How can cinema history matter more

Fictional films are complex industrial and social products and how they are made, distributed, exhibited, and received by audiences and critics must be investigated to fully evaluate their roles as historical evidence.

For example, it is dangerous to interpret a few films from a specific period as simple reflections of American society. The attitudes portrayed in a specific film may represent a series of compromises carefully designed to be non-offensive.

In addition, individual films can indicate very different attitudes toward labor unions, big business, race relations, or women's rights. One Hollywood strategy for creating and pleasing a mass audience included designing films so that audiences could interpret movies in different ways. This is clearest in the carefully regulated portrayal of sexual behavior during the period of Hollywood's dominance An adult or sexually aware audience member may decide that Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart have sex when Casablanca cuts from their passionate kiss to a brief image of the control tower beacon at the nearby airport.

But a child or a socially conservative viewer may assume nothing happened. Most important, the studio could deny to a censor that any sexual activity took place. The Production Code Administration an industry-created "watchdog" committee charged with locating scenes that might be considered objectionable and proposing ways to modify them often suggested such ambiguous scenes to film producers to avoid problems with state or local censorship boards.

Ambiguous scenes provide rich material for studying social history, but they require complex interpretation and investigation. Such investigation requires moving beyond the evidence on the screen whether movie theater, video, or computer monitor to ask how reviewers, censors, and fans understood films.

Likewise historians need to investigate the actual process of filmmaking and the variety of viewpoints involved in production. Hollywood studio archives are filled with discussions of what material should be cut from scripts, what might be offensive to different audiences, how to soften images of sexuality or violence, or how to blur political references. Every Hollywood film involved compromises between divergent viewpoints, often aimed at creating room for multiple interpretations.

Thus, a broad range of materials are needed to write a full history of the cinema as part of cultural life. Film production and film-going are social practices and important aspects of twentieth-century life. To understand them we need to investigate technology, economics including business and industrial organization , advertising, and distribution -- all of which influenced where films were shown and who came to see them.

A wide range of documents provide evidence in this quest, including letters, trade journals, movie reviews, contracts, financial information, scripts, and studio memos. Ironically, a concern with reception and with the social context and consequences of movie-going also involves an historical return to the prevailing concerns of the earliest studies of cinema, as an object of sociological and psychological enquiry, rather than the object of aesthetic, critical and interpretive enquiry that has ensued from the construction of film studies as an academic discipline in the humanities.

The Payne Fund Studies deployed what were then the cutting edge methodologies of American psychological and sociological research to ideological purpose, to seek to maintain a failing Protestant cultural hegemony over the social function of entertainment. The first casualty in this exchange was Chicago School sociologist Paul G. Summarising what he took to be the demonstrable findings of the Payne Fund Studies, Cressey noted that:.

We have, however, abundant evidence that this is an erroneous conception. Through imaginative participation, identification, random reflection, phantasy before and after cinema attendance, and through the impact of prior interests and values, the cinema experience is redefined in many ways and may affect the patron in forms only incidentally associated with film content. Cressey, p. Ideally, the microhistories of Ginzburg and Giovanni Levy extend, complement and qualify the broader generalisations provided by quantitative methods, and their dialogue provides models for the histories of cinema from below that I am advocating.

Nor is it clear how the United States exercised this great power to promote democracies of consumption elsewhere, much less to advance global concord. To what extent — where, when and how — this commercial project mutated into an ideological one will perhaps be a question open to some productive historical revisionism during the next decade.

Certainly our present understanding of how cinema functioned as an agent of consumerism in different places at different times in the last century remains in need of further investigation. Because movie attendance was geographically specific — attendance at this cinema in this neighbourhood with these people and these detailed local understandings of social distinction — these differentiations were integral to the activity and meaning of cinemagoing, at times even constructed into the architecture of the cinemas themselves McKenna, pp.

In her history of the spread of Americanised consumer culture in Europe from to , de Grazia repeatedly demonstrates that different countries — and within each country different classes and groups — acquired the material capacity to participate in consumption at significantly different times. Undoubtedly, the movies, like advertising, reinforced a new economy of desire. Where these conditions did not exist, did cinema exhibition remain a marginal activity not simply because people were too poor to attend frequently, but also because the pleasures of cinema — the aspirational pleasures of viewing consumption and viewing-as-consumption that were part of what economist Simon N.

Patten had called the surplus or pleasure economy — were insufficiently engaged with or integrated into their daily lives? Patten, p. And if we can — or, for that matter, if we cannot — what will that tell us about the social function of cinema? To what extent, where, and when, did the cinema provide a substitute for consumption — a placebo — rather than an aspiration to consume and a guidebook or practical manual in the development of the practice of consumption?

If the answers to these questions are not yet plain, what is somewhat clearer is that such explanations as we may be able to offer will require different historical methods and tools from those that have so far predominated in film history. These tools are likely to be drawn instead from the methodological dialogues of social and cultural historians.

To begin with, however, we will need detailed historical maps of cinema exhibition, amplified by evidence about the nature and frequency of attendance.

Just as vital as this demographic history, however, is the inclusion of experience that will ground quantitative generalisations in the concrete particulars of micro-historical studies of local situations, effects and infrastructure, based perhaps around the records of individual cinemas or small chains. One of these micro-histories may become the Montaillou of cinema history, by revealing how its citizen consumers explained themselves and their place in the world through their encounters with the forces of global and globalising culture Ladourie, passim.

Such histories, self-consciously acknowledging their own constructions and mediations, may also form part of comparative local histories, and, finally, may underpin attempts to consider the cultural function and performance of individual movies in more secure social and cultural detail than we can presently achieve. Robert C. Paul G. Christine Frederick, Selling Mrs. Clarke ed. Jeffrey F. Williams ed. Gledhill andL. And the variety of historical approaches guarantees that historians will draw diverse anddissenting conclusions.

Thompson and D. Translated and quoted in R. Braudel, Capitalism and Material Life, , London , p. Richard Maltby Searle, A New England? Peace and War —, Oxford My thanks to LukeMcKernan for this reference. Burke, What is Cultural History? Miller, N. Govil, J. McMurria, R. Maxwell and T. Wang, Global Hollywood 2, London ,p. Clarke ed. Blumer and P. Bordwell and N. Grieveson, E. Sonnett and P. Stanfield ed. Keil and S. Stamp ed. See also D. Carroll ed. Bowles and N. Maltby and M.

Stokes ed. Nowell-Smith and S. Ricci ed. See also F. Gilbert and S. Grubard ed. Stokes andR. Maltby ed. Hays, London, 5 October, p. Gomery ed.

Trumpbour, Selling Hollywood to the World, Cambridge, p. Young, speech, July , quoted in F. Frederick, Selling Mrs. Consumer, New York , p. Maltby, M.