The Red Rooster Scare: Making Cinema American, 1900-1910

Abel, Richard

ISBN 10: 0520214781 / ISBN 13: 9780520214781

Published by University of California Press, 1999

Very Good - Crisp, clean, unread book with some shelfwear/edgewear, may have a remainder mark - NICE PAPERBACK Standard-sized. Seller Inventory # M0520214781Z2

Synopsis:

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 Pathé 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. Pathé'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.

About the Author: Richard Abel is NEH Professor of English at Drake University and author of The Ciné 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).

Bibliographic Details

Title: The Red Rooster Scare: Making Cinema ...
Publisher: University of California Press
Publication Date: 1999
Binding: Paperback
Condition: Very Good