Introduction: Unfashionable, Overlooked or Under Estimated

In the 1960s and 70s, William K. Everson some times programmed films under the heading 'Lost, Stolen or Strayed'. It was a way of attracting attention away from the canonical masterpieces (or campy classics) showing elsewhere, and towards films or filmmakers that had somehow fallen off the radar – or were never on it in the first place.

This missionary work helped introduce his audiences to a host of forgotten or underappreciated filmmakers, from Charlie Chase to Michael Powell. Occasionally he did succeed in reviving someone's reputation, or forcing a closer look at a 'minor' work by a canonical master. In any case, we all learned that there was a lot more to film history than had ever been dreamt of in Arthur Knight's philosophy.

This issue of Film History (by accident more than design, I admit) looks into some similar corners, casting new light on a variety of subjects that the parade of film historians has generally passed by.

Censorship has certainly been a hot topic for years, but how many of us continue to use the phrase 'Hays Office' when what we are describing is really the work of Joseph I. Breen, who ran the Production Code Administration from 1934 to 1954? Stephen Weinberger uses the occasion of Breen's receipt of an Oscar from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to ask whether Hollywood's films would have been better or worse without Breen's advice.

A mysterious work which was somehow present in film history while being absent from it at the same time, Mário Peixoto's Brazilian classic Limite (1931) is a prime example of a film which hid for years behind a myth of its filmmaker's own making. Bruce Williams gets us as close to the truth as facts allow, which still leaves a bit of room for the legend.

No one is more canonical than D.W. Griffith. But let's face it: the man made a lot of films, and there just isn't enough time to delve into 'minor' works like The Mother and the Law when there are still hundreds of Biograph films to deal with. Arthur Lennig rises to the challenge in an excerpt from his long awaited study of Griffith. What he finds is a progressive-era libertarian, obsessed with individual rights and highly suspicious of any sort of moral crusading.

Production and exhibition may be the sexiest elements of institutional film history, but distribution was the glue which held everything together. There would never have been a 'classical Hollywood cinema' without an efficient distribution sector, but few historians spend much time there. Max Alvarez fills much of this gap with his detailed account of how the American film exchange system developed over its first twenty years, drawing on extensive research in the trade journals which documented this progress.

Those journals tell us a lot more than what films were being made and who made them. They also offer the only detailed chronicle of a disaster which played its own peculiar role in the development of the American film industry, the 1918–19 epidemic of Spanish Influenza. The exhibitors who subscribed to Moving Picture World needed up to the minute information on how the flu was affecting their business, especially when those businesses were being closed down by public health authorities. If the epidemic itself is notorious for having left so little trace on public memory, its impact on the film industry, once generally acknowledged, appears to have vanished down its own rabbit hole.