Recent Books in Film History

Reflecting the broad range of new scholarship in the history of cinema, the books included in this section have been selected by the editorial staff of Film History. The summaries have been provided by the authors.

John Caughie, Trevor Griffiths, and María Veléz-Serna, eds., Early Cinema in Scotland (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018).

This collection of essays, drawn from a three-year research project, provides a detailed context for the history of early cinema in Scotland, tracing the movement from traveling fairground shows to the establishment of permanent cinemas and from variety entertainment to the dominance of the feature film. As a contribution to new cinema history, its focus is on the social experience of cinema for picturegoers and for staff—both in major cities and, distinctively, in small towns. In production, it examines the early attempts to establish a feature film production sector, and it records the importance, both for exhibition and for social history, of local topicals. It considers the popularity of a mythical Scotland as an imaginary location for early European and American films and concludes with a consideration of the arrival of sound. In addition, the book offers an annotated filmography of Scottish-themed feature films from the period.

Still from Great Western Road (1922), a topical filmed by a local Glasgow cinema proprietor.

Reproduced by permission of Moving Image Archive of the National Library of Scotland.

Joshua Glick, Los Angeles Documentary and the Production of Public History, 1958–1977 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018).

Los Angeles Documentary and the Production of Public History, 1958–1977 offers the first cultural history of documentary film and television in the metropolis. While scholars have examined LA as a fiction film capital, it was home to a variety of nonfiction styles and modes of production. Focusing on the period between the election of JFK and the US bicentennial, Los Angeles Documentary explores how mainstream and alternative documentarians created contested forms of public history during a vibrant period of social change. Key figures include Hollywood producers (David Wolper), individuals connected with local PBS (Sue Booker), and independent collectives (LA Newsreel). Never-before-published documents from the David L. Wolper Center along with personal papers and interviews with filmmakers form part of an invaluable archive of primary sources. Los Angeles Documentary will be of interest to scholars working at the intersections of film, television, and urban history, as well as media industry studies.

Film still, Cruisin' J-Town, directed by Duane Kubo, with Hiroshima (Visual Communications, 1975), 16mm.

Courtesy of Visual Communications Photographic Archive.

Lee Grieveson, Cinema and the Wealth of Nations: Media, Capital, and the Liberal World System (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018).

Cinema and the Wealth of Nations examines moving-image media produced by elite political and economic institutions in the United States and United Kingdom in the interwar years of the twentieth century. It studies key examples of this media and the institutions created by government and big business to produce and circulate it. Documentary, propaganda, pedagogic media, and public relations emerged as practices designed to shape the attitudes and conduct of populations and sustain the interests of political and economic elites. Crucial to this history is research in state, corporate, and governmental archives on both sides of the Atlantic. The book also examines the shaping of a commercial media system by exploring the history of radio and the studio system that emerged in Hollywood in the 1920s, when new practices of finance capital brokered alliances between banks, media, telecommunications, and technology industries. Principally, the book focuses on the period from 1913 to 1939, but early chapters explore the expansive contexts for these developments—broadly of capital, the birth of the corporation, imperialism mutating into globalization—and the conclusion explores the use of mass and digital media to facilitate the accelerated assaults of neoliberalism in the second half of the twentieth century.

Conservative Party mobile cinema van, UK, 1927.

(Courtesy Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick, UK.)

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