Richard Abel - Böcker

The concept of settler colonialism offers an invaluable lens to reframe early westerns and travel pictures as re-enactments of the United States' repressed past. Westerns in particular propose a remarkable vision of white settlers' westward expansion that reveals a transformation in what "American Progress" came to mean.Initially, these films tracked settlers moving westward across the Appalachians, Great Plains, and Rockies. Their seizure of "empty land" provoked continual resistance from Indigenous peoples and Mexicans; "pioneers" suffered extreme hardships, but heroic male figures usually scattered or wiped out those "aliens." Some films indulged in nostalgic empathy for the Indian as a "Vanishing American." In the early 1910s, westerns became increasingly popular. In Indian pictures, Native Americans ranged from devious savages, victims of white violence, and "Noble Savages" to "in-between" figures caught between cultures and "mixed-descent peoples" partnered for security or advantage. Mexicans took positions across a similar spectrum. In cowboy and cowgirl films, "ordinary" whites became heroes and heroines fighting outlaws; and bandits like Broncho Billy underwent transformation into "good badmen." The mid to late 1910s saw a shift, as Indian pictures and cowgirl films faded and male figures, embodied by movie stars, dominated popular series. In different ways, William S. Hart and Harry Carey reinvented the "good badman" as a stoic, if troubled, figure of white masculinity. In cowboy films of comic romance, Tom Mix engaged in dangerous stunts and donned costumes that made him a fashionable icon. In parodies, Douglas Fairbanks subverted the myth of "American Progress," sporting a nonchalant grin of effortless self-confidence. Nearly all of their films assumed firmly settled white communities, rarely threatened by Indians or Mexicans. Masked as "Manifest Destiny," the expropriation of the West seemed settled once and for all.Our Country/Whose Country? offers a rich and expansive examination of the significance of early westerns and travel pictures in the ideological foundations of "our country."

The concept of settler colonialism offers an invaluable lens to reframe early westerns and travel pictures as re-enactments of the United States' repressed past. Westerns in particular propose a remarkable vision of white settlers' westward expansion that reveals a transformation in what "American Progress" came to mean.Initially, these films tracked settlers moving westward across the Appalachians, Great Plains, and Rockies. Their seizure of "empty land" provoked continual resistance from Indigenous peoples and Mexicans; "pioneers" suffered extreme hardships, but heroic male figures usually scattered or wiped out those "aliens." Some films indulged in nostalgic empathy for the Indian as a "Vanishing American." In the early 1910s, westerns became increasingly popular. In Indian pictures, Native Americans ranged from devious savages, victims of white violence, and "Noble Savages" to "in-between" figures caught between cultures and "mixed-descent peoples" partnered for security or advantage. Mexicans took positions across a similar spectrum. In cowboy and cowgirl films, "ordinary" whites became heroes and heroines fighting outlaws; and bandits like Broncho Billy underwent transformation into "good badmen." The mid to late 1910s saw a shift, as Indian pictures and cowgirl films faded and male figures, embodied by movie stars, dominated popular series. In different ways, William S. Hart and Harry Carey reinvented the "good badman" as a stoic, if troubled, figure of white masculinity. In cowboy films of comic romance, Tom Mix engaged in dangerous stunts and donned costumes that made him a fashionable icon. In parodies, Douglas Fairbanks subverted the myth of "American Progress," sporting a nonchalant grin of effortless self-confidence. Nearly all of their films assumed firmly settled white communities, rarely threatened by Indians or Mexicans. Masked as "Manifest Destiny," the expropriation of the West seemed settled once and for all.Our Country/Whose Country? offers a rich and expansive examination of the significance of early westerns and travel pictures in the ideological foundations of "our country."

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.

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.

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 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.

The Sounds of Early Cinema is devoted exclusively to a little-known, yet absolutely crucial phenomenon: the ubiquitous presence of sound in early cinema. "Silent cinema" may rarely have been silent, but the sheer diversity of sound(s) and sound/image relations characterizing the first 20 years of moving picture exhibition can still astonish us. Whether instrumental, vocal, or mechanical, sound ranged from the improvised to the pre-arranged (as in scripts, scores, and cue sheets). The practice of mixing sounds with images differed widely, depending on the venue (the nickelodeon in Chicago versus the summer Chautauqua in rural Iowa, the music hall in London or Paris versus the newest palace cinema in New York City) as well as on the historical moment (a single venue might change radically, and many times, from 1906 to 1910). Contributors include Richard Abel, Rick Altman, Edouard Arnoldy, Mats Björkin, Stephen Bottomore, Marta Braun, Jean Châteauvert, Ian Christie, Richard Crangle, Helen Day-Mayer, John Fullerton, Jane Gaines, André Gaudreault, Tom Gunning, François Jost, Charlie Keil, Jeff Klenotic, Germain Lacasse, Neil Lerner, Patrick Loughney, David Mayer, Domi-nique Nasta, Bernard Perron, Jacques Polet, Lauren Rabinovitz, Isabelle Raynauld, Herbert Reynolds, Gregory A. Waller, and Rashit M. Yangirov.

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.

Especially over the past thirty years, serious research on early cinema has blossomed as never before. This rapid growth has included the establishment of international organizations such as Domitor (founded in 1987), with its biannual conferences; film festivals such as Le Giorante del cinema muto (established in Pordenone, Italy, in 1984); the centenary celebrations of cinema’s emergence (in 1994–6); and a host of publications, culminating with the release by Routledge of the Encyclopedia of Early Cinema (2005) (reissued in a revised paperback edition in 2010).Early Cinema is a new title in Routledge’s Major Works series, Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies. It meets the need for an authoritative reference work to enable users to navigate and make sense of the subject’s large literature and the continuing explosion in research output. Edited with the assistance of an international board of consultants by Richard Abel, a leading scholar in the field, this collection brings together in four volumes the foundational and the very best cutting-edge scholarship on early cinema.Early Cinema includes a full index and a comprehensive introduction, newly written by the editor, which places the collected material in its historical and intellectual context. It is an essential work of reference and is destined to be valued by scholars and advanced students of film studies as a vital research tool.

The Encyclopedia of Early Cinema, now in a new paperback edition, is a unique one-volume reference work which explores the first 25 years of cinema's development, from the early 1890s to the mid-1910s. These early years of the history of cinema have lately been the subject of resurgent interest and a growing body of scholarship, and have come to be recognized as an extraordinarily diverse period, when moving pictures were quite unlike the kind of cinema that later emerged as the dominant norm. This encyclopedia covers all aspects of scholarship on early cinema, both traditional and revisionist. It contains articles on the technological and industrial developments, the techniques of film production, the actors and filmmakers of the time, and on the changing modes of representation and narration, as well as the social and cultural contexts within which early films circulated, including topics such as distribution, exhibition and audience. Beyond the USA and Europe, attention is also given to the wider international picture, including those regions in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and South and Central America where filmmaking may have been relatively undeveloped but movie-going was significant. More than 950 entries have been commissioned from internationally recognized specialists. Alphabetically organized, the entries range in length from short factual articles to full essays that offer clear and stimulating discussions of the key issues, people, practices, and phenomena of early cinema. A thematic list of entries is a useful guide through the book, and all entries contain detailed cross-references. The longer articles have considered suggestions for further reading, which are complemented by a general bibliography of specialized works on early cinema.The Encyclopedia of Early Cinema is an invaluable and fascinating resource for students and researchers interested in the history of cinema.

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.

This is a collection of essays which focus upon the most important aspects of the silent cinema, opening up parallels with the postmodern cinema of our own times. Subjects discussed include the colour processes, choreograhic styles of acting, sound accompaniment, reception, the development from "cinema of attractions" to narrative film, national cinemas and relations with other forms of mass culture.

Richard Abel's magisterial new book radically rewrites the history of French cinema between 1896 and 1914, particularly during the years when Pathe-Freres, 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 feeries, 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 Cine 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.

Only once in cinema history have imported films dominated the American market: during the nickelodeon era in the early years of the twentieth century, when the Pathe company's 'Red Rooster' films could be found 'everywhere.' Through extensive original research, Richard Abel demonstrates how crucial French films were in making 'going to the movies' popular in the United States, first in vaudeville houses and then in nickelodeons. Abel then deftly exposes the consequences of that popularity. He shows how, in the midst of fears about mass immigration and concern that women and children (many of them immigrants) were the principal audience for moving pictures, the nickelodeon became a contested site of Americanization. Pathe's Red Rooster films came to be defined as dangerously 'foreign' and 'alien' and even 'feminine' (especially in relation to 'American' subjects like westerns). Their impact was thwarted, and they were nearly excluded from the market, all in order to ensure that the American cinema would be truly American."The Red Rooster Scare" offers a revealing and readable cultural history of American cinema's nationalization, by one of the most distinguished historians of early cinema.

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.

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.

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.

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 Andre 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.

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.

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.

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.

One of the most puzzling lapses in accounts of the rise of the West following the decline of the Roman Empire is the casual way historians have dealt with Gutenberg's invention of printing. The cultural achievements that followed the fifteenth century, when the West moved from relative backwardness to remarkable, robust cultural achievement, would have been impossible without Gutenberg's gift and its subsequent widespread adoption across most of the world.Richard Abel follows the radical cultural impact of the printing revolution from the eighth century to the Renaissance, addressing the viability of the new Christian/Classical culture. Although this culture proved too fragile to endure, those who salvaged it managed to preserve elements of the Classical substance together with the Bible and all the writings of the Church Fathers. The cultural upsurge of the Renaissance (fourteenth to seventeenth centuries), which resulted in part from Gutenberg's invention, is a major focus of this book.Abel aims to delineate how the cultural revolution was shaped by the invention of printing. He evaluates its impact on the rapid reorientation and acceleration of the cultural evolution in the West. This book provides insight into the history of the printed word, the roots of modern-day mass book production, and the promise of the electronic revolution. It is an essential work in the history of ideas.

One of the most puzzling lapses in accounts of the rise of the West following the decline of the Roman Empire is the casual way historians have dealt with Gutenberg's invention of printing. The cultural achievements that followed the fifteenth century, when the West moved from relative backwardness to remarkable, robust cultural achievement, would have been impossible without Gutenberg's gift and its subsequent widespread adoption across most of the world.Richard Abel follows the radical cultural impact of the printing revolution from the eighth century to the Renaissance, addressing the viability of the new Christian/Classical culture. Although this culture proved too fragile to endure, those who salvaged it managed to preserve elements of the Classical substance together with the Bible and all the writings of the Church Fathers. The cultural upsurge of the Renaissance (fourteenth to seventeenth centuries), which resulted in part from Gutenberg's invention, is a major focus of this book.Abel aims to delineate how the cultural revolution was shaped by the invention of printing. He evaluates its impact on the rapid reorientation and acceleration of the cultural evolution in the West. This book provides insight into the history of the printed word, the roots of modern-day mass book production, and the promise of the electronic revolution. It is an essential work in the history of ideas.

This open access book seeks answers to a series of questions about the little studied subject of prologues or theatrical presentations in American movie theaters from the late 1910s to the mid-1920s.