Books by Richard Abel

Motor City Movies, 1916-1925 is a broad textured look at Hollywood coming of age in a city with a burgeoning population and complex demographics. Richard Abel investigates the role of local Detroit organizations in producing, distributing, exhibiting, and publicizing films in an effort to make moviegoing part of everyday life.

These two volumes examine a significant but previously neglected moment in French cultural history: the emergence of French film theory and criticism before the essays of Andr Bazin. Richard Abel has devised an organizational scheme of six nearly symmetrical periods that serve to "e;bite into"e; the discursive flow of early French writing on the cinema. Each of the periods is discussed in a separate and extensive historical introduction, with convincing explications of the various concepts current at the time. In each instance, Abel goes on to provide a complementary anthology of selected texts in translation. Amounting to a portable archive, these anthologies make available a rich selection of nearly one hundred and fifty important texts, most of them never before published in English.

The recipient of the Jay Leyda Prize in Cinema Studies from the US Anthology Film Archives, this two-volume work explores the emergence of French film theory before the essays of Andre Bazin. The anthology contains selections from 150 texts, many published in English for the first time.

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. This book exposes the consequences of that popularity. It offers a revealing cultural history of American cinema's nationalization.

A detailed account of the use of law to defend anti-apartheid struggle, including case studies which include challenges to Pass Laws, black trade union's demands for recognition, censorship, state terror and conscientious objection.

Analyzes film distribution and exhibition practices in order to reconstruct a context for understanding moviegoing at a time when American cities were coming to grips with new groups of immigrants and women working outside the home. This book talks about the history of the film industry, and about the process of imaging a national community.