Explorations in New Cinema History

Approaches and Case Studies

Richard Maltby, Daniel Biltereyst, Philippe Meers, Richard Maltby, Daniel Biltereyst, Philippe Meers

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781405199506, 9781405199490
• eBook ISBN: 9781444396409
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

Explorations in New Cinema History brings together cutting-edge research by the leading scholars in the field to identify new approaches to writing and understanding the social and cultural history of cinema, focusing on cinema's audiences, the experience of cinema, and the cinema as a site of social and cultural exchange.

• Includes contributions from Robert Allen, Annette Kuhn, John Sedwick, Mark Jancovich, Peter Sanfield, and Kathryn Fuller-Seeley among others
• Develops the original argument that the social history of cinema-going and of the experience of cinema should take precedence over production- and text-based analyses
• Explores the cinema as a site of social and cultural exchange, including patterns of popularity and taste, the role of individual movie theatres in creating and sustaining their audiences, and the commercial, political and legal aspects of film exhibition and distribution
• Prompts readers to reassess their understanding of key periods of cinema history, opening up cinema studies to long-overdue conversations with other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences
• Presents rigorous empirical research, drawing on digital technology and geospatial information systems to provide illuminating insights in to the uses of cinema

Part 1
Mapping Cinema Experiences

1

New Cinema Histories

RICHARD MALTBY¹

History is not yet what it ought to be. That is no reason to make history as it can be the scapegoat for the sins which belong to bad history alone.

Marc Bloch (1953, p. 66)

Whenever I hear the word cinema, I can’t help thinking hall, rather than film.

Roland Barthes (1986, p. 346)

Over the past 10 years, an emerging international trend in research into cinema history has shifted its focus away from the content of films to consider their circulation and consumption, and to examine the cinema as a site of social and cultural exchange.² This shared effort has engaged contributors from different points on the disciplinary compass, including history, geography, cultural studies, economics, sociology and anthropology, as well as film and media studies. Their projects have examined the commercial activities of film distribution and exhibition, the legal and political discourses that craft cinema’s profile in public life, and the social and cultural histories of specific cinema audiences. Many of their projects have been collaborative, facilitated by computational analysis and the opportunities for quantitative research offered by databases and Geographical Information Systems, which allow for the compilation of new information about the history of cinema exhibition and reception in ways that would previously have been too labour intensive to undertake.³ Having achieved critical mass and methodological maturity, this body of work has now developed a distinct identity, to which we have given the name ‘the new cinema history’ (Bowles et al., 2011). The aim of this collection is to showcase recent work in the field, and to illustrate the questions that the new cinema history asks. As well as providing a guide to the individual contributions, this introductory essay seeks to explain what the editors believe is new about new cinema history, and what is distinctive in its approach.

In calling this body of work new cinema history, we are deliberately distinguishing it from film history. Film history has been predominantly a history of production, producers, authorship and films. It is most often evaluative, classificatory or curatorial in its remit, and primarily concerned with understanding the complex economic, aesthetic and social systems that might cause particular films to assume the shape that they do. This activity, which has engaged historians already located within the discipline of film studies, has greatly expanded our understanding of the ‘proximate forces’ influencing the development and uses of the medium (Keil, 2004, p. 52). Borrowing its methods and rationale from the practices of art and literary history, historical work of this nature helps to decipher the complex aesthetic codes of the wide range of different cinematic traditions across the globe, drawing out both regularities and irregularities in the ways in which these different cinemas imitate or critique each other’s stylistic habits. It can, for example, explain ‘why we have dialogue hooks, montage sequences, goal-oriented protagonists, and a switch from orthochromatic to panchromatic film stock’ in Hollywood movies of a particular period (Bordwell, 2005). In its close attention to the formal and ideological properties of film as a signifying system, this form of film history can reveal the ways in which the precise and subtle conventions in this system evolve over time, or change in response to external circumstances.

Placing films into a wider historical context has proven to be more problematic, however, in part because of the sceptical attention of some other historians concerned to show that films themselves do bad historical work or fail to meet adequate analytical standards to pass as works of history. As recently as 2006, the American Historical Review (AHR) removed its regular film review section, on the grounds that movies ‘although undoubtedly useful as teaching devices, do not always contribute to an analytical, sophisticated understanding of history’.⁴ Sceptical historians have dismissed film as a form of historical evidence on a variety of grounds: firstly, for what Ian Jarvie has described as its ‘poor information load’, a ‘discursive weakness’ that renders it a ‘very clumsy medium for presenting argument’ and disables it from participating in debates about historical problems. Lacking historiographical complexity, film is at best, according to Jarvie, ‘a visual aid’ (Jarvie, 1978, pp. 377–8). For many historians, moreover, it is too often an inaccurate visual aid, its imitation of the past fatally compromised by the inevitable distortions of fiction and anachronism. As Robert Rosenstone summarises this critique, films ‘fictionalise, trivialise, and romanticise people, events, and movements. They falsify history.’ (Rosenstone, 1995, p. 46). Carla and William Phillips complain that films commonly

treat the historical record as mere raw material, to be adapted to the needs of the screenplay. Chronology is expanded, compressed, reversed, or falsified to suit the dramatic trajectory. Historical personages are revised, deified or demonized, conflated or created from whole cloth to serve the director’s will. (Phillips and Phillips, 1996, p. 63)

Stephen J. Gould observes that we ‘cannot hope for even a vaguely accurate portrayal of the nub of history in film so long as movies must obey the literary conventions of ordinary plotting’ (Gould, 1996, p. 35). Contemplating this litany of complaint, Peter Miskell has suggested that some historians more covertly object to history films because these representations of the past are both out of their control and reach far wider audiences than historians do. To some professional academic historians, Miskell argues, ‘film is a disturbing symbol of an increasingly post-literate world (in which people can read but won’t)’ (Miskell, 2004, p. 249). Worse still, the historical film’s implied defence calls for support on the poststructuralist argument that all narrative forms, including traditional histories, deploy equivalent processes of emplotment, speculation and selection (White, 1973).

Countering the dismissal of films as impoverished and unreliable sources of information, film historians have insisted on film as a different form of evidence, requiring special training in its decoding. Haydon White has argued that the practice of ‘historiophoty’, the historical analysis of visual images, requires a manner of ‘reading’ quite different from that used in assessing written evidence, so that historians need to learn the ‘lexicon, grammar and syntax’ of imagistic evidence (White, 1988a, p. 1194). James Chapman, Mark Glancy and Sue Harper similarly insist that the film historian must understand ‘that films are cultural artefacts with their own formal properties and aesthetics’, and must therefore acquire ‘skills of formal and visual analysis that are specific to the discipline’ (Chapman et al., 2007, p. 1). From these premises, the sympathetic treatment of film as evidence has been placed firmly on the poststructuralist side of debates over the critique of history-writing in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Film theory’s practical postmodernism, offering a multiplicity of ways to arrive at ‘the familiar conclusion that the “text” under analysis is full of contradictory tensions, requires active readers and produces a variety of pleasures’, has naturally aligned itself with a poststructuralist questioning of the presumption that historical truth can escape the constraints of narrative convention (Willemen, 1986, p. 227; Stone, 1992, p. 194). In the face of this alliance of confident uncertainties, many historians have simply baulked at what John E. O’Connor has called the heavy ‘theoretical apparatus of film studies’ and the apparently unbridgeable ‘chasm’ it creates between the two disciplines (O’Connor, 1990, p. 8; Guynn, 2006, p. 14).

Historians’ disinclination to engage with film has combined with film studies’ enthusiasm for interpretation to ensure that the most common approach to film history has been one in which films are treated as involuntary testimony, bearing unconscious material witness to the mentalité or zeitgeist of the period of their production (Guynn, 2006, p. 6). Marc Bloch, co-founder of the Annales School, described unintentional historical evidence of this kind – artefacts from a medieval midden, the commercial correspondence of a sixteenth-century Florentine merchant – as signs that the past unwittingly drops onto the road, from which we can discover ‘far more of the past than the past itself had thought good to tell us’ (Bloch, 1953, pp. 62, 64). The idea that films, along with other forms of mass or popular culture, are ‘eloquent social documents’ reflecting the flow of contemporary history has been an implicit assumption of much writing about cinema, but explanations of how ‘the film-making process taps some reservoir of cultural meaning’ have remained relatively unformulated and untheorised (Barry, 1939, p. vii; Jarvie, 1978, p. 380). In the late 1940s, Siegfried Kracauer proposed that some movies, or some ‘pictorial or narrative motifs’ reiterated in them, might be understood as ‘deep layers of collective mentality which extend more or less below the dimensions of consciousness’ (Kracauer, 1947). Kracauer’s proposition has remained central to what his contemporaries Martha Wolfenstein and Nathan Leites (1950, p. 11) called a ‘psychoanalytic-mythological’ mode of interpreting film’s relationship to culture. Historian Marc Ferro, for example, has encouraged historians to treat films as historically symptomatic, suggesting that they examine the ‘unconscious’ of a filmic text to reveal the biases, tastes or secret fears of the cultural moment in which it was produced.⁵ While such methods are readily compatible with the interpretive practices of film studies, they remain vulnerable to an empirical scrutiny of the basis on which some movies are selected as historically symptomatic while others are not. Writing in 1947, Lester Asheim questioned John Houseman’s analysis of ‘tough’ films such as The Big Sleep or The Postman Always Rings Twice as symptoms of a postwar malaise in which ‘the American people, turning from the anxiety and shock of war, were afraid to face their personal problems and the painful situations of their national life’ (Houseman, 1947, p. 163). Asheim complained that Houseman was generalising from a particular example, without having demonstrated its representativeness. If historians were instead to examine The Razor’s Edge, a big-budget production from the same year, he argued,

they will deduce that our generation was an intensely earnest group of mystical philosophers who gladly renounced the usual pleasures of this world in order to find spiritual peace. From State Fair they can conjure up a nation of simple agrarians whose major problems centered around the prize hog and spiked mincemeat. And what would they make of a generation reflected in Road to Utopia? (Asheim, 1947, p. 416)

The concept of film as ‘objectified mass dream’, consensual myth or ‘barometer of … social and cultural life’ has nevertheless retained considerable seductive power, as has the idea of reading cultural history through textual interpretation (Nash Smith, 1950, p. 91; Landy, 2001, p. 1). Instinctively, this mode of analysis reaches for metaphor and allusion as clues to the kinds of contemporary political or moral conversations the film in question might address. As everyday film consumers, we can use films in this way by drawing on references within our cultural milieu: for example, we might consider whether Avatar (2009) provides an allegorical critique of either multinational capitalism or US foreign policy. Shifting this interpretive speculation into the scholarly historical register sends historians to the archives that house the textual history of public cultures, to search for correspondences between a film and the discourses that surrounded it at the time of its release. Although this is historical work, its mode of analysis often remains that of symptomatic interpretation, in the expectation that an intertextual account that juxtaposes the film’s content with a different text or texts plucked from the same historical milieu ‘will reveal something about the cultural conditions that produced them and attracted audiences to them’.⁶ Such analyses tend to favour films that respond to their quest for allegorical or symptomatic meaning, and risk ascribing to individual films a representational significance that may be disproportionate to their capacity for historical agency. Houseman’s premature invocation of what would later become film noir is a case in point: film noir has, in the main, been understood very much in Houseman’s terms, while Asheim’s counter-examples have remained starved of the oxygen of historical analysis.⁷

When this zeitgeist analysis of individual films aggregates into the study of filmic phenomena (histories of genres, authors or national cinemas, or films on particular topics and so on), the result is a series of compartmentalised thematic accounts largely detached from the circumstances of their consumption, and yet heavily dependent for their significance on the assumption that these textual encodings would have had some kind of social or cultural effect. The post hoc selection and highlighting of films that reward analysis turns the movies themselves into proxies for the missing historical audience, paying little attention to their actual modes of circulation at any time. While it may claim that films demand the historian’s attention because of the cinema’s mass popularity, this symptomatic approach is capable of simultaneously overlooking even the most obvious and readily available indices of that popularity. Robert Ray (1985, pp. 140–1) has noted that in the postwar period there was ‘an enormous discrepancy … between the most commercially successful movies and those that have ultimately been seen as significant. Ray exaggerates only the uniqueness of this period: film history has been written almost in its entirety without regard to, and often with deliberate distaste for, the box office. Nowhere is film studies’ genetic inheritance from literary analysis so much in evidence than in the deformities of attention that this produces. We need to be aware of the historical cost of this approach, and of how much has been omitted in the effort to construct film history as the story its historians want to tell: a story of crisis, innovation, anxiety, turbulence, and the elevation of the junior branch. As a means of writing the history of production, this symptomatic approach omits from serious consideration the great majority of cinema’s most commercially successful products – in the case of Hollywood history, for example, the films of Janet Gaynor, Nelson Eddy, Betty Grable or Shirley Temple – perhaps because few of its historians have wanted to write the history of a cinema of complacency.

Symptomatic film history has also largely been written without acknowledging the transitory nature of any individual film’s exhibition history. Both the US motion picture industry and those industries created in competition with Hollywood are built on business models that require audiences to cultivate the habit of cinemagoing as a regular and frequent social activity. From very early in their industrial history, motion pictures were understood to be consumables, viewed once, disposed of and replaced by a substitute providing a comparable experience. The routine change of programme was a critical element in the construction of the social habit of attendance, ensuring that any individual movie was likely to be part of a movie theatre audience’s experience of cinema for three days or less, with little opportunity to leave a lasting impression before it disappeared indefinitely. Sustaining the habit of viewing required a constant traffic in film prints, ensuring that the evanescent images on the screen formed the most transient and expendable element of the experience of cinema. During the course of every year in the 1920s, for example, somewhere between 500 000 and 750 000 separate contracts covering approximately 11 million film bookings were written between distributors and exhibitors in the United States. For every actor, writer, electrician or painter employed in Hollywood’s production industry in 1939, there were five distribution company salespeople, projectionists, ushers and box-office clerks employed in the business of despatching and exploiting motion pictures, and around 2000 people whose regular habit of ticket-buying greased the wheels of the entire operation.

Figures such as these may give some sense of scale to the larger socioeconomic system implied in Jean Mitry’s 1973 proposal for a film histoire totale, which would be ‘simultaneously a history of its industry, its technologies, its systems of expression (or, more precisely, its systems of signification), and aesthetic structures, all bound together by the forces of the economic, psychosocial and cultural order’ (Mitry, 1973, p. 115). From within the Annales tradition of socio-cultural history, Michèle Lagny has followed Mitry in describing her version of a preferred film history located ‘as part of a larger ensemble, the socio-cultural history … conceived as an articulation among three types of analysis, dealin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Halftitle page
• Title page
• Copyright
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Part 1 Mapping Cinema Experiences
• Part 2 Distribution, Programming and Audiences
• Part 3 Venues and their Publics
• Part 4 Cinema, Modernity and the Local
• Index