Introduction: Film Histories

When this journal was first published, twenty-five years ago, we took as our subject, "the historical development of the motion picture, and the social, technological, and economic context in which this has occurred".

Over the years, individual issues have tended to focus on one or another of these areas, with different authors addressing a single topic - color technology, copyright law, animated films, or non-theatrical production, for example - from a variety of perspectives.

But with this issue we have tried to vary not just the voices but the range of topics they investigate, with a series of essays whose subjects run from advertising to sound recording, from a study of one great film to the entire history of a single, understudied national cinema.

Drawing on such period journals as International Projectionist and Transactions of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers, Lea Jacobs begins this issue with an examination of the industry's ongoing debate over the most appropriate ways to manage the sounds its microphones were now recording, an investigation that shows how science and art interacted throughout the 1930s to achieve this goal. Under Irving Thalberg, it is said, films were not made, but remade. It would appear that soundtracks were subject to re-recording just as frequently, and for many of the same reasons.

The Slovenian cinema is perhaps the least known national cinema in all of Europe. Grounding his discussion in a thoughtful analysis of Balkan politics, and drawing on a wide range of primary studies, Peter Stanković demonstrates that Emir Kusturica's When Father Was Away on Business (1985) is only the best-known example, internationally, of a cinema that has always been shadowed by war, politics, and nationalism.

Michael Wilson, Academy Award-winning screenwriter of A Place in the Sun, suffered politically during the Hollywood blacklist. His script for Salt of the Earth was targeted for obvious reasons, and it was many years before Wilson's credit (and subsequent Academy Award) for The Bridge on the River Kwai was formally acknowledged. Working with Wilson's papers and a variety of other sources, Joseph Dmohowski reveals how his contribution to Lawrence of Arabia was similarly effaced, and for reasons having little to do with politics.

Film History has a long tradition of publishing case studies documenting the arrival of the motion picture - and the motion picture censor - in towns and cities across America. In this issue, Matthew Prigge looks at Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a liberal bastion in which progressive-era reformers ousted an entire cadre of machine politicians, then succumbed themselves to a well-organized wave of reaction. What this meant for motion picture exhibitors was not as simple as one might expect.

And just as there are orphan films for us to reconsider, there are also orphan film technologies that require our attention in the twenty-first century. Unless we believe that history always develops in straight, clear, lines, these failures and dead-ends probably have something to teach us. Jeremy Groskopf shows how one set of failed technologies, which had hoped to revolutionize in-theater advertising, may have secretly snuck back to reshape the look of today's on-line media.

The South Manchuria Railway Company was established by the Japanese during the 1920s to manage (and promote) its transportation infrastructure in the occupied Chinese province they would rename Manchoukuo. But using the Dutch East India Company as a model (with a few ideas from the Empire Marketing board thrown in), the SMU created a remarkable film unit of its own. Not embraced by either Chinese or Japanese film scholars, the history of the SMU and its films is outlined here for the first time by Hanae Kurihara Kramer.

A Film History Board member since 1987, Anthony Slide is noted for his pioneering work on early women filmmakers, especially Alice Guy Blaché and Lois Weber. Looking at the field today, however, he sees a need for caution, as the claims for these women and their accomplishments overreach even their considerable achievements. To counter some of these assertions (occasionally rooted, he admits, in his own work), he makes the case here for Herbert Blach...