20th century american culture
20th century french films
A01=Richard Abel
american cinema
american history
american market
americanization
art history
Author_Richard Abel
Category=ATF
Category=JBCC
Category=JPFN
Category=KNTC
cinema history
commercial crisis
early cinema
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_business-finance-law
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
film and television
film history
film studies
going to the movies
mass immigration
mass media
media studies
movie studies
moving pictures
nationalism
nationalization of american cinema
nickelodeons
pathe films
red rooster films
united states of america
vaudeville houses
Product details
- ISBN 9780520214781
- Weight: 544g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 15 Mar 1999
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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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.
Richard Abel is NEH Professor of English at Drake University and author of The Cine Goes to Town: French Cinema, 1896-1914 (California, 1994), French Film Theory and Criticism, 1907-1939 (1988), and French Cinema: The First Wave, 1915-1929 (1984).
