Film Historiography as Theory of the Film Subject: A Case Study

In a discussion about Japanese Studies, Harry Harootunian and Naoki Sakai observe that a theory cannot be the property of a national, ethnic, racial, or civilizational identity.¹ Unlike empirical knowledge, a theory does not divide people into those who know and those who do not, for it is a form of sociability that allows those who are willing to ask questions to relate to one another. A theory is always mediated by the time and the place of its formulation and uses, but, as a model of social functioning, it cannot be reduced to those markers. The historical specificity of film historiography would not, in itself, be a problem if those who practice it would always take the place and time from which they "do" history as the point of departure of their inquiry. The problem is that they rarely do, because embedded in the question "Where does film history speak from?" are questions of film theory that are still unresolved.

To "do" film history is more than to acquire a sense of where, over a period of five hundred years, the apparatus of cinema came from. The point of retracing how specific cinematic forms developed out of the apparatus's encounter with preexisting cultural practices is, in the end, to understand how, exactly, films function as terrains in which the push and pull of history are played out. This question of how a "text" or film may relate to a historical "context" has been asked most directly in relation to notions of national cinema. Pyaasa (Guru Dutt, 1957) and El vampiro (Fernando Mendez, 1957), for example, are different because Pyaasa was made in India and El vampiro in Mexico. By far the majority of national cinemas' historiographies, however, tend to relegate the "context" to a separate chapter, evoking, yes, history, but setting it aside as if it pertained to a sphere other than, or "outside," the films examined. A film is always simultaneously a cluster of forms arranged according to cultural categories and a commodity that is produced and circulates within economic circuits. With cinema, these categories and circuits are always national and global at the same time. So, Pyaasa and Mother India (Mehboob Khan, 1957, India) are different films, but less so than Pyaasa and El vampiro, because Pyaasa and Mother India were made in a geographical area that is not only governed by the same state policies, but which was also shaped by the same long-term dynamics. But it would be equally correct to argue that Pyaasa and Schlösser und Katen (Kurt Maetzig, 1957, East Germany) are not as different as they might seem, given that both were shot using the same East German film stock. This is to say, although historiographies of national cinemas proceed on the basis that context indeed matters, the first obstacle to a critical understanding of the relation between a film and the time and place in which it was made is the model of history by which we tend to imagine context: a single, linear trajectory, the product of a seamless chain of events culminating with the consolidation of the coalition of interests that narrates the events in the first place. Among other things, this paradigmatic understanding leaves unaccounted for the capacity of the same time and place to produce films very different in kind. A more productive approach would involve thinking of "context" as a force field in which multiple and contradictory temporalities and forces operate simultaneously.

Why is El vampiro different from, say, Los tigres del ring (Chano Urueta, 1957, Mexico)? By the 1950s, state measures had enabled the Mexican film industry to reach its apex. The Ley de la Industria Cinematográfica (Film Industry Law, 1949) prohibited monopolies, but by 1952 a monopoly headed by U.S. magnate William Jenkins in association with, among others, Maximino Avila Camacho, brother of Mexico's expresident, controlled 80 percent of exhibition. Jenkins also succeeded in subjugating to his interests much of the production sector. El vampiro and Los tigres del ring were thus made during what historians have called "the prolonged...