'H-Film': Film History Enters Cyberspace

118 Technology Report INTERNET REPORT !TTi^IM DQMTTI Hi) MQ^HfHQTTV ©? IK)UQAiTrOM 'H-FiIm': Film History Enters Cyberspace Two and a half years ago, scholarly discussion of film and history entered cyberspace. Just before Labor Day, 1993, H-FiIm began to serve as a daily electronic newsletter featuring scholarly interchange on cinema, mass communication, and history. Within weeks, a thousand subscribers, from disciplines as diverse as film studies, history, literature, music, philosophy, psychology, sociology, and women's studies, had joined H-FiIm, making it one of the largest and most active scholarly discussion groups on the Internet. Each day-365 days a year-H-FiIm posts between 3 and 15 scholarly messages. Electronic "chat groups" take diverse forms. Most are unmoderated; they allow anyone to post any message any time they wish. H-FiIm, in contrast, is a moderated list. The moderators (Steven Mintz of the University of Houston, who has recently been joined by Ken Nolley ofWilliamette University) take an active role in running the list, initiating threads, raising discussion topics, reviewing recent books, providing summaries of recent articles, and screening out clutter from the list. Electronic discussion lists like H-FiIm do not seek to substitute for printed journals. They perform quite a different function: to provide a forum in which scholars can discuss topics previously confined to scholarly conferences or small groups of friends. Each day, H-FiIm participants answer queries, offer teaching tips, provide bibliographical suggestions, offer readings of significant films, and, perhaps most important of all, serves as partners in an ongoing discussion of topics of mutual interest. One major goal of scholarly lists like H-FiIm is to combat the anomie suffered by academics who work and research in isolation. Even at larger universities, only a handful of faculty members are engaged in the rigorous analysis and interpretation of film. H-FiIm seeks to provide a scholarly lifeline to those of us who have few colleagues who share our interest in using film as a scholarly resource. One unexpected consequence of H-FiIm has been the creation of a new scholarly community that cuts across traditional disciplinary and department lines. Today, only about a quarter of H-FiIm subscribers come from history departments. Thus H-FiIm has become one of the very rare scholarly examples Film & History Vol. 24, No's. 3-4, 1994 119 of "free space,"where film professionals, professors, and graduate students from diverse fields participate in shared intellectual discourse. For many faculty and graduate students, H-FiIm has also provided a link to publishers and editors, who frequently post calls for essays or books on particular subjects. In the final analysis, the value of an electronic discussion must be measured by the quality of the ideas and insights that appear in its messages. Skeptics-many of whom have never participated on a scholarly discussion list-complain that electronic lists promote brief, superficial messages and unfocused discussions. Certainly, some lists are overrun with trivia, flames, and seemingly endless lists of irrelevant information. I, for one, do not believe that H-FiIm has been like that. I have been repeatedly impressed by the high level of discussion-and also by the willingness of participants to share their expertise on even the most arcane issues. Yet what stands out most vividly to me are the breadth of the discussion threads which have included such topics as the image of American business in film, the depiction of women in cinema, the treatment of race, and cinematic vs. historical truth. With participants from more than thirty countries, the list has forced subscribers to break free from a narrow parochialism and think in more comparative, trans-national terms. H-FiIm has often served a valuable pedagogical function. Non-specialists have learned a great deal, I believe, about the scholarly controversies surrounding propaganda films, new directions in feminist film criticism, the history of film censorship, and the demise of the Production Code. Extensive discussion has focused on audience manipulation in film and the relationship between high and low culture. There have been intensive threads focusing on the treatment of the Holocaust in film, on cinematic depictions of the ancient world, and the social and cultural history...