Professor Emeritus of International Cinema and Media Studies
richabel@umich.eduOffice Information:
phone: 734.764.0147
Department of Film, Television, and Media
Education/Degree:
Ph.D., Comparative Literature, USC, 1970M.A., Comparative Literature, USC, 1965
B.A., English, Utah State University, 1963
Newest from Richard Abel
Our Country/Whose Country? Early Westerns and Travel Films as Stories of Settler Colonialism (2023)
Richard Abel
The concept of settler colonialism offers an invaluable lens to reframe early westerns and travel films as re-enactments of this country’s repressed past. In short, these films stage a remarkable vision of white settlers’ westward expansion that reveals a transformation in what “American Progress” came to mean. Two interconnected pathways structure this book. The primary path links five chapters devoted to early westerns from the early 1900s to the late 1910s. A crucial shift occurs between the third and fourth chapters, coinciding with the outbreak of the Great War....
See More
Movie Mavens (2021)
Richard Abel
Richard Abel's anthology Movie Mavens: US Newspaper Women Take on the Movies 1914 - 1923 reveals women's essential contribution to the creation of American Film Culture. During the early era of cinema, moviegoers turned to women editors and writers for the latest on everyone’s favorite stars, films, and filmmakers. Richard Abel returns these women to film history with an anthology of reviews, articles, and other works. Abel supplements the...
See More
Motor City Movie Culture 1916-1925 (2020)
Richard Abel
Motor City Movie Culture, 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. Tapping a wealth of primary sources material—from newspapers, spatiotemporal maps, and city directories to rare trade journals, theater programs, and local newsreels—Abel shows how entrepreneurs worked to lure moviegoers from Detroit’s diverse ethnic...
See More
Menus for Movieland: Newspapers and the Emergence of American Film Culture (2015)
Richard Abel
At the turn of the past century, the main function of a newspaper was to offer “menus” by which readers could make sense of modern life and imagine how to order their daily lives. Among those menus in the mid-1910s were several that mediated the interests of movie manufacturers, distributors, exhibitors, and the rapidly expanding audience of fans. This writing about the movies arguably played a crucial role in the emergence of American popular film culture, negotiating among national, regional, and local interests to shape fans’ ephemeral experience of moviegoing, their repeated encounters with...
See More