The Red Rooster Scare: Making Cinema American, 1900-1910 (review)

The Red Rooster Scare: Making Cinema American, 1900-1910. Richard Abel. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Pp. xix + 301. $50.00 (cloth); $24.95 (paper).

The Red Rooster Scare represents a self-conscious departure from Richard Abel's groundbreaking, text-centered work on silent French cinema. Focusing on the dominant film company of the period, Paris-based Pathé Frères, its conquest of the American market, and its fall from national and global hegemony, Abel details how Pathé's combination of distinctly recognizable, high quality films, ground-breaking promotions, and cutting-edge business strategies shaped the development of cinema in the United States. This is more than a study of the logistics of one film company, however; instead, Abel draws on Pathé's history to explore how French films helped establish the conditions for an internationally dominant American cinema.

In his introduction, Abel foregrounds the difficulty of constructing a coherent history for this period, given the absence of so many sources and the complexity of events. He locates his project at the intersection of institutional film history, the visual attractions of modernity, Miriam Hansen's work on the construction of early film as an alternative public sphere, and cinema's role in the construction of American identity. ¹ The breadth of his research allows him to make bold thesis statements, such as his claim that "Pathé's presence on the American market provided the single most significant condition of emergence for the nickelodeon" (20). (Previously, historians had speculated that the nickelodeon arose from a convergence of factors--the growth in story films, the trend towards longer films, and the development of a film rental rather than a purchase system.) Besides convincing the reader that this is indeed the case, his analysis foregrounds the early film companies' often litigious and acrimonious battles for control of the American market. Distinguishing between the American market (as an already well-established economic entity) and American national identity (which, as he points out, was less established but even more forcefully articulated), Abel hints at the competing forces involved in the construction of nation and national identity. He shows how conflicts between the demands of the market, particularly in terms of cinema's expanding exhibition market, and the ongoing process of Americanization facilitated Pathé's success between 1905-1908 and led to its demise during the last years of the decade. In so doing, he effectively interrogates assumptions that European productions were regarded as more high-class than American films, showing how the multiple valences of "European"--as high culture or morally suspect or as fashionable/cutting-edge or traditional--could be used to glorify the cinema as a whole or to marginalize foreign competition.

Abel's work on American identity, including a final chapter on the emergence of the Western, is ambitious and thoughtful, thoroughly demonstrating cinema's key institutional role in the process of Americanization. He successfully approaches the Americanization of film form, noting that around 1908 Pathé's films, especially their color films, were credited with a more romantic aesthetic in contrast to the greater "realism" of American films. Furthermore, he suggests that the American melodrama's happy ending might derive from a progressive emphasis on uplift that contrasts with the grand guignol aspect of many French melodramas. His attempts to construct a gendered split across American (masculine) and French (feminine) films remain somewhat underdeveloped, however, and are less convincing in the light of the markedly feminine appeal of many Biograph and Vitagraph films, the later development of serial films, stars, and the often highly feminine address of neighborhood theaters and movie palaces.

While the detail and volume of his research are remarkable, Abel sometimes uses too much of his new material to reinforce established conclusions rather than to contest earlier assumptions or open up new ground. For example, his detailed attention to local variations across the United States highlights how the popularity of the movies followed patterns of immigration from...