CTCS688/Class notes

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Historiography and Historical Methods

CTCS 688
2-6pm
SCA 216
Prof. Laura Isabel Serna
Office hrs: Tues 3-5pm
- SCA 321

Aug 27

Prof Serna

Film History in Mexico, 1917-1936
Distribution
Reception
History of Latino moviegoing in LA

Ãdan Ãvalos, TA

Scholar, artist
Filmmaker

Going over a syllabus

"The historiography on something ... "

Ramsey, Terry. 1920s history of Hollywood

"Cinema" as shorthand for the moving image

Practical challenges

How-to write an answerable question
Negotiating agency among viewers, industries, orgs, individuals

Two ways to become a historian

Read good histories
Write historical work

Requirements

Book review (5pp), 10 min in-class presentation of that review
- Reading for the major arg, of the chapter, of the book
- Learning to read for exams
- Paying close attention to footnotes
Final paper (15-20pp)

Field trip

Margaret Herrick Library
http://www.oscars.org/library/index.html

Gaddis

Gaddis, J. L. (2002). "The landscape of history". The landscape of history.
Big picture: What do historians do?
An illustrative, "literary" approach
Attempting to appeal to a wider audience
Drawing out examples, is there such a thing as too much description?
Discussion of Machiavelli, The Prince
- Detachment and time enables a feeling of "objectivity"?
- "Compression of historical experience" (8)

Why history?

People learn from the past
- "Doomed to repeat..."
Give voice to people left out
- "'Presentism' is no complement among historians" (2)
History is a form of representation
"Truth"-telling
To "smooth over the details" (Ãvalos)
- Or to return to details that have been smoothed over
Details v Big Picture
- Tension between evidence (micro) and argument (macro)
- Temptation to include every little thing
Presentism temptation
- Project contemporary ideas about race, gender, etc into past
- Where do terms, words, definitions come from in their contemporary moment?
- Is it possible to be objective?
Crafting a story, a narrative
- Impossible to ever have "all the facts"
- Writing a monograph, no matter how dry, is telling a story

Diff between a chronicle and a history

Chronicle is a chronology
But history offers analysis, interpretation
History involves abstraction
Accepted facts do not make "historical truths"

Film history, Allen + Gomery

Allen, R. C. and Gomery, D. (1985). "Film history as history". Film history: Theory and practice.
Were it written today, perhaps called "moving image" history
Film history as a "third leg"/branch of film studies
Offer a critique of film history for being "unselfconscious"
How does film criticism differ from film history?
- Less emphasis on context
Film history tends to involve larger scope than the text itself
- Production history

Politics, film history

Integrating, managing the manifestation of one's politics
- Selection of topics, questions, areas of inquiry
- How do you reveal, work with your stakes?
- Film criticism and theory may have greater "aperatures" for one's own voice
  - Easier for a theorist to say "I"
- Film history and historians are engaged more in an objective, scientific tone
- Watch for tone in the writing of others
Before the 1960s, much history is written with
- No ideological "flag planting"
- And a strong, authoritative voice
- Contemporary history, even ones that seem to be "safe", would not take such a tone

Writing about a history that folks wish to forget

e.g. 1920s imperial moment in Mexican film-going
- Time when almost all film shown in Mexico was produced in America
- Important to return to this neglected time
- Unpack the politics, the nationalism

Do media historians not deal with questions of philosophy?

Do they treat data as unproblematic?
Does film history lend itself to popular histories that do not problematize their artifacts and assumptions?
Film theorists have a stereotype of film historians based on this wealth of popular writing
Introduction and Conclusion of a book are places where historians must consider the theoretical stakes of their work

Empiricism in history

Climametric history, closer to a social science
- 1950s, 1960s
- Dealing with numbers
One reason that history departments are closer to humanities or social science depending on university
Realism, like "realistic", contextualism
- We can't know everything, we don't know nothing, ...
- There will always be things that we cannot know

Collectors / Historians

Similar value in the archive
But different questions, frames
Approaching the outsider archivist, collector
- Collector is a curator, author
- "Author"-izing access
- How do you speak to this person?

Selecting an argument

Many arguments can be made about the same material
Part of being a historian == "making decisions"
- What is included, excluded?

Exercise, reading textbook introductions

Jump offs

Toby Miller all historical documents are texts to be read in a context
Vivian Subcheck (sp?) exemplar of intermingling theory, history
Tom Gunion (sp?) another person bridging theory, history, criticism

Sept 3

Before the nickelodeon (film)

What kind of story was it telling?

"Pro-Edison", pro-Porter
Narrative traces evolution of a medium to a single person
Was there neg info about him left out?
- Patent troll
Great man argument, Thomas Carlyle, Herbert Spencer
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Man_theory

Who is the audience of this documentary?

Lay people

Use of tinting

Why were certain images tinted?
Who did the tinting?
Significance of the coloring

"Pseudo-objective vibe"

Documents from the time
Reels of recovered film
Talking heads make opinions, subjectivity seem more obvious

Visual essay

Production choices are rhetorical choices

Carr

Carr, . () "The historian and his facts". What is history?.

Series of lectures

Who was Carr?

British historian
14 volume history of the Soviet Union
Moved from Liberal to very far Left

Whig history

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whig_history
History is a long march toward progress
Often used a pejorative
Tied into Enlightenment, democracy
- All of history leads toward this period
- Was widely used by British historians

Positivism

19th c. historians
"Facts are external to the observer"
History is process of accumulating facts
Facts are self-evident
- Ranke, "wie es eigentlich gewesen"
Historian gathers, sequences, interprets

Are all facts historical facts?

What separates a datum of the past from a historical facts?
Historian can transform the quotidian into a historical fact?
- Power of incorporation into a historical argument

Historian selects facts

But only a small subset of facts are available
Artifacts are lost, destroyed
Facts are deemed significant or not by previous historians
How are some documents or facts deemed relevant?

Archives of documents, artifacts

Organized, restored, identified
Layers of processing
Accessibility
- Technical
- Bureaucratic
Document can only tell us what the author intended us to know

All history is contemporary history

A 2nd position against which Carr argues

Past doesn't exist separate from the historian

Dialogic

On-going interaction between past and present
Only achieve our understanding of the past through the eyes of the present
Can never be separate from the past

Final thoughts on facts

Can't cherry pick the facts that make your argument work
Continuous process of moulding his interpretation to available facts

Pragmatics of continuous history

"Going fishing" in the archive
"Publish or perish", productivity
- Sense that it's a luxury or a waste to not publish after a period of thought, exploration

De Certeau

De Certeau, . () "The historiographical operation". The writing of history.

Social space

Location, not geographical
But a practiced place
- In relation with other people, norms, etc

History as a social space

"Where" is within the discipline, field
The Society for Cinema and Media Studies
- Many people do film studies but are not part of or in communication with the SCMS
Process of authentication by which scholar assess each other + work
- Socialization process
- Screening, exams, accreditation, institutionalization
De Certeau is referring to Foucault's writing about institutionalization
Note: elsewhere De Certeau looks at how history has marginalized colonialized people and practitioners out of existence
Social space, institution "shapes what they write"
- e.g. footnotes

"Denial of the specificity of a place"

"The very principle of ideology" (69)
By moving history into a non-place, ideology moves history away from being able to speak about society (69)
Enables history within a specific institution to become dominant history

Making history as a practice

From artifacts, historians "make history", something different
- An "artifice of nature" (70)
There are techniques, technical work
- Archive, archiving, preservation
- Setting aside, curation
Conventionally historians think of themselves as thinkers,
- and position archivists as do-ers, managers, but no interpreters
Idea of history helps to hide the labor of doing history

Political aspect of making history

History reminds us of what is lacking (85)
Because you are always selecting, delimiting
There are stories still untold, left out

Writing: history as representation

Positivists might say they aren't representing anything, "that's just the way it was"
But De Certeau says that the historian is always making, doing history
Cannot possibly tell the whole story
Creating something : creating texts

Crafton on Jazz Singer

Crafton, D. () The jazz singer's reception in the media and at the box office in Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, ed. . :

http://books.google.com/books?id=ZUr4pRBZUcEC&lpg=PP1&dq=post-theory%20reconstructing%20film%20studies&pg=PA474#v=onepage&q=crafton&f=false

History has inflated the relevance of The Jazz Singer

"Legends are also historical documents"

Why does this legend emerge?

Al Jolson
Investment in the star system

Must do source criticism

Can't take sources as face value
- News sources, trades, etc.
Investigating the LEGEND helps us think of new historical sources
- Helps us come to new questions

Finding similarities among historical accounts

Seems that the same story is retold by multiple people
From where does this legend emerge?

Lindstrom, on Chicago, Nickelodeons

http://books.google.com/books?id=cB2MfzmdwYkC&lpg=PA217&dq=lindstrom%20moving%20picture%20audiences&pg=PA217#v=onepage&q=lindstrom%20moving%20picture%20audiences&f=false

Taking up a historical event that many people have focused on

Who were the early audiences? What were their practices?

How does he move away from previous writing?

Focusing on Chicago, not NYC
Thought of cinema as just one factor of urban development
- Found that cinemas encouraged people to move around the city
Calling on the tools of urban studies to address a question of film studies
Appeals to a different set of facts
- And a different set of methods, techniques

Map-making

Depth of geographic data

Jump offs

Eric Hoyt, co-crediting two archivists on his diss

Sept 10

Screening: Eleanor's catch

"Possibility"

Gender possibilities

How is a woman defined with regard to spaces:

...cities?
...home?

Intertitles

Were there too many? Too few?
How many are required for legibility?

What is Flash Dacy being arrested for?

Does this matter?
Or is he a figure, standing in for general danger?
Not a capitalist figure, but a grifter
He has money through crime, dishonesty

Cooper, Universal women

Driving question, mystery, "puzzle"

Why did they have many fem directors and then suddenly stop?
Asking a "why" question
"Why" is a causal question

Criticizes "too easy" cultural approach (xxv)

Hollywood corporatized, corporations are patriarchical, bye-bye women
"Too easy" a lens
Opening room for other historical claims

Criticizes "feminist leadership" explanation

Uncle Carl is pro-woman and goes out of his way to hire women
Also dismissed in preface

Organizational challenges

Hard to keep track of why certain parts related

Tracing argument

Possibilities

Universal naming

Trends in Brands
Brands are not gendered
Later "stars"/"genres" are gendered

Univ organization

Meritocracy
Promotion based on results, not gender

Univ City

Geography, map of the 'city'
Gender also indeterminant
Work = Play, Play = Work
Women can be elected officials
Conventional locations for gender are missing
Butler, gender, performativity
Women can occupy a professional role
Hopes for Univ City cannot be fully realized because...
- No homes, no one lives there
- Home is where normative female gender is located

Impossibility

Responding to corporatization arg

Karen Mahar, progressivism, uplift enabled women dirs
When film becomes "business pure and simple", opp for women dirs is foreclosed
But his research undermines it

His argument

After 1917, category of women is associated with genres
Universal determines what a "woman" is within cinema
- Stars
- Directors of women's films

Butler, rhetoric

Discourse of "woman" can foreclose possibilities
Corporate, business, industry decisions
Economic models

Genre (Chp 6)

Shorts
Ambiguity gives way to clear solutions

Postscript

So ... what?

"I have presented the institution both as an historical actor and as a site of struggle" (173).
"Universal City's spatial evolution located lived homes off the lot[, ] corporate movie making made the production of a stridently idealized home a central goal" (181)

Sexism?

Cooper sez: it's an institutional problem (185).

Visiting older artifacts, phenomena

Can we say Lois Weber's work is feminist?

Evidence

What kind of evidence is used in making these arguments?

Admits a regrettable lack of internal documents from Universal
Relying on magazines, newspapers, public-facing PR-filtered articles
- Valuable for reading against the grain
Analysis of synopses and reviews
- How is Universal written about?

Reconstructing the careers of individual directors

Lack of archive demands creativity

Crit of the book

Is the argument obtuse?
More signposting?
Is one problem that we assume causality?
- Sometimes it's not possible to have a causal narrative
- Things may not fit together easily
Maybe measuring the degree of individual resistance isn't the most interesting question?

Fischer

Historians fallacies

"Why" questions "are the sine qua non of history"
We want to know, e.g. why the studios are so successful?
Nature of the practice is to make a causal argument
- Attempt to explain occurrence of an event based on antecedents that made it possible

Watch out for:

Mistaking correlation for cause
Mechanistic explanations
Seeking responsibility, e.g. there's a bad person
Too many causes?

Take-aways, conclusions:

Be careful selecting a causal explanation
- Choose one or several
No cause for all occasions
No single cause
You must prioritize the causes
- Historian exercises agency in writing history

Generalization article

Theories are generalizations

"The world works like this..."

Use of statistics in history

School of thought that wants empiricist, scientific history

Perhaps generalization is necessary but...

Must also focus on specific, individual accounts
Limit scope, limit generalization

Arguments against generalization in history

Not enough proof

Diff between historians and science

Historians need imagination and vision
- Inspiring?
"No sharp break between history and mythology" (149)

Whether historians should generalize or not is meaningless

They must generalize to some extent
Or they are writing a chronicle, or compiling a reference
Historian's voice requires generalization

Historian's can never know everything

You must write the most probable argument that you can make
Need not have the absolute true answer
Even if you are speaking to an individual person, their recollection, perspective is not certain

Overarching claims

So many ways to overstep reasonable limits
Not over-stretching to make broad claims about "THE INDUSTRY" or "FILM"

Steiger on Ince

Why does he build a big studio in 1916?

"Why" question
Explicitly not trying to do a "great man" history
She looks at previous explanations
Finds them unsatisfying, turns to division of labor and development of a corpration

Braverman's model of "Labor and monopoly capital"

Going to use it to account for an individual instance
Generalize to describe change across the industry
Ince could have organized his studio in a variety of ways but chose this one
"Not unique... An innovator but not by much" (18)

Continuity script

Standardization, enabling corporate division of labor
A different kind of institutional argument from Cooper

Revised perspective

Ince division of labor, corporate structure more important than any individual person or film
Continuity script is a material manifestation of labor and capital

Compare w Cooper

Steiger's "institution" is the corporation
Cooper uses elaborated notion of the "institution" that includes ideology, social circumstances
Steiger more selective with evidence
- Focuses on Ince because he is an anomaly that illustrates the broader point

Source criticism

Types:

Primary, original materials
Secondary, written after the fact, interpretations
Tertiary, reference materials, compilations

"One historian's secondary source can be another historian's primary source."

Jump offs

Sister carrie, girls goes to work in Chicago, falls into casual prostitution
Jerome Christiansen, Studio authorship, corporate art, auteur theory
Periodical collection at USC
Brett Service, copyright law in SCA

Sept 17, Early cinema

Why early cinema?

Experienced a film historical "turn"
Rennaissance of scholarship

Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show

Lots of BB material in Griffith Park

Co-existence of sets and props

Some dishes are breakable, some are painted on the wall

Pleasure, voyeurism of breaking things

Furniture, dishes

Singer, Modernity and hyperstim

Overstimulated during the workday, leisure activities likewise hyperstim

Methodology

Textual analysis

Selecting a narrow genre of comics: pedestrians in peril
Including lots of reproductions
Very specific regarding publication and date

Incorporating theory

To support the visual texts
Locating examples to support, incorporate the theory

Thesis

People were shocked and overstimulated by urbanity

Is this a stereotype?
- Country bumpkin comes to the city

Using sensational journalism as source

Is this a potential weakness?
Would contemporary readers understand it as sensational?

Is quantity enough?

e.g. Future historian could make an arg that everyone was afraid of immigrants based on volume of artifacts from FOX, etc.
A "wide search" for different types of publications, genres
Acknowledging that sensationalism sells papers
- Could he have gone further investigating the role of the press in nurturing sensationalism?
First few photos suggest a visual overstim (Times Sq), start of the argument

Re: The Suburbanites

Responding to the anxiety of the urban dwellers

Schwartz

Schwartz teaches at USC in history
Pre-cinematic experience in Parisian public life
Bruno's idea of the "kinetic affair"

Methodology

Three examples:

Morgue
MusÃ©e (wax)
panorama

Thinking through "reality"
"Visual privilege", democratizing the rare views, vantages
- Class and spatial privilege

Morgue

Open, free to public
Civic responsibility to identify anon bodies
"flÃ¢niere in the service of the state"

MusÃ©e

Wax museum bringing the "fait divers" to life
Referring to contemporary events

Panoramas

Not as single technology or style but
- An experience, an approach to designing experience
Not a substitute or antecedent for cinema but
- A complementary phenomenon

Role of audience, spectator

These examples yield an audience for cinema
Cinema experienced in "a crowd"

Privilege

The article does not specifically take up privilege
But takes around and through it

Theory building

Lots of discussion of source materials, research but always coming back to theory
How to consider spectators, audiences?
Historical work engaging with big debates in theory

Convincing arg for Paris ...

But what of other locales?
Other visual regimes?
St. Petersburg had a gallery of "abominations of nature"
- Anticipating a "freak show"

Gunning, The Cinema of Attraction

Re: Personal (1904), Princess Nicotine (1909), etc.

The Chase!
Extremely loose narrative on which to hang thrill scenes

Challenging a dominant narrative within film historian

Conventional history: all of film/movies leads toward complex narrative (Griffith)
But he observes a "cinema of attraction"
- Which "goes underground", remains a component of narrative films
- Interrupting the film to greater, lesser degrees
- MÃ©liÃ¨s trick films, also gags, narrative is subordinate to spectacle

Connections with vaudeville

Mass of unrelated acts
Cinema incorporated within this repetoire

Political possibilities of avant-garde cinema

Making connections, possibilities

Methodology

Seeing films as part of other practices
Programming, distribution, exhibition
Must step away from the text and consider the context
Circulation, consumption, production, distribution

Why is narrative so strong?

Walt Fischer's writing on narrative
A drive to locate narrative
David Cook on film history as history of narrative film

Can you have a cinema of attraction without the public display?

e.g. DVD sales, computing
demoscene, "attract scene"

Gunning: "Attractions: How they came into the world"

Title references a "Hebrew Frankenstein"
- Implies a creation that goes beyond the control of the creator
Historicizes his own historiographic term
Describes previous writing, conferences, screenings
- Confluence of notable attendees, historians, writers, critics, filmmakers

"Game changer"

How do arguments that change the field evolve?
Serendipity, cross-fertilization, inter-disciplinarity

Phrase as an analytic tool

"Cinema of attractions", term of art to use

Altman

Responding to an overemphasis on cinema as a visual medium

Arguing for an analysis of sound

Crisis historiography

New tech born nameless, crisis of identity
Social construction of technologies as social/cultural artifacts

Realism

Not in relation to reality but
- To extant standards for reality
Aesthetics of violence
- "Realistic" violence
Realism in sports video games
- Sequential reading of Madden advertisements
"Reality TV" is referring to a socially constructed "reality"
- Not a fundamental truth-telling, reality

Takeaways, methodological

Meaning of the object under study changes over time, space
Changes the "corpus"
Must include many more areas than within the object, unexpected contexts

Jump offs

Gunfighter nation
Black athena, arg for African roots for Greek arts
- Black athena writes back
"Annales", French school of history, seeking everyday experience
Gitelman, Always already new

Sept 24, Narrative, Postmodernism

All this and heaven too

Telling the story that hasn't been told
Role of writing, story
What is told and untold

Biopic, "women's film"

History is centered on certain characters
- Parodic example: _Forrest Gump_
Position the individual as being central, strong affected/effective

Feminine desire

And the "Warping" it sustains in the process of narrativization

Feminist film history

McKee

Requires storytelling
By giving Henriette central subjectivity
- Then she owns the story
- Empowerment, politics
Third-person as a position of power
- Authority
- Self-narration

Genre as a point of entry

if the "women's film" is an opportunity
- does it direct future historical projects?

Footnotes

Extending into new arguments
Explanation of sources
Side-quests
Asides regarding observations within the artifacts

Bodies as archives

Evelyn nesbit and the film(ed) histories of the thaw-white scandal, Savage Stephanie

Public, private
Repository of memories (170)
"only too corporeal" (165)
Finding images of Nesbit
- In youth, in memory, in contemporary of the writer
- Selection of images charged in such a project

More on Savage

Writing like

A tabloid? A story? Gossip?
Short passages recalling (supposed) facts
- Refer always to aspects of her body
Including moments of open interpretation
- Emphasizing the boundaries of the academic history genre

"Toes break the paper of a Japanese parasol" (160)

Is "such a poetic detail" suspect by its form?
Establishing instability of truth
This is what fascinated "the public"

Subheadings are all specific dates

Title cards, interstitial
Filmic, cinematic representation in written form

Hayden White and post-modernism

Most circulated proponent of postmodernism in history:

Attempting to speak historically of history as a discipline
Speaking back from history (the discipline) to literature and psychoanalysis

History and literature

Structurally
Rhetorically

History and psychoanalysis

Drawing out story elements from the individual's past

Estrangement of the artifacts

We encounter them in a different moment

Not all historiography is reducible to ideology

But helps to be aware of our constructive imagination

Identifying genres of history

Deterministic
Chronicle
Escatological, the last in the event to be recalled

Emplotment

Bringing together story elements into a (coherent?) narrative/plot
Narrative is not "imminent" in the artifacts themselves

"History ... has lost sight of its origins in the literary imagination" (62)

Re: Iliad, a mixture of history and fiction

Himmelfarb response

Jeremiad?

Wrote One nation, two cultures about culture war roots in 1960s

Advocates return to traditional values, ethics, morality
Great Man tradition

Responding to Hayden White

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gertrude_Himmelfarb
White makes no distinction between history and literature
- Centers the historian as interpreter
Historical texts are thus indeterminate, paradoxical, ironic

Methodological issues

Objective truth drove a type of rigor

Prefers the centrality of an individual

Denies multiculturalism, subaltern
"Currently fashionable" protests: anti-racism, etc.
Believes that the novelty will wear off

Strong claims to truth

There is something true to be uncovered
Through rigor

Appleby, Hunt, Jacob

Primer for Derrida, Foucault

Discussion of "postmodern" as a term (201)

Historians "doing their job"
Identifying the roots in art/architecture

What is difference between the "coherent" and "unifying" narrative? (229)

Rejecting irony
"Plausibility"?

Cautioning against a postmodern cynicism

If it goes too far, there is no transformation

Aesthetic and literary choices

"History is more than a branch of letters"
History contributes to "epistemology", what can be known

Role of meta-narrative?

Need not be the "master-narrative"
- This is the politics
"There is no action without a story about how the world works"
Natural human tendency to rely on narratives to understand the world

What are they saying to Himmelfarb?

There will still be narratives
Postmodernism is not a solid theoretical framework

Non-narrative film pleasures?

Special effects sequences?
- Final Destination
Gunnings: "Attractions"

Oct 8

Revisit the trip
Short screening
Talk film history

Mabel's blunder

Keystone: "Farce comedy"
Trans-vesticism, comedy
Gender confusion
Mistaken identity
Body language
Paralleling 12th night
Reception?

Who is Mabel?

Working class girl
Brother is a driver
Gutsy

Production

Classic keyhole shot
Spectators know more than the onscreen chars
Mostly medium shots
No close ups

Thinking through our historians

Bordwell, a formalist

Looking at production, casting, genre
"Historical poetics"
- Bordwell, Film art
Development of style, technique, modes of production
Is he interested in questions "outside of the frame"?
Unit of analysis
- Films
Characteristics of his methods
- Formal analysis
- Medium specificity

Sumiko Higashi

Historican turn
Interdisciplinary work

Vivian Sobchack

History as representation
- Reflexivity
"Thrice told tale"
- Might do a history of the Grapevine DVD of Mabel's Turn
What counts as evidence?
Material culture "and its afterlife"
- Many different histories from an artifact

Bottomore

Claims that intertextuality is "not new"
Scientific approach, experimental language
Speaks about "human fallibility" being the internal compromise (16)
Concern with "validity"
- Different interpretations of history being "equally valid" (13)

Scientific film history?

Seeking general truths
Validity

What is theory?

If someone is set against, or alongside, theory.. how is theory defined?

How do our readings define "theory"?

Bordwell - metanarratives that are applied to the text (mechanical)
Bottomore - theories are abstractions, theory
Higashi - jargon, reification, deductive
Smoodin - a methodology among many methodologies (-historicizable)
- We went down a textual analysis road instead of a social history road
Andrew - theory is one part of film studies (and it can be your friend)
Sobchack - "trope", theory is everywhere

What is film history?

Film history

What artifacts are in play?
- Films, movies, games, etc. ("moving image")
- Industrial materials: promotional posters, film canisters, business records, legal documents
- Contemporary criticism, journalism, trades
- Recollections of specific individuals via interview, diary, autobiography
What's at stake?
- Audience
What kinds of questions can we ask?
- Learning about the relationship between technologies, industries, stories
"Story of industry + art + audience"
On-going story about cinema's past
History of popular hollywood cinema + how other cinemas interact with hollywood

"Object anxiety" becoming more acute

Is digital media "film"?
"Screen culture", "moving image"
"What do we do that's special? Or unique? That can't be done in another context."

Jump offs

Mullvey, Laura on rear window
- Jackie Stewart's book is a response to LM
reducio ad absurdum

Oct 15

Housekeeping

Source criticism part I due next Wednesday

Chung, Hollywood Asian

Chung, Hye Seung. (). Hollywood asian.

Her method + argument,

Consideration for "extra-cinematic", "cinematic"
Active intervention as a scholar into the text
Close textual analysis and historical research
Unsatisfying signposting regarding sources?
- "Too much"/"too little"?
Drawing on other disciplines to explain why Korean War wasn't subject of US filmmakers
Theory provides a "language", theory gets examples with which to talk about it
- With "fleeting presences", have to grasp for what is there
Reflexive consideration of her own viewing practices

Suggesting another way to analyze film(s): "re-reading texts"

Star studies
- Hierarchy of labor in Hollywood
- What is a "star"?
Asian-American Studies
- Ethnic studies, racial/ethnic stereotypes
Post-colonial studies
- Performance studies
- Spectatorship
Geo-politics and representation

Queer reading of Hudson in Battle hymn (film) (Chp 5)

Hudson's sexuality was in doubt at the time of its production
Noting rumors of Ahn's homosexuality
Does Hudson always call forth thoughts of queerness?

Revisionist biography

See photo on pg 144, Hudson + children
Dean Hess wrote an autobio about Korean War
Film departs from this

Philip Ahn's various roles

(Ahn family collection is now in the USC Korean archive, Doheny)
Yellow-phobia, evil, villain
Yellow-philia, good, Asian
And how these fit into his Korean identity, biographical elements
Strategically flipping between various accents, stereotypes
- Oriental as a "mask" that can be taken on and off (43)
"He wasn't a star", limited on-screen moments

"Anecdote", "example"

How do these terms diverge?

Biography as genre

Are there unique genre conventions of the 1950s?
Referring to previous work on biopics (44, 45)
Hung focuses on some key details changed: Hess was a minister before WWII
- Was this in anticipation of censorship?

Spectatorship, resistant spectatorship

Complexity of "Asian" as a category
Asian spectators can detect mis-cast characters/actors
- Linguistic
- Cultural knowledge
Hidden texts within the text, available only to certain audiences
- Extra-textual information
- Actor's biography, family

"Oriental masquerade"

"Compelled to employ" (41)
Choice + agency

Choice of examples when examples are slim, "fleeting presences"

Emphasizing the name of the town (145-6)
Impact of export on the changing of town names
Dissertation danger, kitchen sink
Does it start to feel like a social justice issue?
- Weakening the structure of the arg
- Better to pick the best/strongest examples

Consideration for the "B-film"

Worthy of scholarly attention?
How do you bound a B movie?
- Significance as spaces of opportunity
Production guidelines:
- Shorter in length, no stars, lower costs, flat rental fee
- Today's equivalent: straight-to-DVD?
Are you talking about low-budget movies or the aesthetics of low-budget?
In Chung, re-valuing cultural objects, performances?
- Possibility in b-movies absent in the large films
- Transgressive potential
- B-movies often presented in double feature (A/B)

Why Philip Ahn?

Father was a national hero
Why a biography of an actor who played "bit parts", "secondary roles"?
- "Case study" of a "Hollywood Asian"
- He helps to make the argument
How do these projects get started?

Biography as a historical mode

Chung says that Hollywood asian is not a biography
Clark: Biography and "star studies", looking at agency and labor
Banner compares biography with Geertz "thick description" (580)
Suggesting that neither the person nor the cultural context is a "Babel" (581)
- There are factors that can be identified
Chung's is a "critical biography"
- Illuminating other aspects of culture, politics, medium
Adan starts from a 2 min corrido: breaking down each piece
Banner, the "new biography", various possible stories for one figure
Understanding a period thru multiple biographies
- "Critical biography" is historical, "life story" as a chronicle

Clark on actors' labor

"Cultural studies approach to star studies ... introducing the role of struggle" (3)
"Bottom up modes of explication" make stars' labor visible (5)
What is the "object of study"?
- Breaking actor / spectator binary, giving agency to actor (11)
- Finds theoretical formation of "persona" as a third position of the actor ("person", "character") inadequate (11)

Biographies as primary sources

Memoirs, autobiographies, biographies
To be analyzed as you might a text

Jump offs

Something to sing about (film)
Sconce, Jeffery. (). Trashing the academy.
Steel helmet. (film), "B film"
La Banda del Corro Rojo, un corrido
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sessue_Hayakawa
- Dominant viewership doesn't lead to single, coherent reading

Oct 22

Stamp, Movie-struck girls

(Recent Academy scholar)

1908-1915

"film-itis", "narcissistic film consumption"
Femininization of the movies
Desire, pleasure, women's place
Consumerism, urbanity, femme flaneur
Social construction of the self

By chapter:

Space, acceptability

On white slavery films (chp 2)

White slavery, women's agency, working girl, housewife

Newspaper articles, cartoons, fan magazines
Genre that attracted women audiences at same time as it amplified moral panic
Janice Staiger, Miriam Hansen
Complicates role of spectatorship
Agency across 3 victims in Souls
Female role in surveillance
Janice Day, Laura Mulvey (gaze), Rabinowitz
"newly gendered urban landscape" (81)

Serials, ready-made customer (chp 3 + 4)

Fem audiences repeated attending serials
Relat to fan studies
Relies on news + trade sources
Newspapers and films share stories, "multitextual"
Complicated timelines
Ability to "dictate material"

Pro- and anti- suffragette film features, comedies (chp 4)

Looking at Women's movement sources
Uplifting female audiences
Industry concerns + anxieties
Role-reversal films, rhetoric of anxiety over female film-going + citizenship
Suggestions of female agency but within general conservatism

Big q's

Female consumer
Female citizenship
Spectator studies
- Rabinowitz, Bruno
"Desire to desire"
- Jones on pathologization of 1940s women's film
- Discursive connections to disease

Stamp's cultural history

Post-Nickelodeon, cinema moves into theaters, more socially acceptable
- Nicks were squallid, dark, potential zones of sex, unsafe for women
- Self-censorship
- Respectability == white, middle class, married mother
Stamp finds evidence of the respectable audience being "called into being"
- Actual, women like white slave films, serials, suffragettes
Who are the agents?
- Lots of people without names
- To whom do we attribute agency

Agents

Exhibitors

Advertising
Providing childcare

Suffragettes

Campaigning for social change
Marching, leafleting

Filmmakers

Stars

Film critics

Reformers

Moviegoers

Some fans, some not
Stamp seeks their voices in artifacts that they didn't necessarily produce
- Reading against the grain of the sources

Theorists

Mulvey, Laura

Scopophilia, fetishism
Narratives structured for the male gaze
Women are the object of the gaze
"Meta-psychological" argument not rooted in time + space

Rabinovitz, Lauren

Nickelodeon gave women opportunity to go out and look in new ways
- Window shopping, etc.
But women are also watched, surveilled
- Fear of shoplifters
They can look but they are also looked at

Bruno, Juliana

History of filmmaking opening up + enabling women
Told through particular female filmmaker from Naples
- No surviving films

Stamp's HOW

"Looking in particular ways"
Draws women out of artifacts
Discourse analysis
- Multiple people talking about this category: women
- Artifacts are "contributions" to this conversation
Reconstructing conversations, "archaeology"
- (Strategy also found also in Cooper)
- Specifically about female directors
There isn't agency found in individuals here...
- But there are various social groups constructed through discourse and given agency in narratives

Historicizing agency

Why are we obsessed with agency?
Obviously complex
Do we replace one narrative with another?
Looking away from dynamism and making sense of what might at first seem boring

Post-feminism connections to Stamp

How do we define post-feminism?

Re: Glee/GQ
RE: SatC

Regionalism: NYC, Chicago

In moral panic, hysteria

Genre continuum

Chase films
White women in danger
White slavery is an small innovation atop these?

Curiosity as a mode of viewing

Access to places you can see otherwise

Oct 29

Ginzburg

Edgar Wind lead critic of Morelli, "modernist", "positivist"
Enrico Castelnuovo compares him to a detective
Ginzburg quotes Doyle/Holmes refers to Freud's early thinking on psychoanalysis and discovery of Morelli
- Theodor Reik: another scholar connecting psychoanalysis to detective work
"Symptoms", "clues", "pictorial marks" (101)

"This knowledge is characterized by the ability to construct from apparently insignificant experimental data a complex reality that could not be experienced directly. Also, the data is always arranged by the observer in such a way as to produce a narrative sequence, which could be expressed most simply as 'someone passed this way'" (103).

"Evidential and conjectural" disciplines differ from the Galileian paradigm (106)

Because they focus on specific phenomena, individual cases
Galileian focused instead on generalization
Even when historians refer to a "sequence of comparable phenomena", he remains "intrinsically individualizing" (106)

Textual criticism possible to move in Galileian direction

Because of an abstract of "texts" from their material production (107)
e.g. Text from typeface

"Characters", point of contact between the art theorists and scientists (111)

"Individualizing knowledge is always anthropocentric, ethnocentric, and so on" (112)

113: Example of the two-headed calf

Recording details not to identify unique characteristics of this animal but to connect it to the common characteristics of the animal it ought to have been

Medicine as a discipline in between humanities + science

Can't apprehend the functioning of the specific living body
Disease manifests differently in every body

"Zadig's method" (117)

Combines history, archaeology, geology, physical astronomy, paleontology
"Ability to forecase retrospectively" (117)

Emergence of the signature as "inimitable" (119)

Fingerprints (121)

"Can we ... call a conjectural paradigm scientific?" (124)

"Only linguistics has succeeded" (124)

"No one learns to be a connoisseur or diagnostician by restricting himself to practicing only preexistent rules" (124-5)

intuition
firÃ¢sa moving from "known to the unknown" based on clues (125)

Cohen, Orphanista manifesto

"Preservation in the midst of destruction is not only a creative but also an avant-garde art of breathing new life into storytelling and the reproduction of cultural memory" (719)

"Film organizes publics (Benjamin 1955)" (720)

Howard Lomar Walls, hired at L of Congress as copyright clerk, 1939 (721)

Became champion of film preservation
No funding

"Archive fever" turning film-preservationists into social activists

Inaccessibility, lost films (722)
1980s: "Nitrate won't wait"
"Orphan" metaphor emerges in the 1990s

Rick Prelinger

"Dumpster diver"
Organized Prelinger Archives in 1982
- Emphemeral films (ads, industrial, educational, amateur, documentary...)
- Films depict "everyday U.S. life and culture" (722)

"Orphan film"

"film abandoned by its owner or creator" (722)

Preservation + technology

Safety film
Video
Digital
All with affordances, constraints, shelf lives
"digital switch" under debate (722)

Bill Morrison, 1997, Decasia (723)

Bringing attention to film entropy
Re-editing old damaged footage into new narratives (724)

Gregorio Rocha, 2003, Los Rollos Perdidos de Pancho Villa

Narrativizing a search for Pancho Villa
Owning "the greaser" stereotype (726)

"The politics of seeing take on a strikingly material form" (726)

Connecting Morrison/Rocha to Foucault's "archaeology": "images are not only exhumed from the archive but edited and arranged into a new narrative that brings about new imaginings of cultural heritage" (726)

"Archives are not simply deposits of material memory; they are spaces governed by state politics, funding agencies, and preservation technologies, which relegate differntial access to them. They also determine which films get resuscitated and reproduced as the living memories of film viewers" (727)

"Reproducing orphans is no simple matter. It requires exasperating labor on the part of preservationists whose work is mediated by state politics, funding agencies, film collectors, the materiality of film itself, and the available technologies of reproduction that demand ethical considerations and redefinitions of what it means to preserve film" (727)

Dan Streible by Skype

Asst prof at NYU
Assoc dir of Orphan Film Project
Wrote a book on "fight" movies, history of boxing

Orphan Film Project

Biannual Symposium
Started in 1999
Spreading internationally
Don't maintain collection
- But present programs using loaned films (e.g. last weekend at MoMA)
On-going communication via: mailing list, blog, direct mail announcement
- Connections at conferences for moving images, SCMS

On the term "orphan film"

Limited definition includes only films that are still in copyright
Expanded definition includes films that are also neglected, forgotten, not cared for/about
In Hollywood, "orphan" == film that didn't get a distributor

Transition from "ephemeral" to "orphan" film?

Prelinger coined the term "orphan" in his collections: Laserdisc, VHS
Patriarchical sense of the term "orphan"
Dan says Cohen wrote her piece after attending just one screening
- Dan had used the term "orphanista manifesto" jokingly during the screening
Librarian at LoC used the term "orphan film" in a piece of legislation
- Copyright is one reason that film becomes "orphaned"
Affordances of "orphan": more multivalent
- Urgency, need, "pro-social"
- Metaphor was successfully localized to different regions, languages

Funding sources?

Traditionally:

1/3rd registration, 1/3rd university, 1/3rd sponsors/grants
Now they can start with "some money in the pot"
Dean from Tisch dedicated 25,000$, matched by the Cinema school
Applying for grants and sponsorship from preservation/migration laboratories

"Think of me first as a person" (film)

(10m)
Compilation of home movies
1950s-60s
Made my father about his son with Down Syndrome
"Hagafilm, Amsterdam", digital restoration
- Produced a 35mm show print
- "Most expensive home movie"

Restoration process

Danger of nitrate may be over-stated, only dangerous near flame
Fairly stable at the right temperature, humidity
Most of the nitrate comes from UCLA, LoC, Eastman House
- Specialized skillset
Atypical is the "restoration" process of commercial films
- "Dustbusted", "enhanced" transferred to DVD
More common: transfer to safety film + broadcast quality video
Frequent need is to transfer 16mm to video
- Even Indp Film Center (IFC) in NYC doesn't have 16mm projector
Exception: audio restoration, enhancement is done
- Universal Studio regularly donates audio restoration services for 1 or 2 pieces

e.g. Hitler film + reactions

Someone had made a recording of an audience reaction in Radio City Music Hall

Orphan film as a new corpus of work?

How does this change film studies as a field, discipline?
Conversation can't just be about
- Films we can access
- Films we know
- Films that have critical acclaim
Need to consider every film that was ever shot
- Increasing the order of magnitude to a significant degree
Majority of films, videos that exist in N.A./world are not in film archives
- In historical societies, libraries, regional archives, institutional archives
- They often don't know what to do with it, how to manage the collection

Alternate forms of distribution?

Reappropriation, viewership
Internet Archive invited Prelinger to add orphan film
- 2000 films exist there
People do independent uploading on YouTube
- Sometimes difficult to trace the materials back to their sources
- Evidence that people have an impulse to archive the materials
Starting to receive invitations to put together evening film programs
Expensive to put on a show if you are paying shipping costs for prints
Mitigate costs if archives would permit digital transit, circulation
Preservation labs might close
- Film Technology Company in LA founded by 2 "geniuses" but they don't invest in upgrades
- They don't plan to stay in business all that much longer

Disconnection among archives

Various archives are not aware of the collections at other locations
Institutional norms
Enterprise of film preservation
- Many closed member societies
- Isolated from Hollywood to some degree

e.g. Museo del Cine, Buenos Aires

Almost no support from state
- Yet this is where Metropolis is found
Dan went down for 2 weeks to volunteer labor to el Museo
- Contrast to folks who attended a conference/meeting "as a junket"

Archiving new materials

"American Archive": "digital-only repository"

Digital preservation standards
All materials generated by public broadcasting
- Outtakes, scripts, rough cuts
- "Born digital" material goes straight to the archives
"Managed in a way that Youtube is not"
Tough thing is breaking the divide between developed/developing nations
- Even larger "BRIC" countries are not self-archiving

Thompson Foundation

Non-profit in Europe
Partnering with archives in India, Cambodia
Getting trained film archive people in
Problematic colonial-cultural issues
- Even when the goal is to create a sustainable local resource

Preserving national heritage

In U.S., the "National Archive" isn't an archive of national culture, but government production
- Library of Congress increasingly taking on the role of a national culture archive

Copyright deposit

No longer strictly required that you deposit a print of your film to LoC in order to receive copyright
- But it is a norm
- e.g. there is a 35mm print of Avatar in the LoC

Can't trust commercial interests

RKO dumped old films in the Hudson
MGM burned their old film scores

How did DS develop this interest?

Very excited about early cinema
Anything from before 1910 seemed like "it was from Mars"
Seemed like most of the films didn't survive
"Detective-oriented curiosity"
Developed taste for archival work, material nature of the film

Had opportunity to organize a conference

Chose "orphan film" as a theme
Observed rising demand
Maintain excitement seeing all the new stuff coming in
- "8mm reel found at a flea market"
- Unknown!
Special joy in uni

eBay and informal commercial spaces

Center for Home Movies

6 ppl doing work on their own
Some affiliation with the LoC
Did a study for home movies up for auction + bought on ebay in 12mos
- Total cost of buying all of that material: 100,000$
"Acquisition" via eBay
See also: Home Movie Depot, Missouri

Some regional archives systematically track keywords on eBay

Student at NYU following "local films"
Most of what he has been able to see came from eBay

Recent "summit" at LoC regarding home movies

People selling them on eBay, making a living
Archivists distressed to see collection split up and sold piecemeal

"How can we get a million home movies online so people can see them?"

YouTube?
It's own platform?
Private? Public?

Individual in Nederlands had capability to digitize + upload materials

Was personally uploading significant public domain materials to Internet Archive

Social change through found film

"Archive fever"

Connected to VJ, remix culture

"Most people in the network" of orphan films

Share enthusiasm for the social change component
Also sympathy for creative culture
Many people within big media companies are "willing to go to bat" to support these projects
- The corporations are diverse collections of people

Research accompanying the orphan films in the collections

Sometimes archives hold films for years without knowing their circumstances, significance
Very meticulous research bringing details to the materials

Importance of the symposia:

Alchemy, serendipity of assembling 200-300 people from different disciplines, parts of the world
Opportunity for scholar-audience to interact with scholar-presenters

Variable value

Film producers, artists, etc. (and their families) don't think that their materials are valuable

Multiple sedosis

Linda Stone doing diss on amateur film clubs in CA

Todd Haynes on Superstar (Barbie/Karen Carpenter)

"Owes its life to" VHS, home video, tape trading

Copyright conflict over It's a wonderful life

Soundtrack, ownership
Copyright trolls

University status, "education"

Able to invoke "fair use" for almost everything

Educational mission

Risk of copyright trolls

Litigious estates trolling internet for mentions of specific films

Media preferences

VHS tapes persist in university libraries
Not always free to duplicate, even though the magnetic tape has short shelf life
Video reference copies might be the only known copies of certain films
- Not usually considered archives, or preservation oriented
"Anything born on celluloid is" in danger

Jump offs

Next symposium is April 2012, first time they haven't had to pay 20000$ for space
- Space in Queens is donating space
- Theme is "persuasion"
Should we amend Wheeler to include institutional archives?
New findings energize the film history community
What needs to happen for this to happen among computer historians?
Lucas Filmbrand, "bootleg aesthetics", NYU grad, now part of OFP

Nov 5

Auteur Theory

Individual artist/directors who broke away from convention
"Not just craftsmen"
Contested by Pauline Cale, memorable exchange
Elephant in the room because it's hard to talk about film history without the auteur

Another model?

Collaborative

Spedoni, Foucauldian, 1995

Thompson, Bordwell,
Systems, historical
Shots, genius of the system: about the producer

What criticisms have emerged in response to these kinds of histories?

Legitimacy
"Analogical arguments are hard to sustain"
- This is just like this...

Consumption

Consumerism
Embodiment
- Consuming the food very literally

Bodies, materialism

Brooks using the tools that one has access to
Self-discipline
1920s introduction of androgynous, skinniness

Nov 12

Jacobs

Combining historical research with textual analysis
Supporting each other
- Details from analysis of text supports the historical argument
- Historical analysis is reflected in the texts
Methodology: case study
- Obviously she has seen many more films but she specifically focuses on just the "limit cases"
- Selecting evidence to further the argument
Each film, chapter serve a very specific role in the argument

Preface

Discussion of the materials
Shaping of censorship story via memoirs
Archives became available in the 1980s
- Production code was in place before 1933
- Censors were always in negotiation with producers, studios
- Censors knew certain dialogue were no-go, or imagery (exchanging money for sex)

1934 as a transitional year for censorship

Production code administration could impact the narratives themselves
Not just routine cuts, edits
Baby face (film) is just before the code comes out
- Prior to this, little attention paid to the visuals (costuming), more to the script
After Breen in 1934, more control over the visual
- Women pulling on their stockings, e.g. Gold diggers (film), 1933
- State censors operated independently from one another

Fallen woman genre

Plagued with censorship issues
Censorship and genre developing in tandem
Problems: fallen women as sympathetic characters
Comedy seems to mitigate the problems of melodrama

Missing?

Where is the Great Depression in this story?
What effect did changing audiences have on this history?

Using the "limit case"

Pushes us to think the hardest

Clothes, fashion

Class defined through
Rise in class is shown through changes in clothes + appearance
- "Mink coat" is a milestone

Gold digger story

Censorship is attenuated by comedy
Proto media effects theory?
Censors didn't know how to handle the combination of comedy with predatory gold digging
Lubitch touch (74)

Blonde Venus

Produced in 1932
Still in circulation for years after
Breen pulls it in 1934
The lead character balances the domestic and the deviant
- Performance was spectacular

Singapore censorship

Hollywood censorship more lax
SG films would be more closely reviewed because it was about national character

Shift in post 1934 (Chp 5 + 6)

Joseph Breen becomes head of production code admin
- Production code created with Legion of Decency
- Enforcement through the seal
  - Theater owners didn't play non-seal movies until 1955 because it could threaten their access to other films

Stories shouldn't be evaluated solely on their endings

Previously, people who chose immorality were ok to depict if they got their comeupance

Anna Karenina (Chp 5)

Focus on tone, interpretation
Overall narrative character
Can't undermine marriage by showing too much pleasure in the affair
Text seems to "internalize" the code

Gold diggers

Of 1920s, 1933, 1935, 1937, ...

Stella dallas

Maternal figure, aspirational class
Wants to take care of her mother
Voiceover of regret frames all of what takes place on screen

Prices unlimited, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0186460/

Dream sequence about shopping
Dreaming about a period post-rationing
Approved by OWI

"Glamour"

Censorship in practice

Less coherent than it appears from its judgement

Nov 19

Housekeeping

Department party: 3-6pm
Class finish at 4:30pm

Papers

Chicago style
Footnotes preferred
- "Discursive footnotes" == commentary

DeCherney

Chp 1 building archives, film connoisseurship

"Born out of a desire to control ... rather than facilitate" citizens' knowledge of the world
Lindsay's Art of moving pictures

Columbia / Hollywood collaboration

Middle class anxieties re: nitrate, flammability
- Also anxiety over the cultural position of cinema
Zukar, Lansky less commitment to the film
- More on cultural legitimacy

"Photoplay": Americanizing new immigrants (esp. Jews)

Transforming crowds into publics
Existed in the Extension school (vocational)
Connecting Jewish Hollywood industry and Jewish student body
Americanizing projects were already underway in Great Books curriculum
Curious paradox: don't you want Americans making your American movies?

Role of technology

Screenwriting is affordable
In contrast to the technical activities
Cheaper to start up a school

Heads of studios actually teaching film courses

Clear interventions from Hollywood
Not a "natural" outgrowth of art appreciation

Harvard connections

Business school, case studies, symbiosis
Photoplay courses similar to Columbia
Desire to remain/become "gatekeepers"

Concern over unionization

Pushing film-making toward art-making
- Stymie union organizing
"Above the line" workers become artists
- "Below the line" laborers were already becoming organized
Hollywood is in LA because of the "open shop" town
Reducing solidarity

Validating the archive

Previously films were throwaway, ephemeral
Creating value in collection
Art economy as a model
- Abandoned in favor of home viewing (TV/Netflix), or popular collecting (VHS/DVD)

What is this "Hollywood"?

Studios in LA
But offices in NYC
Value of geographic distance?
Imagined, discursive Hollywood
Shorthand?

Emphasis on the failure cases

Documentation of projects that never got off the ground
Thinking probabilities, what could have been?
- Concerned with discourses: "the cultural turn is all over this book"

Potamkin

Explodes cinema into components for plan of a Marxist film library

Iris Barry's change of heart?

Evidence is sparse to work from
He has what she wrote
Tries to illustrate a context
- Moving to the U.S., marrying an American
Her political convictions seemed very strongly held in England
- How could she change so quickly?
England was less diverse at the time
- Strongly nationalist
- Did she assume a similar monolith in the U.S.?

Communism, Marxism not a monolith

Left-leaning intellectuals might have been swayed in the 30s,40s by Stalinism

Barry on female pleasure

Vicarious experiences for women in the cinema (118, 119)

What is "Modernist national cinema"?

DeCherney says that this is what Barry is collecting...?
Is it interchangeable with avant-garde?

Connections between curators and the CIA

Working together in fight against communism
On patronage, avant-garde
Jerome Hill solely sustained the avant-garde

Anthology Film Archives veiled Hill's patronage

Signaled defeat of New American Cinema outside of Hollywood (203)
Avant-garde filmmaker is a full-time amateur
- Professionals in Hollywood decidedly not avant-garde

OWI + Hollywood

Depictions of women, domesticity
"Meshes" has a feminist politics

Narrative and avant-garde

Non-narrative, unconventional narratives

DeCherney is not concerned with text

Institutional history
Seeking discourse
Film movements: success/failure based on patronage + institutional support + discourse

What is DeCherney's argument?

Avant-garde wanted institutional support, didn't get it
Created alternative structure of its own institutions
- Lead to an insularity
The radical populism of the avant-garde was lost
- Eventually part of the dominant institutions (NEA)
- Only going to show the films in accepted places for elite audiences

DeCherney expands what can be included in film history

Figures from modern art, universities that might not be included
Articulates a geography of film history in which the northeast remains important site

What is the impact of avant-garde filmmaking in the U.S.?

Secondary via George Lucas, Tom Anderson

Anderson

Imagined communities

Nation-ness, nationalism, nationality
Examples: online social network? Red Sox Nation?

Ethnicity?

Physicality of the body
Nation-state conveys a political identity, bureaucratic structures
- Ethnicity does not have these organizing structures

Jump offs

Lindsay's vision of the moviehouse: YouTube?
Mutual v Industrial Commission of Ohio, 236 U.S. 230 (1915)
- Film is a business
Kenneth Anger
Maya Deren Meshes in the afternoon 1943 (film)
- Music added Teiji ItÅ 1952
Current DeCherney project is intellectual property
Shot in america
"Superocheros", Mexican filmmakers turn toward Super-8
Chatterjee responding to Anderson on usefulness of nationalism
Werner Solars, on ethnicity, discourse of descent
"Phenotypic roots", common ancestry among multiple ethnicities

CTCS688/Class notes

From Driscollwiki

Contents

Aug 27

Going over a syllabus

Two ways to become a historian

Requirements

Field trip

Gaddis

Why history?

Diff between a chronicle and a history

Film history, Allen + Gomery

Politics, film history

Writing about a history that folks wish to forget

Do media historians not deal with questions of philosophy?

Empiricism in history

Collectors / Historians

Selecting an argument

Exercise, reading textbook introductions

Jump offs

Sept 3

Before the nickelodeon (film)

Carr

Who was Carr?

Whig history

Positivism

Are all facts historical facts?

Historian selects facts

Archives of documents, artifacts

All history is contemporary history

Dialogic

Final thoughts on facts

Pragmatics of continuous history

De Certeau

Social space

History as a social space

"Denial of the specificity of a place"

Making history as a practice

Political aspect of making history

Writing: history as representation

Crafton on Jazz Singer

Why does this legend emerge?

Must do source criticism

Finding similarities among historical accounts

Lindstrom, on Chicago, Nickelodeons

How does he move away from previous writing?

Map-making

Jump offs

Sept 10

Screening: Eleanor's catch

Cooper, Universal women

Driving question, mystery, "puzzle"

Criticizes "too easy" cultural approach (xxv)

Criticizes "feminist leadership" explanation

Organizational challenges

Tracing argument

Possibilities

Impossibility

Postscript

Visiting older artifacts, phenomena

Evidence

Crit of the book

Fischer

Generalization article

Steiger on Ince

Archives

Create your reference material per archive

Entering the Herrick archive

Who is the archivist?

Source criticism

Jump offs

Sept 17, Early cinema

Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show

Co-existence of sets and props

Pleasure, voyeurism of breaking things

Singer, Modernity and hyperstim

Methodology

Thesis

Re: The Suburbanites

Schwartz