HISTORY OF FILM

History Of Film



History Of Film

In the last two decades there has been an explosion of paper archival collections documenting the development of the American film industry. The availability of records of film companies such as Warner Bros., 20th Century-Fox, Paramount, RKO, and others; those of the Motion Picture Producers Association censorship office and the Production Code Administration; of state and local censorship boards; as well as the personal records of individual producers, directors, writers, actors, and actresses is having a profound influence on how scholars interpret the history of the American film industry (Elsaesser, 2004).

Prior to 1975, few American historians were interested in the film industry as a subject for scholarly research and even fewer film scholars were interested in doing the type of archival research that historians were trained to do. Even if both groups had been determined to use traditional archival research as a tool to interpret film history and to read film texts, they would have been frustrated by the lack of archival materials available to them. As late as the early 1970s, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Library of Congress in Washington, D. C., and the Margaret Herrick Library at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles were the main repositories for film scholarship. Even at these institutions, the collections were limited, for the most part, to scripts, films, stills, and previously printed materials. All extremely valuable to be sure, but not the type of materials traditional historians were used to working with (Elsaesser, 2004).

In addition, historians were baffled by the process of reading a film. The result was that traditionally trained historians simply ignored the entire field. Only rarely, and almost always superficially, were Hollywood films or the film industry mentioned in American history monographs and textbooks. Film histories in turn were written by non-historians and the development of the field of film studies drifted naturally to disciplines that did not have to rely on archival documentation for verification. As late as 1960, film scholars relied on the classical histories of the development of film written by men who participated in the birth and growth of the American film industry. Benjamin Hampton's A History of the Movies (1931); Terry Ramsaye's A Million and One Nights: A History of the Motion Picture Through 1925 and Lewis Jacobs's The Rise of the American Film: ...