Film Catalogs as Epistemology—A Memoire

At the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) conference in Montreal in 2015, I had the great pleasure of being interviewed for SCMS "Fieldnotes" by Joan Hawkins (the interview is available on the SCMS website).¹ Early in the interview, she asked me, "What were you reading when you were developing as a scholar in the early seventies?" I was dumbfounded. As I tried to respond to Joan's obvious and simple question, I felt like The Honeymooners's Ralph Kramden when he was stumped and embarrassed, and in the video, I look like a doofus. But in the end, I could not come up with anything like an adequate answer. It was not until several hours after the interview was over, of course, that I realized what I should have told her.

In fact, the focus of my reading early on was the many film catalogs produced by the host of film distributors that were making 16mm prints available to the suddenly burgeoning new field of academic film studies. In the current moment, when we're awash with film scholarship, Joan's question would be easy for a young scholar to respond to. But she was asking about a moment before the need to historicize cinema had become pedagogically essential and before the tsunami of theory had hit film studies. Because I had had absolutely no training in cinema production or history (and I think this was true of most of us who agreed to teach the film courses that students were demanding in the late 1960s and early 1970s), film catalogs were crucial. They allowed us to develop a sense of which films had been made and for what purposes. These catalogs were among the first demonstrations that film history was more extensive than most of us had realized—the first lesson we needed to learn.

During the 1970s, I amassed a considerable shelf of catalogs, large and small and of various types. There were generalist catalogs and specialist catalogs. There were straightforward listings of films and blurbs about them, and there were artistically designed catalogs produced by organizations that assumed that their catalogs needed to be implicit demonstrations of the aesthetic significance and cine-political importance of the films they were making available. Two of the most extensive generalist catalogs, those produced by Contemporary Films and by Audio-Brandon, can serve as examples.

Most of us who were developing film courses in the early 1970s were focused primarily on narrative feature films by Hollywood auteurs (thanks in my case to Andrew Sarris) and by the European, Japanese, and Indian directors who had become staples of our film-going during the 1960s. Many of us were coming from the fields of literature and language, and these feature narrative films seemed like novels, plays, short stories—and so we taught them as if this is what they were. However, the table of contents of the not-very-fancy Contemporary Films catalog was a somewhat guilt-producing reminder that feature entertainment was really only one small part of cinema history and geography. The table of contents divides the catalog into many sections, assuming that teachers and programmers throughout academe (and outside of academe) will have varied interests, beginning with the following:

Art and Artists

The Art of the Motion Picture and Photography

Films for Children

Comedy

Economics, Labor and Management

Education

Family Living

Child Care and Development

Family Relations

Sex Education

Film as Art

The general category of "Science" includes eight subtitles ("Biology," "Chemistry," "Earth Science," "General Science," "Mathematics," "Medical Science," "Nature Study," and "Physical Science"), and "Social Science" includes "Geography," "Peoples of the World," "Anthropology," "Archaeology," "History and Biography," "World Affairs," "Social Problems," and "Sociology." Perusing the Contemporary Films catalog created a useful insecurity about the narrowness of our tendency to focus on commercial entertainments.

The Audio-Brandon catalog, in its various iterations (new, updated listings appeared regularly), was a treasure. As the internet developed, most of us, and most educational institutions, made space by jettisoning shelves of catalogs, but when I visited Anthology Film Archives recently to explore their considerable collection, and the Audio-Brandon...