History can work for you, you know how to use it

Cinema Journal

Volumn 44, Issue 1, 2004, Pages 107-112

  Abel, Richard ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33244470999     PISSN: 00097101     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/cj.2004.0042     Document Type: Review

References (36)

1. Thomas Elsaesser, "Writing and Rewriting Film History: Terms of a Debate," Cinéma et cie 1 (fall 2001): 24-33. Edited by Leonardo Quaresima and Francesco Casetti, in conjunction with the Udine International Film Studies Conference, this journal deserves to be better known in the United States for its essays, conference reports, and abstracts of new projects, published in both English and French
2. Richard Abel, "'Don't Know Much about History,' or the (In)vested Interests of Doing Cinema History," Film History 6, no. 1 (1994): 110-15
3. and Abel, "Frame Stories for Writing the History of French Silent Cinema," Studies in French Cinema 2, no. 1 (2002): 5-13
4. David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Modes of Production and Film Style to 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985)
5. Bordwell also argues for the centrality of stylistic history for film historiography in On the History of Film Style (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997)
6. See, for instance, Charlie Keil, Early American Cinema in Transition, 1907-1913 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002)
7. In the ten-volume History of American Cinema, series, see Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema to 1907 (New York: Scribners, 1990)
8. Eileen Bowser, The Transformation of Cinema, 1907-1915 (New York: Scribners, 1991)
9. and Richard Koszarski, An Evening's Entertainment, 1915-1928 (New York: Scribners, 1993)
10. Tom Gunning, "Early American Film," in John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson, eds., The Oxford Guide to Film Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 255-71
11. Richard Abel, The Red Rooster Scare: Making Cinema American, 1900-1910 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999)
12. Rick Altman, "Film Sound - All of It," iris 27 (spring 1999): 31-47. Altman argues that the principal transformation during the silent era was the silencing of the audience and that the conversion to sound in the late 1920s merely reinforced this transformation
13. Richard deCordova, Picture Personalities: The Emergence of the Star System in America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990)
14. In the context of feminist film historiography, Jennifer Bean and Diane Negra also raise "the Problem with Periodization" in their "Introduction" to Bean and Negra, eds., A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002), 21-22
15. Allen expressed this insistence on studying diverse rural communities in the South most recently in his opening address at the Commonwealth Conference on American Cinema and Everyday Life, University College London, June 25, 2003
16. See, for instance, Chris McKenna, "Early Movie-Going in a Tri-racial Community: Lumberton, North Carolina (1896-1940),"
17. and Terry Lindvall, "Cinema Virtue, Cinema Vice: Race, Religion, and Film Exhibition in Norfolk, Virginia, 1908-1922," presented at the Commonwealth Conference on American Cinema and Everyday Life, University College London, June 27, 2003
18. An earlier, groundbreaking studv of Lexington, Kentucky, a regional marketing center (with a population of thirty thousand people by 1910), is Gregory Waller, Main Street Amusements: Movies and Commercial Entertainment in a Southern City, 1986-1930 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995)
19. With exceptions such as Cleveland, it was in medium- and small-sized cities (with populations of fifty thousand to two hundred thousand), rather than in metropolises such as New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia, that the close relationship developed between newspapers and moving pictures in 1911-12, through extensive advertising; Sunday pages of news, gossip, and reviews; and syndicated columns. Addressing the New York Woman's Press Club in early 1913, W. Stephen Bush praised "the dailies of the Middle West" for first having "begun to take the motion picture seriously." Bush, "The Moving Picture and the Press," Moving Picture World, March 8, 1913, 975
20. See, for instance, Richard Abel, Imagining Community in U.S. Cinema, 1910-1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, forthcoming)
21. Robert C. Allen and Douglas Gomery, Film History: Theory and Practice (New York: Knopf, 1985), 207-11
22. See, for instance, William Uricchio and Roberta Pearson, Reframing Culture: The Case of the Vitagraph Quality Films (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993)
23. Judith Thissen, "Jewish Immigrant Audiences in New York City, 1905-1914"
24. and Lee Grieveson, "Why the Audience Mattered in Chicago in 1907," in Melvyn Stokes and Richard Maltby, eds., American Movie Audiences: From the Turn of the Century to the Early Sound Era (London: BFI Publishing, 1999), 15-28, 79-91
25. For other case studies of Cleveland and Canton, Ohio, see Richard Abel, "The Passing (Picture) Show in the Industrial Heartland: The Early 1910s," in John Fullerton and Jan Olsson, eds., Allegories of Communication: Intermedial Concerns from Cinema to the Digitial (Eastleigh, U.K.: John Libbey, forthcoming)
26. Richard Abel, "A Patchwork Map of Weekly Movie-Going, 1911-1913," in Robert Allen, Richard Maltby, and Melvyn Stokes, eds., Hollywood's Audiences: The Social Experience of Movie-Going (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, forthcoming)
27. Louise Lamphere, From Working Mothers to Working Daughters: Immigrant Women in a New England Industrial Community (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987)
28. "Resolutions Passed by the Civic Theatre Committee of Pawtucket and Central Falls, R.I., June 2, 1913." Moving Picture World, August 2, 1913, 8
29. See also "Pawtucket Has Civic Theater," Moving Picture World, March 20, 1915, 1752. The resolutions specifically mention the need to translate film stories and intertitles into such languages as Polish, Italian, Syrian, Hebrew, and Yiddish. Like all other theaters in Pawtucket, the Star was not open on Sundays
30. The Star Theatre's accounts book, which notes weekly expenses and daily receipts from early December 1911 through October 1913, can be found in the Keith-Albee Collection, Special Collections, University of Iowa Library, Iowa City. I thank Rick Altman for drawing my attention to this unusual source
31. See, for instance, Jan Olsson, "Pressing Inroads: Metaspectators and the Nickelodeon Culture," in John Fullerton, ed., Screen Culture: History and Textuality (Eastleigh, U.K.: John Libbey, 2004), 113-35
32. For a more thorough summary of my own early research, see Richard Abel, "A Marriage of Ephemeral Discourses: Newspapers and Moving Pictures, 1910-1914," Cinéma et cie 1 (fall 2001): 59-83
33. Any attempt to reconstruct patterns of exhibition and reception from newspapers (as with any kind of surviving discursive material) has to confront historiographic questions of veracity, responsibility, and relevance. See, for instance, Donald Crafton, "The Jazz Singer's Reception in the Media and at the Box Office," in David Bordwell and Noël Carroll, eds., Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), 461-63
34. Kathryn Oberdeck offers a model for analyzing how a vaudeville manager negotiated among different ethnic audiences in New Haven, Connecticut, in "'Mr. Poli Is the Big Chief!': The Theatrical Manager, His Audiences, and the Vaudeville Industry," in Oberdeck, The Evangelist and the Impresario: Religion, Entertainment, and Cultural Politics in America, 1884-1914 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 179-213
35. Although focused on New York, Giorgio Bertellini offers another model in "Italian Imageries, Historical Feature Films, and the Fabrication of Italy's Spectators in Early 1900s New York," in Stokes and Maltby, American Movie Audiences, 29-45
36. For a further analysis of Price's columns, which sometimes appeared daily, see Richard Abel, "Fan Discourse in the Heartland: Gertrude Price and the Des Moines News, 1912-1914," in Amelie Hastie and Shelley Stamp, eds., Women and the Silent Screen: Cultural and Historical Practices (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, forthcoming)