Richard Abel

During the early era of cinema, moviegoers turned to women editors and writers for the latest on everyone's favorite stars, films, and filmmakers. Richard Abel returns these women to film history with an anthology of reviews, articles, and other works. Drawn from newspapers of the time, the selections show how columnists like Kitty Kelly, Mae Tinee, Louella Parsons, and Genevieve Harris wrote directly to female readers. They also profiled women working in jobs like scenario writer and film editor and noted the industry's willingness to hire women. Sharp wit and frank opinions entertained and informed a wide readership hungry for news about the movies but also about women on both sides of the camera. Abel supplements the texts with hard-to-find biographical information and provides context on the newspapers and silent-era movie industry as well as on the professionals and films highlighted by these writers. An invaluable collection of rare archival sources, Movie Mavens reveals women's essential contribution to the creation of American film culture.

Us Newspaper Women Take on the Movies, 1914-1923

Movie Mavens

These two volumes examine a significant but previously neglected moment in French cultural history: the emergence of French film theory and criticism before the essays of André Bazin. Richard Abel has devised an organizational scheme of six nearly symmetrical periods that serve to "bite into" the discursive flow of early French writing on the cinema. Each of the periods is discussed in a separate and extensive historical introduction, with convincing explications of the various concepts current at the time. In each instance, Abel goes on to provide a complementary anthology of selected texts in translation. Amounting to a portable archive, these anthologies make available a rich selection of nearly one hundred and fifty important texts, most of them never before published in English.

French Film Theory and Criticism: 1907-1929

A History/Anthology, 1907-1939. Volume 1: 1907-1929

French Film Theory and Criticism, Volume 1

These two volumes examine a significant but previously neglected moment in French cultural history: the emergence of French film theory and criticism before the essays of Andr Bazin. Richard Abel has devised an organizational scheme of six nearly symmetrical periods that serve to "bite into" the discursive flow of early French writing on the cinema. Each of the periods is discussed in a separate and extensive historical introduction, with convincing explications of the various concepts current at the time. In each instance, Abel goes on to provide a complementary anthology of selected texts in translation. Amounting to a portable archive, these anthologies make available a rich selection of nearly one hundred and fifty important texts, most of them never before published in English.

A History/anthology, 1907-1939

French Film Theory and Criticism

A History/Anthology, 1907-1939. Volume 2: 1929-1939

French Film Theory and Criticism, Volume 2

At the turn of the past century, the main function of a newspaper was to offer “menus” by which readers could make sense of modern life and imagine how to order their daily lives. Among those menus in the mid-1910s were several that mediated the interests of movie manufacturers, distributors, exhibitors, and the rapidly expanding audience of fans. This writing about the movies arguably played a crucial role in the emergence of American popular film culture, negotiating among national, regional, and local interests to shape fans’ ephemeral experience of moviegoing, their repeated encounters with the fantasy worlds of “movieland,” and their attractions to certain stories and stars. Moreover, many of these weekend pages, daily columns, and film reviews were written and consumed by women, including one teenage girl who compiled a rare surviving set of scrapbooks. Based on extensive original research, Menus for Movieland substantially revises what moviegoing meant in the transition to what we now think of as Hollywood.

Newspapers and the Emergence of American Film Culture, 1913–1916

Menus for Movieland

Early Cinema

Giorgio Bertellini

Rob King

While many studies have been written on national cinemas, Early Cinema and the "National" is the first anthology to focus on the concept of national film culture from a wide methodological spectrum of interests, including not only visual and narrative forms, but also international geopolitics, exhibition and marketing practices, and pressing linkages to national imageries. The essays in this richly illustrated, landmark anthology are devoted to reconsidering the nation as a framing category for writing cinema history. Many of the 34 contributors show that concepts of a national identity played a role in establishing the parameters of cinema's early development, from technological change to discourses of stardom, from emerging genres to intertitling practices. Yet, as others attest, national meanings could often become knotty in other contexts, when concepts of nationhood were contested in relation to colonial/imperial histories and regional configurations. Early Cinema and the "National" takes stock of a formative moment in cinema history, tracing the beginnings of the process whereby nations learned to imagine themselves through moving images.

Early Cinema and the "National"

Politics by Other Means explores the fundamental question of how law can constrain political power by offering a pathbreaking account of the triumphant final decade of the struggle against apartheid. Richard Abel presents case studies of ten major legal campaigns including: challenges to pass laws; black trade union demands for recognition; state terror; censorship; resistance to the "independent" homelands; and treason trials.

Law in the Struggle Against Apartheid, 1980-1994

Politics By Other Means

"This outstanding work offers a new description of the evolution of American cinema in the nickelodeon period. . . . With his usual groundbreaking research, Abel demonstrates the key role Pathé films played in this transformation. . . . Although clearly of crucial importance to film studies and film history, this treatment of the issues of the rise of nationalism within the cinema should make the work of great interest to historians dealing with modern nationalism and its relation to mass media."—Tom Gunning, author of D. W. Griffith and the Origins of Narrative Film

Making Cinema American, 1900-1910

The Red Rooster Scare

This engaging, deeply researched study provides the richest and most nuanced picture we have to date of cinema—both movies and movie-going—in the early 1910s. At the same time, it makes clear the profound relationship between early cinema and the construction of a national identity in this important transitional period in the United States. Richard Abel looks closely at sensational melodramas, including westerns (cowboy, cowboy-girl, and Indian pictures), Civil War films (especially girl-spy films), detective films, and animal pictures—all popular genres of the day that have received little critical attention. He simultaneously analyzes film distribution and exhibition practices in order to reconstruct a context for understanding moviegoing at a time when American cities were coming to grips with new groups of immigrants and women working outside the home. Drawing from a wealth of research in archive prints, the trade press, fan magazines, newspaper advertising, reviews, and syndicated columns—the latter of which highlight the importance of the emerging star system—Abel sheds new light on the history of the film industry, on working-class and immigrant culture at the turn of the century, and on the process of imaging a national community.

Americanizing the Movies and Movie-Mad Audiences, 1910-1914

Silent Film offers some of the best recent essays on silent cinema, essays that cross disciplinary boundaries and break new ground in a variety of ways. Some focus on the "materiality" of early cinema: the color processes used in printing nitrate film stocks, the choreographic styles of film acting, and the wide range of sound accompaniment. Others focus on questions of periodicity and nationality: on the shift from a "cinema of attractions" to a "classical narrative cinema," on the relationship between changes in production and those in exhibition, and on the historical specificity of national cinemas. Still others focus on early cinema's intertextual relations with various forms of mass culture (from magazine stories or sensational melodramas in the United States to the tango craze in Russia), and on reception in silent cinema (from black audiences in Chicago to women's fan magazines of the 1920s). Taken together, the contributors to this volume suggest provocative parallels between silent cinema at the turn of the last century and "postmodern" cinema at the end of our own. This book is an important contribution to the study of silent film and a key addition to this new series.

Silent Film

Robert C. Allen

Linda Williams

Ana M. Lopez

John Belton

Noel Carroll

Naomi Greene

Ien Ang

Christopher Orr

Jean-Loup Bourget

Geoffrey Nowell-Smith

Pam Cook

Alan Casty

Charles Affron

Christian Viviani

Chuck Kleinhans

Charlotte Brunsdon

Cawelti, John G.

Gerould, Daniel

Brooks, Peter

Elsaesser, Thomas

Ruth McCormick

Ellen Seiter

A Reader on Film & Television Melodrama

Imitations of Life

00 This updated edition of Richard Abel's magisterial history of French cinema between 1896 and 1914 is based on extensive investigation of rare archival films and documents. This updated edition of Richard Abel's magisterial history of French cinema between 1896 and 1914 is based on extensive investigation of rare archival films and documents.

French Cinema, 1896-1914, Updated and Expanded Edition

The Ciné Goes to Town

Motor City Movie Culture, 1916–1925 is a broad textured look at Hollywood coming of age in a city with a burgeoning population and complex demographics. Richard Abel investigates the role of local Detroit organizations in producing, distributing, exhibiting, and publicizing films in an effort to make moviegoing part of everyday life. Tapping a wealth of primary source material—from newspapers, spatiotemporal maps, and city directories to rare trade journals, theater programs, and local newsreels—Abel shows how entrepreneurs worked to lure moviegoers from Detroit's diverse ethnic neighborhoods into the theaters. Covering topics such as distribution, programming practices, nonfiction film, and movie coverage in local newspapers, with entr'actes that dive deeper into the roles of key individuals and organizations, this book examines how efforts in regional metropolitan cities like Detroit worked alongside California studios and New York head offices to bolster a mass culture of moviegoing in the United States.

Motor City Movie Culture, 1916-1925

In the first third of the twentieth century, the publishing industry in the United Kingdom and the United States was marked by well-established and comfortable traditions pursued by family-dominated firms. The British trade was the preserve of self-satisfied men entirely certain of their superiority in the world of letters; their counterparts in North America were blissfully unaware of development and trends outside their borders. In this unique historical analysis, Richard Abel and Gordon Graham show how publishing evolved post-World War II to embrace a different, more culturally inclusive, vision.Unfortunately, even among the learned classes, only a handful clearly understood either the nature or the likely consequences of the mounting geopolitical tensions that gripped pre-war Europe. The world was largely caught up in the ill-informed and unexamined but widely held smug and shallow belief that the huge price paid in "the war to end all wars" had purchased perpetual peace, a peace to be maintained by the numerous, post-war high-minded treaties ceremoniously signed thereafter.The history presented here has as its principals a handful of those who fled to the Anglo-Saxon shores in the pre-World War II era. The remainder made their way to Britain and the United States following that war. They brought an entirely new vision of and energetic pursuit of the cultural role of the book and journal in a society, a vision which was quickly adopted and naturalized by a perspicacious band of post-war native-born book people.

The Impact of Expatriate Publishers in Britain and America in the 20th Century

Immigrant Publishers

William Gordon Graham

This volume is based on a special issue of "Logos "that grew out of a meeting of an international group of book trade hands. It is the first broad-scale account and assessment of the commercial aspects of the U.S. book trade from publisher to library by way of book dealers and wholesalers. Two major phenomena, concentration into larger units and concern about the electronic future, are recurring themes in this collection. Concentration characterizes bookselling as much as publishing, and the electronic future preoccupies librarians even more than publishers. Chapters and contributors to "The Book in the United States Today "include: "A Religious Country Reflected in its Publishing Industry" by Werner Mark Linz; "Children's Books: 500 Million a Year" by Charles E. Gates; "U.S. School Publishing" by Cameron S. Moseley; "The Paperback Conquest of America" by Betty Ballantine; "Medical Publishing in the U.S." by Eric J. Newman; "The U.S. College Textbook" by Robert R. Worth; "The American University Library" by Hendrik Edelman; and "Between Academe and the Marketplace: University Presses Face the 21st Century" by Naomi B. Pascal. In the postscript, Gordon Graham discusses one of the defects of the U.S. book industry today, a shortage of collective memory. The common ground of the industry, he writes, is seen in securing legal rights and political advantage, not in any ideological attachment to the shared product, its history or its culture. "The Book in the United States Today "provides important information for publishers, librarians, authors, and book sellers.

The Book in the United States Today

This encyclopedia presents a wealth of information on early cinema history, with coverage of the techniques and equipment of film production, profiles of the pioneering directors and producers, analysis of individual films and the rapid growth of distinct film genres, and the emergence of something the world had never seen before - the movie star. The work also focuses on how the nature of film exhibition changed as the industry grew, and how the public's reception to films also changed. The pre-cinema period is closely examined to show those mass-cultural forms and practices - such as music hall and vaudeville - from within which cinema was to emerge. A perfect companion for any student of early cinema and film studies.

Encyclopedia of Early Cinema

Richard Abel's magisterial new book radically rewrites the history of French cinema between 1896 and 1914, particularly during the years when Pathé-Frères, the first major corporation in the new industry, led the world in film production and distribution. Based on extensive investigation of rare archival films and documents, and drawing on recent social and cultural histories of turn-of-the-century France and the United States, his book provides new insights into the earliest history of the cinema. Abel tells how early French film entertainment changed from a cinema of attractions to the narrative format that Hollywood would so successfully exploit. He describes the popular genres of the era—comic chases, trick films and féeries, historical and biblical stories, family melodramas and grand guignol tales, crime and detective films—and shows the shift from short subjects to feature-length films. Cinema venues evolved along with the films as live music, color effects, and other new exhibiting techniques and practices drew larger and larger audiences. Abel explores the ways these early films mapped significant differences in French social life, helping to produce thoroughly bourgeois citizens for Third Republic France. The Ciné Goes to Town recovers early French cinema's unique contribution to the development of the mass culture industry. As the one-hundredth anniversary of cinema approaches, this compelling demonstration of film's role in the formation of social and national identity will attract a wide audience of film scholars, social and cultural historians, and film enthusiasts.

Richard Abel

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