Synopses & Reviews
American Movie Audiences examines the place of Hollywood cinema in the everyday life of its spectators from its beginnings to the arrival of sound. Previously, little has been known of early audiences and their response to the films of the day and this book brings together an array of fresh research on some of the key issues. These include the social composition of audiences, questions of ethnicity and class in the Nickelodeon era and how attempts at regulating cinema were justified by the particular and (not always accurate) constructions of cinema audiences by middle class reformers. Other contributors consider the extent to which audiences and other conditions of reception became standardised and the ways in which audiences and exhibitors participated in - or resisted - the process of homogenisation that
accompanied the rise of Hollywood.
About the Author
Contributors include: Steven Ross, Gregory Waller, Thomas Doherty, Roberta Pearson, William Urrichio.
Melvyn Stokes teaches American and Film History at University College London. Richard Maltby is Head of Screen Studies at the Flinders University of South Australia.
Table of Contents
Jewish immigrant audiences in New York City, 1905-14 / Judith Thissen -- Italian imageries, historical feature films and the fabrication of Italy's spectators in early 1900s New York / Giorgio Bertellini -- Film and ethnic identity in Harlem, 1896-1915 / Alison Griffiths and James Latham -- 'The formative and impressionable stage': discursive constructions of the nickelodeon's child audience / Roberta Pearson and William Uricchio -- Why the audience mattered in Chicago in 1907 / Lee Grieveson -- The revolt of the audience: reconsidering audiences and reception during the silent era / Steven J. Ross -- Viewing the viewers: representations of the audience in early cinema advertising / Kathryn Helgesen Fuller -- Reminiscences of the past, conditions of the present: at the movies in Milwaukee in 1918 / Leslie Midkiff DeBauche -- This is where we came in: the audible screen and the voluble audiences of early sound cinema / Thomas Doherty -- Hillbilly music and Will Rogers: small-town picture shows in the 1930s / Gregory A. Waller.