In Focus: Film History, or a Baedeker Guide to the Historical Turn

After establishing the film archive at George Eastman House, James Card, the legendary curator, believed that life should be lived in Rochester. He lured me to upstate New York from Boston in the 1970s by promising to show me any film in his collection.¹ Access depended, as he cheerfully acknowledged, on whimsy. So I was surprised, years later, when a young curator, in a more bureaucratic setting, noted that a well-known theoretician at nearby University of Rochester never deigned to set foot in the archive. Yet when Jon Lewis and I first discussed an In Focus section on film history (code name: "historical turn"), he commented that recent professional buzz was less about theory and more about "archive fever."

Granted, research paradigms in an electronic age are subject to turnover so that semiotic reductionism, for example, is no longer in vogue. But has there indeed been a "historical turn" based on empirical research (not to be conflated with empiricism) in film studies, and, if so, what issues should we be articulating?² Contributors to this section worked in advance of such a turn or are paving its way so that each has his or her own take on film history.

In the 1970s and early 1980s, Cinema Journal published several articles on film history, especially on early American cinema. But as Janet Staiger observes in her piece here, few historical works have appeared in the last five years. Indeed, Steven Ross concludes that the authors published in volume 43 (2003) did little archival research. Works that are not even histories can still profit, in my view, from use of empirical data. Access to media libraries like those in Los Angeles and New York requires travel, but box-office figures and recent reviews are not difficult to obtain. A great deal of material is also available on microfilm. But as Staiger also points out, even literature searches are far from exhaustive. Although the current editor of Cinema Journal has written film history, his lists of submissions for board review confirm that film histories, loosely defined, represent scarcely 20 percent. At the last SCMS conference, approximately 26 percent of the panels were in some sense historical.³ Despite the fact that histories won the prize during my two-year stint on the Dissertation Award Committee, such theses represented only 20 percent of the submissions. Percentages of recent and forthcoming titles in publishers' catalogs are even lower. Apparently the bypass onto the "historical turn" is far from crowded. What these limited data reveal is that most academics who train students in film studies have not themselves been trained to do empirical research. As Robert Sklar notes in his contribution, a revolutionary Kuhnian paradigm shift (which is historicist in implication) has not yet occurred in the discipline.

Yet the "historical turn" still represents a slowly accelerating movement in film studies, if not a complete revolution. Contributors to this In Focus section discuss key issues, such as the status and dating of prints, (Charles Musser), periodization in relation to local histories (Richard Abel), media and screen studies based on intertexuality (Musser, Staiger), global communication and market economies (Sklar, Staiger), digital technology (Sklar), and theorizing film history (Staiger).

As a cultural historian who does film history, I will focus in this introduction on interdisciplinary issues, namely the intersecting of social and cultural history with film history (Abel, Lee Grieveson, Ross, Staiger), with feminist history (Jane Gaines), and with rethinking history as narrative (Gaines, Sklar). Given calls for collaborative research (Donald Crafton) and accessible language (Ross) that challenge the elitist and disciplinary construction of academe, I conclude by asking pointed questions about the histories of marginalized subjects (Grieveson, Musser, Sklar).

Admittedly, social and cultural history have recently been subject to redefinition (hence, the label "new"). But if film scholars are drawing on historians and contributing to a larger discourse (Crafton, Grieveson, Sklar), let us define terms and differentiate between history proper and social and cultural media history (Abel, Grieveson, Staiger). Social history, in particular studies of women, workers, and ethnic and racialized peoples who did not leave...