American Cinema's Transitional Era

by Keil, Charles

• ISBN13: 9780520240254
• ISBN10: 0520240251
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-06-01
• Publisher: Univ of California Pr

Summary

The years between 1908 and 1917 witnessed what may have been the most significant transformation in American film history. During this "transitional era," widespread changes affected film form and film genres, filmmaking practices and industry structure, exhibition sites, and audience demographics. By the end of the period, cinema had moved toward the shape it would assume for decades under the studio system. This collection of new essays by prominent film scholars traces these myriad changes, presenting the most detailed and comprehensive portrait yet of this pivotal stage in cinema's development. Topics under discussion include debates about cinema's place in American culture; the influence of an evolving feature format; the role of state censorship; emerging genres and audiences; onscreen depictions of gender, race, and nationality; changing exhibition practices and theater locales; and the emergence of Hollywood as the nation's film capital.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations and Tables	vii
Acknowledgments	ix
Introduction	1	(14)
PART 1. DEFINING TRANSITION: REVISION AND DEBATE
Systematizing the Electric Message: Narrative Form, Gender, and Modernity in The Lonedale Operator	15	(36)
Tom Gunning
``To Here from Modernity'': Style, Historiography, and Transitional Cinema	51	(15)
Charlie Keil
Periodization of Early Cinema	66	(10)
Ben Brewster
Feature Films, Variety Programs, and the Crisis of the Small Exhibitor	76	(27)
Ben Singer
PART 2. THE TRANSITIONAL SCREEN: NEW GENRES, CULTURAL SHIFTS
What Happened in the Transition? Reading Race, Gender, and Labor between the Shots	103	(28)
Jacqueline Stewart
The ``Imagined Community'' of the Western, 1910-1913	131	(40)
Richard Abel
The Coney Island Comedies: Bodies and Slapstick at the Amusement Park and the Movies	171	(20)
Lauren Rabinovitz
Travelogues and Early Nonfiction Film: Education in the School of Dreams	191	(26)
Jennifer Lynn Peterson
PART 3. THE INDUSTRY IN TRANSITION: CHANGING INSTITUTIONS AND AUDIENCES
Where Development Has Just Begun: Nickelodeon Location, Moving Picture Audiences, and Neighborhood Development in Chicago	217	(22)
J. A. Lindstrom
A House Divided: The MPPC in Transition	239	(26)
Scott Curtis
Not Harmless Entertainment: State Censorship and Cinema in the Transitional Era	265	(20)
Lee Grieveson
Cinema under the Sign of Money: Commercialized Leisure, Economies of Abundance, and Pecuniary Madness, 1905-1915	285	(30)
Constance Balides
The Menace of the Movies: Cinema's Challenge to the Theater in the Transitional Period	315	(17)
Roberta E. Pearson
``It's a Long Way to Filmland'': Starlets, Screen Hopefuls, and Extras in Early Hollywood	332	(21)
Shelley Stamp
List of Contributors	353	(4)
Index	357