George Kleine was a New York City optician who moved to Chicago in 1893 to set up an optical store. In 1896 he branched out and began selling motion picture equipment and films. Within a few years he becameAmerica's largest film distributor and a pivotal figure in the movie business. In chronicling the career of this motion picture pioneer – including his rapid rise to fame and fortune, but also his gradual downfall after 1915 as the era of Hollywood began – Joel Frykholm provides an in-depth account of the emergence of the motion picture business in the United States and its development throughout the silent era. Through the lens of Kleine's fascinating career, this book explores how motion pictures gradually transformed from a novelty into an economic and cultural institution central to both American life and an increasingly globalised culture of mass entertainment.
The potential of films to educate has been crucial for the development of cinema intended to influence culture, and is as important as conceptions of film as a form of art, science, industry, or entertainment. Using the concept of institutionalization as a heuristic for generating new approaches to the history of educational cinema, contributors to this volume study the co-evolving discourses, cultural practices, technical standards, and institutional frameworks that transformed educational cinema from a convincing idea into an enduring genre. The Institutionalization of Educational Cinema examines the methods of production, distribution, and exhibition established for the use of educational films within institutions–such as schools, libraries, and industrial settings in various national and international contexts and takes a close look at the networks of organizations, individuals, and government agencies that were created as a result of these films' circulation. Through case studies of educational cinemas in different North American and European countries that explore various modes of institutionalization of educational film, this book highlights the wide range of vested interests that framed the birth of educational and nontheatrical cinema.
This 'transitional era' covered the years 1908-1917 & witnessed profound changes in the structure of the motion picture industry in the US, involving film genre, film form, filmmaking practices & the emergence of the studio system. The pattern which emerged dominated the industry for decades to come.
The potential of films to educate has been crucial for the development of cinema intended to influence culture, and is as important as conceptions of film as a form of art, science, industry, or entertainment. Using the concept of institutionalization as a heuristic for generating new approaches to the history of educational cinema, contributors to this volume study the co-evolving discourses, cultural practices, technical standards, and institutional frameworks that transformed educational cinema from a convincing idea into an enduring genre. The Institutionalization of Educational Cinema examines the methods of production, distribution, and exhibition established for the use of educational films within institutions–such as schools, libraries, and industrial settings in various national and international contexts and takes a close look at the networks of organizations, individuals, and government agencies that were created as a result of these films' circulation. Through case studies of educational cinemas in different North American and European countries that explore various modes of institutionalization of educational film, this book highlights the wide range of vested interests that framed the birth of educational and nontheatrical cinema.
Upon its original publication in 1976, The American Film Industry was welcomed by film students, scholars, and fans as the first systematic and unified history of the American movie industry. Now this indispensible anthology has been expanded and revised to include a fresh introductory overview by editor Tino Balio and ten new chapters that explore such topics as the growth of exhibition as big business, the mode of production for feature films, the star as market strategy, and the changing economics and structure of contemporary entertainment companies. The result is a unique collection of essays, more comprehensive and current than ever, that reveals how the American movie industry really worked in a century of constant change-from kinetoscopes and the coming of sound to the star system, 1950s blacklisting, and today's corporate empires.
When America began to emerge as a world power at the end of the nineteenth century, Italy was a young nation, recently unified. The technological advances brought about by electricity and the combustion engine were vastly speeding up the capacity of news, ideas, and artefacts to travel internationally. Furthermore, improved literacy and social reforms had produced an Italian working class with increased time, money, and education. At the turn of the century, if Italy's ruling elite continued the tradition of viewing Paris as a model of sophistication and good taste, millions of lowly-educated Italians began to dream of America, and many bought a transatlantic ticket to migrate there. By the 1920s, Italians were encountering America through Hollywood films and, thanks to illustrated magazines, they were mesmerised by the sight of Manhattan's futuristic skyline and by news of American lifestyle. The USA offered a model of modernity which flouted national borders and spoke to all. It could be snubbed, adored, or transformed for one's personal use, but it could not be ignored. Perversely, Italy was by then in the hands of a totalitarian dictatorship, Mussolini's Fascism. What were the effects of the nationalistic policies and campaigns aimed at protecting Italians from this supposedly pernicious foreign influence? What did Mussolini think of America? Why were jazz, American literature, and comics so popular, even as the USA became Italy's political enemy? America in Italian Culture provides a scholarly and captivating narrative of this epochal shift in Italian culture.
Mixing film history with social history, Reel Patriotism examines the role played by the American film industry during World War I and the effects of the industry’s pragmatic patriotism in the decade following the war. Looking at such films as Joan the Woman and Wings and at the war-time activities of Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin, film distributors, including George Kleine, and the National Association of the Motion Picture Industry, this book shows how heavily publicized gestures of patriotism benefited the reputation and profits of the movie business. Leslie Midkiff DeBauche shows how the United States government’s need to garner public support for the war, conserve food, raise money, and enlist soldiers was met by the film industry. Throughout the nineteen months of American involvement in World War I, film studios supported the war effort through the production of short instructional films, public speaking activities of movie stars, the civic forum provided by movie theaters, and the National Association of the Motion Picture Industry’s provision of administrative personnel to work directly with government agencies. While feature films about the war itself never dominated the release schedules of film distributors, they did become a staple film industry offering throughout the late 1910s and 1920s. The film industry had much to gain, DeBauche demonstrates, from working closely with the U.S. government. Though the war posed a direct challenge to the conduct of business as usual, the industry successfully weathered the war years. After the war, film producers, distributors, and exhibitors were able to capitalize on the good will of the movie-goer and the government that the industry’s war work created. It provided a buffer against national censorship when movie stars became embroiled in scandal, and it served as a selling point in the 1920s when major film companies began to trade their stock on Wall Street.
Flickering Empire tells the fascinating yet little-known story of how Chicago served as the unlikely capital of American film production in the years before the rise of Hollywood (1907–1913). As entertaining as it is informative, Flickering Empire straddles the worlds of academic and popular nonfiction in its vivid illustration of the rise and fall of the major Chicago movie studios in the mid-silent era (principally Essanay and Selig Polyscope). Colorful, larger-than-life historical figures, including Thomas Edison, Charlie Chaplin, Oscar Micheaux, and Orson Welles, are major players in the narrative—in addition to important though forgotten industry titans, such as "Colonel" William Selig, George Spoor, and Gilbert "Broncho Billy" Anderson.
The essays in American Cinema 1890-1909 explore and define how the making of motion pictures flowered into an industry that would finally become the central entertainment institution of the world. Beginning with all the early types of pictures that moved, this volume tells the story of the invention and consolidation of the various processes that gave rise to what we now call "cinema."
