Introduction: Moving Picture Fiction

Can fiction ever be a legitimate source for history? Or to put it another way, can we find out about real events in the past from reading fiction written at the time? Some scholars might think that the use of fiction as a historical source is at best problematic and at worst something to be avoided. They might argue that fiction cannot tell us anything much about the historical facts, for it is, after all, ‘all made up’. But there is another point of view, which suggests that a fictional work written at or near the time of the events it describes, while not providing specific facts, may tell us a good deal in a general sense about such events. Writers of fiction tend to reflect and comment on the developments of their time; they tend to focus on aspects which are of interest and relevance to their readers; and, not being restricted to specific events and incidents, they can generalise and distil what they think is important. In this sense, they are as good at anyone at putting a thermometer under the collective tongue of the moment, and offering to us a contemporary assessment of what was of interest and concern in society.¹ By contrast, commentators who look back from the future, may on occasion overlook some of the issues and themes which were seen as significant by people of the time.

If therefore one of our aims as historians is to try and recapture the thinking of people in the past, we could do worse than examine – critically – these distilled artistic reflections on the phenomenon (here being movies) which interests us.² As Hollywood author Rupert Hughes put it in a note in one of his novels (quoted by Peter Jewell in his article in this issue): ‘While this book is offered as a novel, not a history, I have done what I could to keep it as true to fact as only history can be, while making it as true to life as only fiction can be’.³ A fictional construction, in other words, might give us a better overview than the mere facts can offer.

One might go further by arguing that in the case of the movies the use of fiction as a historical source is particularly apt and has wider repercussions, for the film medium has had an especially strong influence on society. So fictional reflections and comments about the cinema tell us not only about the medium itself, but about how the public and writers themselves have increasingly been influenced and affected by this medium – how society has in effect been ‘mediatised’. As the late critic Kenneth Tynan put it (again thanks to Peter Jewell for this):

The most powerful influence on the arts in the West is – the cinema. Novels, plays, and films are filled with references to, quotations from, parodies of – old movies. They dominate the cultural subconscious because we absorb them in our formative years ... and we see them again on TV when we grow up... As the sheer number of films piles up, their influence will increase, until we have a civilization entirely moulded by cinematic values and behaviour patterns.⁴

Although he exaggerates for effect, one can see what Tynan is getting at, and his point is if anything strengthened by the growing dominance in our lives today of television and other screen-entertainment forms. Yet even in the early years of Hollywood, some pundits saw that the reflection of the film world in fiction and other writings was developing a momentum of its own. Katharine Gerould, an east-coast based academic, observed in 1923 that while other famous towns in America might be characterised as having symbolic or legendary significance, ‘Hollywood, California, you may say, is most often a text’.⁵

For this issue of Film History we have gathered together articles related to film fiction from the early days of cinema to the 1930s. We start with translations of two hitherto unknown essays on cinema by the Dutch novelist Louis Couperus, which contrast cinemagoing in Italy and in the North of Europe in 1911 and 1916...