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Arab film making was only partly able to compete with “First World” cinema. It has remained greatly dependent on Western imports, technical know-how, evaluation, and partly even on Western financial support. The so-called Third-Worldist anti-colonial cinema did not succeed in resolving the contradiction between cultural promotion, political commitment, and rentability, and was soon eclipsed either by entirely mainstream-oriented cinema or by the rather anti-authoritarian, deconstructive, and stylistically innovative, yet regionally marginalized, cinéma d'auteur. Nonetheless, mainstream as well as individualist cinema was able to convey elements of native art and culture, and became actively involved in the creation of specific national or cultural identities. Although the medium became part of a mass-mediated culture and functioned as a means of mass entertainment, commercialism, the obligation to rentability, and competition with Western products did not result in a complete imitation of Western cinema, but initiated the reformation of the imported film language according to the needs of local audiences.

It is important to try to recapture the seriousness with which Abbé Jean-Baptiste de la Chapelle and some others took the question of ventriloquism, and this chapter examines the importance of the topic within one of the earliest novels of the new American republic. It is also important to remember that this was the period in which ventriloquism was beginning to find its place within what would become a culture of mass entertainment. It was to be expected that the growing tendency for ventriloquism to take a narrative form would result in its appearance in more developed narratives. However, it was scarcely to be expected that a young American writer, determined to assist in the formation of a distinctively American form of novel in the early days of the new republic, would make ventriloquism the centrepiece of his work. However, this is precisely what Charles Brockden Brown did in Wieland, Or The Transformation: An American Tale.

This chapter discusses the rise of blacks in American mass culture between 1890 and 1930, and how it coincided with the heyday of what historian David Nasaw has described as the era of “public amusements.” A proliferation of commercialized mass entertainment, ranging from phonograph parlors and silent-film palaces to professional sports events and dancehalls, transformed American leisure. In huge numbers, Americans of all classes and backgrounds sought out these and other forms of commercial leisure. By exploiting the era's dizzying technological innovations, mass-culture entrepreneurs produced accessible and alluring forms of entertainment that accelerated the nation's emerging consumer economy. This new prominence of mass entertainment, and of blacks in it, accentuated contradictions in American attitudes about both race and culture.

This chapter claims that the entertainment revolution of the 1840s occurred because new types of shows were mounted in new types of playhouses for a new type of spectator. Melodrama and vaudeville became less fashionable and more clearly targeted to a certain kind of customer. Vaudeville, or variety, in particular, had been a saloon entertainment that spectators enjoyed while talking, walking about, eating, and drinking, and it suffered as temperance feeling pushed respectable people—especially genteel women—away from theatres where liquor was served. Paradoxically, the theatrical half-life variety thrived, becoming the first of the new popular entertainments to appeal to spectators (albeit male ones) in all regions and from all classes. In the 1870s and 1880s, it emerged from the saloon to become the engine of mass entertainment.

This chapter describes an abiding distinction in African American writing between sight, which seems divisive and prejudicial, and sound, which is identified with community solidarity and expression. It argues that this distinction is harder to uphold in the case of later writers such as James Weldon Johnson, especially considering his participation in mass entertainment, where sound is just as distant and commodified as sight. It also shows the difficulty this poses for Johnson's program of redefining race in cultural terms.

This chapter attempts to sketch out some of the cultural meanings of a virtuoso with a concentration on Franz Liszt, who defined the model that subsequent virtuosos have been expected either to emulate or to reject. Technical wizardry and sexual magnetism set the Lisztian virtuoso sharply apart from the Orphean singer. A virtuoso's instrument carries no metaphysical privilege; it is a machine that must be manually operated and yet spiritualized. The virtuoso becomes a magnet for the multiple ambivalences that have haunted the concept of appearance itself in relation to the body, theatricality, deception, and rhetoric. The virtuoso concert can be understood historically as part of a long series of performance genres devised to attract a large public. Many of these genres originated in the social and cultural turmoil of Paris during the Restoration and July Monarchy. The virtuoso concert combines the contradictory functions of ceremony and carnival. It exacts disciplined attention from the audience along with awe at the performer's preternatural skill and frees the audience to take personal pleasure in the spectacle of the virtuoso's face and body, which is a medium of identification and desire.

This chapter notes that television presents an interesting case of a relatively young medium whose function and forms had to be defined within a context of already developed debates over the high/popular divide. It shows that the possible contradiction in television's aims to disseminate national values and ‘high’ culture and to entertain a mass audience was posed with particular acuity in France, where the democratisation of high culture had long been central to national identity and to what the State perceived as its duty. The chapter concludes that television exemplifies the twin threads of allegiance to French exceptionalism and market-driven alignment with Western norms which characterise French cultural life.

This chapter examines the “people's” orchestra, which tried to fill the rapidly growing gap between the elite and mass entertainment, studying the People's Orchestra of 1912–1913, the developments that led to it, and its eventual downfall. It also studies the question of whether the European symphonic tradition could be adapted to national or regional needs to form a concert practice that had wide public appeal and “American” characteristics.

Today's audiences become bored more quickly. It seems to take more to attract their interest, captivate them, and sustain their attention. The balance between unity and variety has tipped in favor of variety. Beauty as an ideal has been replaced by adventure. Perhaps something about communicative technique can be learned from films, television, and popular music that play to contemporary audiences in the tens of millions. This mass entertainment leaves nothing to chance in trying to reach potential clients. If nothing more, they have an attitude and a determination that might be applied beneficially. The world of America looking toward the new millennium is an increasingly barbaric place, with slaughter on the streets, drugs perverting lives in almost every family, and constant revelations of deceit and crime in high places. It seems to be growing cruder and more insensitive. The honesty and integrity of arts are fundamentally at odds with these conditions.

This chapter takes a closer look at Spartacus' engagement with Roman spectacle as a fighter and entertainer. Beyond the series' intense focus on sexuality and the problems of slavery, this chapter argues that the creators also emphasize the multimodal representation of the Roman culture of performance and spectacle in the arena. The new Spartacus series, the chapter claims, offers a complex image of Roman spectacle in terms of spatial materialities, spectacular aesthetics, and social realism: the amphitheater is conveyed as a microcosm of Roman society and the central point of reference for Roman “popular” culture in the sense of mass entertainment.

This introductory chapter discusses the factors contributing to the widespread popularity of exhibitions of living foreign peoples in nineteenth century. Originally presented on a small scale as servants and shopkeepers, by the 1880s performers were displaced by the hundreds from their homelands and lived on site in ostensibly authentic “native villages.” Within this context, living foreign peoples were transformed into professional “savages” and became tied to new forms of cheap mass entertainment.

This introductory chapter discusses the theme of this volume which is about the popular reception of Albert Einstein's relativity theory in Great Britain. This volume analyzes excerpts from newspapers, magazines, and books that display a deliberate misapplication of the new cosmology to familiar experience. It also explores how relativity took on a slightly different set of connotations in the context of mass entertainment and shows how producers of satire, news, poetry, and popular fiction brought their own special skills to bear on tensions between the abstract, general, or universal and the local, personal, or partisan.

This chapter describes how, in the lead-up to the First World War, flamenquismo became a mass phenomenon in Spain, as it pervaded most forms of public entertainment, from género chico to bullfighting. Critics in the orbit of regeneracionismo, whose call for the use of education and the arts to “regenerate” Spanish society was reinvigorated in the wake of the 1898 desastre, saw flamenquismo as a new “plague” that threatened to jeopardize their endeavors. Among them, Eugenio Noel became the most outspoken and vitriolic critic of flamenco and bullfighting. His publications and public talks sparked the outrage of stakeholders in the bullfighting and flamenco businesses, who attempted to murder him on various occasions. Noel’s writings represent a desperate attempt to “civilize” Spanish society by raising awareness about corruption and politics, but they contain serious instances of bigotry against Gypsies and flamenco that did not help to overcome stigmatizing prejudice.

This chapter describes a period in which the most important national media outlets in Argentina began to alter the established language they used to describe crime, a moment when journalists, photographers, and illustrators began to deploy a wider set of resources to represent homicides, robberies, and kidnappings in the Buenos Aires press. The themes and methods of crime stories evolved and incorporated a new protagonist, the pistolero. Reporting popularized this figure to such a degree that it became difficult to separate the social phenomenon of “pistolerismo” from the advancements in the very graphic media that brought him to life: the expansion of their ability to reproduce images, the indulgent heterogeneity of their sources, and their commercial logic. The key to understanding the rise of the pistolero's visibility resides in the affinity between the new languages of mass entertainment and certain criminal practices.

Pentecostalism is now the second largest subgrouping of global Christianity. It’s charted tremendous growth, even in deeply post-Christian countries like Sweden. This chapter compares British and American pentecostalism and looks at how disciples related to or rejected pop culture. Believers had an interesting, hot and cold, relationship with mass entertainment, music, and mass media. They were eager to borrow much for evangelistic purposes, and quick to shun all that they thought to be sinful. British pentecostalism never grew at the pace and never achieved the astounding success of their co-religionists across the Atlantic. Some of this had directly to do with access to mass culture and a willingness or ability to adjust the faith to pop culture. This chapter ends by detailing and analysing the major differences and similarities of the faith as it developed in both regions.

Pictures wielded considerable power in nineteenth-century society, shaping the way that Americans portrayed and related to one another, and presented themselves. This is not only a history through pictures, but a history of pictures: it departs from most historians’ approaches to images as self-explanatory illustrations, and instead examines those images as largely overlooked primary source evidence. Consuming Identities charts the growth of a commodified image industry in one of the most diverse and dynamic cities in the United States, from the gold rush to the turn of the twentieth century. The following chapters focus on the circulation of human representations throughout the city of San Francisco and around the world, as well as the cultural dimensions of the relationship between people, portraits, and the marketplace. In so doing, this work traces a critical moment in the shaping of individual modern identities.