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"Pathe Goes to Town": French Films Create a Market for the Nickelodeon

1995; University of Texas Press; Volume: 35; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/1225805

1527-2087

Richard Abel,

Photography and Visual Culture

No one writing about the silent cinema in France after World War I can ignore the fact that films so dominated the market that they determined, in part, what constituted a French cinema. But is the converse true for the period prior to that war? Can any of us writing about the cinema in the United States, especially before 1910, ignore the fact that films sometimes dominated the market and so determined, in part, what became an American cinema? Apparently we can, or at least we can avoid dealing with films all that seriously. Even Charles Musser's recent and remarkable The Emergence of Cinema pushes films to the margins (in sections appended to the ends of chapters), following the long-held, probably unconscious tendency of film historians to Americanize early cinema.2 But what if we challenge this tendency, recognize the structuring absence around which early cinema was constituted, and foreground the foreign bodies of films so prominent in its midst?3 That is what I propose to do in this essay, focusing on the period from 1902 to 1906, the years of the cinema's emergence as a viable industry. For it was during those years that the films of Georges M6lies and Path6Freres had a considerable impact-to the point where, by the summer of 1905, Path6 had become the leading supplier of moving pictures for the market.