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The foreign manufacturers have been taught their lesson. More and more care is being shown in preparing films for the American market. . . . They are eliminating objectionable scenes, and through their American agents, who strive to give clear, decisive criticisms of the films sent here, the European producers get closer to the American ideal.1 The words are Herbert Blaché’s, from a prominently displayed interview in the New York Dramatic Mirror (February 1913), and his positions—vice president of the Gaumont Company in the United States, president of Film Supply , and soon to be cofounder of Exclusive Supply—made it easy to assume that, in his words, he “should know something about the American market for foreign films.” Nearly a century later, this kind of claim persists as a familiar trope in histories of early American cinema, even in Bowser’s The Transformation of Cinema, 1907–1915, where one can find this sentence: “Pathé Frères and other foreign producers were quick to observe American tastes and morals, and as the American market was the biggest . . . , the films sent here would be those that they knew to be acceptable.”2 Strictly speaking, this was true of the early 1910s, if by “acceptable” one means acceptance by the National Board of Censorship. Yet if one follows the discursive traces of how European sensational melodramas, especially French ones, circulated and were received during this period, the claim becomes more difficult to substantiate. Indeed, Blaché himself might have found his words a bit embarrassing just six months later, when Gaumont released the first of its now famous Fantômas series on the US market—to a far from welcome response. Within the context of “American tastes and morals,” as the previous chapters have shown, sensational melodramas were a major object of concern during the early 1910s. What the trade press called thriller melodramas were particChapter 5 The “Usable Present” of Thrillers From the Jungle to the City 185 ularly suspect because, unlike Civil War films and westerns (if to a lesser extent ), they were so often of European manufacture. Yet thrillers were quite popular, particularly with what were described as the “ordinary moving picture audience,” “average crowd,” or “public”—all terms that served to mask the “masses” of working-class and white-collar youth who frequented the picture shows.3 While generally “not elevating in taste and . . . worthless as examples of art,” the Mirror argued in early 1912, thrillers still could be produced in such a way as to “appeal to all classes” as a “perfectly legitimate type of drama.”4 The class division not so artfully elided in this trade press discourse, however, also had a corollary, more fractious component: a perceived difference between American and “foreign” (specifically, French) values and tastes in the kinds of thrillers produced. Indeed, both the Mirror and Moving Picture World assumed a “European public . . . not yet educated up to the American standard,” a public to which French manufacturers in particular catered with the worst thriller melodramas—full of criminal activity, excessive violence, and morbidity.5 If thriller melodramas mapped out opposing “positions in the dialectical drama of modernity,” as Tom Gunning puts it, the crime thriller that focused on “the criminal who preys on [modernity’s] new systems of mobility and circulation” became closely associated with the French, whereas the detective film that focused on “the detective, whose intelligence, knowledge, and perspicacity allow him. . . to uncover crime and restore order,” became the prerogative of the Americans.6 A similarly schematic distinction in terms of exploiting or curbing violence, I would argue, also came to mark French and American animal or jungle pictures. All three kinds of thriller melodramas eventually would play crucial, if somewhat complicated, roles in the development of series films, multiple-reel films or features, and serials. As exports on the US market, consequently, French crime thrillers, unlike Italian historical spectacles, seemed a serious moral and social threat to the work of uplifting and Americanizing the masses (many of them recent immigrants ). Throughout this period, their otherness, particularly in contrast to the detective films and animal pictures produced by US manufacturers, provoked a kind of culture war waged in the trade press and local newspapers. On the one hand, that culture war served to codify what would be acceptable, even legitimate, and distinctly American about thriller melodramas in moving pictures —and what was not, and should be excluded. On the other hand, it generally allowed the circulation of “illegitimate” crime thrillers on the...

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