The Red Rooster Scare: Making Cinema American, 1900-1910

Abel then deftly exposes the consequences of that popularity. He shows how, in the midst of fears about mass immigration & concern that women & children (many of them immigrants) were the principal audience for moving pictures, the nickelodeon became a contested site of Americanization. Pathé's Red Rooster films came to be defined as dangerously "foreign" & "alien" & even "feminine" (especially in relation to "American subjects" like westerns). Their impact was thwarted, & they were nearly excluded from the market, all in order to ensure that the American cinema would be truly American.  

The Red Rooster Scare offers a revealing & readable cultural history of American cinema's nationalization, by one of the most distinguished historians of early cinema. "This outstanding work offers a new description of the evolution of American cinema in the nickelodeon period. . . . With his usual groundbreaking research, Abel demonstrates the key role Pathé films played in this transformation. . . . Although clearly of crucial importance to film studies & film history, this treatment of the issues of the rise of nationalism within the cinema should make the work of great interest to historians dealing with modern nationalism & its relation to mass media. --Tom Gunning, author of D. W. Griffith & The Origins of Narrative Film