| Sumario: | “In Now Playing, a history of early film exhibition in Toronto, sociologist Paul S. Moore explores how the cinema became a mass medium. In particular, Moore focuses on how local government officials, film exhibitors and newspaper writers transformed moviegoing, an activity that middle-class city dwellers at first considered unusual and even dangerous, into a regular habit that was safe, respectable and even patriotic. Not just another entry in the growing number of city-centered histories of moviegoing, this thoughtful work calls into question many accepted arguments about early cinema and produces new research issues that will encourage social historians to reexamine the development of film exhibition in the early 1900s. . . . City-specific social histories of moviegoing are in themselves rewarding because they provide new details about local and particular film exhibition practices, but Now Playing does more than describe the emergence of cinema in Toronto.”
|
|---|