Motor City Movie Culture, 1916-1925 by Richard Abel (review)

Over the last three and a half decades, Richard Abel has written some of the most important works on the history of silent-era French and North America cinema. A historian who masterfully makes the archival sources of his research both visible and deeply felt in the fabric of ever-fascinating stories that are always in the making, Abel continually provides us with a rich understanding of, and access to, the historian's collecting, organizing, and interpretive labor that underpins the stories he tells.

The ten-year period covered by his latest book, on the evolving cinema culture of metropolitan Detroit, is dictated largely by his access to the emergent coverage of the movies by the city's many newspapers prior to their more standardized and full-scale reporting on current studio releases and the motion-picture industry after 1925. Additionally, Abel makes extensive use of some rare but significant regional film distribution and local exhibition publications from the period. The book's four main chapters detail the circulation of films in the metropolitan area; the programming practices at the city's many cinemas; the production and exhibition of locally produced films and newsreels; and the variegated consumption of cinema by Detroit audiences with particular attention to movie stars, as well as the editorial choices of local newspapers as evinced in their pages devoted to the screen. Interspersed between the chapters are several entre'acts that present short, focused profiles of important individuals, publications, practices, or companies. These briefer segments have the virtue of isolating a specific subject or issue outside of the incessant, though compelling "thick descriptions" of the four chapters that provide the reader breathing space to reflect on Abel's masterful accumulation and presentation of details about movie theaters, ethnic neighborhoods, local talent, urban planning, municipal politics, newspaper contests, the culture of automobile manufacturing, educational films, advertising, and those movie stars favored by Detroit audiences. (Pola Negri, for example, makes appearances throughout the book as an international celebrity enduringly embraced by Detroit's sizable Polish population.)

No historian better understands the importance of newspapers to the formation of American movie culture than Richard Abel, and none has put newspaper research to better effect. One will read through Motor City Movie Culture differently depending on how much or how little one knows about Detroit's past, or about American film history in general, according to one's interests and proclivities. Indeed, the book knowingly adopts the newspaper's logic of the menu by seemingly offering something for everyone, an open and ongoing history that rejects grand narrative while retaining grandeur. Even though this history has no defined critical purpose beyond documenting, within the limits of a consultable archive, industrial Detroit's movie culture from the late Progressive Era to the Jazz Age, Abel finds occasion to attend to some of his abiding commitments that seek to challenge film historical lacunae, such as the central participation of women in the development of the cinema.

Impressively, Motor City Movie Culture remains historiographically open by repeatedly marking the limits of the surviving evidence, by posing questions about those audiences that remain underrepresented in the historical record, by pointing out the ways and means of possible future research, and by marking the finite capabilities of a dedicated and brilliant film historian. At long last, the city of Detroit can claim to have its own preeminent history of silent cinema within its environs, and those of us interested in twentieth-century media cultures have another fine case-history of an understudied metropolitan area to complicate and enrich what we think we know about the development of the cinema in the United States.