Bøker av Richard Abel

"Absolutely fascinating! I, of course, knew nothing about stage prologues. You've very successfully whetted my appetite."  - Peter Holland, McNeel Family Professor in Shakespeare Studies, University of Notre Dame.This open access book seeks answers to a series of questions about the littlestudied subject of prologues or theatrical presentations in American movie theaters from the late 1910s to the mid-1920s. How did prologues emerge out of prior practices? Who were the exhibitors most involved? What characteristics would come to define prologues? How widespread did they become not only in metropolitan palace cinemas but also in movie theaters in mid-sized cities and even small towns? If they generally created an atmosphere that complimented or harmonized with the feature films, could they also be what at the time was called "contrastive"? Who were the performers in these theatrical presentations? Were prologues ever described, in ads and audience responses, as a program's main attraction and to what effect?The book comprises five chapters and up to a hundred photographs of prologue stage settings. Moreover, supplementing each chapter is one or more relevant trade press documents. Overall, the chapters construct a set of practices and typologies that came to define the theatrical presentations that typically preceded the feature films. They also advance this argument: the variety format of combined stage and screen performance in movie theaters has a longer and unexpectedly revealing history than usually assumed. In short, an exhibitor would have a certain degree of creativity in his/her programming, which in turn could strongly impact an audience's movie-going experience.Richard Abel is Professor Emeritus of International Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Michigan, USA. His most recent books include Menus for Movie Land: Newspapers and the Emergence of American Film Culture, 1913-1916 (2015), Motor City Movie Culture, 1916-1925 (2020), and Our Country/Whose Country?: Early Westerns and Travel Films as Stories of Settler Colonialism (2023) as well as Barbara C. Hodgdon's Ghostly Fragments, co-edited with Peter Holland (2021), and the edited collection, Movie Mavens: US Newspaper Women Take on the Movies, 1914-1923 (2021).

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 Andr Bazin. Richard Abel has devised an organizational scheme of six nearly symmetrical periods that serve to "e;bite into"e; 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.

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. This book exposes the consequences of that popularity. It offers a revealing cultural history of American cinema's nationalization.

Presents the history of French cinema between 1896 and 1914, particularly during the years when Pathe-Freres, the first major corporation in the industry, led the world in film production and distribution. This book tells how early French film entertainment changed from a cinema of attractions to the narrative format that Hollywood would exploit.

A detailed account of the use of law to defend anti-apartheid struggle, including case studies which include challenges to Pass Laws, black trade union's demands for recognition, censorship, state terror and conscientious objection.

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. This book talks about the history of the film industry, and about the process of imaging a national community.