Around the world, at any instant, millions of people are watching movies. They watch mainstream entertainment, serious “art films,” documentaries, cartoons, experimental films, educational shorts. They sit in air-conditioned theaters, in village squares, in art museums, in college classrooms, or in their homes before a television screen. The world’s film theaters attract around 15 billion customers each year. With the availability of films on video—whether broadcast, fed from cable or satellites or the Internet, or played back from cassette or DVD—the audience has multiplied far beyond that.
Nobody needs to be convinced that film has been one of the most influential media for over one hundred years. Not only can you recall your most exciting or tearful moments at the movies, you can also probably remember moments in ordinary life when you tried to be as graceful, as selfless, as tough, or as compassionate as those larger-than-life figures on the screen. The way we dress and cut our hair, the way we talk and act, the things we believe or doubt—all these aspects of our lives are shaped by films. Films also provide us with powerful aesthetic experiences, insights into diverse cultures, and glimpses of new ways of thinking.
So we aren’t surprised that people rush to see the latest hit or rent a cult favorite from the video store. Why, though, should anybody care about old movies?
For one thing, they provide the same sorts of insights that we get from watching contemporary movies. Some offer intense artistic experiences or penetrating visions of human life in other times and places. Some are documents of everyday existence or of extraordinary historical events that continue to reverberate in our times. Still other old movies are resolutely strange. They resist assimilation to our current habits of thought. They force us to acknowledge that films can be radically different from what we are used to and that we must adjust our own field of view to accommodate what was, astonishingly, taken for granted by others.
Film history encompasses more than just films. By studying how films were made and received, we discover the range of options available to filmmakers and film viewers. By studying the social and cultural influences on films, we understand better the ways in which films may bear the traces of the societies that made and consumed them. Film history opens up a range of issues in politics, culture, and the arts—both “high” and “popular.”
Yet another answer to our question is this: studying old movies and the times in which they were made is intrinsically fun. As a relatively new field of academic research (no more than forty years old), film history has the excitement of a young discipline. Over the past few decades, many lost films have been recovered, little-known genres explored, and neglected filmmakers reevaluated. Ambitious retrospectives have revealed entire national cinemas that had been largely ignored. Even television, with cable stations devoted wholly to cinema, brings previously rare and obscure silent and foreign films into viewers’ living rooms. And much more remains to be discovered. Simply put, there are more old movies than new ones and, hence, many more chances for fascinating viewing experiences.
In the space of this one volume, we aim to introduce the history of film as it is presently conceived, written, and taught by its most accomplished scholars. This book assumes no specialized knowledge of film aesthetics or theory, although some acquaintance with these areas would certainly benefit the reader.1 We limit our scope to those realms of filmmaking that are most frequently studied. We consider theatrical fiction films, documentary films, experimental or avant-garde filmmaking, and animation. There are other types of cinema—most notably educational, industrial, and scientific films—but, whatever their intrinsic interest, for the moment they play secondary roles in most historians’ concerns.
Film History: An Introduction is not, however, exactly a distillation of an “essential” film history. Researchers are fond of saying that there is no film history, only film histories. For some, this means that there can be no intelligible, coherent “grand narrative” that puts all the facts into place. The history of avant-garde film does not fit neatly into the history of color technology or the development of the Western or the life of John Ford. For others, film history means that historians work from various perspectives and with different interests and purposes.
We agree with both points. There is no Big Story of Film History that accounts for all events, causes, and consequences. And the variety of historical approaches guarantees that historians will draw diverse and dissenting conclusions. We also think that film history is more aptly thought of as a set of film histories, because research into film history involves asking a series of questions and searching for evidence in order to answer them in the course of an argument. When historians focus on different questions, turn up different evidence, and formulate different explanations, we derive not a single history but a diverse set of historical arguments. In this introduction we will explain what film historians do and the particular approach Film History; An Introduction takes.
World History
