In 1908 in Charities and Commons, John Collier wrote that “The nickelodeon is a family theater, and is almost the creation of the child, and it has discovered a new a healthy cheap-amusement public. . . . [It] began above all as a neighborhood institution, offering an evening of the most varied interest to the entire family for a quarter. . . . All the settlements and churches combined do not r4each daily a tithe of the simple and impressionable fold that the nickelodeons reach and vitally impress every day. Here is a new social force, perhaps the beginning of a true theater of the people, and an instrument whose power can only be realized when social workers begin to use it.” In 1911, David Hulfish described a “Store Front Theater Building”: “A vacant business house having been selected both for location and for size, the process of converting it into a motion-picture theater is to remove the glass front and framing for the door and windows, to replace it with a closed front a few back from the sidewalk line into which are built the ticket seller’s booth and the entrance and exit doors and on the inside of which is built the proejction operator’s booth. At the inner end of the room a muslin screen about 3 to 4 yards is stretched. The room is filled with rows of chairs, either kitchen chairs or opera chairs, as the expense justified by the location will permit, and a piano is placed near the picture the screen.” So the movies in America began, with transformed store-fronts, a family audience many of them women, and an inkling, as yet unrealized, that a new rhetorical cultural force was being born. The movies were European first, French especially, and Richard Abel is easily the best historian of early French cinema. In Red Rooster Scare, a history of the Pathe-Freres movie company’s venture into the American market, he complements and expands his earlier work on the French cinema itself. This work adds to and expands the work of Charles Musser, whose Before the Nickelodeon has documented the rise of the early cinema from the American side by telling the story of the Edison Company and of Edwin Porter especially. It’s interesting to place the two books side by side, as much of Edison’s early success depended on his duping of Pathe films (yes, the Chinese were not the first to develop this art form, nor were American recording artists the first to be wronged by it). Musser describes the difficulties the Americans faced in learning how to tell stories properly. Many of the early Edison films (including the very successful nfictional arrative The Great Train Robbery of 1903) were based on current events gleaned from the newspapers. Audiences could be counted on to be familiar with the stories, and very little in the way of narrative development was therefore necessary. This accounts for the difficulty one can experience in viewing certain of the films. Why would a man approach several well-dressed ladies in front of a monument at the nation’s capitol and then be chased by all of them until finally one brings him up short with a pistol? Because recent news accounts had told of how European aristocrats were coming to America in search of wives. But without that information, the film would make little sense. Unlike the Americans, the Pathe brothers company made movies for a mass international audience using story lines that had to be legible across national and cultural boundaries. This is one reason the company enjoyed such enormous intitial success, essentially dominating American film during its earliest years from 1900 to 1908. Another is the high visual quality of the films. Pathe projectors did not flicker between frames, and Pathe learned early on that color tinting adds to the appeal of films. Abel notes that “exhibitors, journalists, and others consistently celebrated the cinema by invoking the marvels of Pathe’s ‘high quality’–from its unique stencil-color process to the ‘flickerless images’ produced by its superbly crafter cameras, projectors, and perforating machines.” In America, especially in the crowded cities where the new movie theaters proliferated, what this meant is that the Pathe films could speak more directly to the new immigrant audience, most of whom did not possess the ability to read English language newspapers that supplied the information needed to understand Edison films. But that power and that ability would also be the downfall of Pathe in America. By 1910, it would be reduced to a small role in a film making market dominated for the first time by American companies. How that came about is the most moving and interesting part of the story Abel tells in Red Rooster Scare. The most popular form of entertainment in American cities and summer parks at the turn of the century was vaudeville, an amalgalm of acts, from comedy routines and songs to short dramatic sketches like “The Ex-Convict” about a reformed wrong-doer who is himself wronged until an upper-class man saves him. Vaudeville was a cheap form of family entertainment, costing anything from a nickel to a quarter. By 1900 a number of vaudeville theater owners began incorporating the new entertaiment medium of film into their string of acts, often as a filler between shows. When the films began, the audience would know it was time to leave and make room for the news set of customers. But it soon became evident to theater owners that the real draw was the movies themselves, and the use of movies spread rapidly as a result. Indeed, accoring to Abel, movies account for the sudden boom in vaudeville houses at this time. Relying on current newspaper accounts, Abel argues persuasively that easily the most popular films were those of the Pathe Company like Cinderella and A Trip to the Moon. Between 1903 and 1905, the number of family vaudeville theaters that used film grew, aided by the development of story films and by the new rental exchanges which made film distribution much easier and more efficient. In the Fall and Winter of 1903-04 alone, forty new vaudeville houses would list films as part of their show. Things were going so well for the Pathe films that the company opened an agency office in New York to be followed by another a year later in Chicago. The move was wise, since Edison had been making most of its profits from duped Pathe products, and the issue of licensing was heating up to be one of the most contentious issues in the early cinema. The years 1904-05 witnessed an upsurge in film exhibition, as more and more theater owners realized what they were missing by not incoporating the new, highly lucrative entertainment form. Pathe continued to outsell its American competitors with such imaginative fantasies as The Impossible Voyage, historical dramas like Marie Antoinette, film versions of famous novels like The Strike (based on Zola’s Germinal), and perhaps its most popular film of the era–The Passion Play–which it would re-release several years later in colorized form. Between 1905 and 1908, Pathe would dominate the American market, which was becoming increasingly wide and deep. By 1907, there were 500 storefront movie houses in New York City alone, many located in downtown immigrant neighborhoods. Eugene Cline would proclaim in Show World that year that as much as 80% of the films released weekly were foreign, with most coming from Pathe. Pathe was now acknowledge in the American press as “the finest moving photographer.” Harper’s Weekly declared “the French the masters of the new field.” The Passion Play was the most popular film of 1907, and over a third of the films in circulation came from the French movie company. It sold twice as many films as all of its American competitors combined. But things were changing. More and more women were now part of the audience, female office workers who spent their lunch hours and weekend afternoons at the
cinema. A n
ew social space was coming into being, one where greater personal liberty was possible in contrast to the older highly scrutinized Victorian world of middle and upper class theater going. Theaters were beginning to convert to movie houses, and more and more middle and upper middle class movie venues came into being. Movies were about to be wrestled away from the immigrant audience and converted into a vehicle of uplift directed at increasingly middle class patrons. And Edison was becoming more active in his attempts to control the industry. Association of Edison Licensees joined with the Film Service Association, and although Pathe participated, one consequence of the new arrangement was that its market share shrunk. At the same time, the Progressive Era crusades to clean up America (and American immigrant life especially) targeted Pathe. Its movies were now seen to be examples of bad taste and immorality in light of the need to control immigrant culture and channel it in ways more in keeping with the dominant Christian culture. Abel points out that after 1907, a sense of admiration for the technical mastery of French film products was replaced by another sense that French culture was “risque, deviant, and morally suspect–an allegedly different from American culture–especially in its display of sexual behavior, violence, and distasteful comic business.” The World reported that year: “That sort of thing may be all right on the otehr side of the pond, but it won’t do over here.” As part of the attempt to police immigrant culture, the National Board of Censorship was created, and its weight, according to Abel, fell particularly hard on Pathe, whose films were singled out for criticism and censorship. At the same time, a new discourse of “Americanism” was growing in the US, one that associated authenticity and masculinity with a xenophobic and racist vision of America and that branded French culture as effeminate, imitation, and alien. The new western genre, which begins to become popular near the end of the first decade of the century, is a symptom of this change. The popular press now turned somewhat savagely on Pathe. Its films were characterized as ridiculous, even dangerous. The combination of Edison’s maneuvering and the discourse of moral outrage seems to have taken its toll on the company. Increasingly, it withdrew from the American market and concentrated on Europe. And in 1908, a new player on the stage began to seize the imagination of the American movie-going audiences–Biograph, with its innovative young director, D. W. Griffith. But that’s another story. Abel’s book is distinguished by its depth of scholarship. His focus is the popular press and the film indexes from the period, and he does wonderful work with the archives of the film rental agencies.
Richard Abel, Red Rooser Scare: Making Cinema Ame
In 1908 in Charities and Commons, John Collier wrote that “The nickelodeon is a family theater, and is almost the creation of the child, and it has discovered a new a healthy cheap-amusement public. . . . [It] began above all as a neighborhood institution, offering an evening of the most varied interest to the entire family for a quarter. . . . All the settlements and churches combined do not r4each daily a tithe of the simple and impressionable fold that the nickelodeons reach and vitally impress every day. Here is a new social force, perhaps the beginning of a true theater of the people, and an instrument whose power can only be realized when social workers begin to use it.”
In 1911, David Hulfish described a “Store Front Theater Building”: “A vacant business house having been selected both for location and for size, the process of converting it into a motion-picture theater is to remove the glass front and framing for the door and windows, to replace it with a closed front a few back from the sidewalk line into which are built the ticket seller’s booth and the entrance and exit doors and on the inside of which is built the proejction operator’s booth. At the inner end of the room a muslin screen about 3 to 4 yards is stretched. The room is filled with rows of chairs, either kitchen chairs or opera chairs, as the expense justified by the location will permit, and a piano is placed near the picture the screen.”
So the movies in America began, with transformed store-fronts, a family audience many of them women, and an inkling, as yet unrealized, that a new rhetorical cultural force was being born. The movies were European first, French especially, and Richard Abel is easily the best historian of early French cinema. In Red Rooster Scare, a history of the Pathe-Freres movie company’s venture into the American market, he complements and expands his earlier work on the French cinema itself. This work adds to and expands the work of Charles Musser, whose Before the Nickelodeon has documented the rise of the early cinema from the American side by telling the story of the Edison Company and of Edwin Porter especially. It’s interesting to place the two books side by side, as much of Edison’s early success depended on his duping of Pathe films (yes, the Chinese were not the first to develop this art form, nor were American recording artists the first to be wronged by it). Musser describes the difficulties the Americans faced in learning how to tell stories properly. Many of the early Edison films (including the very successful nfictional arrative The Great Train Robbery of 1903) were based on current events gleaned from the newspapers. Audiences could be counted on to be familiar with the stories, and very little in the way of narrative development was therefore necessary. This accounts for the difficulty one can experience in viewing certain of the films. Why would a man approach several well-dressed ladies in front of a monument at the nation’s capitol and then be chased by all of them until finally one brings him up short with a pistol? Because recent news accounts had told of how European aristocrats were coming to America in search of wives. But without that information, the film would make little sense.
Unlike the Americans, the Pathe brothers company made movies for a mass international audience using story lines that had to be legible across national and cultural boundaries. This is one reason the company enjoyed such enormous intitial success, essentially dominating American film during its earliest years from 1900 to 1908. Another is the high visual quality of the films. Pathe projectors did not flicker between frames, and Pathe learned early on that color tinting adds to the appeal of films. Abel notes that “exhibitors, journalists, and others consistently celebrated the cinema by invoking the marvels of Pathe’s ‘high quality’–from its unique stencil-color process to the ‘flickerless images’ produced by its superbly crafter cameras, projectors, and perforating machines.” In America, especially in the crowded cities where the new movie theaters proliferated, what this meant is that the Pathe films could speak more directly to the new immigrant audience, most of whom did not possess the ability to read English language newspapers that supplied the information needed to understand Edison films. But that power and that ability would also be the downfall of Pathe in America. By 1910, it would be reduced to a small role in a film making market dominated for the first time by American companies. How that came about is the most moving and interesting part of the story Abel tells in Red Rooster Scare.
The most popular form of entertainment in American cities and summer parks at the turn of the century was vaudeville, an amalgalm of acts, from comedy routines and songs to short dramatic sketches like “The Ex-Convict” about a reformed wrong-doer who is himself wronged until an upper-class man saves him. Vaudeville was a cheap form of family entertainment, costing anything from a nickel to a quarter. By 1900 a number of vaudeville theater owners began incorporating the new entertaiment medium of film into their string of acts, often as a filler between shows. When the films began, the audience would know it was time to leave and make room for the news set of customers. But it soon became evident to theater owners that the real draw was the movies themselves, and the use of movies spread rapidly as a result. Indeed, accoring to Abel, movies account for the sudden boom in vaudeville houses at this time. Relying on current newspaper accounts, Abel argues persuasively that easily the most popular films were those of the Pathe Company like Cinderella and A Trip to the Moon. Between 1903 and 1905, the number of family vaudeville theaters that used film grew, aided by the development of story films and by the new rental exchanges which made film distribution much easier and more efficient. In the Fall and Winter of 1903-04 alone, forty new vaudeville houses would list films as part of their show. Things were going so well for the Pathe films that the company opened an agency office in New York to be followed by another a year later in Chicago. The move was wise, since Edison had been making most of its profits from duped Pathe products, and the issue of licensing was heating up to be one of the most contentious issues in the early cinema.
The years 1904-05 witnessed an upsurge in film exhibition, as more and more theater owners realized what they were missing by not incoporating the new, highly lucrative entertainment form. Pathe continued to outsell its American competitors with such imaginative fantasies as The Impossible Voyage, historical dramas like Marie Antoinette, film versions of famous novels like The Strike (based on Zola’s Germinal), and perhaps its most popular film of the era–The Passion Play–which it would re-release several years later in colorized form. Between 1905 and 1908, Pathe would dominate the American market, which was becoming increasingly wide and deep. By 1907, there were 500 storefront movie houses in New York City alone, many located in downtown immigrant neighborhoods. Eugene Cline would proclaim in Show World that year that as much as 80% of the films released weekly were foreign, with most coming from Pathe. Pathe was now acknowledge in the American press as “the finest moving photographer.” Harper’s Weekly declared “the French the masters of the new field.” The Passion Play was the most popular film of 1907, and over a third of the films in circulation came from the French movie company. It sold twice as many films as all of its American competitors combined.
But things were changing. More and more women were now part of the audience, female office workers who spent their lunch hours and weekend afternoons at the
cinema. A n
ew social space was coming into being, one where greater personal liberty was possible in contrast to the older highly scrutinized Victorian world of middle and upper class theater going. Theaters were beginning to convert to movie houses, and more and more middle and upper middle class movie venues came into being. Movies were about to be wrestled away from the immigrant audience and converted into a vehicle of uplift directed at increasingly middle class patrons.
And Edison was becoming more active in his attempts to control the industry. Association of Edison Licensees joined with the Film Service Association, and although Pathe participated, one consequence of the new arrangement was that its market share shrunk. At the same time, the Progressive Era crusades to clean up America (and American immigrant life especially) targeted Pathe. Its movies were now seen to be examples of bad taste and immorality in light of the need to control immigrant culture and channel it in ways more in keeping with the dominant Christian culture. Abel points out that after 1907, a sense of admiration for the technical mastery of French film products was replaced by another sense that French culture was “risque, deviant, and morally suspect–an allegedly different from American culture–especially in its display of sexual behavior, violence, and distasteful comic business.” The World reported that year: “That sort of thing may be all right on the otehr side of the pond, but it won’t do over here.” As part of the attempt to police immigrant culture, the National Board of Censorship was created, and its weight, according to Abel, fell particularly hard on Pathe, whose films were singled out for criticism and censorship. At the same time, a new discourse of “Americanism” was growing in the US, one that associated authenticity and masculinity with a xenophobic and racist vision of America and that branded French culture as effeminate, imitation, and alien. The new western genre, which begins to become popular near the end of the first decade of the century, is a symptom of this change.
The popular press now turned somewhat savagely on Pathe. Its films were characterized as ridiculous, even dangerous. The combination of Edison’s maneuvering and the discourse of moral outrage seems to have taken its toll on the company. Increasingly, it withdrew from the American market and concentrated on Europe. And in 1908, a new player on the stage began to seize the imagination of the American movie-going audiences–Biograph, with its innovative young director, D. W. Griffith. But that’s another story.
Abel’s book is distinguished by its depth of scholarship. His focus is the popular press and the film indexes from the period, and he does wonderful work with the archives of the film rental agencies.
Reviewed by Michael Ryan