Editor’s Introduction: Film History and the Individual Film

Exploring and explicating the history of cinema through studying an individual film remains a widespread strategy for researchers and probably also for those of us charged with teaching this history to undergraduates. Not that there haven’t been compelling counterarguments to this practice, like Eric Smoodin’s call for historians to “decenter” film and “look past the screen” and the New Cinema History’s insistence that aesthetic analysis and symptomatic interpretations of individual films tell us little in the end about the history of commercial cinema and the everyday practice of cinemagoing.¹ And how might thinking historically about the individual film shift once we acknowledge, following Charles Acland, that as much as a film is “a sequence of images and sounds,” it is also an “aging” text that unfolds in time and moves through space as it is exhibited and performed?²

Film History has typically not published many essays devoted predominantly to the in-depth analysis of an individual film. In practice, however, there’s no simple formula for neatly distinguishing a historical study from a close reading that attempts in some way to consider the film under analysis within a broader historical context or that draws on material from the trade press, newspapers, and fan magazines. With the increasing accessibility of digital archives of searchable print material, such resources have become much easier to tap, facilitating certain lines of inquiry and making it even more abundantly clear that the process of contextualization necessarily involves selection, prioritization, and interpretation, which is to say that historical study and close reading are by no means incompatible or even necessarily separate.

Over the past three years, Film History has run a number of articles that are largely focused on specific films, including D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance (1916) but also The Chinese Revolution, a staged newsreel from 1912, as well as the independently produced science-fiction feature, Destination Moon (1950); the union-sponsored documentary, The Inheritance (1964); and Mai Zetterling’s government-funded TV film Of Seals and Men (1979). As these titles suggest, the ongoing process of expanding and reimagining the cinematic canon continues, particularly when it comes to making visible the vast array of titles that were not fictional features, made by men, produced under the sign of Hollywood, and/or intended for theatrical release. These essays concerned with particular films directly or indirectly stand not only as markers of what kinds of films merit attention but also as examples of how individual films might be studied across multiple histories, tracked through paratexts and programming strategies, professional biographies and production cultures, networks of circulation and instances of reception—not to mention the potentially “interminable” (to use Barbara Klinger’s term) cultural, social, political, economic, and intermedial contexts well beyond the screen.³

This issue of Film History offers six quite diverse articles that take as their focus individual films. These articles do not cover the same period, genre, nation, or director, and it should be noted that they were not written as part of a special issue. The authors were not specifically asked to read the other contributions or to speculate more broadly on the historiographical import of centering a research project on a particular film. Beyond their individual merits and what they can tell us about the six films under consideration, the articles as a group put on display quite different sources and take up a range of research questions, concerning, for example, negotiations over industry and state censorship, the process of adapting source material for the screen, script development and preproduction, exploitation and advertising. In disparate ways, these case studies all underscore that focusing on an individual film most often involves populating (or repopulating) film history with individual people whose decisions and whose aims matter.

Not all of the authors grapple as directly as Eric Schaefer feels compelled to do in his article on The Orgy at Lil’s Place (1963) with the basic question of what makes this or that individual film worthy of special attention. Asking “why this film?” is another way of asking what makes a given film worth...