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The Hollywood War Film

entertainment within urban centers, but influenced the flow of commercial traffic that flocked to these sites. While such analysis might have steered Whissel away from closely examining film plot and style, it would have helped put cinema’s emerging institutional status in the early 1900s in sharper focus. At the same time, it would have helped Whissel bridge the distance between the turn of the century—her main focus in the third chapter—and her discussion of the 1910s in the fourth chapter. Another important avenue of inquiry that Whissel might have explored further has to do with the circulation and exhibition of American-produced film prints. In addition to the varying nature of the film product from venue to venue in the opening years of cinema, the creation of the Motion Picture Patents Company in 1908 and the rise of heated debates concerning local, state-based, and national censorship made the years preceding the First World War a crucial period for the trafficking of film prints. And the 1915 Supreme Court case Mutual Film Corporation v. Industrial Commission of Ohio established that film would be treated as a business to be regulated according to the laws of interstate commerce rather than as intellectual property protected under the First Amendment. The question of how to define film as a particular kind of product would in turn dictate how it could travel. Whissel does provide a convincing endpoint for her study, noting that at the onset of World War I new technologies and the mobilization of the film industry for the war effort had a profound impact on how modern traffic was conceived and experienced in America and abroad. One era of traffic would give way to another. Making some initial conjectures concerning how this transition took place, Picturing American Modernity certainly lays the groundwork for future research. Whissel’s synthesis of an eclectic array of literary, theatrical, and visual sources and the interdisciplinary nature of the project make the book a rich resource for students and scholars interested in the intersections between film history, the social uses of technology, and American cultural history.