Americanizing the Movies and the "Movie-Mad" Audiences, 1910-1914 (review)

Location, location, location. Richard Abel's new book, Americanizing the Movies, shows that early cinema's nation-building project involved significant local variation. This book picks up where his earlier study, The Red Rooster Scare, left off—with the Americanization of cinema in 1910. Abel extends his focus on the construction of American identity through early film from 1910-1914 (Red Rooster concludes in 1910). He analyzes how the "imagined community of nationality"—Benedict Anderson's key phrase—is represented on screen and how theater managers, publicists and filmmakers created a mass American audience in a heterogeneous context. His interpretation of texts and exhibition practices is grounded in the specificity of different locations and the details of newspaper publicity in these cities (in conjunction with the national trade press).

Abel is justified in focusing on such a short time frame because these four years encompass significant shifts in cinema history: the decline of the single-reel film and the rise of the feature, the success of the independent filmmakers in their battle with the "Trust," and the rise of a publicity machine centered around the personalities of movie stars. Abel also defines these 4 years as a "period of intense Americanization" (172) for several reasons. Europeans, Australians and South Americans (among others) eagerly consumed the popular American Westerns, which featured rugged individualism, the Indian as the quintessential primitive American, and the cowgirl as the American new woman. Civil War films helped create a national community of "reunion culture" (165). Both Westerns and Civil War films helped nudge foreign features off center stage. Furthermore, the illustrated songs, part of the "combination shows" along with movies, were often the only American product on the program and they preached assimilation with a nostalgic longing for the past. In these ways, Abel's encyclopedic discussion of Americanization offers new insights into film genres that have already received a great deal of attention and also includes more peripheral aspects of film history, such as the illustrated songs.

Americanizing the Movies innovatively combines the interpretation of movie texts with the study of the "temporal conditions of moviegoing" (85). On one hand, Abel has new evidence of the regularization of movie-goers' habit of attending the first day of Mutual's multi-reel releases; but, on the other hand, he documents local variations in cities in New England and the Midwest. Smaller single-industry cities like Lowell tended to have a few picture houses only in the downtown commercial area, while cities with a more diverse industrial base, such as Minneapolis, had picture theaters in the commercial districts as well as neighborhoods demarcated by race or ethnicity. Americanization of audiences, according the Abel, sometimes included an appeal to "everyone," but behind inclusive rhetoric racist exclusion prevailed and, in other cases, publicity hailed, more specifically, the working man or the romantic couple. His discussion of gender in the movie audience follows some well-worn paths, including the trajectory of young women's movie-going as a rejection of Victorian gender roles to a more conservative investment in fashion and romance. Still, some intriguing new faces emerge here: Gertrude Price's two years (1912-1914) as the "moving picture" journalist for Scripps-McRae newspapers is a fascinating vignette in Americanizing the Movies.

Abel's book has a novel twist: it includes at least one primary document from the trade press or local newspapers to illuminate the themes of each chapter. Although this strategy allows readers to evaluate some of his prized sources for themselves, they also tend to interrupt the flow of the argument. This is especially true when the book ends abruptly with a document, rather than a full conclusion in Abel's own words. This study, however, convincingly qualifies many hallowed themes in film history, reinforces these four years as a key transitional period in the Americanization of cinema, and successfully links the local to the national and the global with ample new research.