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  1. Home
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  3. Entertainment Industrialised
  • Cited by 47
  • Gerben Bakker, London School of Economics and Political Science
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
July 2009
Print publication year:
2008
Online ISBN:
9780511497322
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511497322
Subjects:
History, Regional History after 1500, Economic History, Twentieth Century Regional History
Series:
Cambridge Studies in Economic History - Second Series
Information

Book description

Entertainment Industrialised was the first study to compare the emergence and economic development of the film industry in Britain, France and the United States between 1890 and 1940. Gerben Bakker investigates the commercialisation and industrialisation of live entertainment in the nineteenth century and analyses the subsequent arrival of motion pictures, revealing that their emergence triggered a process of incessant creative destruction, development and productivity growth that continues in the entertainment industry today. He argues that cinema industrialised live entertainment by automating it, standardising it and making it tradeable, a process that was largely demand led, and that a quality race between firms changed the structure of the international entertainment market. While a hundred years ago, European enterprises were supplying half of all films shown in the US, the quality race resulted in today's industry, in which a handful of American companies dominate the global entertainment business.

Reviews

'… a sophisticated and satisfying analysis of the American, British and French industries … inventive and thought-provoking … all historians of early twentieth-century film should grapple with this work.’

Source: The American Historical Review

Review of the hardback:'… the book presents a compelling and detailed explanation for the dominance of Hollywood, an explanation that is firmly rooted in economic theory … an admirable attempt at presenting a detailed, coherent and rigorous explanation of the economic forces that shaped the evolution of the film industry, an industry that is perhaps too often prone to wrap itself in myth and hyperbole.'

Source: EHNet

Review of the hardback:'… a commanding scholarly synthesis, drawing upon an extraordinarily extensive set of sources, which will prove indispensable to researchers in this field, and, more widely, the economic history of the second industrial revolution. … Bakker provides a coherent and convincing groundbreaking account of the economic history of the international film industry.'

Source: Economic History Review

Review of the hardback:'… a recommended read …'

Source: World Economics

Review of the hardback:‘… this laudably ambitious and exhaustively researched study significantly enhances our understanding not only of the history of the film industry, but of commercial entertainments more generally.’

Source: English Historical Review

Review of the hardback:'… an insightful economic history of the emergence and development of the American, British, and French cinema industries. … scholars of all stripes would benefit from reading this book.’

Source: Business History Review

Review of the hardback:‘… offers bold explanatory models where anecdotal or descriptive approaches have prevailed before … provides great insights in many aspects of the history of cinema … anyone willing to dispute Bakker’s narrative of creative destruction through brilliant entrepreneurship will have to come up with an argument at least as solid, lucid and well-documented.’

Source: Kelvingrove Review

Review of the hardback:'Entertainment Industrialised is a fascinating work, a pleasure to read and strongly recommended for everyone with an interest in film, history or economics … the best starting point for those who want to read about the economic history of film, whether it be historians, economists, film scholars or general readers … a fascinating whole with a broad scope.'

Source: Tijdschrift voor Mediageschiedenis

Review of the hardback:'Open Entertainment Industrialised on any page, and the sense of real discovery is instant. This is history with new eyes … It is a book that demands to be read.'

Source: The Bioscope

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