others, to construct a factually dense (sometimes overwhelmingly so) but interestingly arranged argument. He was obviously guided by two of the four epigraphs he places at the start of this work. The first is from the historian Marc Bloch: “It would be sheer fantasy to imagine that for each historical problem there is a unique type of document with a specific sort of use. On the contrary, the deeper the research, the more the light of evidence must converge from sources of different kinds.” The other, more succinct but equally serviceable, is from Elmore Leonard: “History can work for you, you know how to use it.” With these directives in mind, Abel industriously scours the archives for all sorts of materials to illuminate and enliven the historical problem that fascinates him: how did an emerging mass art and the commercial enterprise that produced it become so quickly and, for the most part, irreversibly Americanized? It is a problem that he approaches via a...