The Future of the Past

Five reasons for going or looking back dominate time-travel literature: explaining the past, searching for a golden age, enjoying the exotic, reaping the rewards of temporal displacement and foreknowledge, and refashioning life by changing the past.

David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country¹

Although Lowenthal's list applies to time-travel literature, histories are easily categorized as a type of time-travel literature, and, indeed, Lowenthal meant them to be. The reasons people want to write or read histories are plentiful and personal. Eight years ago, I wrote about what I thought were the "pleasures and profits of a postmodern film historiography," and I still believe that essay accounts for my devotion to the genre. Despite the problem of being "denied access to the real," with all the attendant anxieties, new pleasures can be taken in an ethical and "authentic performance in the writing of film and media history."² I concluded:

World politics, and the place of media in creating that world and its politics, are too fragile at this time to any longer justify abstention from other conversations. The job of the intellectual in the public sphere is to effect public memory, to connect and create context for public policy.³

Of Lowenthal's list, I tend to lean toward the last reason for producing histories: to refashion life by changing the past—or, if not literally changing it, refashioning the possibilities of the future by reconsidering how we remember and represent the past for the sake of the yet to come. For film history at this moment, this broad objective could take many paths to eventual fulfillment. The strength of our discipline is that so many people with different skills and interests are now foraging through that past.

Here, I wish to mark out three historiographic practices that I think might make this time-travel literature better. First, scholars need to stop thinking of film history as film history and start thinking more about media history. While I believe fully that the concept of media specificity exists, being sheltered by studying only film is to work with blinders on.

Film as a business and an art was never isolated from the other entertainments or from the political and aesthetic expressions with which it competed, and its capitalist and radical creators worked with and against those other media. Researchers considering the business activities of the last thirty years tend to think of film as within larger media monopolies in a global circulation of product. This has always been the economic and political situation. Capital has been in a network of geopolitical relations, and film, in a multimedia environment. Individual textual and generic migration across media occurred in 1896 as well as in 1996. (Look at the vaudeville act "The May Irwin-John C. Rice Kiss." Consider the early successful movie genres: the melodrama and western.) Technologies developed in a complex social and regulatory environment determined by precedents from and pressures by other media. I cannot think of a single research question that benefits from a solely media-specific approach. The better-trained historians will be those capable of discussing theatrical transformations in 1880, amateur wireless radio in 1917, vaudeville headliners in 1920, broadcast genres in every era, and best-selling novels of the 1950s.

Second, intentional amnesia does not help us. Scholars of media history need to learn to do good literature reviews. Forgive my crankiness as a senior who is worried about losing memory, but it does the discipline no good to spend months in an archive discovering what someone already excavated twenty years ago. A recent issue of Cinema Journal included one of the few historical essays published in the publication in the last five years. The essay, on industrial configurations in the 1910s, benefits from a meticulous survey of the trade paper Moving Picture World (although the endnotes consistently and erroneously call it Motion Picture World). However, the author appears to have read only mainstream books on the research question he was considering. Had he done a thorough review of periodicals, he would have discovered that scholarship already...