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The Red Rooster Scare
by Richard Abel
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Book Presentation:
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).
Press Reviews:
"This outstanding work offers a new description of the evolution of American cinema in the nickelodeon period. . . . With his usual groundbreaking research, Abel demonstrates the key role Pathé films played in this transformation. . . . Although clearly of crucial importance to film studies and film history, this treatment of the issues of the rise of nationalism within the cinema should make the work of great interest to historians dealing with modern nationalism and its relation to mass media."—Tom Gunning, author of D. W. Griffith and the Origins of Narrative Film
See the publisher website: University of California Press
> From the same author:
Our Country/Whose Country? (2024)
Early Westerns and Travel Films as Stories of Settler Colonialism
by Richard Abel
Subject: Countries > United States
Movie Mavens (2021)
US Newspaper Women Take on the Movies, 1914-1923
Dir. Richard Abel
Subject: On Films > Movie magazines
Menus for Movieland (2015)
Newspapers and the Emergence of American Film Culture 1913-1916
by Richard Abel
Subject: Silent Cinema
Early Cinema and the National (2008)
Dir. Richard Abel, Giorgio Bertellini and Rob King
Subject: Silent Cinema
Americanizing the Movies and Movie-Mad Audiences (2006)
1910-1914
by Richard Abel
Subject: Silent Cinema
French Film Theory and Criticism 1907-1939 (1988)
vol.1: 1907-1929 - vol. 2: 1929-1939
by Richard Abel
> On a related topic:
Politicking and Emergent Media (2016)
US Presidential Elections of the 1890s
Subject: History of Cinema
Flickering Empire (2015)
How Chicago Invented the U.S. Film Industry
by Michael Glover Smith and Adam Selzer
Subject: History of Cinema
For the Love of Pleasure (1998)
Women, Movies, and Culture in Turn-the-Century Chicago
Subject: History of Cinema
The Transformation of Cinema 1907-1915 (1994)
History of the American Cinema vol.2
Subject: Silent Cinema
Cinema '62 (2020)
The Greatest Year at the Movies
by Stephen Farber and Michael McClellan
Subject: History of Cinema
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