Does Film History Need a Crisis?

At a conference in the 1980s, sponsored by the American Historical Association, that brought film historians together with scholars of U.S. history, one of the latter commented privately that he found some of the former rather "whigish."¹ This was not a Harry Potterism avant la lettre; rather, it was a reference that most historians would easily recognize. The term derives from a small polemical book, The Whig Interpretation of History, by British historian Herbert Butterfield, published in 1931. Butterfield defined the object of his critique as "the tendency in many historians . . . to praise revolutions provided they have been successful, to emphasise certain principles of progress in the past and to produce a story which is the ratification if not the glorification of the present."² Butterfield's viewpoint has had a remarkably long run in general historiography; as recently as 2002, it was described as "historiographical orthodoxy."³ However, the historian at the conference was not directing his remark at an interpretation that treated cinema's past as a story of progress; by the 1980s, an antiteleological stance had become a cinema studies axiom. Instead, what seemed "whigish" in this person's estimation was an account of revolutionary success, progress, and the ratification (if not the glorification) offered by film historians of their own historiographic achievements.

Shortly after the conference, I recounted this anecdote to a class in film historiography, and offered some additional perspectives. Film historians, I suggested, had not yet fully recognized that the practice of historiography is fundamentally dialogic. Historical discourse is constantly being transformed through historians' commentaries and critiques on the work of other past and present historians. The historian, as Michel de Certeau puts it, "effaces error. . . . The territory that he occupies is acquired through a diagnosis of the false. . . . His work is oriented toward the negative."⁴ Present-day film historians had excelled in detecting what they regarded as error in their predecessors and had staked out significant new territories in historical interpretation. What was naturally difficult to accept, however, was that the inherent dialogism of their discipline would in turn subject their work to critique. The transformation of historiography would continue, I suggested to the class, and in several decades' time emerging film historians would ask new questions about the past and debate new perspectives that were likely to be substantially different from those that scholars of the 1980s had valorized. Film historiography almost certainly would have moved on to territories as yet uncharted.

Several decades have now passed since those incidents. Has my prediction been borne out? A fence-sitting answer would have to be yes and no. If my own thoughts to the class had drawn implicitly on Thomas Kuhn's model of paradigm change, which posited anomaly and crisis as engines of scholarly upheaval, then no major crisis in film historiography has developed in those years in a manner that Kuhn insisted was "a necessary precondition for the emergence of novel theories."⁵

A more pertinent framework from which to challenge a whigish viewpoint might have come from Paul Veyne, who declared that "there is no progress in historical synthesis. . . . History does not progress, but widens, which means that it does not lose backward the terrain that it conquers forward. So it would be snobbish to take into account only the pioneering zones of historiography."⁶ Emphasizing that "history is fundamentally erudition," Veyne proposed that historical works that displayed such erudition would remain contemporary even as theories of history waxed and waned.⁷ Veyne's quoted remarks appear in a chapter titled "Lengthening the Questionnaire," which is another way of stating his notion that history does not progress but widens.

Several questions concerning present-day film historiography emerge from these brief introductory remarks. First, drawing on Veyne, what constitutes "lengthening the questionnaire" in film history, and how has the discipline "widened" in recent decades? Second, not entirely jettisoning Kuhn, are there currently any elements of "crisis" from which new theories about cinema history might generate? Finally, suggesting a possible synthesis of these two contrasting viewpoints, might lengthening the questionnaire bring about a transformation in film historiography...