Class-ic Cinema

Abstract

Class-ic Cinema Kathryn J. Oberdeck (bio) Steven J. Ross. Working-Class Hollywood: Silent Film and the Shaping of Class in America. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. xviii + 367 pp. Illustrations, appendixes, notes, and index. $29.95. Over the last two decades, film scholars and historians of American working-class life have provoked each other to produce important revisions in both fields. Social historians have explored the juncture of popular entertainment and working-class culture to show how industrial workers, immigrant communities, and working-class women used movies and other amusements to enliven, ease, and even challenge the rigors of their lives. 1 Meanwhile, film history has reached beyond the study of cinematic texts and their producers to look at the social context of movie reception as well as wider social struggles over distribution, censorship, and production that shaped film entertainment. 2 This cross-fertilization of social history and film scholarship has not only vastly enriched the narrative of mass entertainment in the United States; it has also creatively challenged the very categories in terms of which historians study working-class lives and leisure. By placing movies and their spectators in the context of work, family, and community institutions, historians of working-class culture have demonstrated that movie meanings often lie beyond particular film texts or theaters, in the everyday struggles that shape the ways spectators make sense of popular amusements. By uncovering the ways movies depict American social conflicts and provoke new contests over issues of censorship and taste, socially oriented film scholarship has expanded the terrain on which historians understand popular political struggles to take place. Steven J. Ross’s Working Class Hollywood: Silent Film and the Shaping of Class in America takes the integration of film scholarship and working-class history in a new direction. Ross focuses directly on cinematic production and spectatorship within organizations and communities that were vitally concerned with the representation of class struggles. He takes as a point of departure the working-class character of the movies in their first decades as a mass leisure pursuit—roughly 1905 to 1925. He then homes in on the efforts of laborite and socialist filmmakers who used movies to popularize their own [End Page 601] creeds of solidarity and collective action. He places their efforts in the wider context of filmmaking by business elites—including the leaders of an increasingly corporate film industry—as well as by political and cultural Progressives. The result is a vividly written chronicle of multi-faceted struggles over the meaning of class in American life as they took shape in silent film. Ross’s unprecedented attention to the extensive uses of film by working-class movements provides a convincing basis for provocative arguments about the importance of these movements to the history of film, and vice versa. By recognizing how unions, radical political movements, and the cultures of working-class life they addressed shaped audiences’ experience of silent film, Ross makes a strong case for the importance of these organizations and communities to any understanding of the significance of films that depicted labor, poverty, working-class leisure, and proletarian solidarity. He also makes a case for film as a crucial arena of working-class politics, where the struggle to win Americans to laborite and socialist conceptions of class were waged and, in the era he covers, lost. Part I of Working-Class Hollywood focuses on how early silent films presented class distinctions and conflicts to their predominantly working-class audiences. This section begins with a chapter on the working-class character of early film audiences and of the venues, mainly nickelodeons, where they encountered the movies. Ross describes how the institutions of early commercial cinema took shape in ways that appealed to American workers’ experience of increasingly tedious work, gradually expanding leisure, and the growing division of American culture into distinct high and low strata. With their low startup costs, nickelodeons were easy for small-time entrepreneurs to set up in working-class neighborhoods. Because of their neighborhood locations and their “continuous” screening of an entertainment whose enjoyment did not require English language skills, these new institutions quickly acquired a loyal clientele of both native-born and immigrant working-class men...