Nickels and dimes: The movies in a 'rampantly American' city, 1914--1923.
详细信息
- 作者：Aronson ; Michael Goodman.
- 学历：Doctor
- 年：2002
- 导师：Fischer, Lucy
- 毕业院校：University of Pittsburgh
- 专业：History, United States.;Cinema.
- ISBN：9780493999333
- CBH：3078820
- Country：USA
- 语种：English
- FileSize：15203521
- Pages：337
文摘
This dissertation engages film history from the bottom up, focusing on the ways in which a diverse regional culture negotiates and interacts with the mass medium of the movies during the 1910s and early 1920s. As the title, Nickels and Dimes: The Movies In A "Rampantly American" City, 1914--1923 suggests, the work locates its analysis of movie exhibition and moviegoing in Pittsburgh at a moment when this metropolis is as much a symbol as a city---a symbol of the imbricating forces of immigration, industrialization and urban modernity. As such, the city provides a productive site to address many guiding assumptions about the evolution of American movie culture in the silent era. Employing a broad range of archival materials, rare local films, and an unusual trade journal, The Pittsburgh Moving Picture Bulletin, the dissertation traces local anxieties and aspirations generated by the medium during a period in which the existing historiography has largely focused on the nationalization of the moviegoing experience. The work begins by situating the local and national determinates which were involved in the continued cultural entrenchment of the nickel theatre, long after the doors had closed on this city's eponymous Nickelodeon. Tracing out the specific path of exhibition development that occurred in Pittsburgh, the work argues that the tenacity of nickel pricing in the mid 1910s was not simply the result of local limitations or exhibitor economic impotence, but rather a denotative indicator for a diffuse set of issues regarding the nickelodeon as both a place and experience in cultural and institutional flux. Then, through an analysis of those activities which affect and emphasize the local experience of the moving picture show, including state-sponsored censorship, theatre-based exploitation and promotion and exhibitor-made "local view" movies, this dissertation reveals the ways in which exhibitors and their audiences continued to resist and adapt to the developing dominance of the Hollywood system.