George Kleine and American Cinema: The Movie Business and Film Culture in the Silent Era by Joel Frykholm (review)

Abstract

George Kleine, though central to the development of American cinema, has always seemed something of an outlier: one of the founding members of the Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC, also known as the Edison Trust), he was neither a manufacturer of equipment nor a producer of films at the time of the Trust’s inception. Instead, Kleine made his mark in distribution, and distribution of foreign films at that. Kleine’s position in early film history seems secure, but until now he has remained relatively underexamined as an industry player, his activities never garnering the attention of his more widely chronicled peers, such as Edison or Lubin. Joel Frykholm’s George Kleine and American Cinema: The Movie Business and Film Culture in the Silent Era, seeks to remedy that situation by assessing the full span of Kleine’s career, from his beginnings as a purveyor of Edison films and projectors in the late 1890s until his exit from the industry by the mid-1920s. But, as his title indicates, Frykholm’s study is more than simply a biography: the author views Kleine’s somewhat unorthodox experiences as an opportunity to analyze the economic logic of the American film industry in its early years, while also situating that analysis within a consideration of cinema’s shifting cultural value during the same period. As Frykholm puts it, “the goal is to join three storylines—a career history, an economic/industrial history and a cultural history—into a unified narrative of how the institution of cinema took its shape from its emergence to the end of the silent era” (3). Ultimately, as Frykholm himself would likely concede, the economic history takes precedence. Frykholm’s approach, indebted in particular to the work of Gerben Bakker, attempts to make sense of the business actions of the entrepreneur within a matrix of market forces, industrial performance, and a changing socio-economic landscape. Borrowing concepts and approaches from economist Arthur De Vany (who has argued that revenue distribution in the film industry tends toward the “kurtotic,” or is heavily skewed toward success for the few) and business scholar Candace Jones (who has argued for the interplay of “entrepreneurial choice and institutional rules”), Frykholm views the fluctuations in the career of Kleine as a way to promote a particular understanding of the early institutionalization of cinema. At first glance, this appears to be Frykholm’s boldest historiographic move: positioning his work squarely in the centre