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history of film , history of cinema , a popular form of mass media , from the 19th century to the present.

(Read Martin Scorsese’s Britannica essay on film preservation.)

Early years, 1830–1910

The illusion of films is based on the optical phenomena known as persistence of vision and the phi phenomenon . The first of these causes the brain to retain images cast upon the retina of the eye for a fraction of a second beyond their disappearance from the field of sight, while the latter creates apparent movement between images when they succeed one another rapidly. Together these phenomena permit the succession of still frames on a film strip to represent continuous movement when projected at the proper speed (traditionally 16 frames per second for silent films and 24 frames per second for sound films). Before the invention of photography, a variety of optical toys exploited this effect by mounting successive phase drawings of things in motion on the face of a twirling disk (the phenakistoscope , c. 1832) or inside a rotating drum (the zoetrope, c. 1834). Then, in 1839, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre , a French painter, perfected the positive photographic process known as daguerreotype , and that same year the English scientist William Henry Fox Talbot successfully demonstrated a negative photographic process that theoretically allowed unlimited positive prints to be produced from each negative. As photography was innovated and refined over the next few decades, it became possible to replace the phase drawings in the early optical toys and devices with individually posed phase photographs, a practice that was widely and popularly carried out.

There would be no true motion pictures, however, until live action could be photographed spontaneously and simultaneously. This required a reduction in exposure time from the hour or so necessary for the pioneer photographic processes to the one-hundredth (and, ultimately, one-thousandth) of a second achieved in 1870. It also required the development of the technology of series photography by the British American photographer Eadweard Muybridge between 1872 and 1877. During that time, Muybridge was employed by Gov. Leland Stanford of California, a zealous racehorse breeder, to prove that at some point in its gallop a horse lifts all four hooves off the ground at once. Conventions of 19th-century illustration suggested otherwise, and the movement itself occurred too rapidly for perception by the naked eye, so Muybridge experimented with multiple cameras to take successive photographs of horses in motion. Finally, in 1877, he set up a battery of 12 cameras along a Sacramento racecourse with wires stretched across the track to operate their shutters. As a horse strode down the track, its hooves tripped each shutter individually to expose a successive photograph of the gallop, confirming Stanford’s belief. When Muybridge later mounted these images on a rotating disk and projected them on a screen through a magic lantern, they produced a “moving picture” of the horse at full gallop as it had actually occurred in life.

The French physiologist Étienne-Jules Marey took the first series photographs with a single instrument in 1882; once again the impetus was the analysis of motion too rapid for perception by the human eye . Marey invented the chronophotographic gun, a camera shaped like a rifle that recorded 12 successive photographs per second, in order to study the movement of birds in flight. These images were imprinted on a rotating glass plate (later, paper roll film), and Marey subsequently attempted to project them. Like Muybridge, however, Marey was interested in deconstructing movement rather than synthesizing it, and he did not carry his experiments much beyond the realm of high-speed, or instantaneous, series photography. Muybridge and Marey, in fact, conducted their work in the spirit of scientific inquiry; they both extended and elaborated existing technologies in order to probe and analyze events that occurred beyond the threshold of human perception. Those who came after would return their discoveries to the realm of normal human vision and exploit them for profit.

In 1887 in Newark, New Jersey , an Episcopalian minister named Hannibal Goodwin developed the idea of using celluloid as a base for photographic emulsions. The inventor and industrialist George Eastman , who had earlier experimented with sensitized paper rolls for still photography, began manufacturing celluloid roll film in 1889 at his plant in Rochester, New York . This event was crucial to the development of cinematography : series photography such as Marey’s chronophotography could employ glass plates or paper strip film because it recorded events of short duration in a relatively small number of images, but cinematography would inevitably find its subjects in longer, more complicated events, requiring thousands of images and therefore just the kind of flexible but durable recording medium represented by celluloid. It remained for someone to combine the principles embodied in the apparatuses of Muybridge and Marey with celluloid strip film to arrive at a viable motion-picture camera .

Such a device was created by French-born inventor Louis Le Prince in the late 1880s. He shot several short films in Leeds, England, in 1888, and the following year he began using the newly invented celluloid film. He was scheduled to show his work in New York City in 1890, but he disappeared while traveling in France. The exhibition never occurred, and Le Prince’s contribution to cinema remained little known for decades. Instead it was William Kennedy Laurie Dickson , working in the West Orange , New Jersey, laboratories of the Edison Company, who created what was widely regarded as the first motion-picture camera.

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Essay Film

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Essay Film by Yelizaveta Moss LAST REVIEWED: 24 March 2021 LAST MODIFIED: 24 March 2021 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199791286-0216

The term “essay film” has become increasingly used in film criticism to describe a self-reflective and self-referential documentary cinema that blurs the lines between fiction and nonfiction. Scholars unanimously agree that the first published use of the term was by Richter in 1940. Also uncontested is that Andre Bazin, in 1958, was the first to analyze a film, which was Marker’s Letter from Siberia (1958), according to the essay form. The French New Wave created a popularization of short essay films, and German New Cinema saw a resurgence in essay films due to a broad interest in examining German history. But beyond these origins of the term, scholars deviate on what exactly constitutes an essay film and how to categorize essay films. Generally, scholars fall into two camps: those who find a literary genealogy to the essay film and those who find a documentary genealogy to the essay film. The most commonly cited essay filmmakers are French and German: Marker, Resnais, Godard, and Farocki. These filmmakers are singled out for their breadth of essay film projects, as opposed to filmmakers who have made an essay film but who specialize in other genres. Though essay films have been and are being produced outside of the West, scholarship specifically addressing essay films focuses largely on France and Germany, although Solanas and Getino’s theory of “Third Cinema” and approval of certain French essay films has produced some essay film scholarship on Latin America. But the gap in scholarship on global essay film remains, with hope of being bridged by some forthcoming work. Since the term “essay film” is used so sparingly for specific films and filmmakers, the scholarship on essay film tends to take the form of single articles or chapters in either film theory or documentary anthologies and journals. Some recent scholarship has pointed out the evolutionary quality of essay films, emphasizing their ability to change form and style as a response to conventional filmmaking practices. The most recent scholarship and conference papers on essay film have shifted from an emphasis on literary essay to an emphasis on technology, arguing that essay film has the potential in the 21st century to present technology as self-conscious and self-reflexive of its role in art.

Both anthologies dedicated entirely to essay film have been published in order to fill gaps in essay film scholarship. Biemann 2003 brings the discussion of essay film into the digital age by explicitly resisting traditional German and French film and literary theory. Papazian and Eades 2016 also resists European theory by explicitly showcasing work on postcolonial and transnational essay film.

Biemann, Ursula, ed. Stuff It: The Video Essay in the Digital Age . New York: Springer, 2003.

This anthology positions Marker’s Sans Soleil (1983) as the originator of the post-structuralist essay film. In opposition to German and French film and literary theory, Biemann discusses video essays with respect to non-linear and non-logical movement of thought and a range of new media in Internet, digital imaging, and art installation. In its resistance to the French/German theory influence on essay film, this anthology makes a concerted effort to include other theoretical influences, such as transnationalism, postcolonialism, and globalization.

Papazian, Elizabeth, and Caroline Eades, eds. The Essay Film: Dialogue, Politics, Utopia . London: Wallflower, 2016.

This forthcoming anthology bridges several gaps in 21st-century essay film scholarship: non-Western cinemas, popular cinema, and digital media.

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The History of Film Timeline — All Eras of Film History Explained

M otion pictures have enticed and inspired artists, audiences, and critics for more than a century. Today, we’re going to explore the history of film by looking at the major movements that have defined cinema worldwide. We’re also going to explore the technical craft of filmmaking from the persistence of vision to colorization to synchronous sound. By the end, you’ll know all the broad strokes in the history of film.

Note: this article doesn’t cover every piece of film history. Some minor movements and technical breakthroughs have been left out – check out the StudioBinder blog for more content.

• Pre-Film: Photographic Techniques and Motion Picture Theory
• The Nascent Film Era (1870s-1910): The First Motion Pictures
• The First Film Movements: Dadaism, German Expressionism, and Soviet Montage Theory
• Manifest Destiny and the End of the Silent Era
• Hollywood Epics and the Pre-Code Era
• The Early Golden Age and the Introduction of Color
• Wartime Film and Cinematic Propaganda
• Post-War Film Movements: French New Wave, Italian Neorealism, Scandinavian Revival, and Bengali Cinema
• The Golden Age of Hollywood: The Studio System and Censorship
• New Hollywood: The Emergence of Global Blockbuster Cinema
• Dogme 95 and the Independent Movement
• New Methods of Cinematic Distribution and the Current State of Film

When Were Movies Invented?

Pre-film techniques and theory.

Movies refer to moving pictures and moving pictures can be traced all the way back to prehistoric times. Have you ever made a shadow puppet show? If you have, then you’ve made a moving picture.

To create a moving picture with your hands is one thing, to utilize a device is another. The camera obscura (believed to have been circulated in the fifth century BCE) is perhaps the oldest photographic device in existence. The camera obscura is a device that’s used to reproduce images by reflecting light through a small peephole.

Here’s a picture of one from Gemma Frisius’ 1545 book De Radio Astronomica et Geometrica :

When Did Movies Start?  •  Camera Obscura in ‘De Radio Astronomica et Geometrica’

Through the camera obscura, we can trace the principles of filmmaking back thousands of years. But despite the technical achievement of the camera obscura, it took many of those years to develop the technology needed to capture moving images then later display them. 

When Was Film Invented?

The first motion pictures.

When were movies invented ? The first motion pictures were incredibly simple – usually just a few frames of people or animals. Eadweard Muybridge’s The Horse in Motion is perhaps the most famous of these early motion pictures. In 1878, Muybridge set up a racing track with 24 cameras to photograph whether horses gallop with all four hooves off the ground at any time

The result was sensational. Muybridge’s pictures set the stage for all coming films; check out a short video on Muybridge and his work below.

When Did the First Movie Come Out?  •  Eadweard Muybridge’s ‘The Horse in Motion’ by San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Muybridge’s job wasn’t done after taking the photographs though; he still had to produce a projection machine to display them. So, Muybridge built a device called the zoopraxiscope, which was regarded as a breakthrough device for motion picture projecting.

Muybridge’s films (and tech) inspired Thomas Edison to study motion picture theory and develop his own camera equipment.

Films as we know them today emerged globally around the turn of the century, circa 1900. Much of that development can be attributed to the works of the Lumière Brothers, who together pioneered the technical craft of moviemaking with their cinematograph projection machine. The Lumière Brothers’ 1895 shorts are regarded as the first commercial films of all-time; though not technically true (remember Muybridge’s work).

French actor and illusionist Georges Méliès attempted to buy a cinematograph from the Lumière Brothers in 1895, but was denied. So, Méliès ventured elsewhere; eventually finding a partner in Englishman Robert W. Paul.

Over the following years, Méliès learned just about everything there was to know about movies and projection machines. Here’s a video on Méliès’ master of film and the illusory arts from Crash Course Film History.

When Were Movies Invented?  •  Georges Méliès – Master of Illusion by Crash Course

Méliès’ shorts The One Man Band (1900) and A Trip to the Moon (1902) are considered two of the most trailblazing films in all of film history. Over the course of his career, Méliès produced over 500 films. His contemporary mastery of visual effects , multiple exposure , and cinematography made him one of the greatest filmmakers of all-time .

Movie History

The first film movements.

War and cinema go together like two peas in a pod. As we continue on through our analysis of the history of film, you’ll start to notice that just about every major movement sprouted in the wake of war. First, the movements that sprouted in response to World War I:

DADAISM AND SURREALISM

History of Motion Pictures  •  Still From ‘Un Chien Andalou’ by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí

Major Dadaist filmmakers: Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dalí, Germaine Dulac.

Major Dadaist films: Return to Reason (1923), The Seashell and the Clergyman (1928), U n Chien  Andalou (1929).

Dadaism – an art movement that began in Zurich, Switzerland during World War I (1915) – rejected authority; effectively laying the groundwork for surrealist cinema . 

Dadaism may have begun in Zurich circa 1915, but it didn’t take off until years later in Paris, France. By 1920, the people of France had expressed a growing disillusionment with the country’s government and economy. Sound familiar?

That’s because they’re the same points of conflict that incited the French Revolution. But this time around, the French people revolted in a different way: with art. And not just any art: bonkers, crazy, absurd, anti-this, anti-that art. 

It’s important to note that Paris wasn’t the only place where dadaist art was being created. But it was the place where most of the dadaist, surrealist film was being created. We’ll get to dadaist film in a short bit, but first, let’s review a quick video on Dada art from Curious Muse.

Where Did Film Originate?  •  Dadaism in 8 Minutes by Curious Muse

Salvador Dalí, Germaine Dulac, and Luis Buñuel were some of the forefront faces of the surrealist film movement of the 1920s. French filmmakers, such as Jean Epstein and Jean Renoir experimented with surrealist films during this era as well.

Dalí and Buñuel’s 1929 film Un Chien Andalou is undoubtedly one of the most influential surrealist/dadaist films. Let’s check out a clip:

History of Movies  •  ‘Un Chien Andalou’ Clip

The influence of Un Chien Andalou on surrealist cinema can’t be quantified; key similarities can be seen between the film and the works of Walt Disney, David Lynch , Terry Gilliam , and other surrealist directors.

Learn more about surrealism in film →

GERMAN EXPRESSIONISM 

The Creation of Film and German Expressionism  •  Still From ‘The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari’ by Robert Wiene

• German Expressionism – an art movement defined by monumentalist structures and ideas – began before World War I but didn’t take off in popularity until after the war, much like the Dadaist movement.
• Major German Expressionist filmmakers: Fritz Lang, F.W. Murnau, Robert Wiene 
• Major German Expressionist films: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), Nosferatu (1922), and Metropolis   (1927).

German Expressionism changed everything for the “look” and “feel” of cinema. When you think of German Expressionism, think contrast, gothic, dark, brooding imagery and colored filters. Here’s a quick video on the German Expressionist movement from Crash Course:

History of Film Timeline  •  German Expressionism Explained

The great works of the German Expressionist movement are some of the earliest movies I consider accessible to modern audiences. Perhaps no German Expressionist film proves this point better than Fritz Lang’s M ; which was the ultimate culmination of the movement’s stylistic tenets. Check out the trailer for M below.

Most Important Film in History of German Expressionism  •  ‘M’ (1931) Trailer, Restored by BFI

M not only epitomized the “monster” tone of the German Expressionist era, it set the stage for all future psychological thrillers. The film also pioneered sound engineering in film through the clever use of diegetic and non-diegetic sound . Fun fact: it was also one of the first movies to incorporate a leitmotif as part of its soundtrack.

Over time, the stylistic flourishes of the German Expressionist movement gave way to new voices – but its influence lived on in monster-horror and chiaroscuro lighting techniques. 

Learn more about German Expressionism →

SOVIET MONTAGE THEORY

Film History 101  •  The Odessa Steps in ‘Battleship Potemkin’

• Soviet Montage Theory – a Soviet Russian film movement that helped establish the principles of film editing – took place from the 1910s to the 1930s. 
• Major Soviet Montage Theory filmmakers: Lev Kuleshov, Sergei Eisenstein , Dziga Vertov.
• Major Soviet Montage Theory films: Kino-Eye (1924), Battleship Potemkin (1925), Man With a Movie Camera (1929).

Soviet Montage Theory was a deconstructionist film movement, so as to say it wasn’t as interested in making movies as it was taking movies apart… or seeing how they worked. That being said, Soviet Montage Theory did produce some classics.

Here’s a video on Soviet Montage Theory from Filmmaker IQ:

Eras of Movies  •  The History of Cutting in Soviet Montage Theory by Filmmaker IQ

The Bolshevik government set-up a film school called VGIK (the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography) after the Russian Revolution. The practitioners of Soviet Montage Theory were the OG members of the “film school generation;” Kuleshov and Eisenstein were their teachers.

Battleship Potemkin was the most noteworthy film to come out of the Soviet Montage Theory movement. Check out an awesome analysis from One Hundred Years of Cinema below.

History of Film Summary  •  How Sergei Eisenstein Used Montage to Film the Unfilmable by One Hundred Years of Cinema

Soviet Montage Theory begged filmmakers to arrange, deconstruct, and rearrange film clips to better communicate emotional associations to audiences. The legacy of Soviet Montage Theory lives on in the form of the Kuleshov effect and contemporary montages .

Learn more about Soviet Montage Theory →

When Did Movies Become Popular?

The end of the silent era.

There was no Hollywood in the early years of American cinema – there was only Thomas Edison’s Motion Picture Patents Company in New Jersey.

Ever wonder why Europe seemed to dominate the early years of film? Well it was because Thomas Edison sued American filmmakers into oblivion. Edison owned a litany of U.S. patents on camera tech – and he wielded his stamps of ownership with righteous fury. The Edison Manufacturing Company did produce some noteworthy early films – such as 1903’s The Great Train Robbery – but their gaps were few and far between.

To escape Edison’s legal monopoly, filmmakers ventured west, all the way to Southern California. 

Fortunate for the nomads: the arid temperature and mountainous terrain of Southern California proved perfect for making movies. By the early 1910s, Hollywood emerged as the working capital of the United States’s movie industry.

Director/actors like Charlie Chaplin , Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton became stars – but remember, movies were silent, and people knew there would be an acoustic revolution in cinema. Before we move on from the Silent Era, check out this great video from Crash Course.

When Did Movies Become Popular?  •  The Silent Era by Crash Course

The Silent Era holds an important place in film history – but it was mostly ushered out in 1927 with The Jazz Singer . Al Jolson singing in The Jazz Singer is considered the first time sound ever synchronized with a feature film . Over the next few years, Hollywood cinema exploded in popularity. This short period from 1927-1934 is known as pre-Code Hollywood.

When Did Hollywood Start?

Pre-code hollywood.

In our previous section, we touched on the rise of Hollywood, but not the Hollywood epic. The Hollywood epic, which we regard as longer in duration and wider in scope than the average movie, set the stage for blockbuster cinema. So, let’s quickly touch on the history of Hollywood epics before jumping into pre-code Hollywood.

It’s impossible to talk about Hollywood epics without bringing up D.W. Griffith. Griffith was an American film director who created a lot of what we consider “the structure” of feature films. His 1915 epic The Birth of a Nation brought the technique of cinematic storytelling into the future, while consequently keeping its subject matter in the objectionable past.

For more on Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (and its complicated legacy), check out this poignant interview clip with Spike Lee . 

History of Filmmaking  •  Spike Lee on ‘The Birth of a Nation’

As Lee suggests, it’s important to acknowledge the technical achievement of films like The Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind without condoning their horrid subject matter. 

As another great director once said: “tomorrow’s democracy discriminates against discrimination. Its charter won’t include the freedom to end freedom.” – Orson Welles.

Griffith made more than a few Hollywood epics in his time, but none were more famous than The Birth of a Nation .

Okay, now that we reviewed the foundations of the Hollywood epic, let’s move on to pre-code Hollywood.

PRE-CODE HOLLYWOOD

A History of Film  •  James Cagney in ‘The Public Enemy’

• Pre-Code Hollywood – a period in Hollywood history after the advent of sound but before the institution of the Hays Code – circa ~1927-1934.
• Major Pre-Code stars: Ruth Chatterton, Warren William, James Cagney.
• Major Pre-Code films: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931), The Public Enemy (1931), Baby Face (1933).

Pre-Code Hollywood was wild. Not just wild in an uninhibited sense, but in a thematic sense too. Films produced during the pre-Code era often focused on illicit subject matter, like bootlegging, prostitution, and murder – that wasn't the status quo for Hollywood – and it wouldn’t be again until 1968.

We’ll get to why that year is important for film history in a bit, but first let’s review pre-Code Hollywood with a couple of selected scenes from Kevin Wentink on YouTube.

Movie Film History  •  Pre-Code Classic Clips

Pre-Code movies were jubilant in their creativity; largely because they were uncensored . But alas, their period was short-lived. In 1934, MPPDA Chairman William Hays instituted the Motion Picture Production Code banning explicit depictions of sex, violence, and other “sinful” deeds in movies. 

Learn more about Pre-Code Hollywood →

Development of Movies

The early golden age and color in film.

The 1930s and early 1940s produced some of the greatest movies of all-time – but they also changed everything about the movie-making process. By the end of the Pre-Code era, the free independent spirit of filmmaking had all but evaporated; Hollywood studios had vertically integrated their business operations, which meant they conceptualized, produced, and distributed everything “in-house.”

That doesn’t mean movies made during these years were bad though. Quite the contrary – perhaps the two greatest American films ever made, Citizen Kane and Casablanca , were made between 1934 and 1944.

But despite their enormous influence, neither Citizen Kane nor Casablanca could hold a candle to the influence of another film from this decade: The Wizard of Oz .

The Wizard of Oz wasn’t the first film to use Technicolor , but it was credited with bringing color to the masses. For more on the industry-altering introduction of color, check out this video on The Wizard of Oz from Vox.

When Was Color Movies Invented?  •  How Technicolor Changed Movies

Technicolor was groundbreaking for cinema, but the dye-transfer process of its colorization was hard… and cost prohibitive for studios. So, camera manufacturers experimented with new processes to streamline color photography. Overtime, they were rewarded with new technologies and techniques.

Learn more about Technicolor →

Cinema Eras

Wartime and propaganda films.

In 1937, Benito Mussolini founded Cinecittà , a massive studio that operated under the slogan “Il cinema è l'arma più forte,” which translates to “the cinema is the strongest weapon.” During this time, countries all around the world used cinema as a weapon to influence the minds and hearts of their citizens.

This was especially true in the United States – prolific directors like Frank Capra, John Ford, John Huston, George Stevens, and William Wyler enlisted in the U.S. Armed Forces to make movies to support the U.S. war cause. 

Documentarian Laurent Bouzereau made a three-part series about the war films of Capra, Ford, Huston, Stevens, and Wyler. Check out the trailer for Five Came Back below.

A History of Film  •  Five Came Back Trailer

Wartime film is important to explore because it teaches us about how people interpret propaganda. For posterity’s sake, let’s define propaganda as biased information that’s used to promote political points.

Propaganda films are often regarded with a negative connotation because they sh0w a one-sided perspective. Films of this era – such as those commissioned for the US Department of War’s Why We Fight series – were one-sided because they were made to counter the enemy’s rhetoric. It’s important to note that “one-sided” doesn’t mean “wrong” – in the case of the Why We Fight series, I think most people would agree that the one-sidedness was appropriate. 

Over time, wartime film became more nuanced – a point proven by the 1966 masterwork The Battle of Algiers .

History of Movies

Post-war film movements.

Global cinema underwent a renaissance after World War II; technically, creatively, and conceptually. We’re going to cover a few of the most prominent post-war film movements, starting with Italian Neorealism.

ITALIAN NEOREALISM

Movie Film History  •  Still from Vittorio De Sica’s ‘Umberto D.’

• Italian Neorealism (1944-1960) – an Italian film movement that brought filmmaking to the streets; defined by depictions of the Italian state after World War II.
• Major Italian Neorealist film-makers: Vittorio De Sica, Roberto Rossellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, Luchino Visconti, Federico Fellini .
• Major Italian Neorealist films: Rome, Open City (1945), Bicycle Thieves (1948), La Strada (1954), Il Posto (1961).

Martin Scorcese called Italian Neorealism “the rehabilitation of an entire culture and people through cinema.” World War II devastated the Italian state: socially, economically, and culturally.

It took people’s lives and jobs, but perhaps more importantly, it took their humanity. After the War, the people needed an outlet of expression, and a place to reconstruct a new national identity. Here’s a quick video on Italian Neorealism.

Movie History  •  How Italian Neorealism Brought the Grit of the Streets to the Big Screen by No Film School

Italian Neorealism produced some of the greatest films ever made. There’s some debate as to when the movement started and ended – some say 1943-1954, others say 1945-1955 – but I say it started with Rome, Open City and ended with Il Posto . Why? Because those movies perfectly encompass the defining arc of Italian Neorealism, from street-life after World War II to the rise of bureaucracy. Rome, Open City shows Italy in the thick of chaos, and Il Posto shows Italy on the precipice of a new era.

The legacy of Italian Neorealism lives on in the independent filmmaking of directors like Richard Linklater, Steven Soderbergh, and Sean Baker.

Learn more about Italian Neorealism →

FRENCH NEW WAVE

Development of Movies  •  Still From Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless

• French New Wave (1950s onwards) – or La Nouvelle Rogue, a French art movement popularized by critics, defined by experimental ideas – inspired by old-Hollywood and progressive editing techniques from Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock.
• Major French New Wave filmmakers: Jean-Luc Godard , François Truffaut , Agnes Varda.
• Major French New Wave films: The 400 Blows (1959), Breathless (1960), Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962).

The French New Wave proliferated the auteur theory , which suggests the director is the author of a movie; which makes sense considering a lot of the best French New Wave films featured minimalist narratives. Take Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless for example: the story is secondary to audio and visuals. The French New Wave was about independent filmmaking – taking a camera into the streets and making a movie by any means necessary. 

Here’s a quick video on The French New Wave by The Cinema Cartography.

History of Filmmaking  •  Breaking the Rules With the French New Wave by The Cinema Cartography

It’s important to note that the pioneers of the French New Wave weren’t amateurs – most (but not all) were critics at Cahiers du cinéma , a respected French film magazine. Writers like Godard, Rivette, and Chabrol knew what they were doing long before they released their great works. 

Other directors, like Agnes Varda and Alain Resnais, were members of the Left Bank, a somewhat more traditionalist art group. Left Bank directors tended to put more emphasis on their narratives as opposed to their Cahiers du cinéma counterparts.

The French New popularized (but did not invent) innovative filmmaking techniques like jump cuts and tracking shots . The influence of the French New Wave can be seen in music videos, existentialist cinema, and French film noir .

Learn more about the French New Wave → 

Learn more about the Best French New Wave Films →

SCANDINAVIAN REVIVAL

A History of Film  •  Still from Ingmar Bergman’s ‘The Seventh Seal’

• Scandinavian Revival (1940s-1950s) – a filmmaking movement in Scandinavia, particularly Denmark and Sweden, defined by monochrome visuals, philosophical quandaries, and reinterpretations of religious ideals.
• Major Scandinavian Revival filmmakers: Carl Theodor Dreyer and Ingmar Bergman.
• Major Scandinavian Revival films: Day of Wrath (1943), The Seventh Seal (1957), Wild Strawberries (1957).

Swedish, Danish, and Finnish films have played an important role in cinema for more than 100 years. The Scandinavian Revival – or renaissance of Scandinavian-centric films from the 1940s-1950s – put the films of Sweden, Denmark, and Finland in front of the world stage.

Here’s a quick video on the works of the most famous Scandinavian director of all-time: Ingmar Bergman .

History of Cinema  •  Ingmar Bergman’s Cinema by The Criterion Collection

The influence of Scandinavian Revival can be seen in the works of Danish directors like Thomas Vinterberg and Lars von Trier , as well as countless other filmmakers around the world.

BENGALI CINEMA

History of Motion Pictures  •  Still from Satyajit Ray’s ‘Pather Panchali’

• Bengali Cinema – or the cinema of West Bengal; also known as Tollywood, helped develop arthouse films parallel to the mainstream Indian cinema.
• Major Bengali filmmakers: Satyajit Ray and Mrinal Sen.
• Major Bengali films: Pather Panchali (1955) and Bhuvan Shome (1969).

The Indian film industry is the biggest film industry in the world. Each year, India produces more than a thousand feature-films. When most people think of Indian cinema, they think of Bollywood “song and dance” masalas – but did you know the country underwent a New Wave (similar to France, Italy, and Scandinavia) after World War II? The influence of the Indian New Wave, or classic Bengali cinema, is hard to quantify; perhaps it’s better expressed by the efforts of the Academy Film Archive, Criterion Collection, and L'Immagine Ritrovata film restoration artists. Here's an introduction to one of India's greatest directors, Satyajit Ray.

Evolution of Cinema  •  How Satyajit Ray Directs a Movie

In 2020, Martin Scorsese said, “In the relatively short history of cinema, Satyajit Ray is one of the names that we all need to know, whose films we all need to see.” Ray is undoubtedly one of the preeminent masters of international cinema – and his name belongs in the conversation with Hitchcock, Renoir, Kurosawa, Welles, and all the other trailblazing filmmakers of the mid-20th century.

Learn more about Indian Cinema →

OTHER POST-WAR & NEW WAVE MOVEMENTS

How Has Film Changed Over Time?  •  Still from Akira Kurosawa’s ‘Stray Dog’

Italy, France, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and India weren’t the only countries that underwent “New Waves” after World War II; Japan, Iran, Great Britain, and Russia had minor film revolutions as well.

In Japan, directors like Akira Kurosawa and Yasujirō Ozu introduced new filmmaking techniques to the masses; their 1940s-1950s films were great, but some filmmakers, like Hiroshi Teshigahara and Nagisa Ōshima felt they were better suited to make films about “modern” Japan. 

Here’s a quick video on the Japanese New Wave from Film Studies for YouTube.

Cinema Eras  •  Japanese New Wave Video Essay by Film Studies for YouTube

Some cinema historians combine the Japanese New Wave with the post-war era. For simplicity’s sake, we’ll do the same: the major films of this era (1940s-1960s) include Rashomon (1950), Tokyo Story (1953), and Seven Samurai (1954).

The Iranian New Wave began about fifteen years after the end of World War II, circa 1960-onwards. Iranian cinema is an important part of Iranian culture. Here’s a quick video on Iranian cinema from BBC News.

Important Dates in Film History  •  Spotlight on Iran’s Film Industry via BBC News

Cinema historians widely consider Dariush Mehrjui’s The Cow (1969) to be a foundational film for the movement. Abbas Kiarostami is perhaps the most famous Iranian filmmaker of all-time. His film Close-Up (1990) is regarded as one of the greatest films ever produced in Iran.

The British New Wave was a minor film movement that was defined by kitchen-sink realism – or depictions of ordinary life. Many filmmakers of the British New Wave were critics before they were directors; and they wanted to depict the average life of Britain through a filmic eye.

Here’s a lecture on the British New Wave from Professor Ian Christie at Gresham College. 

History of Filmmaking  •  Street-Life and New Wave British Cinema by Gresham College

The British New Wave became synonymous with Cinéma vérité (cinema of truth) over the course of its brief existence. Some of the major pictures of the movement include: Look Back in Anger (1959) and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960).

Russian cinema is complex… probably just as complex as American cinema. We could spend 100 pages talking about Russian cinema – but that’s not the focus of this article. We already talked about Soviet Montage Theory, so let’s skip ahead to post World War II Soviet cinema. 

When I think of post-war Soviet cinema, I think of one name: Andrei Tarkovsky . Tarkovsky directed internationally-renowned films like Andrei Rublev (1969), Solaris (1972), and Stalker (1979) in his brief career as the Soviet Union’s pre-eminent maestro. 

Here’s a deep dive into the works of Tarkovsky by “Like Stories of Old.”

Film Industry Timeline  •  Praying Through Cinema – Understanding Andrei Tarkovsky by Like Stories of Old

Tarkovsky wasn’t the only great filmmaker in the post-war Soviet Union – but he was probably the best. I’d be remiss if I didn’t use this section to focus on him. 

History of Film Timeline

The golden age of hollywood.

The Hollywood Golden Age began with the fall of pre-Code Hollywood (1934) and lasted until the birth of New Hollywood (1968).

• Major stars of the Hollywood Golden Age: Humphrey Bogart, Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn, Audrey Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor, Clark Gable, Ingrid Bergman, Henry Fonda, Kirk Douglas, Gregory Peck, Lauren Bacall, Grace Kelly, James Dean, Marlon Brando.
• Major filmmakers of the Hollywood Golden Age: Cecil B. DeMille , Orson Welles , Billy Wilder , Frank Capra , John Huston , Alfred Hitchcock , John Ford , Elia Kazan , David Lean , Joseph Manckiewicz.

Notice how many names we included? It’s ridiculous – it would be wrong to omit any of them; and still, there are probably dozens of iconic figures missing. The Hollywood Golden Age was all about stars. Stars sold pictures and the studios knew it. “Hepburn” could sell a movie every time; it didn’t matter which Hepburn – or what the movie was about.

Here’s a breakdown of the Hollywood Golden Age from Crash Course.

History of Movies  •  The Golden Age of Hollywood by Crash Course

There are a few sub-eras within the Hollywood Golden Age era; let’s break them down in detail.

Important Dates in Film History  •  Photo of MPPDA Chairman William Hays

In 1934, Chairman William Hays of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America instituted a production code that banned graphic cinematic depictions of sex, violence, and other illicit deeds. 

The “Production Code” or “ Hays Code ” was responsible for the censorship of Hollywood films for 34 years. 

For more on the history of Hollywood censorship and movie ratings, check out the video from Filmmaker IQ below.

How Has Film Changed Over Time?  •  History of Hollywood Censorship by Filmmaker IQ

The Hays Code kept cinema tame, which led to Hollywood romanticism. But it also made cinema unrealistic, which made the American public yearn for improbable outcomes. Not to mention that it set race relations back an indeterminable amount of years. The Hays Code specifically forbade miscegenation, or “the breeding of people of different races.” 

Ultimately, the censorship of Hollywood films was about keeping power in the hands of people with power. It had some positive unintended outcomes – but it wasn’t worth the cost of suppression.

Learn more about the Hays Code →

Learn more about the history of movie censorship →

Film Industry Timeline  •  Still from Nicholas Ray’s ‘In a Lonely Place’

Film noir is a style of film that’s defined by moralistic themes, high contrast lighting, and mysterious plots. Oftentimes, film noirs feature hardboiled protagonists . It’s important to note that film noir is a style, not a film movement. As such, we won’t list “film noir directors,” but we will list some iconic examples of film noir.

Major Hollywood film noirs: The Maltese Falcon (1941), Double Indemnity (1944), Sunset Boulevard (1950).

Hollywood film noirs were inspired by classic detective fiction stories, like those of Arthur Conan Doyle and Edgar Allan Poe. Over time, film noir was adopted as a style around the world – most famously in Great Britain with Carol Reed’s The Third Man .

Here’s a video on defining film noir from Jack’s Movie Reviews.

Eras of Movies  •  Defining Film Noir by Jack’s Movie Reviews

We could spend another 50 pages on film noir (like many other topics in this compendium) – but instead, let’s continue on.

Learn more about film noir →

How Movies Have Changed Over Time  •  Still from John Ford’s ‘The Searchers’

Hollywood westerns were incredibly popular during the Golden Age. Why? Because the American people loved stories of lawlessness and expansion, dating all the way back to Erastus Beadle’s dime novels – making the western the perfect subgenre for vicarious cinema.

Major Hollywood westerns: Stagecoach (1939), High Noon (1952), The Searchers (1956). 

Westerns, much like film noirs, allowed repressed audiences to feel alive at the movie theater. Remember: Hollywood films were censored during the Golden Age, which meant you couldn’t find graphic violence or pornography at the theaters. So, audiences took what they could get – which was usually film noirs and Westerns.

Here’s a video on the history of Westerns in Hollywood cinema. 

Evolution of Film  •  Western Movies History by Ministry of Cinema

Hollywood westerns inspired a global fascination with cowboys, mercenaries, and gunslingers, directly leading to samurai cinema, spaghetti westerns, zapata westerns, and neo-westerns.

Learn more about Spaghetti Westerns →

Learn more about Neo-Westerns →

McCARTHYISM & THE BLACKLIST

How Movies Have Changed Over Time  •  Bryan Cranston as Blacklisted Screenwriter Dalton Trumbo

In 1947, the state of Wisconsin elected notorious fear-monger Joseph McCarthy as senator of their state. McCarthy hated free-speech – that’s not a one-sided perspective, that’s the truth. McCarthy spent his entire career demagoguing, and his legacy shows that. 

In 1950, ten Hollywood screenwriters were summoned to appear before the United States Congress House of Un-American Activities, largely because of McCarthy's divisive rhetoric against communist sympathizers. The screenwriters were cited for contempt of congress and fired from their jobs, and thus, the blacklist was born.

For more on McCarthyism and the Hollywood blacklist , check out the video from Ted-Ed below.

The History of Film  •  McCarthyism and the Blacklist by Ted-Ed

The Hollywood blacklist derailed the careers of hundreds of writers, directors, and producers from 1950-1960. The blacklist ended when Kirk Douglas credited Dalton Trumbo – one of the most famous blacklisted screenwriters – as the screenwriter of Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus , effectively taking back control of Hollywood.

Learn more about the Hollywood Blacklist →

THE PARAMOUNT CASE

The History of Film  •  Paramount Studios Classic Style Logo

In 1948, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that the five major motion picture studios: Paramount, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), Warner Bros., 20th Century Fox, and RKO violated the U.S. Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890.

As a result of the decision, movie studios could no longer solely create and distribute movies to their own theaters.

It may not sound important, but the Paramount Case changed everything for American cinema. Here’s a quick video on the Case and its lasting impact on Hollywood.

The History of Filmmaking  •  Film History 101: The Paramount Decree by Omar Rivera

The Paramount Case opened the door for international films and independent theaters. It also gave businesses more freedom to show movies outside of the MPPDA ratings system.

Evolution of Cinema

New hollywood.

Movie History  •  Still from Arthur Penn’s’ Bonnie and Clyde’

• New Hollywood, otherwise known as the Hollywood New Wave, introduced “the film school generation” to Hollywood. New Hollywood films are defined as larger in scope, darker in subject matter, and overtly more graphic than their Golden Age predecessors.
• Major New Hollywood filmmakers: George Lucas , Steven Spielberg , Martin Scorsese , Brian De Palma , Peter Bogdanovich, Woody Allen , Francis Ford Coppola , James Cameron .
• Major New Hollywood films: Bonnie and Clyde (1967), The Graduate (1967), Easy Rider (1969), Midnight Cowboy (1969), The Godfather (1972), American Graffiti (1973).

New Hollywood ushered American filmmaking into a new era by returning to the popular genres of the pre-Code era, such as gangster films and sex-centric films. It also marked the emergence of “film-school” directors like George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and Martin Scorsese. It’s clear from watching New Hollywood films that the writers and directors who produced them were acutely aware of cinema history. 

During this era, writers like Woody Allen employed themes of existentialist cinema found in the French New Wave and Italian Neorealism (among other movements). Directors like Martin Scorsese utilized advanced framing techniques pioneered by masters of the pre-war era.

For more on New Hollywood, check out this feature documentary based Peter Biskind's seminal book "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls."

Movie History  •  How New Hollywood Was Born

New Hollywood (and its immediate aftermath) produced some of the greatest films of all-time: such as The Godfather (1972), The Godfather Part II (1974), Chinatown   (1974), Taxi Driver (1976), Network (1976), and Annie Hall (1977).

Somewhat tragically, New Hollywood ended with the emergence of blockbuster films – such as Jaws (1975) and Star Wars (1977) – in the mid to late 1970s.

Learn more about New Hollywood →

Eras of Movies

Dogme 95 and independent movements.

Big-budget movies dominated the movie-scene after New Hollywood ended. Suddenly, cinema became more of a spectacle than an art-form. That’s not to say movies produced during this era (1975-1995) were bad – some big-budget films, like Back to the Future (1985) and   Jurassic Park (1993) were financially successful and critically acclaimed; and writer/directors like John Hughes found enormous success making studio films about seemingly mundane life. 

But despite the financial prospect of making contrived studio films, some filmmakers decided to go back to their roots and make films independently, much in the vein of the artists of the French New Wave. This spirit inspired the Danish Dogme 95 movement and the American Independent movement.

Evolution of Film  •  Photo Still from ‘Festen’ by Thomas Vinterberg

D0gme 95 – a Danish film movement that brought filmmaking back to its primal roots: no non-diegetic sound, no superficial action, and no director credit. 

Major Dogme 95 filmmakers: Thomas Vinterberg and Lars von Trier

Major Dogme 95 films: Dogme #1 – Festen (1998), Dogme #2 – The Idiots (1998), Dogme #12 – Italian for Beginners (2000).

It’s ironic that Dogme 95 , which states the director must not be credited, is perhaps best known for the fame of two of its founders: Thomas Vinterberg and Lars von Trier. Dogme 95 sought to rid cinema of extravagant special effects and challenging productions by making the filmmaking process as simple as possible. To do this, its founders created the Vows of Chastity: a ten-part manifesto for Dogme 95 filmmaking.

Check out a video on the Vows of Chastity and Dogme 95 below.

History of Cinema  •  Vows of Chastity – Films of Dogme 95 by FilmStruck

Ultimately, the Vows of Chastity proved too limiting for filmmakers – but their influence lives on in New Danish cinema and independent films all over the world.

Learn more about Dogme 95 →

History of Cinema  •  Still from Kevin Smith’s ‘Clerks’

Indie film – or late 80s, early 90s cinema produced outside of the major motion picture system – was about experimenting with new cinematic forms, pushing the Generation Next agenda, and making art by any means necessary. 

Major indie filmmakers: Richard Linklater , Wes Anderson , Steven Soderbergh , Jim Jarmusch . 

Major indie films: Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989), Slacker (1990), and Bottle Rocket (1994).

The American indie movement launched the careers of a myriad of great directors. It also marked the beginning of a major decline for film. The advent of digital cameras and DVDs meant film was becoming a luxury. Conversely, it meant procuring the necessary equipment needed to make movies was easier than ever.

Indie-films introduced the idea that anybody could make movies. For better or worse, the point proved to be true. The '90s and early 2000s were littered with independently produced, scarcely funded movies. It was unrestrained, but it was also liberating.

Check out this video on no-budget filmmaking from The Royal Ocean Film Society to learn more about the indie movement.

Evolution of Cinema  •  Lessons for the No-Budget Feature by The Royal Ocean Film Society

The indie movement (as it was known then) ended when the major studios (like Disney and Turner) bought the independent studios (like Miramax and New Line). Today, we often refer to minimalist, low-budget movies as independent, but the truth is just about every production studio is owned by a conglomerate.

How Has the Film Industry Changed?

New distribution methods.

The current state of cinema is in flux due to a wide array of issues, including (but not limited to) the economic impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, the wide-adoption of new streaming services from first-party producers, i.e. Netflix, Disney, Paramount, etc., and the growth of new media forms.

Over the last few years, big-budget epics like Marvel’s The Avengers and Star Wars have performed well at the U.S. and Chinese box-office, but their success has often come at the expense of medium-budget movies; the result being a deeper lining of the pockets of exorbitantly wealthy corporations.

Still, there’s a lot of money to be made – a point perhaps best proven by the rise of the Chinese film industry. In 2020, China overtook North America as the world’s biggest box-office market, per THR. Check out a video on Hengdian, China’s largest film studio from South China Morning Report.

Movie History  •  Inside China’s Largest Film Studio by South China Morning Report

Movies seem to get bigger and bigger every year but the development of computer-generated-imagery and compositing techniques has given filmmakers the technology to create vast worlds in limited spaces.

So: what’s next for film? Who’s to say for certain? The future of the industry looks cloudy – but there’s definite promise on the horizon. More people have cinema-capable cameras in their pocket today than ever before. Perhaps the next great movement will take off soon.

Related Posts

• What is CinemaScope  →
• When Was the Camera Invented →
• What Was the First Movie Ever Made  →

100 Years of Cinematography

The history of film includes a lot more than what we went over here. In 2019, the American Society of Cinematographers celebrated 100 years of great cinematography with a list of legendary works. In our next article, we break down some of the ASC’s choices with video examples. Follow along as we look at the work of Conrad Hall, Vittorio Storaro, and more.

Up Next: Best Cinematography of All-Time →

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The secret history of the essay film

Charting the resurgence of ‘sort of documentaries’ to celebrate chris marker, king of the essay film.

“Essay films are arguably the most innovative and popular form of filmmaking since the 1990s,” wrote Timothy Corrigan in his notable 2011 book,  The Essay Film . True, perhaps, but mention of the genre to your average joe won’t spark the instant recognition of today’s romcoms, sci-fis and period dramas. The thing is, essay films have been around since the dawn of cinema: they emerged not long after the  Lumière brothers  recorded the first ever motion pictures of Lyonnaise factory workers in 1894, yet their definition is still ambiguous.

They are similar to documentary and non-fiction film in that they are often based in reality, using words, images and sounds to convey a message. But according to Chris Darke – co-curator of the Whitechapel Gallery’s current retrospective  of the great essay filmmaker Chris Marker – it is “the personal aspect and style of address” that makes the essay film distinct. It is this flexibility that has appealed to contemporary filmmakers, permitting a fresh, nuanced viewing experience.

Geoff Andrew, a senior programmer at the BFI who helped curate last year’s landmark essay film season, explained, “they are sort of documentaries, sort of non-fiction films.” The issue is that some filmmakers try to provide an objective point of view when it is just not possible. “There’s always somebody manipulating footage and manipulating reality to present some sort of message.” Andrew continued, “So, in a way, all documentaries are essay films.”

But the essay film is particularly resurgent these days, with filmmakers like Michael Moore , Werner Herzog , and Nick Broomfield  molding the genre in their own ways. Their popularity isn’t just due to incendiary topics like men getting eaten by bears as in Herzog’s Grizzly Man  and high school massacres as in Moore’s Bowling for Columbine ; essay films are capable of compelling beauty. Now, with the Whitechapel Gallery ’s retrospective of the late Frenchman, Chris Marker , arguably the greatest essay filmmaker there’s ever been, we take a look at the essay film’s secret history.

1909  -  D. W. Griffith ’s   A Corner in Wheat

Considered by some to be the first essay film ever, A Corner in Wheat  is a little subversive thorn in the side of the man. Lasting only 14 minutes, it tells the tale of a ruthless crop gambler who amasses riches by monopolising the wheat market, exploits the agricultural poor, and is promptly killed under a pile of his own grain. Think twice, greedy capitalists.

1929  -   Dziga  Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera

“The film drama is the opium of the people,” proclaimed Soviet film pioneer  Dziga Vertov , “down with Bourgeois fairy-tale scenarios.” He was the most radical of his fellow Soviet filmmaker compatriots, and Man with a Movie Camera  was his masterpiece. In it, he tried to create an “international language of cinema” through a beguiling mix of jump cuts, split screens and superimpositions. Vertov’s idea was to uncover the artifice of filmmaking, with one scene of the film depicting a cameraman inside a giant beer.

1940  -  Hans Richter’s The Film Essay

The term “essay film” was originally coined by German artist Hans Richter, who wrote in his 1940 paper, The Film Essay : “The film essay enables the filmmaker to make the ‘invisible’ world of thoughts and ideas visible on the screen... The essay film produces complex thought – reflections that are not necessarily bound to reality, but can also be contradictory, irrational, and fantastic.” So while World War II was blazing away, a new cinema was born.

1982  - Chris  Marker’s Sans Soleil

You know that this brilliant, freewheeling travelogue is something special when it suggests that Pac-Man is “a perfect graphic metaphor for the human condition.” It takes in anti-colonial struggles, sumo wrestling, a volcanic eruption in Iceland, the antiquities of the Vatican, Marker’s love of cats and more. An unnamed female narrates a circuitous journey from Africa to Japan, in an engaging style never seen before. Some might say he laid down a marker.

1993  -  Derek Jarman’s Blue

Diagnosed with HIV and beginning to lose his eyesight, Jarman  decided to turn his illness into his art. Although the premise of nothing but a dim, blue background accompanied by voiceovers for 79 minutes might not seem enthralling, it really is. Jarman recalls memories of his past lovers, and his current life of endless pill-popping, with a poignant score by Brian Eno  and Simon Fisher Turner .

1998 - Jean -Luc  Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinema

Comprised of hundreds of clips of films, music and poetry, this eight part series – that took over a decade to make – remained a secret seen only at a precious few film festivals thanks to the gargantuan amount of rights needed to be cleared. Histoire(s) du cinema is an epic of free association whose central theme is voyeurism, since Godard believes that cinema consists of a man looking at a woman. Harriet Andersson , topless and alluring on a beach in Ingmar Bergman ’s Monika , is one of many examples.

2004  -  Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11

The most successful documentary at the US box office ever, Fahrenheit 9/11  is a prime example of the essay film’s wild popularisation (it also won the Palme d’Or  at Cannes). Michael Moore ’s swipe at the Republican jugular was a classic example of the essay filmmaker’s prominence, outrightly mocking President George W. Bush and questioning the fairness of his election. Disney refused to distribute the film, and the rest is history.

2010  -  Errol Morris’ Tabloid

Tabloid is the outrageous story of a former Miss Wyoming, Joyce McKinney, who was alleged to have kidnapped an American mormon missionary living in England, handcuffed him to a bed in a Devonshire cottage and made him a sex slave. The woman claimed she was saving the man from a cult, but then fleed to Canada wearing a red wig, where she posed as part of a mime troupe. As ever, Errol Morris  deftly offers alternate explanations, which led to McKinney suing him after the release of the film.

2014  -  Hito Steyerl’s How Not To Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educationa l

After touring galleries of the world and a recent stint at the ICA, Hito Steyerl ’s How Not To Be Seen made waves as “an art for our times”. It is a disembowelling satire that mocks the idea that it we can become invisible and have genuine privacy, in this digital age. If we want to disappear, it suggests, we should become poor, or hide in plain sight, or get “disappeared” by the authorities.

Chris Marker: A Grin Without a Cat is on until 22 June at  Whitechapel Gallery

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The essay film

In recent years the essay film has attained widespread recognition as a particular category of film practice, with its own history and canonical figures and texts. In tandem with a major season throughout August at London’s BFI Southbank, Sight & Sound explores the characteristics that have come to define this most elastic of forms and looks in detail at a dozen influential milestone essay films.

Andrew Tracy , Katy McGahan , Olaf Möller , Sergio Wolf , Nina Power Updated: 7 May 2019

from our August 2013 issue

Le camera stylo? Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929)

I recently had a heated argument with a cinephile filmmaking friend about Chris Marker’s Sans soleil (1983). Having recently completed her first feature, and with such matters on her mind, my friend contended that the film’s power lay in its combinations of image and sound, irrespective of Marker’s inimitable voiceover narration. “Do you think that people who can’t understand English or French will get nothing out of the film?” she said; to which I – hot under the collar – replied that they might very well get something, but that something would not be the complete work.

The Sight & Sound Deep Focus season Thought in Action: The Art of the Essay Film runs at BFI Southbank 1-28 August 2013, with a keynote lecture by Kodwo Eshun on 1 August, a talk by writer and academic Laura Rascaroli on 27 August and a closing panel debate on 28 August.

To take this film-lovers’ tiff to a more elevated plane, what it suggests is that the essentialist conception of cinema is still present in cinephilic and critical culture, as are the difficulties of containing within it works that disrupt its very fabric. Ever since Vachel Lindsay published The Art of the Moving Picture in 1915 the quest to secure the autonomy of film as both medium and art – that ever-elusive ‘pure cinema’ – has been a preoccupation of film scholars, critics, cinephiles and filmmakers alike. My friend’s implicit derogation of the irreducible literary element of Sans soleil and her neo- Godard ian invocation of ‘image and sound’ touch on that strain of this phenomenon which finds, in the technical-functional combination of those two elements, an alchemical, if not transubstantiational, result.

Mechanically created, cinema defies mechanism: it is poetic, transportive and, if not irrational, then a-rational. This mystically-minded view has a long and illustrious tradition in film history, stretching from the sense-deranging surrealists – who famously found accidental poetry in the juxtapositions created by randomly walking into and out of films; to the surrealist-influenced, scientifically trained and ontologically minded André Bazin , whose realist veneration of the long take centred on the very preternaturalness of nature as revealed by the unblinking gaze of the camera; to the trash-bin idolatry of the American underground, weaving new cinematic mythologies from Hollywood detritus; and to auteurism itself, which (in its more simplistic iterations) sees the essence of the filmmaker inscribed even upon the most compromised of works.

It isn’t going too far to claim that this tradition has constituted the foundation of cinephilic culture and helped to shape the cinematic canon itself. If Marker has now been welcomed into that canon and – thanks to the far greater availability of his work – into the mainstream of (primarily DVD-educated) cinephilia, it is rarely acknowledged how much of that work cheerfully undercuts many of the long-held assumptions and pieties upon which it is built.

In his review of Letter from Siberia (1957), Bazin placed Marker at right angles to cinema proper, describing the film’s “primary material” as intelligence – specifically a “verbal intelligence” – rather than image. He dubbed Marker’s method a “horizontal” montage, “as opposed to traditional montage that plays with the sense of duration through the relationship of shot to shot”.

Here, claimed Bazin, “a given image doesn’t refer to the one that preceded it or the one that will follow, but rather it refers laterally, in some way, to what is said.” Thus the very thing which makes Letter “extraordinary”, in Bazin’s estimation, is also what makes it not-cinema. Looking for a term to describe it, Bazin hit upon a prophetic turn of phrase, writing that Marker’s film is, “to borrow Jean Vigo’s formulation of À propos de Nice (‘a documentary point of view’), an essay documented by film. The important word is ‘essay’, understood in the same sense that it has in literature – an essay at once historical and political, written by a poet as well.”

Marker’s canonisation has proceeded apace with that of the form of which he has become the exemplar. Whether used as critical/curatorial shorthand in reviews and programme notes, employed as a model by filmmakers or examined in theoretical depth in major retrospectives (this summer’s BFI Southbank programme, for instance, follows upon Andréa Picard’s two-part series ‘The Way of the Termite’ at TIFF Cinémathèque in 2009-2010, which drew inspiration from Jean-Pierre Gorin ’s groundbreaking programme of the same title at Vienna Filmmuseum in 2007), the ‘essay film’ has attained in recent years widespread recognition as a particular, if perennially porous, mode of film practice. An appealingly simple formulation, the term has proved both taxonomically useful and remarkably elastic, allowing one to define a field of previously unassimilable objects while ranging far and wide throughout film history to claim other previously identified objects for this invented tradition.

Las Hurdes (1933)

It is crucial to note that the ‘essay film’ is not only a post-facto appellation for a kind of film practice that had not bothered to mark itself with a moniker, but also an invention and an intervention. While it has acquired its own set of canonical ‘texts’ that include the collected works of Marker, much of Godard – from the missive (the 52-minute Letter to Jane , 1972) to the massive ( Histoire(s) de cinéma , 1988-98) – Welles’s F for Fake (1973) and Thom Andersen’s Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003), it has also poached on the territory of other, ‘sovereign’ forms, expanding its purview in accordance with the whims of its missionaries.

From documentary especially, Vigo’s aforementioned À propos de Nice, Ivens’s Rain (1929), Buñuel’s sardonic Las Hurdes (1933), Resnais’s Night and Fog (1955), Rouch and Morin’s Chronicle of a Summer (1961); from the avant garde, Akerman’s Je, Tu, Il, Elle (1974), Straub/Huillet’s Trop tôt, trop tard (1982); from agitprop, Getino and Solanas’s The Hour of the Furnaces (1968), Portabella’s Informe general… (1976); and even from ‘pure’ fiction, for example Gorin’s provocative selection of Griffith’s A Corner in Wheat (1909).

Just as within itself the essay film presents, in the words of Gorin, “the meandering of an intelligence that tries to multiply the entries and the exits into the material it has elected (or by which it has been elected),” so, without, its scope expands exponentially through the industrious activity of its adherents, blithely cutting across definitional borders and – as per the Manny Farber ian concept which gave Gorin’s ‘Termite’ series its name –  creating meaning precisely by eating away at its own boundaries. In the scope of its application and its association more with an (amorphous) sensibility as opposed to fixed rules, the essay film bears similarities to the most famous of all fabricated genres: film noir, which has been located both in its natural habitat of the crime thriller as well as in such disparate climates as melodramas, westerns and science fiction.

The essay film, however, has proved even more peripatetic: where noir was formulated from the films of a determinate historical period (no matter that the temporal goalposts are continually shifted), the essay film is resolutely unfixed in time; it has its choice of forebears. And while noir, despite its occasional shadings over into semi-documentary during the 1940s, remains bound to fictional narratives, the essay film moves blithely between the realms of fiction and non-fiction, complicating the terms of both.

“Here is a form that seems to accommodate the two sides of that divide at the same time, that can navigate from documentary to fiction and back, creating other polarities in the process between which it can operate,” writes Gorin. When Orson Welles , in the closing moments of his masterful meditation on authenticity and illusion F for Fake, chortles, “I did promise that for one hour, I’d tell you only the truth. For the past 17 minutes, I’ve been lying my head off,” he is expressing both the conjuror’s pleasure in a trick well played and the artist’s delight in a self-defined mode that is cheerfully impure in both form and, perhaps, intention.

Nevertheless, as the essay film merrily traipses through celluloid history it intersects with ‘pure cinema’ at many turns and its form as such owes much to one particularly prominent variety thereof.

The montage tradition

If the mystical strain described above represents the Dionysian side of pure cinema, Soviet montage was its Apollonian opposite: randomness, revelation and sensuous response countered by construction, forceful argumentation and didactic instruction.

No less than the mystics, however, the montagists were after essences. Eisenstein , Dziga Vertov and Pudovkin , along with their transnational associates and acolytes, sought to crystallise abstract concepts in the direct and purposeful juxtaposition of forceful, hard-edged images – the general made powerfully, viscerally immediate in the particular. Here, says Eisenstein, in the umbrella-wielding harpies who set upon the revolutionaries in October (1928), is bourgeois Reaction made manifest; here, in the serried ranks of soldiers proceeding as one down the Odessa Steps in Battleship Potemkin (1925), is Oppression undisguised; here, in the condemned Potemkin sailor who wins over his imminent executioners with a cry of “Brothers!” – a moment powerfully invoked by Marker at the beginning of his magnum opus A Grin Without a Cat (1977) – is Solidarity emergent and, from it, the seeds of Revolution.

The relentlessly unidirectional focus of classical Soviet montage puts it methodologically and temperamentally at odds with the ruminative, digressive and playful qualities we associate with the essay film. So, too, the former’s fierce ideological certainty and cadre spirit contrast with that free play of the mind, the Montaigne -inspired meanderings of individual intelligence, that so characterise our image of the latter.

Beyond Marker’s personal interest in and inheritance from the Soviet masters, classical montage laid the foundations of the essay film most pertinently in its foregrounding of the presence, within the fabric of the film, of a directing intelligence. Conducting their experiments in film not through ‘pure’ abstraction but through narrative, the montagists made manifest at least two operative levels within the film: the narrative itself and the arrangement of that narrative by which the deeper structures that move it are made legible. Against the seamless, immersive illusionism of commercial cinema, montage was a key for decrypting those social forces, both overt and hidden, that govern human society.

And as such it was method rather than material that was the pathway to truth. Fidelity to the authentic – whether the accurate representation of historical events or the documentary flavouring of Eisensteinian typage – was important only insomuch as it provided the filmmaker with another tool to reach a considerably higher plane of reality.

Dziga Vertov’s Enthusiasm (1931)

Midway on their Marxian mission to change the world rather than interpret it, the montagists actively made the world even as they revealed it. In doing so they powerfully expressed the dialectic between control and chaos that would come to be not only one of the chief motors of the essay film but the crux of modernity itself.

Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929), now claimed as the most venerable and venerated ancestor of the essay film (and this despite its prototypically purist claim to realise a ‘universal’ cinematic language “based on its complete separation from the language of literature and the theatre”) is the archetypal model of this high-modernist agon. While it is the turning of the movie projector itself and the penetrating gaze of Vertov’s kino-eye that sets the whirling dynamo of the city into motion, the recorder creating that which it records, that motion is also outside its control.

At the dawn of the cinematic century, the American writer Henry Adams saw in the dynamo both the expression of human mastery over nature and a conduit to mysterious, elemental powers beyond our comprehension. So, too, the modernist ambition expressed in literature, painting, architecture and cinema to capture a subject from all angles – to exhaust its wealth of surfaces, meanings, implications, resonances – collides with awe (or fear) before a plenitude that can never be encompassed.

Remove the high-modernist sense of mission and we can see this same dynamic as animating the essay film – recall that last, parenthetical term in Gorin’s formulation of the essay film, “multiply[ing] the entries and the exits into the material it has elected (or by which it has been elected)”. The nimble movements and multi-angled perspectives of the essay film are founded on this negotiation between active choice and passive possession; on the recognition that even the keenest insight pales in the face of an ultimate unknowability.

The other key inheritance the essay film received from the classical montage tradition, perhaps inevitably, was a progressive spirit, however variously defined. While Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935) and Olympia (1938) amply and chillingly demonstrated that montage, like any instrumental apparatus, has no inherent ideological nature, hers were more the exceptions that proved the rule. (Though why, apart from ideological repulsiveness, should Riefenstahl’s plentifully fabricated ‘documentaries’ not be considered as essay films in their own right?)

The overwhelming fact remains that the great majority of those who drew upon the Soviet montagists for explicitly ideological ends (as opposed to Hollywood’s opportunistic swipings) resided on the left of the spectrum – and, in the montagists’ most notable successor in the period immediately following, retained their alignment with and inextricability from the state.

Progressive vs radical

The Grierson ian documentary movement in Britain neutered the political and aesthetic radicalism of its more dynamic model in favour of paternalistic progressivism founded on conformity, class complacency and snobbery towards its own medium. But if it offered a far paler antecedent to the essay film than the Soviet montage tradition, it nevertheless represents an important stage in the evolution of the essay-film form, for reasons not unrelated to some of those rather staid qualities.

The Soviet montagists had created a vision of modernity racing into the future at pace with the social and spiritual liberation of its proletarian pilot-passenger, an aggressively public ideology of group solidarity. The Grierson school, by contrast, offered a domesticated image of an efficient, rational and productive modern industrial society based on interconnected but separate public and private spheres, as per the ideological values of middle-class liberal individualism.

The Soviet montagists had looked to forge a universal, ‘pure’ cinematic language, at least before the oppressive dictates of Stalinist socialist realism shackled them. The Grierson school, evincing a middle-class disdain for the popular and ‘low’ arts, sought instead to purify the sullied medium of cinema by importing extra-cinematic prestige: most notably Night Mail (1936), with its Auden -penned, Britten -scored ode to the magic of the mail, or Humphrey Jennings’s salute to wartime solidarity A Diary for Timothy (1945), with its mildly sententious E.M. Forster narration.

Night Mail (1936)

What this domesticated dynamism and retrograde pursuit of high-cultural bona fides achieved, however, was to mingle a newfound cinematic language (montage) with a traditionally literary one (narration); and, despite the salutes to state-oriented communality, to re-introduce the individual, idiosyncratic voice as the vehicle of meaning – as the mediating intelligence that connects the viewer to the images viewed.

In Night Mail especially there is, in the whimsy of the Auden text and the film’s synchronisation of private time and public history, an intimation of the essay film’s musing, reflective voice as the chugging rhythm of the narration timed to the speeding wheels of the train gives way to a nocturnal vision of solitary dreamers bedevilled by spectral monsters, awakening in expectation of the postman’s knock with a “quickening of the heart/for who can bear to be forgot?”

It’s a curiously disquieting conclusion: this unsettling, anxious vision of disappearance that takes on an even darker shade with the looming spectre of war – one that rhymes, five decades on, with the wistful search of Marker’s narrator in Sans soleil, seeking those fleeting images which “quicken the heart” in a world where wars both past and present have been forgotten, subsumed in a modern society built upon the systematic banishment of memory.

It is, of course, with the seminal post-war collaborations between Marker and Alain Resnais that the essay film proper emerges. In contrast to the striving culture-snobbery of the Griersonian documentary, the Resnais-Marker collaborations (and the Resnais solo documentary shorts that preceded them) inaugurate a blithe, seemingly effortless dialogue between cinema and the other arts in both their subjects (painting, sculpture) and their assorted creative personnel (writers Paul Éluard , Jean Cayrol , Raymond Queneau , composers Darius Milhaud and Hanns Eisler ). This also marks the point where the revolutionary line of the Soviets and the soft, statist liberalism of the British documentarians give way to a more free-floating but staunchly oppositional leftism, one derived as much from a spirit of humanistic inquiry as from ideological affiliation.

Related to this was the form’s problems with official patronage. Originally conceived as commissions by various French government or government-affiliated bodies, the Resnais-Marker films famously ran into trouble from French censors: Les statues meurent aussi (1953) for its condemnation of French colonialism, Night and Fog for its shots of Vichy policemen guarding deportation camps; the former film would have its second half lopped off before being cleared for screening, the latter its offending shots removed.

Night and Fog (1955)

Appropriately, it is at this moment that the emphasis of the essay film begins to shift away from tactile presence – the whirl of the city, the rhythm of the rain, the workings of industry – to felt absence. The montagists had marvelled at the workings of human creations which raced ahead irrespective of human efforts; here, the systems created by humanity to master the world write, in their very functioning, an epitaph for those things extinguished in the act of mastering them. The African masks preserved in the Musée de l’Homme in Les statues meurent aussi speak of a bloody legacy of vanquished and conquered civilisations; the labyrinthine archival complex of the Bibliothèque Nationale in the sardonically titled Toute la mémoire du monde (1956) sparks a disquisition on all that is forgotten in the act of cataloguing knowledge; the miracle of modern plastics saluted in the witty, industrially commissioned Le Chant du styrène (1958) regresses backwards to its homely beginnings; in Night and Fog an unprecedentedly enormous effort of human organisation marshals itself to actively produce a dreadful, previously unimaginable nullity.

To overstate the case, loss is the primary motor of the modern essay film: loss of belief in the image’s ability to faithfully reflect reality; loss of faith in the cinema’s ability to capture life as it is lived; loss of illusions about cinema’s ‘purity’, its autonomy from the other arts or, for that matter, the world.

“You never know what you may be filming,” notes one of Marker’s narrating surrogates in A Grin Without a Cat, as footage of the Chilean equestrian team at the 1952 Helsinki Olympics offers a glimpse of a future member of the Pinochet junta. The image and sound captured at the time of filming offer one facet of reality; it is only with this lateral move outside that reality that the future reality it conceals can speak.

What will distinguish the essay film, as Bazin noted, is not only its ability to make the image but also its ability to interrogate it, to dispel the illusion of its sovereignty and see it as part of a matrix of meaning that extends beyond the screen. No less than were the montagists, the film-essayists seek the motive forces of modern society not by crystallising eternal verities in powerful images but by investigating that ever-shifting, kaleidoscopic relationship between our regime of images and the realities it both reveals and occludes.

— Andrew Tracy

1.   À propos de Nice

Jean Vigo, 1930

Few documentaries have achieved the cult status of the 22-minute A propos de Nice, co-directed by Jean Vigo and cameraman Boris Kaufman at the beginning of their careers. The film retains a spontaneous, apparently haphazard, quality yet its careful montage combines a strong realist drive, lyrical dashes – helped by Marc Perrone’s accordion music – and a clear political agenda.

In today’s era, in which the Côte d’Azur has become a byword for hedonistic consumption, it’s refreshing to see a film that systematically undermines its glossy surface. Using images sometimes ‘stolen’ with hidden cameras, A propos de Nice moves between the city’s main sites of pleasure: the Casino, the Promenade des Anglais, the Hotel Negresco and the carnival. Occasionally the filmmakers remind us of the sea, the birds, the wind in the trees but mostly they contrast people: the rich play tennis, the poor boules; the rich have tea, the poor gamble in the (then) squalid streets of the Old Town.

As often, women bear the brunt of any critique of bourgeois consumption: a rich old woman’s head is compared to an ostrich, others grin as they gaze up at phallic factory chimneys; young women dance frenetically, their crotch to the camera. In the film’s most famous image, an elegant woman is ‘stripped’ by the camera to reveal her naked body – not quite matched by a man’s shoes vanishing to display his naked feet to the shoe-shine.

An essay film avant la lettre , A propos de Nice ends on Soviet-style workers’ faces and burning furnaces. The message is clear, even if it has not been heeded by history.

— Ginette Vincendeau

2. A Diary for Timothy

Humphrey Jennings, 1945

A Diary for Timothy takes the form of a journal addressed to the eponymous Timothy James Jenkins, born on 3 September 1944, exactly five years after Britain’s entry into World War II. The narrator, Michael Redgrave , a benevolent offscreen presence, informs young Timothy about the momentous events since his birth and later advises that, even when the war is over, there will be “everyday danger”.

The subjectivity and speculative approach maintained throughout are more akin to the essay tradition than traditional propaganda in their rejection of mere glib conveyance of information or thunderous hectoring. Instead Jennings invites us quietly to observe the nuances of everyday life as Britain enters the final chapter of the war. Against the momentous political backdrop, otherwise routine, everyday activities are ascribed new profundity as the Welsh miner Geronwy, Alan the farmer, Bill the railway engineer and Peter the convalescent fighter pilot go about their daily business.

Within the confines of the Ministry of Information’s remit – to lift the spirits of a battle-weary nation – and the loose narrative framework of Timothy’s first six months, Jennings finds ample expression for the kind of formal experiment that sets his work apart from that of other contemporary documentarians. He worked across film, painting, photography, theatrical design, journalism and poetry; in Diary his protean spirit finds expression in a manner that transgresses the conventional parameters of wartime propaganda, stretching into film poem, philosophical reflection, social document, surrealistic ethnographic observation and impressionistic symphony. Managing to keep to the right side of sentimentality, it still makes for potent viewing.

— Catherine McGahan

3. Toute la mémoire du monde

Alain Resnais, 1956

In the opening credits of Toute la mémoire du monde, alongside the director’s name and that of producer Pierre Braunberger , one reads the mysterious designation “Groupe des XXX”. This Group of Thirty was an assembly of filmmakers who mobilised in the early 1950s to defend the “style, quality and ambitious subject matter” of short films in post-war France; the signatories of its 1953 ‘Declaration’ included Resnais , Chris Marker and Agnès Varda. The success of the campaign contributed to a golden age of short filmmaking that would last a decade and form the crucible of the French essay film.

A 22-minute poetic documentary about the old French Bibliothèque Nationale, Toute la mémoire du monde is a key work in this strand of filmmaking and one which can also be seen as part of a loose ‘trilogy of memory’ in Resnais’s early documentaries. Les statues meurent aussi (co-directed with Chris Marker) explored cultural memory as embodied in African art and the depredations of colonialism; Night and Fog was a seminal reckoning with the historical memory of the Nazi death camps. While less politically controversial than these earlier works, Toute la mémoire du monde’s depiction of the Bibliothèque Nationale is still oddly suggestive of a prison, with its uniformed guards and endless corridors. In W.G. Sebald ’s 2001 novel Austerlitz, directly after a passage dedicated to Resnais’s film, the protagonist describes his uncertainty over whether, when using the library, he “was on the Islands of the Blest, or, on the contrary, in a penal colony”.

Resnais explores the workings of the library through the effective device of following a book from arrival and cataloguing to its delivery to a reader (the book itself being something of an in-joke: a mocked-up travel guide to Mars in the Petite Planète series Marker was then editing for Editions du Seuil). With Resnais’s probing, mobile camerawork and a commentary by French writer Remo Forlani, Toute la mémoire du monde transforms the library into a mysterious labyrinth, something between an edifice and an organism: part brain and part tomb.

— Chris Darke

4. The House is Black

(Khaneh siah ast) Forough Farrokhzad, 1963

Before the House of Makhmalbaf there was The House is Black. Called “the greatest of all Iranian films” by critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, who helped translate the subtitles from Farsi into English, this 20-minute black-and-white essay film by feminist poet Farrokhzad was shot in a leper colony near Tabriz in northern Iran and has been heralded as the touchstone of the Iranian New Wave.

The buildings of the Baba Baghi colony are brick and peeling whitewash but a student asked to write a sentence using the word ‘house’ offers Khaneh siah ast : the house is black. His hand, seen in close-up, is one of many in the film; rather than objects of medical curiosity, these hands – some fingerless, many distorted by the disease – are agents, always in movement, doing, making, exercising, praying. In putting white words on the blackboard, the student makes part of the film; in the next shots, the film’s credits appear, similarly handwritten on the same blackboard.

As they negotiate the camera’s gaze and provide the soundtrack by singing, stamping and wheeling a barrow, the lepers are co-authors of the film. Farrokhzad echoes their prayers, heard and seen on screen, with her voiceover, which collages religious texts, beginning with the passage from Psalm 55 famously set to music by Mendelssohn (“O for the wings of a dove”).

In the conjunctions between Farrokhzad’s poetic narration and diegetic sound, including tanbur-playing, an intense assonance arises. Its beat is provided by uniquely lyrical associative editing that would influence Abbas Kiarostami , who quotes Farrokhzad’s poem ‘The Wind Will Carry Us’ in his eponymous film . Repeated shots of familiar bodily movement, made musical, move the film insistently into the viewer’s body: it is infectious. Posing a question of aesthetics, The House Is Black uses the contagious gaze of cinema to dissolve the screen between Us and Them.

— Sophie Mayer

5. Letter to Jane: An Investigation About a Still

Jean-Luc Godard & Jean-Pierre Gorin, 1972

With its invocation of Brecht (“Uncle Bertolt”), rejection of visual pleasure (for 52 minutes we’re mostly looking at a single black-and-white still) and discussion of the role of intellectuals in “the revolution”, Letter to Jane is so much of its time as to appear untranslatable to the present except as a curio from a distant era of radical cinema. Between 1969 and 1971, Godard and Gorin made films collectively as part of the Dziga Vertov Group before they returned, in 1972, to the mainstream with Tout va bien , a big-budget film about the aftermath of May 1968 featuring leftist stars Yves Montand and  Jane Fonda . It was to the latter that Godard and Gorin directed their Letter after seeing a news photograph of her on a solidarity visit to North Vietnam in August 1972.

Intended to accompany the US release of Tout va bien, Letter to Jane is ‘a letter’ only in as much as it is fairly conversational in tone, with Godard and Gorin delivering their voiceovers in English. It’s stylistically more akin to the ‘blackboard films’ of the time, with their combination of pedagogical instruction and stern auto-critique.

It’s also an inspired semiological reading of a media image and a reckoning with the contradictions of celebrity activism. Godard and Gorin examine the image’s framing and camera angle and ask why Fonda is the ‘star’ of the photograph while the Vietnamese themselves remain faceless or out of focus? And what of her expression of compassionate concern? This “expression of an expression” they trace back, via an elaboration of the Kuleshov effect , through other famous faces – Henry Fonda , John Wayne , Lillian Gish and Falconetti – concluding that it allows for “no reverse shot” and serves only to bolster Western “good conscience”.

Letter to Jane is ultimately concerned with the same question that troubled philosophers such as Levinas and Derrida : what’s at stake ethically when one claims to speak “in place of the other”? Any contemporary critique of celebrity activism – from Bono and Geldof to Angelina Jolie – should start here, with a pair of gauchiste trolls muttering darkly beneath a press shot of ‘Hanoi Jane’.

6. F for Fake

Orson Welles, 1973

Those who insist it was all downhill for Orson Welles after Citizen Kane would do well to take a close look at this film made more than three decades later, in its own idiosyncratic way a masterpiece just as innovative as his better-known feature debut.

Perhaps the film’s comparative and undeserved critical neglect is due to its predominantly playful tone, or perhaps it’s because it is a low-budget, hard-to-categorise, deeply personal work that mixes original material with plenty of footage filmed by others – most extensively taken from a documentary by François Reichenbach about Clifford Irving and his bogus biography of his friend Elmyr de Hory , an art forger who claimed to have painted pictures attributed to famous names and hung in the world’s most prestigious galleries.

If the film had simply offered an account of the hoaxes perpetrated by that disreputable duo, it would have been entertaining enough but, by means of some extremely inventive, innovative and inspired editing, Welles broadens his study of fakery to take in his own history as a ‘charlatan’ – not merely his lifelong penchant for magician’s tricks but also the 1938 radio broadcast of his news-report adaptation of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds – as well as observations on Howard Hughes , Pablo Picasso and the anonymous builders of Chartres cathedral. So it is that Welles contrives to conjure up, behind a colourful cloak of consistently entertaining mischief, a rueful meditation on truth and falsehood, art and authorship – a subject presumably dear to his heart following Pauline Kael ’s then recent attempts to persuade the world that Herman J. Mankiewicz had been the real creative force behind Kane.

As a riposte to that thesis (albeit never framed as such), F for Fake is subtle, robust, supremely erudite and never once bitter; the darkest moment – as Welles contemplates the serene magnificence of Chartres – is at once an uncharacteristic but touchingly heartfelt display of humility and a poignant memento mori. And it is in this delicate balancing of the autobiographical with the universal, as well as in the dazzling deployment of cinematic form to illustrate and mirror content, that the film works its once unique, now highly influential magic.

— Geoff Andrew

7. How to Live in the German Federal Republic

(Leben – BRD) Harun Farocki, 1990

Harun Farocki ’s portrait of West Germany in 32 simulations from training sessions has no commentary, just the actions themselves in all their surreal beauty, one after the other. The Bundesrepublik Deutschland is shown as a nation of people who can deal with everything because they have been prepared – taught how to react properly in every possible situation.

We know how birth works; how to behave in kindergarten; how to chat up girls, boys or whatever we fancy (for we’re liberal-minded, if only in principle); how to look for a job and maybe live without finding one; how to wiggle our arses in the hottest way possible when we pole-dance, or manage a hostage crisis without things getting (too) bloody. Whatever job we do, we know it by heart; we also know how to manage whatever kind of psychological breakdown we experience; and we are also prepared for the end, and even have an idea about how our burial will go. This is the nation: one of fearful people in dire need of control over their one chance of getting it right.

Viewed from the present, How to Live in the German Federal Republic is revealed as the archetype of many a Farocki film in the decades to follow, for example Die Umschulung (1994), Der Auftritt (1996) or Nicht ohne Risiko (2004), all of which document as dispassionately as possible different – not necessarily simulated – scenarios of social interactions related to labour and capital. For all their enlightening beauty, none of these ever came close to How to Live in the German Federal Republic which, depending on one’s mood, can play like an absurd comedy or the most gut-wrenching drama. Yet one disquieting thing is certain: How to Live in the German Federal Republic didn’t age – our lives still look the same.

— Olaf Möller

8. One Man’s War

(La Guerre d’un seul homme) Edgardo Cozarinsky , 1982

One Man’s War proves that an auteur film can be made without writing a line, recording a sound or shooting a single frame. It’s easy to point to the ‘extraordinary’ character of the film, given its combination of materials that were not made to cohabit; there couldn’t be a less plausible dialogue than the one Cozarinsky establishes between the newsreels shot during the Nazi occupation of Paris and the Parisian diaries of novelist and Nazi officer Ernst Jünger . There’s some truth to Pascal Bonitzer’s assertion in Cahiers du cinéma in 1982 that the principle of the documentary was inverted here, since it is the images that provide a commentary for the voice.

But that observation still doesn’t pin down the uniqueness of a work that forces history through a series of registers, styles and dimensions, wiping out the distance between reality and subjectivity, propaganda and literature, cinema and journalism, daily life and dream, and establishing the idea not so much of communicating vessels as of contaminating vessels.

To enquire about the essayistic dimension of One Man’s War is to submit it to a test of purity against which the film itself is rebelling. This is no ars combinatoria but systems of collision and harmony; organic in their temporal development and experimental in their procedural eagerness. It’s like a machine created to die instantly; neither Cozarinsky nor anyone else could repeat the trick, as is the case with all great avant-garde works.

By blurring the genre of his literary essays, his fictional films, his archival documentaries, his literary fictions, Cozarinsky showed he knew how to reinvent the erasure of borders. One Man’s War is not a film about the Occupation but a meditation on the different forms in which that Occupation can be represented.

—Sergio Wolf. Translated by Mar Diestro-Dópido

9. Sans soleil

Chris Marker, 1982

There are many moments to quicken the heart in Sans soleil but one in particular demonstrates the method at work in Marker’s peerless film. An unseen female narrator reads from letters sent to her by a globetrotting cameraman named Sandor Krasna (Marker’s nom de voyage), one of which muses on the 11th-century Japanese writer  Sei Shōnagon .

As we hear of Shōnagon’s “list of elegant things, distressing things, even of things not worth doing”, we watch images of a missile being launched and a hovering bomber. What’s the connection? There is none. Nothing here fixes word and image in illustrative lockstep; it’s in the space between them that Sans soleil makes room for the spectator to drift, dream and think – to inimitable effect.

Sans soleil was Marker’s return to a personal mode of filmmaking after more than a decade in militant cinema. His reprise of the epistolary form looks back to earlier films such as  Letter from Siberia  (1958) but the ‘voice’ here is both intimate and removed. The narrator’s reading of Krasna’s letters flips the first person to the third, using ‘he’ instead of ‘I’. Distance and proximity in the words mirror, multiply and magnify both the distances travelled and the time spanned in the images, especially those of the 1960s and its lost dreams of revolutionary social change.

While it’s handy to define Sans soleil as an ‘essay film’, there’s something about the dry term that doesn’t do justice to the experience of watching it. After Marker’s death last year, when writing programme notes on the film, I came up with a line that captures something of what it’s like to watch Sans soleil: “a mesmerising, lucid and lovely river of film, which, like the river of the ancients, is never the same when one steps into it a second time”.

10. Handsworth Songs

Black Audio Film Collective, 1986

Made at the time of civil unrest in Birmingham, this key example of the essay film at its most complex remains relevant both formally and thematically. Handsworth Songs is no straightforward attempt to provide answers as to why the riots happened; instead, using archive film spliced with made and found footage of the events and the media and popular reaction to them, it creates a poetic sense of context.

The film is an example of counter-media in that it slows down the demand for either immediate explanation or blanket condemnation. Its stillness allows the history of immigration and the subsequent hostility of the media and the police to the black and Asian population to be told in careful detail.

One repeated scene shows a young black man running through a group of white policemen who surround him on all sides. He manages to break free several times before being wrestled to the ground; if only for one brief, utopian moment, an entirely different history of race in the UK is opened up.

The waves of post-war immigration are charted in the stories told both by a dominant (and frequently repressive) televisual narrative and, importantly, by migrants themselves. Interviews mingle with voiceover, music accompanies the machines that the Windrush generation work at. But there are no definitive answers here, only, as the Black Audio Film Collective memorably suggests, “the ghosts of songs”.

— Nina Power

11.   Los Angeles Plays Itself

Thom Andersen, 2003

One of the attractions that drew early film pioneers out west, besides the sunlight and the industrial freedom, was the versatility of the southern Californian landscape: with sea, snowy mountains, desert, fruit groves, Spanish missions, an urban downtown and suburban boulevards all within a 100-mile radius, the Los Angeles basin quickly and famously became a kind of giant open-air film studio, available and pliant.

Of course, some people actually live there too. “Sometimes I think that gives me the right to criticise,” growls native Angeleno Andersen in his forensic three-hour prosecution of moving images of the movie city, whose mounting litany of complaints – couched in Encke King’s gravelly, near-parodically irritated voiceover, and sometimes organised, as Stuart Klawans wrote in The Nation, “in the manner of a saloon orator” – belies a sly humour leavening a radically serious intent.

Inspired in part by Mark Rappaport’s factual essay appropriations of screen fictions (Rock Hudson’s Home Movies, 1993; From the Journals of Jean Seberg , 1995), as well as Godard’s Histoire(s) de cinéma, this “city symphony in reverse” asserts public rights to our screen discourse through its magpie method as well as its argument. (Today you could rebrand it ‘Occupy Hollywood’.) Tinseltown malfeasance is evidenced across some 200 different film clips, from offences against geography and slurs against architecture to the overt historical mythologies of Chinatown (1974), Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) and L.A. Confidential (1997), in which the city’s class and cultural fault-lines are repainted “in crocodile tears” as doleful tragedies of conspiracy, promoting hopelessness in the face of injustice.

Andersen’s film by contrast spurs us to independent activism, starting with the reclamation of our gaze: “What if we watch with our voluntary attention, instead of letting the movies direct us?” he asks, peering beyond the foregrounding of character and story. And what if more movies were better and more useful, helping us see our world for what it is? Los Angeles Plays Itself grows most moving – and useful – extolling the Los Angeles neorealism Andersen has in mind: stories of “so many men unneeded, unwanted”, as he says over a scene from Billy Woodberry’s Bless Their Little Hearts (1983), “in a world in which there is so much to be done”.

— Nick Bradshaw

12.   La Morte Rouge

Víctor Erice, 2006

The famously unprolific Spanish director Víctor Erice may remain best known for his full-length fiction feature The Spirit of the Beehive (1973), but his other films are no less rewarding. Having made a brilliant foray into the fertile territory located somewhere between ‘documentary’ and ‘fiction’ with The Quince Tree Sun (1992), in this half-hour film made for the ‘Correspondences’ exhibition exploring resemblances in the oeuvres of Erice and Kiarostami , the relationship between reality and artifice becomes his very subject.

A ‘small’ work, it comprises stills, archive footage, clips from an old Sherlock Holmes movie, a few brief new scenes – mostly without actors – and music by Mompou and (for once, superbly used) Arvo Pärt . If its tone – it’s introduced as a “soliloquy” – and scale are modest, its thematic range and philosophical sophistication are considerable.

The title is the name of the Québécois village that is the setting for The Scarlet Claw (1944), a wartime Holmes mystery starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce which was the first movie Erice ever saw, taken by his sister to the Kursaal cinema in San Sebastian.

For the five-year-old, the experience was a revelation: unable to distinguish the ‘reality’ of the newsreel from that of the nightmare world of Roy William Neill’s film, he not only learned that death and murder existed but noted that the adults in the audience, presumably privy to some secret knowledge denied him, were unaffected by the corpses on screen. Had this something to do with war? Why was La Morte Rouge not on any map? And what did it signify that postman Potts was not, in fact, Potts but the killer – and an actor (whatever that was) to boot?

From such personal reminiscences – evoked with wondrous intimacy in the immaculate Castillian of the writer-director’s own wry narration – Erice fashions a lyrical meditation on themes that have underpinned his work from Beehive to Broken Windows (2012): time and change, memory and identity, innocence and experience, war and death. And because he understands, intellectually and emotionally, that the time-based medium he himself works in can reveal unforgettably vivid realities that belong wholly to the realm of the imaginary, La Morte Rouge is a great film not only about the power of cinema but about life itself.

Sight & Sound: the August 2013 issue

In this issue: Frances Ha’s Greta Gerwig – the most exciting actress in America? Plus Ryan Gosling in Only God Forgives, Wadjda, The Wall,...

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Buy The Complete Humphrey Jennings Collection Volume Three: A Diary for Timothy on DVD and Blu Ray

Humphrey Jennings’s transition from wartime to peacetime filmmaking.

Buy Chronicle of a Summer on DVD and Blu Ray

Jean Rouch’s hugely influential and ground-breaking documentary.

Further reading

Video essay: The essay film – some thoughts of discontent

Kevin B. Lee

The land still lies: Handsworth Songs and the English riots

The world at sea: The Forgotten Space

What I owe to Chris Marker

Patricio Guzmán

His and her ghosts: reworking La Jetée

Melissa Bradshaw

At home (and away) with Agnès Varda

Daniel Trilling

Pere Portabella looks back

John Akomfrah’s Hauntologies

Laura Allsop

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The museum and IMAX cinema are temporarily closed. Pictureville and Cubby Broccoli cinemas are open. 

Find out about our  major transformation .

A very short history of cinema

Published: 18 June 2020

Learn about the history and development of cinema, from the Kinetoscope in 1891 to today’s 3D revival.

Cinematography is the illusion of movement by the recording and subsequent rapid projection of many still photographic pictures on a screen. Originally a product of 19th-century scientific endeavour, cinema has become a medium of mass entertainment and communication, and today it is a multi-billion-pound industry.

Who invented cinema?

No one person invented cinema. However, in 1891 the Edison Company successfully demonstrated a prototype of the  Kinetoscope , which enabled one person at a time to view moving pictures.

The first public Kinetoscope demonstration took place in 1893. By 1894 the Kinetoscope was a commercial success, with public parlours established around the world.

The first to present projected moving pictures to a paying audience were the Lumière brothers in December 1895 in Paris, France. They used a device of their own making, the Cinématographe, which was a camera, a projector and a film printer all in one.

What were early films like?

At first, films were very short, sometimes only a few minutes or less. They were shown at fairgrounds, music halls, or anywhere a screen could be set up and a room darkened. Subjects included local scenes and activities, views of foreign lands, short comedies and newsworthy events.

The films were accompanied by lectures, music and a lot of audience participation. Although they did not have synchronised dialogue, they were not ‘silent’ as they are sometimes described.

The rise of the film industry

By 1914, several national film industries were established. At this time, Europe, Russia and Scandinavia were the dominant industries; America was much less important. Films became longer and storytelling, or narrative, became the dominant form.

As more people paid to see movies, the industry which grew around them was prepared to invest more money in their production, distribution and exhibition, so large studios were established and dedicated cinemas built. The First World War greatly affected the film industry in Europe, and the American industry grew in relative importance.

The first 30 years of cinema were characterised by the growth and consolidation of an industrial base, the establishment of the narrative form, and refinement of technology.

Adding colour

Colour was first added to black-and-white movies through hand colouring, tinting, toning and stencilling.

By 1906, the principles of colour separation were used to produce so-called ‘natural colour’ moving images with the British Kinemacolor process, first presented to the public in 1909.

Kinemacolor was primarily used for documentary (or ‘actuality’) films, such as the epic With Our King and Queen Through India (also known as The Delhi Durbar ) of 1912, which ran for over 2 hours in total.

The early Technicolor processes from 1915 onwards were cumbersome and expensive, and colour was not used more widely until the introduction of its three‑colour process in 1932. It was used for films such as Gone With the Wind and The Wizard of Oz (both 1939) in Hollywood and A Matter of Life and Death (1946) in the UK.

Frames of stencil colour film

Advertisement for With Our King and Queen Through India , 1912

Adding sound

The first attempts to add synchronised sound to projected pictures used phonographic cylinders or discs.

The first feature-length movie incorporating synchronised dialogue, The Jazz Singer (USA, 1927), used the Warner Brothers’ Vitaphone system, which employed a separate record disc with each reel of film for the sound.

This system proved unreliable and was soon replaced by an optical, variable density soundtrack recorded photographically along the edge of the film, developed originally for newsreels such as Movietone.

Cinema’s Golden Age

By the early 1930s, nearly all feature-length movies were presented with synchronised sound and, by the mid-1930s, some were in full colour too. The advent of sound secured the dominant role of the American industry and gave rise to the so-called ‘Golden Age of Hollywood’.

During the 1930s and 1940s, cinema was the principal form of popular entertainment, with people often attending cinemas twice a week. Ornate ’super’ cinemas or ‘picture palaces’, offering extra facilities such as cafés and ballrooms, came to towns and cities; many of them could hold over 3,000 people in a single auditorium.

In Britain, the highest attendances occurred in 1946, with over 31 million visits to the cinema each week.

What is the aspect ratio?

Thomas Edison had used perforated 35mm film in the Kinetoscope, and in 1909 this was adopted as the worldwide industry standard. The picture had a width-to-height relationship—known as the aspect ratio—of 4:3 or 1.33:1. The first number refers to the width of the screen, and the second to the height. So for example, for every 4 centimetres in width, there will be 3 in height. 

With the advent of optical sound, the aspect ratio was adjusted to 1.37:1. This is known as the ‘Academy ratio’, as it was officially approved by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (the Oscars people) in 1932.

Although there were many experiments with other formats, there were no major changes in screen ratios until the 1950s.

How did cinema compete with television?

The introduction of television in America prompted a number of technical experiments designed to maintain public interest in cinema.

In 1952, the Cinerama process, using three projectors and a wide, deeply curved screen together with multi-track surround sound, was premiered. It had a very large aspect ratio of 2.59:1, giving audiences a greater sense of immersion, and proved extremely popular.

However, Cinerama was technically complex and therefore expensive to produce and show. Widescreen cinema was not widely adopted by the industry until the invention of CinemaScope in 1953 and Todd‑AO in 1955. Both processes used single projectors in their presentation.

CinemaScope ‘squeezed’ images on 35mm film; when projected, they were expanded laterally by the projector lens to fit the screen. Todd-AO used film with a width of 70mm. By the end of the 1950s, these innovations had effectively changed the shape of the cinema screen, with aspect ratios of either 2.35:1 or 1.66:1 becoming standard. Stereo sound, which had been experimented with in the 1940s, also became part of the new widescreen experience.

Specialist large-screen systems using 70mm film were also developed. The most successful of these has been IMAX, which as of 2020 has over 1,500 screens around the world. For many years IMAX cinemas have shown films specially made in its unique 2D or 3D formats but more recently they have shown popular mainstream feature films which have been digitally re-mastered in the IMAX format, often with additional scenes or 3D effects.

How have cinema attendance figures changed?

While cinemas had some success in fighting the competition of television, they never regained the position and influence they held in the 1930s and 40s, and over the next 30 years audiences dwindled. By 1984 cinema attendances in Britain had declined to one million a week.

By the late 2000s, however, that number had trebled. The first British multiplex was built in Milton Keynes in 1985, sparking a boom in out-of-town multiplex cinemas.

Today, most people see films on television, whether terrestrial, satellite or subscription video on demand (SVOD) services. Streaming film content on computers, tablets and mobile phones is becoming more common as it proves to be more convenient for modern audiences and lifestyles.

Although America still appears to be the most influential film industry, the reality is more complex. Many films are produced internationally—either made in various countries or financed by multinational companies that have interests across a range of media.

What’s next?

In the past 20 years, film production has been profoundly altered by the impact of rapidly improving digital technology. Most mainstream productions are now shot on digital formats with subsequent processes, such as editing and special effects, undertaken on computers.

Cinemas have invested in digital projection facilities capable of producing screen images that rival the sharpness, detail and brightness of traditional film projection. Only a small number of more specialist cinemas have retained film projection equipment.

In the past few years there has been a revival of interest in 3D features, sparked by the availability of digital technology. Whether this will be more than a short-term phenomenon (as previous attempts at 3D in the 1950s and 1980s had been) remains to be seen, though the trend towards 3D production has seen greater investment and industry commitment than before.

Further reading

• Cinematography in the Science Museum Group collection
• The Lumière Brothers: Pioneers of cinema and colour photography , National Science and Media Museum blog
• Cinerama in the UK: The history of 3-strip cinema in Pictureville Cinema , National Science and Media Museum blog
• BFI Filmography—a complete history of UK feature film
• BFI National Archive
• Imperial War Museums film archive

Pictureville Cinema

Pictureville is the home of cinema at the National Science and Media Museum, showing everything from blockbusters to indie gems.

Robert Paul and the race to invent cinema

Discover the story of Robert Paul, the forgotten pioneer whose innovations earned him the title of ‘father of the British film industry’.

Cinema technology

Discover objects from our collection which illuminate the technological development of moving pictures.

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• Archive Blog

Essays on the Essay Film

About the author.

In addition to his long career in film archiving and curating, Jan-Christopher Horak has taught at universities around the world. His recent book, Saul Bass: Anatomy of Film Design (2014) was published by University Press of Kentucky.

"Archival Spaces" Blog - Ithaca College

Sans soleil   (1983)

For decades, I’ve been interested in the essay film, ever since I fell in love with Jean-Luc Godard’s work from the 1960s, like Pierrot le fou (1965), Two or Three Things I Know About Her (1967), but especially since the 1990s, when I wrote about Godard’s colleague Chris Marker, whose Sans soleil (1983) is a masterpiece of the genre.  Recently, I discussed Saul Bass’ Why Man Creates (1968) as an essay film.  But is it a genre?  Straddling documentary and fiction, the subjectivity of the author and the objectivity of the filmed image, vacillating between image and sound, visuality and the word, essay films in many ways defy definition.  Jean-Pierre Gorin, himself a film essayist, writes in Essays on the Essay Film (ed. Nora M. Alter and Timothy Corrigan, Columbia University Press, 2017): “They come in all sizes, shapes, and hues – and they will continue to do so... How can one even attempt to draw its floor plan, sketch its history and catalog the idiosyncratic products that appear in its inventory?” (p. 270).

Such semantic nebulousness already held true for the literary essay, as this anthology documents.  Max Bense notes that essays always imply a level of experimentation, because they are exploring various forms of subjectivity.  Similarly, the essays in this volume experiment with possible definitions of film essays.  Essays on the Essay Film is accordingly divided into four sections:  1. Theoretical essays on the essay as a literary form by Georg Lukács, Robert Musil, Max Bense, Theodor W. Adorno and Aldous Huxley.  2. Previously published essays on the essay film by Hans Richter, Alexandre Astruc and André Bazin.  3. Analytical essays by Phillip Lopate, Paul Arthur, Michael Renov, Timothy Corrigan and Raymond Bellour.  4. Essays by filmmakers of the form, including Gorin, Hito Steyerl, Ross McElwee, Laura Mulvey and Isaac Julien.

Pierrot le fou (1965)

The editors make a wise decision to include writings on the literary essay, since many of its characteristics can be applied to essay films.  Georg Lukács, for example, supposes that the essay is not an act of creating the new, but rather only of reconfiguring previously known information.  Max Bense defines essays as a form of experimental writing that eschews absolute statements in the interest of exploring parameters and possibilities.  Theodor Adorno takes Bense a step further by connecting the essay to anti-Platonic values, such as the ephemeral, the transitory, and the fragmentary.  Given the ambiguity of the image, the push and pull between the filmmaker’s subjectivity and the objectivity of the image, are not such values integral to the cinema experience?

The earliest theoretical statements about the essay film come from experimental filmmaker and artist Hans Richter, who in his 1939 tract, Struggle for the Film: Towards a Socially Responsible Cinema , foresees a new form of documentary that has the ability to visualize thought.  Alexander Astruc, an early member of the French New Wave , theorized the future of cinema in neither documentary nor fiction films, but rather in filmmakers who use the camera as a pen— le camera au stylo— for the expression of authorial subjectivity.  Phillip Lopate, on the other hand, defines five characteristics for the essay film:  1. It has to communicate through language, whether spoken or written.  2. It must be the work of a single author.  3. It must set itself the task of solving a specific problem or problems.  4. It must be a wholly personal point of view.  5. It must be eloquent and interesting.  Like Lopate, the late film critic and essayist Paul Arthur focuses on the film auteur, insisting that the essay film must give evidence a critical, self-reflexive author who is able to communicate through word and image.

Timothy Corrigan contributes a historical analysis of the essay film, from Dziga Vertov to Agnès Varda, agreeing with Lukács’ thesis that the essay film indeed creates no new forms, but remixes and recontextualizes ideas that are already in circulation.  The final part of his essay focuses on a close reading of Varda’s The Gleaners and I (2000).

Again and again the authors of the volume emphasize the essay film’s openness of form and always-tentative contours that defy any absolute definitions.  Thus, the authors of Essays , as well as the even more subjective contributions of the filmmakers, discuss definitions and characteristics of a genre that isn’t one, unable or unwilling to draw definite conclusions.  They are consciously circling around an indefinable object.  The pleasure here is not to be found in the end goal, but rather in the intellectual journey.  Nevertheless, it would have been nice if there had at least been agreement about when the essay film first appeared in film history, whether with Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929), Georges Franju’s Le sang des bêtes (1949) or Chris Marker’s Lettre de Sibérie (1958).  A filmography of the essay film would have helped readers visualize the parameters of what films are considered essay films, a common ground for further discussion.  Personally, I would have also liked to have read more about the aesthetics of the essay film, its visual and emotional appeal, not just intellectual pull.  In retrospect, I remember the tactile sensuality of images in many of the films discussed, scenes that evoke emotion.  I also question whether the essay or essay film is mainly a remix, and not in some way an independent creation of aesthetic value.  Despite these slight reservations, this volume is eminently readable and a contribution to understanding a form of cinema that continues to morph and grow.

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Essays on the essay film.

Edited by Nora M. Alter and Timothy Corrigan

Columbia University Press

Pub Date: March 2017

ISBN: 9780231172677

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Creatively and capaciously, this rich volume gets at the essay film not only by including key critics and practitioners of the form but, importantly, by going beyond the genre itself to broader contributions to essay theorization from philosophy and belles lettres. An exciting, inventive volume with great delights at every turn. Dana Polan, New York University

Alter and Corrigan's masterful new volume on the essay film is rigorous, comprehensive, and refreshingly surprising. Their invaluable collection probes theoretical reflections on the essay as a mode of expression and a way of thinking in light of the creative and political investments of filmmakers around the globe; it also chronicles the essay film's changing countenances, from its prehistory and early signs of life to novel permutations in the present. Featuring a very distinguished cast of players, this collection is a production of the highest order. Eric Rentschler, Harvard University

Nora Alter and Tim Corrigan bring their seasoned literary experience to herd but never tame the unruly essay film. Its prestige soaring, this mode is tethered to a long history of experimental writing that will keep it from disappearing into the bog of blogs and YouTube mashups whose best examples it is already inspiring. The proof is in the Table of Contents: a brilliant litany of sensitive, reliable writers, who dare to take on the most daring forms of image-thought the cinema has produced. Dudley Andrew, Yale University

Recent years have witnessed a rapid growth in interest in the history, concept and diverse manifestations of the essay film. In this essential collection, Nora Alter and Timothy Corrigan have brought together a superb selection of foundational texts with a range of key recent writings by leading scholars and essay filmmakers. The result is an enormously rich resource for anyone interested in the past, present, and future of this most vital of audiovisual forms. Michael Witt, University of Roehampton

About the Author

• Film and Media Studies
• Film History, Theory, and Criticism
• Photography
• Film and Culture Series

On The Site

• performing arts

Godard and the Essay Film

A Form That Thinks

by Rick Warner

Imprint: Northwestern University Press

288 Pages , 6.00 x 9.00 in , 49 b-w images

• 9780810137370
• Published: July 2018
• 9780810137387
• 9780810137394
• Description

RICK WARNER is an assistant professor of film in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

“ Godard and the Essay Film is a first-rate piece of scholarship that makes substantial contributions on a variety of topics, including the essay as literary and cinematic form, film and philosophy, and the study of the indispensable oeuvre of Jean-Luc Godard.” —Michael Renov, author of The Subject of Documentary    ". . . a superb piece of work, reaffirming cinema as a (potentially) philosophical machine that can lead us to think (that we have not yet begun thinking)." — Studies in European Cinema

“ Godard and the Essay Film is an exceptionally innovative and fresh study that manages to rethink one of the most important and challenging filmmakers in cinema history. In the process, Warner has also engaged one of the most important and prominent waves in modern filmmaking, the essay film. While there is a growing body of scholarship on this subject, Warner’s more focused engagement offers keen new insights that extend beyond Godard’s work.” —Timothy Corrigan, author of The Essay Film: From Montaigne, After Marker

"It is made clear in Godard and the Essay Film, through meticulous close readings of scenes and techniques, that Godard's primary goal in his essay films is to establish a conversation with the viewer. Such a dialogue, where the viewer is asked to decode montaged connections, identify references and provide answers to posed scenarios, is understandably difficult and ultimately always unfinished . . . Also unique to this book is the emphasis on co-filmmaking . . ." —Yelizaveta Goldfarb Moss, Screen "There is no shortage of books on provocative French-Swiss director Jean-Luc Godard, but this one serves the additional function of intervening in discussion of a difficult-to-define type of move: the essay film . . . The book's strongest discussions are those in which Warner opens up Godard's work to its contexts, and a particular highlight is the chapter on couples and coupling, which deals with Godard's collaborations with Anne-Marie Miéville." —K. M. Flanagan, George Mason University, CHOICE

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Defining the Cinematic Essay: The Essay Film by Elizabeth A. Papazian & Caroline Eades, and Essays on the Essay Film by Nora M. Alter & Timothy Corrigan

When it came time for the students to create their own documentaries, one of my policies was for them to “throw objectivity out the window”. To quote John Grierson, documentaries are the “creative treatment of actuality.” Capturing the truth, whatever it may be, is quite nearly impossible if not utterly futile. Often, filmmakers deliberately manipulate their footage in order to achieve educational, informative and persuasive objectives. To illustrate, I screened Robert Flaherty’s 1922 film Nanook of the North and always marveled at the students’ reactions when, after the screening, I informed them that the film’s depiction of traditional Inuit life was entirely a reenactment. While many students were shocked and disappointed when they learned this, others accepted Flaherty’s defence of the film as true to the spirit, if not the letter, of the Inuit’s vanishing way of life. Another example that I screened was a clip from controversial filmmaker Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine (2002) which demonstrated how Moore shrewdly used editing to villainise then-NRA president Charlton Heston. Though a majority of the class agreed with Moore’s anti-gun violence agenda, many were infuriated about being “lied to” and “misled” by the editing tactics. Naturally these examples also raise questions about the role of ethics in documentary filmmaking, but even films that are not deliberately manipulative are still “the product of individuals, [and] will always display bias and be in some manner didactic.” (Alter/Corrigan, p. 193.)

To further my point on the elusive nature of objectivity, I screened Alain Resnais’s Nuit et brouillard ( Night and Fog , 1956), Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil (1983) and Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir (2008.) Yet at this point I began to wonder if I was still teaching documentary or if I had ventured into some other territory. I was aware that Koyaanisqatsi had also been classified as an experimental film by notable scholars such as David Bordwell. On the other hand, Nuit et brouillard is labeled a documentary film but poses more questions than answers, since it is “unable to adequately document the reality it seeks.” (Alter/Corrigan p. 210.) Resnais’s short film interweaves black and white archival footage with colour film of Auschwitz and other camps. The colour sequences were shot in 1955, when the camps had already been deserted for ten years.   Nuit et brouillard scrutinises the brutality of the Holocaust while contemplating the social, political and ethical responsibilities of the Nazis. Yet it also questions the more abstract role of knowledge and memory, both individual and communal, within the context of such horrific circumstances. The students did not challenge Night and Fog’s classification as a documentary, but they wondered if Waltz with Bashir and especially Sans Soleil had entirely different objectives since they seemed to do more than present factual information. The students also noted that these films seemed to merge with other genres, and wondered if there was a different classification for them aside from poetic, observational, participatory, et al.  Although it is animated, Waltz with Bashir is classified as a documentary since it is based on Folman’s own experiences during the 1982 Lebanon War. Also, as Roger Ebert notes, animation is “the best way to reconstruct memories, fantasies, hallucinations, possibilities, past and present.” 2 However, it is not solely a document of Folman’s experiences or of the war itself. It is also a subjective meditation on the nature of human perception. As Folman attempts to reconstruct past events through the memories of his fellow soldiers, Waltz with Bashir investigates the very nature of truth itself. These films definitely challenged the idea of documentary as a strict genre, but the students noticed that they each had interesting similarities. Aside from educating, informing and persuading, they also used non-fiction sounds and images to visualise abstract concepts and ideas.

Sans Soleil (Marker, 1983)

Sans Soleil has been described as “a meditation on place […] where spatial availability confuses the sense of time and memory.” (Alter/Corrigan, p. 117.) Some of my students felt that Marker’s film, which is composed of images from Japan and elsewhere, was more like a “filmed travelogue”. Others described it as a “film journal” since Marker used images and narration to describe certain experiences, thoughts and memories. Yet my students’ understanding of Sans Soleil was problematised when they discovered that the narration was delivered by “a fictional, nameless woman […] reading aloud from, or else paraphrasing, letters sent to her by a fictional, globe-trotting cameraman.” 3 Upon learning this, several students wondered if Sans Soleil was actually a narrative and not a documentary at all. I briefly explained that, since it was also an attempt to visualise abstract concepts, Sans Soleil was known as an essay film. Yet this only complicated things further!  The students wondered if other films we saw in the class were essayistic as well. Was Koyaanisqatsi an essay on humanity’s impact on the world? Was Jesus Camp (Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, 2006) an essay on the place of religion in society and politics?  Where was the line between documentary and the essay film? Between essay and narrative? Or was the essay just another type of documentary?  Rather than immerse myself in the difficulties of describing the essay film, I quickly changed the topic to the students’ own projects, and encouraged them to shape their documentaries through related processes of investigation and exploration.

If I had been able to read “Essays on the Essay Film” by Nora M. Alter & Timothy Corrigan and “The Essay Film: Dialogue, Politics, Utopia” by Elizabeth A. Papazian & Caroline Eades before teaching this class, I still may not have been able to provide definitive answers to my students’ questions. But this is not to say that either of these books are vague and inconclusive! Each one is an insightful collection of articles that explores the complexities of the essay film. In her essay “The Essay Film: Problems, Definitions, Textual Commitments” featured in Alter and Corrigan’s “Essays on the Essay Film” Laura Rascaroli wisely notes that “we must resist the temptation to overtheorise the form or, even worse, to crystallise it into a genre…” since the essay film is a “matrix of all generic possibilities.” (Alter/Corrigan, p. 190) Fabienne Costa goes so far as saying that “The ‘cinematographic essay’ is neither a category of films nor a genre. It is more a type of image, which achieves essay quality.” (Alter/Corrigan, p. 190) It is true that filmmakers, critics, and scholars (myself included) have attempted to understand the essay film better by grouping it with genres that bear many similarities, such as documentary and experimental cinema. Yet despite these similarities, the authors suggest that the essay film needs to be differentiated from both documentary and avant-garde practices of filmmaking. Both “Essays on the Essay Film” and “The Essay Film: Dialogue, Politics, Utopia” illustrate that this mutable form should not be understood as a specific genre, but rather recognised for its profoundly reflective and reflexive capabilities. The essay film can even defy established formulas. As stated by filmmaker Jean-Pierre Gorin in his essay “Proposal for a Tussle” the essay film “can navigate from documentary to fiction and back, creating other polarities in the process between which it can operate.” (Alter/Corrigan, p. 270.)

Nora M. Alter and Timothy Corrigan’s “Essays on the Essay Film” consists of writings by distinguished scholars such as Andre Bazin, Theodore Adorno, Hans Richter and Laura Mulvey, but also includes more recent work by Thomas Elsaesser, Laura Rascaroli and others. Although each carefully selected text spans different time periods and cultural backgrounds, Alter and Corrigan weave together a comprehensive, yet pliable description of the cinematic essay.

“Essays on the Essay Film” begins by including articles that investigate the form and function of the written essay. This first chapter, appropriately titled “Foundations” provides a solid groundwork for many of the concepts discussed in the following chapters. Although the written essay is obviously different from the work created by filmmakers such as Chris Marker and Trinh T. Minh-ha, Alter and Corrigan note that these texts “have been influential to both critics and practitioners of the contemporary film essay.” (p. 7) The articles in this chapter range from Georg Lukacs’s 1910 “On the Nature and Form of the Essay” to “Preface to the Collected Essays of Aldous Huxley” which was published in 1960. Over a span of fifty years, the authors illustrate how the very concept of the essay was affected by changing practices of art, history, philosophy, culture, economics, politics, as well as through modernist and postmodernist lenses. However, these articles are still surprisingly relevant for contemporary scholars and practitioners. For example, in an excerpt from The Man Without Qualities , Robert Musil writes that, “A man who wants the truth becomes a scholar; a man who wants to give free play to his subjectivity may become a writer; but what should a man do who wants something in between?” (p. 45.) Naturally, this reminded me of my class’s discussion on Sans Soleil and Waltz with Bashir. It concisely encapsulates the difficulties that arise when the essay film crosses boundaries of fiction and non-fiction. However, in his 1948 essay “On the Essay and its Prose”, Max Bense believes that the essay lies within the realm of experimentation, since “there is a strange border area that develops between poetry and prose, between the aesthetic stage of creation and the ethical stage of persuasion.”  (p. 52.)  Bense also notes that the word “essay” itself means “to attempt” or to “experiment” and believes that the essay firmly belongs in the realm of experimental and avant-garde. This is appropriate enough, given that writers, and more recently filmmakers and video artists have pushed the boundaries of their mediums in order to explore their deepest thoughts and emotions.

Alter and Corrigan follow this chapter with “The Essay Film Through History” which details the evolution of the essay film. Writing in 1940, Hans Richter considers the essay film a new type of documentary and praises its abilities to break beyond the purportedly objective goals of documentaries in an attempt to “visualize thoughts on screen.” (p. 91) Eighteen years later, Andre Bazin celebrates Chris Marker’s thought-provoking voice-over narration as well as his method of “not restricting himself to using documentary images filmed on the spot, but [using] any and all filmic material that might help his case.” (p. 104) Bazin even compares Marker’s style to the work of animator Norman McLaren, supporting the idea of the essay film’s use of unfettered creativity. By the time the reader gets to the third chapter, “Contemporary Positions”, he or she is well aware of the capricious and malleable nature of the essay film. As Corrigan remarks:

As it develops in and out of those documentary and avant-garde traditions, the history of the essay film underlines a central critical point: that the essayistic should not necessarily be seen simply as an alternative to either of these practices (or to narrative cinema); rather it rhymes with and retimes them as counterpoints within and to them. Situated between the categories of realism and formal experimentation and geared to the possibilities of “public expression,” the essay film suggests an appropriation of certain avant-garde and documentary practices in a way different from the early historical practices of both, just as it tends to invert and restructure the relations between the essayistic and narrative to subsume narrative within that public expression. The essayistic play between fact and fiction, between the documentary and the experimental, or between non-narrative and narrative becomes a place where the essay film inhabits other forms and practices. (p. 198)

Alter and Corrigan’s volume implies that the essay can inhabit many forms, styles or genres. More importantly is the idea that it should be recognised for its intentions and capabilities. Whatever form it takes, the essay is an attempt to seek, explore, understand, visualise and question, without necessarily providing clearly defined answers. The essay film also places considerable value on the intellect and opinion of the viewer, since it is an invitation to reflect on the thoughts, experiences, emotions and perceptions that are being conveyed. “Essays on the Essay Film” sensibly concludes with the chapter entitled “Filmmakers on the Essayistic”. Notable filmmakers, such as Lynn Sachs and Ross McElwee provide valuable insight into their own practices. The featured filmmakers, documentarians and video artists in this chapter do not focus specifically on what form their work takes, but what they are trying to achieve. For instance, in her article “On Writing the Film Essay,” Lynn Sachs proclaims that “My job is not to educate but rather to spark a curiosity in my viewer that moves from the inside out.” (p. 287.) Admittedly, Sachs’s statement contradicts the idea that documentary films seek to educate, inform and persuade, which I taught in my own classes. Yet Sachs’s insights, as well as those of the many other filmmakers in “Essays on the Essay Film” demonstrate how the camera is as versatile as the pen when communicating thoughts, emotions and ideas.

Tree of Life (Malick, 2011)

Elizabeth A. Papazian and Caroline Eades have also compiled several surprising, challenging and thoroughly captivating articles that exemplify the many forms that the essay film can take. The Essay Film: Dialogue, Politics, Utopia includes articles by several prominent scholars that explore the essay film’s place throughout history as well as within various cultural settings. Like Alter and Corrigan, they also present a convincing argument that the essay film is distinct from both documentary, avant-garde and narrative filmmaking, since it is “characterized by a loose, fragmentary, playful, even ironic approach […] and raises new questions about the construction of the subject, the relationship of the subject to the world and the aesthetic possibilities of cinema.” (Papazian/Eades, p. 1) Papazian and Eades explore how essayistic tendencies can manifest in narrative, documentary, avant-garde, and even video art through careful analyses of specific films and videos. The book opens with Timothy Corrigan’s “Essayism and Contemporary Film Narrative” which explores how the essayistic can inhabit narrative film, specifically through Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life and Lech Majewski’s The Mill and the Cross , both released in 2011. Corrigan observes that The Tree of Life “continually seems to resist its own narrative logic” (p. 18) by presenting a highly fragmented and non-linear plot.  Instead of placing it into the hybrid realm of experimental-narrative, however, Corrigan argues that:

Rather than locate a linear connection between past, present and future, the narrative flashbacks in The Tree of Life become a search for genesis – or more accurately many geneses – which might be better described as disruptive recollections that never adequately collect and circulate, as fractured and drifting images and moments producing not evolutionary lines, but the spreading reflective branches of essayism. (p. 19-20.)

The Essay Film: Dialogue, Politics, Utopia continues with essays by other acclaimed, yet indefinable filmmakers such as Jean Luc-Godard and Claire Denis. Essays by Rick Warner and Martine Beugnet explore how these filmmakers defy closure and continuity, even while appearing to work within established forms and genres. Ann Eaken Moss explores the essayistic approach that Chantal Akerman imbues within her experimental “home movies.”   News from Home (1977) is a meditation on Akerman’s own sense of dislocation from her home in Belgium while she adapts to life in New York City. In “Inside/Outside: Nicolasito Guillen Landrian’s Subversive Strategy in Coffea Arabiga” Ernesto Livon-Grosman investigates Landrian’s means of furtively including his own political agenda within a government-sanctioned documentary. What was meant to be a propagandistic documentary about the benefits of Cuban coffee plantations becomes an essayistic critique on the power structure of Fidel Castro’s government. (Livon-Grosman.) Papazian and Eades conclude their volume with an afterward by Laura Rascaroli, affirming that “it is with the potentiality of all essay films to question and challenge their own form”. (p. 300) The essay film may be distinct from narrative, documentary and the avant-garde, but it itself has no discernable style or formula. The Essay Film: Dialogue, Politics, Utopia clearly illustrates how the essay film, although bordering on established genres “must create the conditions of its own form.” (pp. 301-302.) Every filmmaker’s unique thoughts, experiences, meditations, questions and perceptions cannot neatly fit into a strict set of generic guidelines. However, this does not make the essay film more difficult to understand, but further implies that it is a unique practice rather than a specific form.

News from Home (Akerman, 1977)

Even with the insight provided by these two volumes, I do not regret introducing the essay film to my documentary students, despite their questions and confusion. As illustrated throughout Essays on the Essay Film and The Essay Film: Dialogue, Politics, Utopia it has typically been an esoteric and transgressive form, and perhaps including it with better known genres such as documentary and experimental films could be an effective way of introducing it to beginning filmmakers and scholars. Then again, perhaps it should be taught as a form separate from documentary, narrative and the avant-garde. I do wish that I was able to speak more about it at length during that particular instance, since the essay film deserves a considerable amount of thought and attention. Whether or not there is a correct pedagogical approach to teaching the essay film, both of these volumes are tremendously illuminating, but also open the door to further discussion about this compelling form of cinema.

• Bill Nichols, Introduction to Documentary , 2nd ed. (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2010). ↩
• Roger Ebert, “Waltz with Bashir”, rogerebert.com , January 21, 2009, https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/waltz-with-bashir-2009 ↩
• Jonathan Rosenbaum, “Personal Effects: The Guarded Intimacy of Sans Soleil”, The Criterion Collection , June 25, 2017, https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/484-personal-effects-the-guarded-intimacy-of-sans-soleil ↩

07 Adapting History and Literature into Movies

This essay offers an overview of adaptation, an initiation for the educated reader who is not a communications or film specialist. It will reference “The Social and Cultural Construction of Abraham Lincoln in U.S. Movies and on U.S. TV”—but mainly with an eye to the larger issue of cinematographic adaptation itself.

Apples and Giraffes

Literature and film, movies and books, compare like apples and giraffes, said contemporary American writer Dennis Lehane. 1 But they do compare. They do interbreed. As do history and film. But the question is: How and why do history, literature and movies fruitfully nourish one another? When apples, giraffes, and other exotica interbreed what results?

Many thousands of movies are adaptations from historical or literary sources. Hence the recent internet vernacular of “litflicks”—literature adapted into flicks, the flickering medium of the motion pictures. 2 History is generically dealt with by cinema in the epic, period, or historical film. Film historians generally distinguish the epic group from the strict historical group by its sheer size, expense, and the sumptuousness of the movie’s costumes and sets. The period film is distinguished by the production fact that it can be set in the far distant past or the immediate present, as in the Jazz Age, 1926 version of The Great Gatsby or with the achingly Sixties, 1969 film Zabriskie Point . 3

Although literature, history, and movies are distinct forms of communication thousands of solutions and accommodations have been found so they can get along and have fruitful relationships. The first key is the nature and tradition of adaptation itself. Tales evolve and one generation adjusts the stories of the past to the present time and to its modern needs and ways of story telling. “My dramas are but slices cut off from the great banquet of Homer’s poems,” wrote the Greek dramatist Aeschylus (525–456 B.C.). 4 But Aeschylus’ dramas were leaner and meaner, in search of a higher truth which synthesized moral opposites, profoundly simpler than anything all-embracing Homer ever wrote. For it is the singer, not the song, that makes the splendor of communication successful. And a story retold, as Aeschylus retold Homer, continues. What is beneath the surface of the story that has been told before and will be told again—a story that has been alive among humans for centuries or millennia?

Literature, History, and Movies

Consider how information exists and knowledge is distilled. How a story is told is as important as its subject matter. Thus, three fundamental points about how the nature of literature and history effect their relation to movies:

First, legend precedes historical fact. Did Nestor and Ajax in the Iliad ever actually exist and do what Homer claims they did? Until factual, textual proof is found this remains, at the least, an open question. The Iliad remains legend rather than history, literature rather than history, superstition rather than science. Hence, human culture as we know it shows that literature precedes history as a practice of inquiry, as a creative record of human events.

Second, a fundamental distinction exists between history and memory. History is then, memory is now. A judicious, critical management of documentary evidence allows history to get as close as possible to the facts of the past; then as it was then. Memory is the past remembered and reconstructed through the lens of the present and its building blocks. 5 Movies flourish in a popular, contemporary market place. They must entertain the sensibilities of the present. Anachronism is their delight and pleasure. Memory is their very breath. So history inevitably gets short-changed in movies—with some notable exceptions.

Third, with regard to the history of ideas, one distinguishes between an older meaning of literature as literacy and the cultivation of reading (dominant through the eighteenth century) and a newer reality and reference to literature as a body of writing which contrasts with erudition and which emphasizes wit, talent, and taste (which begins to dominate the older meaning by the end of the eighteenth century). 6 Story-telling movies that are not straight documentary or raw, live footage have a much stronger generic affinity to literature than to history. Thus the movie-history relation is more a connection rather than a similarity, an association rather than nearness. The difference is subtle but meaningful. The viewer can expect a movie to be like literature. But can you expect a movie to be history?

Two exceptions of note which prove the rule with regard to movies and history are documentary cinema and raw footage. Documentary cinema has a closer relation to history. Documentary can function like journalism or on-the-spot news, though news is “only the rough draft of history”—as publisher Phil Graham of The Washington Post once said. Conventional wisdom defines documentary as “relating to or found in documents: aiming at presentation of reality,” 7 “broadly: factual, objective.” 8

But look deeper and one often finds that the non-fiction film or photo which is about “real life” was treated subjectively and sometimes doctored just as much as a piece of fiction. Though documentary is relied upon as objective fact, as proven support for something, it can easily be a constructed, subjective artifact and be synonymous with social persuasion or propaganda. This is not a problem, but an asset for documentary, and a point to which this essay shall return. Raw footage is also known as “stock shot” and is film footage of actual, ordinary or exceptional events which is stocked away and then used as movie filler, a means to intensify mimesis in a fiction film or documentary, a way to cut production costs, or kept for historical record. One outstanding case of stock shot would be the Zapruder Film . This was the only live movie made of the John F. Kennedy assassination of November 22, 1963 by amateur cameraman and garment manufacturer Abraham Zapruder of Dallas, Texas. 9 This film has been used or referenced in about forty movies to date, including Oliver Stone’s 1991, bullying but engrossing movie JFK , a 1999, HBO Sopranos’ episode, and conspiracy theory documentaries of the last few years. 10

The vitality of adaptation and influence evolved in Western culture through various epochs down to the European Age of the Enlightenment, when the proprietary concept of plagiarism came into common play. Prior to that, new versions of old tales, such as European medieval romances, were considered to refurbish and refit stories that had been told before and would be told again and again. There was once a much stronger sense of the common property of culture. The change that came about during the European Enlightenment had to do with owning painting and art criticism, literature, natural philosophy, history, and music. 11

The originality, stylistic authority and proprietary rights of a composer and a composition became a major factor in the production, adaptation, and consumption of culture. This was capped by a new sense of individualism, a term and concept which did not come into common use in the English language until the early 1800s. 12 One result was the “self-made” author who could make a living from his writings and was deservedly proud that he could do so by selling his work to the public and did not have to toady to patronage. The Augustan poet, satirist, and translator Alexander Pope (1688–1794) was the first outstanding Anglo-American example of this. From his Homeric translations he made a net profit of the then very large sum of £10,000 and he bragged he could “. . . live and thrive Indebted to / no Prince or Peer alive.” 13

Precedents for plagiarism existed. Stealing from another person’s work among the literate elite in ancient Greece and Rome was taken as a cowardly sign that one lacked personal, creative integrity. Around the time Johann Gutenberg’s printing press was working (beginning in Strasbourg in the 1430s), the legal phenomenon of “letters patent” came into existence—a document from the monarch which conferred the privilege, or patent, to print, usually given to a Stationer’s Company or guild. It was the first Anglo-American law, the Occidental Copyright Law Statute of Queen Anne of England of 1710, which expressly guaranteed copyright. Which, in turn, was followed in the newly minted United States by the first U.S. Copyright Act of 1790. 14

The concept and practice of adaptation as a break from the original creation, and not as a refitting flourished once copyright and plagiarism were written into the granite of the law. The term’s two-fold original meaning adapted to this cultural, social, and economic change. First by the Latin etymology of adaptation: ad —“near, adjacent to,” and aptus : “to fasten, to fit.” While the secondary, derived meaning of adaptation as something “broken up” and “remade totally anew” adapted to the newer social and commercial sense in a world where “capitalism” was also a new word.

Cultural History

Final introductory note: This essay about adapting history and literature into film is a cultural history approach to the question of cinematographic adaptation. It highlights concern for cultural translation, with how the culture and language of the past has been transformed into the present.

Culture is not handed on like a baton in a relay race from one generation to another or from one nation to another. As it evolves, culture has to be reproduced. “A culture does not have an independent inertia.” 15 In classical terms, cultural history is a secular humanist, Aristotelian approach to culture. My a priori assumption is that all knowledge is gained and perpetuated by the close association between the human mind, spirit, and body conditioned by the environment of its time. No Greater Power—from archetypes, to Godhead, to Platonic “forms”—exists independently of our sensible world, of our human need to construct, guide, give and get what we require as human beings. Man is his own maker.

The ancient art and craft of adaptive communication means recreation. Beneath the surface of a story refurbished over the ages and updated by different media lies a heritage of useful knowledge which adds to well-being in proportion as it is communicated. The genesis of the forms themselves can now help us to figure out the relationship of literature to film, the written word to the visual image.

Malleable Forms and Contents

Protean Forms and Authenticity

In his classic study Novels Into Film (1954), George Bluestone argued that the novel is “protean because it has assimilated essays, letters, memoirs, histories, religious tracts, and manifestoes” 16 —and one may add: the folk tale, the play, epic, and romance. Film itself is also specially “protean because it has assimilated photography, music, dialog, the dance”—and one may add: literature and history, painting, visible color, audible sound, and the art of inducing a sleeplike trance.

But movies do more. Movies are distinct from both literature and history because a movie has to move on multiple tracks, combine two or more types of media. As the German American film theorist and perceptual psychologist Rudolf Arnheim (1904–2007) noted in 1938, a movie is a composite work of art which:

. . . is possible only if complete structures, produced by the media, are integrated in the form of parallelism. Naturally, such a ‘double track’ will make sense only if the components do not simply convey the same thing; they must complete each other in the sense of dealing differently with the same subject; each medium must treat the subject in its own way, and the resulting difference must be in accordance with those that exist between the media. 17

History has also assimilated different genres. But, more importantly, it has traditionally been considered to be of two sorts: the biographies of great people or the story of ordinary folk. This began as the long-standing distinction in history between the work of Thucydides and that of Herodotus. Thucydides wrote heroic political history which emphasized the interrelations of the highly privileged. Thucydides reserved the moral drama of historical tragedy for an elite (as did literature until the modern, industrial age). Herodotus’ work was pluralistic, polyvalent, democratic. His tone was colloquial rather than terse, his narrative was far more about people than abstractions. In the Herodotean words of Henry Ford’s amanuensis William John Cameron (1878–1955): “The history of historians is usually bunk . . . but history that you can see is of great value. It is not the past of the books, . . . it is the past of living men and women; folks pretty much like ourselves.” 18 The contemporary American cultural historian Karl Krober has updated these issues in his study Make-Believe in Film and Fiction (2006) and argued for a different set of contrasts regarding the fundamental differences between literature and movies. Literature, he claims, makes it easier to share subjective fantasies, it frees the mind from limits of time and space, and it dramatizes the ethical significance of ordinary behavior, while simultaneously intensifying readers’ awareness of how they themselves think or feel. Movies’ uniquely magnify movements to produce stories which are specially potent in exposing hypocrisy, problems of criminality in modern society, and the relation between nature and man, the private self and the natural environment. 19 In other words, movies are more like journalism—the rough draft of history. The American playwright, movie director and screenwriter David Mamet (1947– ) has put the matter more succinctly in basic building terms. Literature, he said (and a play in particular) “is like an airplane. You don’t want to have any extra parts there.” While “a movie’s more like a car; it can probably sustain a couple extra parts to make it look pretty.” 20

The protean blends of history and cinema match nicely in the epic spectacular. The movie set in an epic—the film’s stage arrangement, scenery, props, place and costumes—takes on such force of character that it has the strength of an actual subject. Like a documentary, an epic spectacular owes a great deal of its effectiveness to the coherence and apparent authenticity of all elements in the film. The set is a spine that must exist so the body of the movie can exist. The director must bring spine and body to life. And so history appears to be reborn in the epic movie. 21

Authentic setting both enhances the veracity of an epic movie and gives the popular audience a tantalizing insight into the people and places that helped to make history happen. MGM’s 1959 Ben Hur sent out second unit scouts to film locations in Italy, along with England, France, Mexico and Spain, to achieve this. Of course, this was a gross factual error. The creative point was not to achieve one hundred percent factual, historical accuracy, but to attain the emotional perspective of epic space. In character terms, the late Charlton Heston was beautifully cast with his stern, hawk-like features, intense, stoic expression, and sinewy, athletic frame. The point being that historical accuracy in the movie context should be judged by different rules than the dialectical, academic context of history. “There is no point in comparing the relative value of the various media. Personal preferences exist, but each medium reaches the heights in its own way.” 22 In the movie business, as opposed to the history business, authentic does not mean factually erudite. It means coherence. It means history recast into fresh dramatic form. At its best, the epic spectacular combines heroic political history with pluralistic, polyvalent and democratic themes—as in David Lean’s superb Anglo-American production Lawrence of Arabia (1962). It is a movie business formula that has produced hokum and rubbish, but also cinematic masterpieces and cutting-edge advances in narrative form and multimedia technology. In American cinema, it is a formula that has worked from D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916) through the twentieth and twenty-first century Western, the Bible epic, war movie, sword and sandal Roman Empire film or British Empire movie, the disaster film, and the science fiction intergalactic adventure movie.

Word, Image, Technology

One last point about the material and conceptual nature of literature, history, and movies. Literature and history must have the word— logos . Their particular nature as media consists “precisely in the abstractness of language, which calls every object by the collective name of its species and therefore defines it in only a generic way, without reaching the object itself in its individual concreteness . . ., hence the spiritual quality of its vision, the acuteness and succinctness of its descriptions.” 23 As literature and history advance beyond their oral stage, they demand the written word (or print) conveyed by reading. The medium of movies needs images in motion which are conveyed by a projection on to a screen. In all works of art there is a hierarchy of media. For movies the image, iconos , dominates.

A movie gets to places literature and history do not. And then it delivers that place to its audience in a way literature and history cannot. The audience, in turn, must use their eyes for a movie to work. After all, are not literature and history forms of communication which are more available to a blind person? With literature and history the audience sees with their inner eye, not as much with their outer, physical eye. “Film creates a fully defined and immediate physical reality that requires dramatization and exploration; it brings characters visually realized into direct relationship with their environment and in immediate proximity to the viewer.” 24

Cinema also needs electricity. Movies could never have existed without the necessary technology. Print advanced literature beyond the spoken word and the written page and allowed mass media. But technology midwifed movies into their very existence. Technological determinism has played a much greater part in the creation of movies. From its modern inception, the technology also helps to distinguish the entertainment film from the documentary. In 1893 the American inventor and businessman Thomas Edison created the first film company to make and show movies to the public. The Edison Company filmed in a tar paper barn set on a swivel, in which the roof could be opened or closed so as to adjust to the sun. Edison’s unwieldy camera, the Kinetograph, was a large, fixed machine run by an electric motor to ensure smooth motion. The point here is that Edison’s “camera did not go out to examine the world; instead, items of the world were brought to it—to perform. Thus Edison began with a vaudeville parade: dancers, jugglers, contortionists, magicians, strong men, boxers, cowboy rope twirlers.” 25

In contrast, documentary cinema was first developed by Louis Lumière in 1895 by using the cinématographe camera which was a hundredth of the weight of Edison’s Kinetograph. The cinématographe was about the size of a small suitcase, very portable, and could film, print, or project. Edison’s movies were entertaining indoor performances. Lumière’s movies documented the world outdoors. His camera “was an ideal instrument for catching life on the run”— sur le vif , as Lumière put it. 26

The American film director, comedian and cartoonist Terry Gilliam has argued that the nineteenth century sense of cinema as a whole came from the flickering passages seen by riders in trains when they looked out at the passing landscape through the train window’s frame. 27 One technology inspired another. And without electricity in the 1890s neither the Lumière brothers in France nor Thomas Edison and George Eastman working together in America could have established the craft of filming and projection. (However, vigorous, mobile entertainment existed prior to the new technology—the street theater, the carnival, and the enthusiastic links of circus rings. So it was not the technology alone that provided the creative genesis.)

The novel dates back at least to Heliodorus (third century A.D.). In the long run the novel is a far more formal genre and has been a more creative medium than film. Both novel and literature are preindustrial arts, but movies are an industrial art. The novel also has a lengthy record as a class-oriented medium. For centuries the novel relied on the upper and middle-class elitism of literacy. Cinema was born as mass and popular cultures bloomed in urban civilizations in modern times. As critics have noted about cinema since its pre-World War One days of Nickelodeon entertainment, it is the most popular and democratic of art forms (although admission did not always cost only a nickel). The 1913 admission price to the spectacular movie Quo Vadis was the current equivalent of about $31.00. 28

Movies fed on the placenta of the popular, the common coin, and not on the support of a superior class. 29 Movies were ushered into existence by the common, human hunger for story. This is part of the special process which, together with other characteristics, helps to define American culture. “American man,” wrote Eric Hoffer, “is eminently a storyteller. His search for a purpose, a cause, an ideal, a mission and the like is largely a search for a plot and a pattern in the development of his life story—a story that is basically without meaning or pattern.” 30 Every American group creates stories about its own heroes and villains which help to reinforce and provide identity for the group. In its relatively short run compared to literature and history, the movie business has democratically catered to wider audience needs and market demands.

The Visual Book

At the risk of arguing by list, note that the illustrated book has been around for a very long time. The written text has a huge history of visual relationships. Indeed, has the written text ever not been illustrated? 31 For our American cultural history purposes a fascinating detail in this long chronicle is that the very first best seller in America was an illustrated book. Indeed, it was a very illustrated book: Francis Quarles’ Emblemes (1635) and Hieroglyphikes (1638). These were each an emblem book—a work of moral and religious verse based on Bible quotations in which the word text was matched by allegorical illustrations. Quarles’ Emblemes and Hieroglyphikes were the best emblem books produced in England in English, and undoubtedly in America as well. 32

Which is to say that America was ever a nation with a strong preference for visual communication, long before the cinema. The entertainment industry, with movies and TV in particular, are to the United States what wine is to France or oil is to Saudi Arabia. One reason why movies made such great headway in the United States was because of the nation’s pronounced national taste for and tradition of visual communication and storytelling. Once twentieth-century U.S. mass media was established in 1930—with electric sound recordings, radio and movies—non-fiction book titles outnumbered fiction titles. The greater part of storytelling moved to the new media.

Types of Adaptation

When adapting from literature to film, one begins with the raw stuff, the subject matter of a short story, novella, or novel, of a play, history, biography, or with a poem, song, or folk tale. It is all good because it is ready-made and market-tested. The characters and stories are already popular. Now they have to be mass-produced. Three types of adaptation follow: loose, faithful, or literal. 33 Adaptation is by nature a translation into a different medium which expresses itself by using a different group of techniques, essential materials, and rules of creative harmony.

The loose adaptation takes the raw stuff and reweaves it into a movie as the director, producer, or studio wishes and as the movie needs. Contemporary cultural norms are often a determining factor. The various adaptations of James Cain’s all-American novel The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934) became more overtly sexual as the times—and countries of adaptation—changed. One could easily imagine an effective and even momentarily pornographic adaptation of this steamy, laconic crime thriller at some point in the future. 34 In The Postman Always Rings Twice libidinal action is the narrative’s existential pumping force. Its eros and thanatos are deliciously extreme and invite loose play. 35

One should wonder about action. Overall, are Americans and American cinema prone to loose adaptations because of an emphasis on action as an end in itself within the civilization? “I need a little less talk and a lot more action,” is a common State-side saying. And as Anglo-American actor Michael Caine claimed in his autobiography: “The British make ‘talking pictures;’ Americans make ‘moving pictures.’” 36 This is not universally true, but good enough to be a rule of thumb. In American national tradition, a movie is a mover and a shaker, it tries to provide emotional satisfaction for it audience. Example: The 1935 film version of Jack London’s excellent Call of the Wild —starring Clark Gable, Jack Oakie and Loretta Young, was a fine film in its own way (billed with the tagline: “An Epic Novel . . . An Epic Picture!”)—but it typically lacked the level of thoughtful backstory present in the novel. 37 Plus, the very popular buddy character in the movie, Short Hoolihan, was played by Jack Oakie (1903–1978). Oakie was the inveterate scene stealer with the charm of a big, friendly, flappy, hairy dog. He was the nation’s loveable, pudgy, all-American, good time “Okie” character of the era. “No matter how hard I worked all day, I could always find a party to go to,” he wrote in his autobiography Jack Oakie’s Double Takes . 38 Just as the actors Richard Roundtree in Shaft (1971) and Eddie Murphy in Beverly Hills Cop (1984) provided audience interest because they integrated a new kind of American into the mainstream—a back-talking, thoroughly male, self-confident, Black protagonist—so did Jack Oakie in his time and place blend in a hearty contemporary figure: a working-class, funny and eventually successful White guy from Oklahoma or the Red River Valley country. 39

Jack Oakie’s popularity was more important than the integrity of Jack London’s original text. After Hoolihan-Oakie was shown to die in Call of the Wild ’s world premiere held at the Cathay Circle Theater in Los Angeles (an action true to the novel), the audience was so upset that a new ending was provided for the movie in which Oakie lived, so the public (and MGM’s box office) would not be disappointed. And would Jack London, champion of the rough and tumble working class (who wrote: “affluence means influence”), have been upset? Why not let Hoolihan-Oakie live? A traditional condition of action rather than reflection in American cinema was specially true through the 1950s and 1960s. Then something changed. By that time over five hundred art house or art theater halls flourished in the U.S.A. showing foreign films: in the Boston, Massachusetts area, for example, the well-known Brattle Street Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the Coolidge Corner Theater in Brookline, or the Paris Cinema on Boylston Street in Boston. There was both an artistic and a market message here.

The new generation of Baby Boomer U.S. audience and film makers were subsequently receptive to and incorporated into U.S. films the serious aesthetic and social intentions of non-U.S. movies. At one level, this distinction gradually dissolved between the reflective-artistic qualities of U.S. and non-U.S. films, and consequently the number of art theaters rapidly dwindled. At another level, the American need for action, star power, and contemporaneity which could justify loose adaptation remained. Examples of loose adaptation in American cinema would be: The Best Years of Our Lives (1945, directed by William Wyler—adapted from the prose poem Glory for Me by MacKinlay Kantor 40 ), King Creole (1958, directed by Michael Curtiz, loosely adapted from A Stone for Danny Fisher by Harold Robbins 41 ), or Disney’s Pinocchio (1940, loosely based on the original Italian version). The loose adaptation may add additional subplots and characters, change situation or setting. Some of the original, in spirit or in fact, still remains. Loose adaptation can also mean expanding only a few lines from an original text. The original Biblical story of David and Bathsheba—the approximately one thousand words of II Samuel 11: 2–27, 12: 1–24—is part of one of the oldest pieces of historiography in the Western world, II Samuel 9–20 and I Kings 11–22. It became the movie David and Bathsheba (1951, taglined: “For this woman . . . he broke God’s own commandment!”). 42 This loose adaptation of a Biblical text was earnest, austere and languid.

As often happens with folklore or Biblical texts, star power and storyline changes heightened the interest and drama of the plot. In the original Biblical version King David spies Bathsheba by chance: “And it came to pass in an eveningtide, that David arose from his bed, and walked upon the roof of the king’s house: and from the roof he saw a woman washing herself; and the woman was very beautiful to look upon.” (II Samuel 11.2) But in the adaptation directed by Henry King and written by Philip Dunne (which received the Academy Award nomination for Best Writing: Story and Screenplay), Bathsheba exposed herself on purpose in order to seduce David. Their subsequent betrayal was an expression of mutual complicity. The vicarious interest of the 1950s American women in the movie audience was heightened. Bathsheba was an agent, not just a victim. Like popular music and folk song, texts from the Bible, legends, or folklore have the nature of common property. Like popular song, the original text is anonymous or invented by an individual or group who yields it to the community. The story or song is then modified or taken apart in performance.

Arguably the most adapted source works are legends. Some film historians count the vampire legend as the single most adapted tale of all time. Could a legend be that tantalizing end point for history and beginning place for myth where all is possible? 43

The faithful adaptation takes the literary or historical experience and tries to translate it as close as possible into the filmic experience. Sometimes there are equivalents in film to the original way of saying or doing what happens in literature and history, and sometimes not. And “faithful” depends on the movie makers’ knack to be true to the original spirit of the raw stuff, the primary source. Faithful works from the inside out; loose works from the outside in. Loose has no problem with dismantling and reassembling, breaking up and remaking totally anew. Faithful wants to stay loyal to the intention of the original, to convey the heart and soul. So in a faithful adaptation, even if the movie went so far as to change the original story’s ending, the movie makers would want to make sure that they did not betray the core meaning.

Some outstanding twentieth century examples of faithful cinematic renditions of an original literary or historical text are: The Ox-Bow Incident (1943, directed by William Wellman; novel: 1940), The Grapes of Wrath (1940, directed by John Ford; novel: 1939), The Godfather (1972, directed by Francis Ford Coppola; novel:1969), The Man Who Would Be King (1975, directed by John Huston, from Rudyard Kipling’s short story of the same name 1888), The Dead (1987, directed by John Huston, from the story in Joyce’s Dubliners, 1914 ), Dances With Wolves (1990, directed by Kevin Costner, adapted from Michael Blake’s novel of the same name, 1986–1988.)

The faithful adaptation has the thorny problem of the narrator and the general commentary. The narrator is the good shepherd who guides the flock of meanings in the original, word-based text. How do you replace such an important figure without loosing direction? In Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath , for example, seventeen percent of the novel were general commentary. In the movie’s faithful adaptation by John Ford and Twentieth Century Fox there was no voice-over narrator in the filmic space. 44 But each medium worked perfectly well on its own terms. The movie Grapes of Wrath maintained a serious narrative tone. It had mature quality of cinematic sound, coloring, photography and casting which helped to replace and even enhance the historical novel’s original voice. Dorothea Lange’s 1930s pitch-perfect photographic style was incorporated by the film’s Director of Photography Gregg Toland. Alfred Newman’s musical score achieved superb shading. The casting of the Joad family was done with vigor and depth: Jane Darwell as Ma Joad, solid as oak, yet vulnerable in her strength; Henry Fonda,—as Steinbeck himself said: “A lean, stringy, dark-faced piece of electricity walked out on the screen and he had me. I believed my own story again.” 45 The public relations department at Twentieth Century Fox possibly pushed this maturity too far. They emphasized the serious nature of the movie’s subject when it was released by stressing that Grapes of Wrath was only for an adult audience. It was taglined: “The thousands who have read the book will know why WE WILL NOT SELL ANY CHILDREN TICKETS to see this picture!” 46

The social conventions of 1940 also did not allow John Ford to end Grapes of Wrath with the novel’s last scene of young Rose of Sharon baring her breast and suckling the starving man who “was about fifty, his whiskery face gaunt, and his open eyes . . . vague and staring” and who hadn’t eaten for about six days. But Ford did manage to end his version with the book’s characteristic note of spreading the milk of human kindness. The movie draws to a conclusion with a concise version of the novel’s chapter twenty-eight farewell scene between Tom Joad and his mother.

A strong expression of a literal adaptation is often a play performed as a movie. This includes movies filmed on stage and in performance (as in the Broadway Theater Archive series 47 ). Or it could be a play such as Arthur Miller’s Death of A Salesman (1949) which has been faithfully transmuted at least three times into cinema: in 1951 (directed by László Benedek, starring Frederic March as Willy Loman), in 1966 (directed by Alex Segal, starring Lee J. Cobb, who had already appeared in Miller’s original 1949 production), and then in 1985 (directed by Volker Schlöndorff, starring Dustin Hoffman). A good example of an outstanding historical play literally adapted to film is Sunrise at Campobello , 1960, adapted from the 1958 stage drama about Franklin Delano Roosevelt written by the politically engaged Dore Schary. 48

What happens to the play transferred to film? Well, a film has incredibly more space than a stage. A movie can literally take the scenic arrangement outside and the medium offers the director all sorts of tempting forms of physical and psychological expansion. Franklin Roosevelt’s dramatic walk without crutches on his crippled legs to the podium, with one hand on a cane and the other hand clutching his son’s arm, to deliver the 1924 Presidential nominating speech for Al Smith before thousands of spectators at the Democratic Party Convention within the huge dome of Madison Square Garden is suitably heightened in the movie version.

Film offers a variety of focused and sustained camera angles. It expands or contracts our experience by virtue of the absence of the space-time continuum. Shots in separate spaces are edited together. Different times can be spliced, joined, or blended. The everyday sequential chain of experience is removed, intensified, or rearranged. The environment—the viewing filter of a dark theater or a quiet room—enhances the experience. This can make the literal adaptation of a visually contained text, like the rooms in Death of a Salesman , claustrophobic. Yet, by doing so, it heightens the play’s inherent tone of psychological oppression and impending doom. Each version of Death of a Salesman is enhanced by cinematic techniques of expressionism.

A movie can accordion a play up or down, enlarge it or reduce it. Although the phenomenon of live performance—the smell of grease paint, the timber of the actors’ and actresses’ uneven voices, the emotions of the crowd, and even the creak of the theater’s seats, all of which are at the heart and soul of theater—are rarely there in a movie. The 1981 film Zoot Suit , the faithful adaptation of a play based on the historical incident of L.A.’s World War II 1940s “Zoot Suit Riots,” is an exception. 49  A Hollywood feature film needs a celebrity actor to pull in a big box office. And the star of the day may be a Brad Pitt or an Angelina Jolie or a Tom Cruise who may or may not be appropriate for the play itself. But they have the pull to secure the part. A case in point was the original film adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie . Williams said it was “the most awful travesty of the play I’ve ever seen . . . horribly mangled by the people who did the film script.” Williams particularly disliked the choice of casting, with actress Gertrude Lawrence playing the mother Amanda Wingfield and Jane Wyman playing Laura Wingfield. But he thought the opposite way about Elia Kazan’s darkly brilliant adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire with fleshy, brutal Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski and a tremulous Vivien Leigh as pale Blanche DuBois. 50

A play as a play on stage, in contrast, concentrates and frames audience focus. On stage characters adapt to the same words and action at the same time and on the same plain. The stage space is a limited horizontal plain as opposed to the immense vertical plain of the movie screen. The stage has three dimensions and a movie two. But the absence of the space-time continuum in a movie provides oneiric depth. This is partly created by the sensation of inevitable flow. With a theatrical stage, each member of the audience individually chooses where to look, who to listen to, or who or what to hold on to most attentively. In a movie, the camera keeps making that choice and providing the small, medium, and big picture. The camera decides what you see and where you look and even who your ears perk up to the most. The camera is your eyes, it is inevitable flow. As the exuberant Russian director Dziga Vertov (1896–1954) declared, for a film perception of the world the most fundamental point is the “use of the camera as a cinema eye more perfect than the human eye for exploring the chaos of visual phenomena filling the universe . . . . We cannot improve our eyes, but we can always improve the camera.” 51 Yet faithful types of adaptation tend to impose self-destructive limitations, to sacrifice power for loyalty, risk for reassurance. When Tom Stoppard wrote the screenplay, Robert Benton directed, and Dustin Hoffman starred in the faithful 1991 movie adaptation of E. L. Doctorow’s brilliant novel Billy Bathgate , the film was a flop. “We have seen this world before, in every gangster movie set in the 1920s or 1930s,” wrote Chicago Sun-Times critic Roger Ebert, “but never has it had less juice, been more dry and exhausted.” 52

Art is risk. Art is: “always pushing . . . always wanting to explore . . . you want to get yourself into trouble and see how well you can fight your way out of it.” 53 Whether it be a loose, faithful, or literal adaptation, at the end of the day, the final result of success or failure is not a matter of formula but finesse. How well you fight your way out of it. “It is not enough to show bits of truth on the screen, separate frames of truth” wrote Vertov. “These frames must be thematically organized so that the whole is also a truth.” 54

Documentary and Literal Adaptation

Documentary films seek a form of literal adaptation to be historically sound. But the nature of historical truth achieved by documentary is debatable. Documentary is not a verbatim representation. As noted earlier, conventional wisdom defines documentary as “relating to or found in documents: aiming at presentation of reality . . . broadly factual, objective.” Objective? As historian Erik Barnouw maintained, a documentary film director makes endless choices:

. . . of topic, people, vistas, angles, lenses, juxtapositions, sounds words. Each selection is an expression of a point of view . . . [thus] of course a propagandistic role is involved. One can hardly imagine a documentary . . . that is not propaganda—in the sense of trying to present evidence that may enlarge understanding and change ideas. A documentary cannot be ‘the truth’. It is evidence, testimony—which announces its topic, alerts our critical faculties, and at its best is part of the diverse testimony which is at the very heart of a democratic process. 55

A documentary is not fiction but faith. As propaganda itself—from its original Latin use: de propaganda fide , “concerning the faith to be propagated” [Vatican, 1622] 56 —documentary takes a stand, holds a cause. A documentary provides objective reality filtered. As a case in point, consider Ken Burns’ The Civil War (1990). It began literally as a time of war film. It was initially screened in the U.S.A. on PBS television in a national environment of intensifying patriotism as the Persian Gulf War developed in the fall of 1990. 57 Episode One: The Cause – 1861 ended with a very moving letter from a soldier to his wife, written July 14, 1861, which stressed his undying love and commitment to his wife, family, principles, and government. “I have no misgivings about, or lack of confidence in the cause in which I am engaged, and my courage does not halt or falter. I know how strongly American Civilization now leans on the triumph of the Government . . . . And I am willing—perfectly willing—to lay down all my joys in this life, to help maintain this Government.” 58 That soldier died fighting for his American cause shortly thereafter. The launch of Burns’ The Civil War was propitious.

Next, The Civil War was a movie made for TV. Television has a “bardic function” in most modern cultures. It is a social ritual which overrides individual distinctions and in which people freely engage in order to communicate with the collective, cultural self. 59 This has particularly been true in the U.S.A for open-access network TV and for Public Broadcasting Service TV. PBS programs a common, national schedule. Yet PBS is locally based in a non-profit organization (a university, state agency, or community organization). It receives almost 25 percent of its total revenue from viewer donations (“Viewers like you!” as most PBS programs begin by declaring.) And it is watched by about one third of the U.S. population each week. 60 The Civil War ’s success—the program amassed in the U.S.A. the largest audience for any series in public TV history, more than 14 million viewers watched each evening, while 39 million Americans tuned into at least one episode of the telecast—was reinforced by its TV channel context. 61 At its best, PBS TV is the community talking to itself. Its programs are not flashy frames for ads, as network TV can easily be. It seeks to accommodate itself to the actual community. Burns’ Civil War clicked with current U.S. mass media reality.

Third, among the viewers who saw The Civil War enthusiastically it was common to find this documentary called the best history lesson they ever had. As one person wrote: “. . . Burns, in a very real way, is that special teacher most of us have who convinces us for a while that there is, indeed, interest to be plumbed where there was never interest before.” 62 Though he is aware of its shortcomings as history, Burns has stressed the timely need for his documentary: “I don’t think the story of the Civil War can be told too often. I think it surely ought to be retold for every generation.” 63 It is a movie that adapts by updating historical reality.

Fourth, The Civil War had also been received by some Americans as “history with honey” and overweighted with “. . . visual rhetoric, maudlin music and lugubrious readings.” 64 Burns resurrects the gloomy Victorian sentimentality characteristic of the 1800s. But this is a spirit true to the realism of Charles Dickens and Mark Twain and the Civil War itself. Burns’ literal version of that event is a deeply moral and emotional reading. One can hear a Civil War tone of awe, pain and lucid innocence from the voice of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn when he reflects on the mob action he witnesses at the end of Chapter 33 in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)—when two old men are stripped down, smeared with hot tar, stuck with feathers, each made to sit astraddle and crotch raw on a splintery wooden rail upon which they were jounced and bounced out of town. “Well, it made me sick to see it; and I was sorry for them poor pitiful rascals, it seemed like I couldn’t ever feel any hardness against them any more in the world,” thought Huck. “It was a dreadful thing to see. Human beings can be awful cruel to one another.” 65

Lastly, Burns takes his reading of the Civil War beyond maudlin grief and woe. The documentary updates the event by an integrated synthesis which involves the deep witness of the popular, ordinary viewpoint given by common soldiers, farmers, workers, immigrants, tradesmen and women of all minorities. The traditional occupation of transcendent ideals, the strategies and statistics of battles, the doings of great men and women is subdued—but not omitted. He makes of the event a story of tragic reconciliation. “Between 1861 and 1865, Americans made war on each other and killed each other in order to become the kind of country that could no longer conceive how that was possible” ( Civil War, Episode One: The Cause – 1861 ). It was a sublimely satisfying sacrifice. The documentary’s driving principle is separation followed by reconciliation and union.

A few points about Lincoln’s presentation in most U.S. documentaries and fiction films: Why have U.S. movies and TV found Lincoln so attractive? There have been about six hundred significant film and TV productions which have incorporated Abraham Lincoln, not counting his use in everything from TV variety to new programs. 66 Lincoln was a distinctly memorable subject for still visuals and later became a natural subject for moving pictures. He was a main dish of that meal which fed the public’s ongoing appetite for Civil War stories as the event which defined modern America. Lincoln was ready-made, market-tested, already popular and in the public domain—waiting to be mass-produced. He had also been a very entertaining man. Thus Lincoln the humorist became a great source of ongoing public entertainment. And he was far and away the most beguiling and diverting of early U.S. Presidents.

Finally, the subject matter of Lincoln, the Civil War, and slavery in fiction, film, or historical renditions has been a way Americans have tried to come to terms with tragedy. Abraham Lincoln’s monumental nature has served as a common, contested ground for coming to terms with American identity by Americans themselves; collective representation. (As the U.S.A. has become globally less self-confident over the past few decades, notice how Lincoln’s own heroic, legendary stature has diminished in the United States.) He is a figure Americans can publicly turn to in times of trial. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream Speech” of August, 1963 is inconceivable without the background of Washington, D.C.’s Lincoln Memorial. It is striking how Lincoln was quoted or noted on U.S. TV around the time of the 9/11 World Trade Center attack. But Lincoln can also be dismissed, rejected, neglected, readjusted. Just like tragedy itself in the U.S.A.?

Questions of Film Medium

“All we have are words,” murmurs one of the characters in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot . Is this true? How important in a movie are words? How important that language itself be proper to the filmic experience? Could it be that the more outstanding the use of language is in a movie, the more it stands out and might even displace the viewing of a story.

A striking contemporary case in point would be the movies directed, written, or co-written by the contemporary American writer David Mamet, such as Glengarry Glen Ross (1992, directed by James Foley, screenplay by David Mamet) or The Winslow Boy (1999, directed and written by David Mamet, play by Terence Rattigan). At Mamet’s best his language drives the story forward with its sparks of wit, its brain tickles, his electric sense of timing—as in The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981, directed by Bob Rafelson, screenplay by David Mamet), Heist (2001, directed and written by David Mamet), or Spartan (2004, directed and written by David Mamet). At Mamet’s cinematic worst, his linguistic eloquence slows the story down—as in House of Games (1987, directed by David Mamet, screenplay by David Mamet and Jonathan Katz), or The Spanish Prisoner (1997, directed and written by David Mamet). In this last case he is a mix of lumpy Samuel Beckett peppered with an overdose of Harold Pinter’s pregnant pauses. Mamet’s ambiguous success italicizes the question: Can language be too good for cinema?

Then there is the matter of speaking it out. If a character does not say what his or her problem is, then how does the audience know? If we are not told with words, then how is the audience told? And what do we know by the way we are told? It is in the nature of the film medium that a movie only has a few ways by which actors can reveal their thoughts. These are: by what the actors say, their facial expressions, body language, transparent action, or by context (often reinforced by music or sound) which reveals what the actors and actresses are thinking or feeling. 67 The bewitching but irascible Bette Davis (1908–1989) once complained on set: “I want it to be me who walks up that staircase, and not the goddamn music!”.

Whose language carries the story along? Is the movie narrated? If so, what kind of rapport is established by the narrator with the audience? As U.S. film director Mike Nichols said: “A movie is like a person. Either you trust it or you don’t.” Who or what establishes that trust? (In the glorious Hollywood epic The Vikings, 1958, only the sonorous voice of Orson Welles narrating could have established such aural trust in the audience.) Short story, novella, and novel have a viewpoint. Does a movie? Does the movie have one or many points of view? Can it have none at all? Can a movie seem to be only a camera?

The style and authorship of the screenplay matters. It can be key seasoning in the feast of the movie. Numerous great American writers have worked for and enhanced Hollywood writing scripts: F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Raymond Chandler, Neil Simon, and Robert Sherwood to name only five. In some cases, people who were full-time screenwriters also turned out remarkable novels—notably screenwriters of Hollywood’s golden age, such as W. R. Burnett, Niven Busch, and James M. Cain. 68 Whoever wrote the screenplay must be factored in to the equation of failed or successful adaptation. Is it true—a point so often made that it is tiresome—that the inferior work of literature is the best raw material with which to make a superior work of film? That weak, sensational stories are given greater credibility and depth when made into movies? Though widely claimed, this is far from self-evident. This piece of conventional wisdom functions on the metaphor that great manure produces brilliant crops. Surely, the best Shakespearian film adaptations disprove this argument.

The issue of the quality of the original versus the quality of the adaptation is really a matter of the match of makers. John Ford made a masterpiece movie out of a masterpiece novel with Grapes of Wrath . But Hollywood’s 1956 version of War and Peace directed by King Vidor was a disaster, whereas the Russian, faithful adaptation version of 1968, Voyna i mir , directed by Sergei Bondarchuk, was a master work. I would personally contend that whatever results from an adaptation of literature to film depends on the ability and creative—often commercial or material—opportunities of the film maker. Weak books do not automatically make strong movies, nor do strong movies make weak books.

Finally, with regard to words, there is the matter of the veracity of language and the ethnicity of the characters. From the time of D. W. Griffith’s The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912), the first Hollywood gangster film, the street-wise Italians and Irish were singled out. The movie characters spoke a rough patois of idiomatic gutter talk that thrilled or shocked many contemporary audiences. But it took decades before the movies were close to the original, the authentic street slang, or the use of a genuine street accent and ethnic terms.

The written word in literate America has been more articulate and daring with accents and vulgarities—dating back at least to the creation of Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn characters in the 1870s and 80s. There is good reason to believe that Huck’s language in the classic The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) was actually modeled on authentic African-American vernacular of the period. 69 But it was common in U.S. movies until the 1960s that a Jew would play an Italian—such as Paul Muni playing an Al Capone figure in the 1932 Scarface — The Shame of a Nation (adapted from the novel by Armitage Trail), or a Mexican would play an Indian, a Chinese person, a Frenchman, a Greek, or an Arab—such as the versatile and full-blooded actor Anthony Quinn actually did. Veracity did not count as much as getting the story told well on film.

Cans and Cannots: Genres

Genres of literature and film overlap. Each do gangster, detective, war, horror, romance, science fiction and western stories, the spy thriller, the propaganda story or the documentary, the comic and the tragic mode very well. A story told in one of the various wide-screen and wide-film photographic processes and viewing systems channel their message in a way only a movie can. Wide-screen effect can alter genre effect and meaning. Technical advantage has always been an important factor and was often developed by the U.S. movie industry as it was competing for the entertainment dollar with the written word, radio or live entertainment, and, later, with television.

The technical edge that American movies claimed over the written word and other forms of entertainment was shown by a history of spectacular visual promises. This started with Vitascope (first developed late 1890s), then there was Polyvision (first developed 1920s), followed by Vitarama (late 1930s), Fox Grandeur (1930s), 3-D (first U.S. use 1922, popular in the 1950s and, once again, today), Cinerama (1950s), Superscope, Panscope, Warnerscope, and Todd-AO (1950s), IMAX (Omnimax or Imax Dome [began 1970], Imax 3D [1990s]), and some of the newer digital delivery systems now used.

Movies are fundamentally a material culture, a plastic art—in the original sense of plastic as molding, shaping, fashioning or giving form to a yielding material such as clay or wax. Movies’ yielding materials are the flesh and blood of the actors and the technicians, the flickering celluloid photos or digital pixels which show and sound when reproduced before us on the screen. Movies are actually between 16 to 30 still photographs per second exhibited before us in quick succession. The human brain fills in the gaps and creates continuity. The phenomenon called persistence of vision. Literature—mediated by word, handwriting, or print—is far more immaterial and abstract. “Words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean,” wrote Theodore Dreiser in Sister Carrie . “Little audible links, they are, chaining together great inaudible feelings and purposes.” 70 Literature “is not reducible to the words on the page,” noted the sympathetic sage of the Beatniks Kenneth Rexroth (1905–1982). In what we can define as literature “they are there because of the craft of writing. As an art, literature is the organization of words to give pleasure; through them it elevates and transforms experience; through them it functions in society as a continuing symbolic criticism of values.” 71

For writers who are specially psychological or who favor stream-of-consciousness writing or an intimism style, television is “arguably a more suitable medium than feature films” since a small screen favors “a concentration on character and dialogue rather than action and spectacle.” 72 One can see the success of small screen intimacy in U.S. TV shows ranging from I Love Lucy (1951–1957, starring Lucille Ball) through to Deadwood (2004–2006, HBO, starring Ian McShane) and Desperate Housewives (2004–present, HBO, staring Teri Hatcher).

Anglo-American examples of thickly psychological texts which do not lend themselves to an easy adaptation are the experimental novels of the conscious, unconscious, and subconscious life—those written by Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, or William Faulkner. 73 But other forms of primary, interior narrative are also hard to translate into film. A notoriously spectacular goof when adapting literature of an intimism style to film was the 1959 adaptation of The Diary of Anne Frank (directed by George Stevens) into Cinemascope format. As Chicago critic Dave Kehr noted at the time, The Diary of Anne Frank represented director George Stevens “at the height of his pretentiousness and the depths of his accomplishment.” 74 Cinemascope had its virtues. But in a story about alienation, fragmentation, and being in closed or narrow spaces, a contextual arrangement that emphasized width, height and open space was wholly inappropriate.

By taking the right creative liberties for the story at hand, a fine movie which is a faithful adaptation of a thickly psychological text—but not literal—can be made. Thus one has the acceptable 1969 Technicolor and Panavision version of William Faulkner’s The Reivers , the brilliant British 1969 adaptation of D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love by Ken Russel, and the truly great Robert Rossen, 1949, film version of Robert Penn Warren’s Faulknerian opus All The King’s Men (1946; Pulitzer Prize in 1947). Notable with respect to creating a psychological, interior space in the outer, visual space of movies has been the incorporation of the brilliantly distortional techniques of the German cinema of Expressionism into U.S. movies. One can experience this, for example, in the Hollywood art of German-American director Fritz Lang (1890–1976, specially in his early Warner Brothers studio work of the 1930s and 1940s).

Creative liberty also means to use or not to use literature at all. As the American movie-going audience became more accustomed to mass media communication, a link with literary sources was considered less necessary for a movie. The earlier films of the Hollywood studios were quite conservative in this respect. Then U.S. independent cinema—ships that sailed without the need for literary ballast—began developing in the early 1950s, with a distinct and indigenous independent cinema movement existing by the late 1960s and 1970s. U.S. movies became less literary. From the 1930s to the 1960s in the U.S.A., the majority of major films were based on material that came from other forms, mainly literary, while most U.S. films nowadays are created from scripts written to be filmed directly.

Either way, a movie has to maintain the thrill that runs like a cross beam through the structure of the story. Commit this act of electrical transfer and the adaptation transmits something essential about the original. It adapts and fits the recreation near to the previous link in the chain of the greater story telling.

Voice and Narrator

The words of literature are spoken in a temper, tone, and voice—“voice of the Bard! / Who Present, Past & Future, sees.” 75 When adapting from literature to film, the problem of viewpoint and voice is specially evident when one has a strong first-person narrator in the original—like Huck Finn in Twain’s Adventures of Huck Finn (1884) or Holden Caulfield in Salinger’s Catcher in The Rye (1951). This is unfair competition.Read their respective opening lines: “You don’t know about me, without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer ; but that ain’t no matter.” And: “If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it.” 76 The voice has spoken. It has been done. Twain and Salinger got it right the first time. No matter how good the actor, a voice-over on a movie sound track which uses the same words could not get the same effect. Because one has the original effect—the authentic original—produced by Huck and Holden themselves. Over time the voice-over technique has evolved and diminished. There is much less of it than there used to be. Anglophone movies until the 1950s easily used voice-overs of a literary nature in one of four ways. These ways were:

• as an objective narrator in a fictional film who brings us forward in time, who prepares us for an event, or comments on the action ( The Vikings , 1958, directed by Richard Fleischer, with the sonorous voice of Orson Welles);
• as a first-person narrator who participates in the film and who now gives us a subjective commentary on an scene in which he or she appears, or performs the narrative functions described in a fictional film in which he or she does not appear ( The Picture of Dorian Gray , 1945, directed by Albert Lewin; Dances With Wolves , 1990, directed by Kevin Costner; The Shawshank Redemption, 1994, directed by Frank Darabont;
• as a screen character whose thoughts we overhear ( The Lady in the Lake, 1946, directed by Robert Montgomery; The Barber , 2001, directed by Michael Bafaro; The 13 th Warrior , 1999, directed by John McTiernan;
• as a character in the film whose voice is heard in another character’s imagination (e.g., while reading that person’s letter or even that person’s mind ( A Letter to Three Wives , 1949, directed by Joseph Mankiewicz; Forbidden Planet , 1956, directed by Fred Wilcock, adapted from William Shakespeare’s The Tempest ). Of course, these voices overlap, as voices often do. 77

In the post-World War II period American movies became more cinematic and less literary. They relied more on direct exposition by way of the camera or on a well-blended, simultaneous combination of what is seen and was is thought. So that when only the outside of a building or vehicle is seen, a character’s voice can enter inside. Or a character’s voice overlaps from scene to scene. This cannot be done in a literary text. Strictly visual presentation and a simultaneous narrative voice which is separate from visual presentation cannot be done in a traditional novel. But the modern graphic novel, such as Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1973–1991), can achieve this simultaneity. 78

Hence, the options of the adaptor are clear. Literature adapted to movies has “to be severely altered, cut,” as U.S. actor and director Erwin Panofsky said, and needs to be seriously “enriched by interpolations to make good movie scripts.” 79 The creator becomes a destroyer in order to create. The individual responsible for writing the various stages of a film script “must be allowed to rearrange, cut and add whatever he feels is necessary to make the material work in cinematic terms,” as American screenwriter and playwright William Packard noted. 80

Screenwriting, Collaboration

Practically speaking, at least two major material actions must be done in the adaptation process. The screenplay taken from a book is the crucial link between the original literature and the final film. The screenwriter has to have removed and reproduced the story’s central axis into the screenplay, which must also possess the original’s driving passion. “You try to find what is the spine of the piece,” screenwriter William Goldman exclaimed, “plus, you have to think what was it that thrilled you? . . . What moved you?” . . . Now, you have to combine those two things somehow . . . Plus keeping the story straight.” 81 But that’s only half the battle, since “a screenplay is an imperfect reflection of the film.” 82

The remarkable U.S. novelist and screenwriter W. R. Burnett (1899–1982) solved this problem by first writing his own novels—which he would then rewrite and transfer into movie screenplays. When he could, he would also be present at the actual filming of the story in order to assist the director with dialogue needs and changes. Two of his spectacular successes in the gangster film genre were High Sierra (1941) and The Asphalt Jungle (1950). 83 The contemporary American director Terry Gilliam first writes his own graphic novel version of his films in the previsualization technique of storyboarding, which he then transfers to the screen as his movie, such as in Brazil (1985).

The second major action required by the adaptation process—far longer and more elaborate—is the whole collaborative and creative process of the filmmaking itself. This is a process in which tinkerings and alterations, additions and subtractions, individual efforts and collaborations are done all along the line. Movies, as a medium of American popular culture, are a collaborative art by their very nature. Rarely can one man or woman make and distribute a work of popular culture, and certainly not a movie. The cinematic process includes at least a half-dozen steps along the way.

The Cinematic Process: Six Steps

First, the film maker has to locate a coherent story which an audience will accept and want to see told. Or, rather, re-told on screen. Shakespeare is always good fodder. Or even Herman Melville’s wordy and metaphysically extraordinary Moby Dick (1851) can succeed—if cut and re-fit into film with the gusto and finesse of John Huston. 84

Second, the producer has to figure out what the film will cost once it is adapted from this work of fiction and if he can pay for it. If the work is no longer copyrighted, all the better. Then there is no original intellectual property to worry about and no royalties to pay for a primary text. If it is an old story, the primary text might also be attractive because it is a costume drama—such as an adaptation from Charles Dickens or Henry James.

Third comes the matter of precedent. Has this kind of thing sold before? Since movies are a commercial industry—like cars, pencils, or the production of different brands and flavors of toothpaste, well, you figure it out—the bank wants to back merchandise with a good track record. If one brand of toothpaste hits upon peppermint as a smash hit with the consumer, then many other peppermint-flavored brands will soon follow. Likewise, adaptations from fiction come in batches: Henry James’ Daisy Miller (1974, directed by Peter Bogdanovich), The Europeans (1979, directed by Merchant-Ivory), The Bostonians (1984, directed by Merchant-Ivory). Then, about a decade later, a second wave: The Portrait of a Lady (1996, directed by Jane Campion), Washington Square (1997, directed by Agnieszka Holland), The Wings of the Dove (1997, directed by Iain Softley), Under Heaven (1998, directed by Meg Richman—also adapted from The Wings of the Dove ), Notting Hill (1999, directed by Roger Michell—a romantic comedy in which Hugh Grant meets Julia Roberts while she is in London filming an unspecified Henry James novel), and The Golden Bowl (2000, directed by James Ivory). Why was Henry James, that most intricate and brazenly baroque of all American highbrow writers, so often adapted to film? Henry James’ fat is made lean. And once slimmed down, Henry James sells. And, as James’ early contemporary Ralph Waldo Emerson said: “If a man can write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mousetrap than his neighbor, though he builds his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door.” 85

One should see movies not only as fulfilling the requirements of a genre, but as part of a cycle, as film critic Jonathan Muby has insisted. A “cycle” was the term commonly used in America for movie types prior to World War II. This is where censorship—which has effected both literature and movies in America—enters in. Both violence or gangsterism in literature and movies can be socially threatening. They are dangerous expressions “of a larger disorganizing and destructive force,” cycles of violence and crime which threaten society. Especially when displayed in the mass media of movies they threaten society from within—they are cycles “vocalized from within the machinery of cultural administration.” 86 Henry James adaptations, on the other hand, have offered reassuring cycles of costume drama gentility which have been perfumed by frail trails of psychological insight.

The fourth step in the modern creative process of film-making is the pre-sale. In the movie industry, pre-sale has two meanings. Before you sell your commodity to the general public, you conduct a private sale of the product. This way one gains financial support to complete the product and may provide eventual profits for the investor. And as pre-sale is the formative period before sale, product production may be distant from the actual place of production and initial distribution. The maker can sell a product not yet produced in one country in yet another country far away. It is all part of the movie game. With a movie one can have outstanding actors, special effects, and a great story in hand—from which basis one sells the distribution rights prior to completion. Particularly abroad; overseas is a good place to sell. They buy on conceptual credit—Sherlock Holmes from the British for the Americans, Sylvester Stallone or Clint Eastwood from the Americans for the Europeans. If the final film is a bomb, the producer has made more money this way. If it is a blockbuster, everyone profits. Either way, the studio and the producer can enhance the initial production budget.

Fifth is a series of complications in the practical work of actually adapting fiction into film, the actual making of the movie, the production itself. This is a time and a place when words have to be juxtaposed with images. That is to say, when the original letter matters. But “fidelity to the original spirit of the piece is not always to the letter, because the letter does not necessarily work on film.” 87 Actions have to be transferred from descriptions to dramatizations, from slow to snappy timing. Time strictly controls the adaptation possibilities—90 to 180 minutes for a film, which is much less time than it takes to read and digest most books. The written story may be richly textured, and minor incidents, settings and characters have to be cut out, or down, or be consolidated. When a tale goes from fiction to film “shaping a story to be told with the minimum necessary number of scenes and characters and the most contained list of locations is a necessary part of the game.” 88 Most people in professional, corporate life are now acquainted with this practice—the need to adapt to a concise, word and visual presentation. This happens when one goes from a free-flowing, person-to-audience presentation of information to a form-fitting, power point presentation. One has to fit into the given frame. To accomplish this can be a straight jacket experience. Or it can condense and order one’s efforts like the composition of a sonnet for the one you love.

Finally, the sixth concern in the practical work of adaptation is the audience—or, as the American lyricist, musical comedy, author, and theatrical producer Oscar Hammerstein II reportedly called them: “That big black giant.” They are a devouring abyss which the producer ultimately cannot control and who finally decide if the creation works or not.

The whole collaborative and creative process of filmmaking itself shows us that adaptation is not one element transferred to another singular element. As with U.S. popular culture, the realistic paradigm is culture as a whole. Perhaps the fundamental issue is not zero to five stars, a series of qualitative rankings that range through poor, fair, good, better, and best. (Although, to be fair, excellence happens—as does its opposite.) But the fundamental issue is that “there is a totality of culture that pervades and surrounds a society rather than a culture that exists in tiers.” 89 A story is told and retold.

Film or Book?

The student, film buff, or movie connoisseur should give up the naive claim that a film should be faithful to the book. That is not the point of successful adaptation. Too many hands each play their part in moulding and shaping the completed movie. Adaptation requires originality. And it is a process of accretion, of leveling and tiers of the one story being built upon other tiers and each enriched by the ongoing telling. Recall Homer and Aeschylus, mentioned at the beginning of this essay. Is there one story of Achilles, one story of Odysseus? Each telling narrates, explains, reveals. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby was a U.S. best seller in 1926, but it was told again in movie form in 1926, 1949, 1974, and 2000. 90 Gatsby is one story among many that stays alive for Americans by virtue of its cinematic renewal enriched with each telling. It is one story among many that helps to create community, gives life itself the form it lacks, and helps to insulate people from the tragedy of others.

I think Dennis Lehane was wrong when he said that movies and books compare like apples and giraffes. If one can understand literature and film as a continuum, as one story, then a person may delight in one vision retold and refreshed. Many filmmakers know this. “Because the ancient wisdom,” as David Mamet said, “is you get to write it three times: when you write it, when you direct it, when you edit it.” 91 You keep telling and retelling the story.

And, finally, it takes so many fingers to get the one job done: the original work of literature, the screenwriter and his screenplay, the film director (“Who makes decisions about choices already made by the film crew” 92 ), the producer who holds the money bags; the give, take, quirks and charisma of the main actors and actresses; the props, scenes and settings; the cameraman (director of photography), the lighting man, the movie editor, the music director, the art director, and the audience. Yes, you—a public audience who may even view various versions of the movie before it is finally released in order to determine the viability of a last cut. The audience is a public made up of individuals and a mass. And in all likelihood people will see the film because of word of mouth, chance, convenience or escapism, or fundamental hunger for entertainment—and maybe a touch of education, too. You are not dumb. You are the audience. The audience is a maker and an adaptor. The audience will finally decide whether the whole process succeeded or not. You buy the tickets.

1    Scott McCabe, “Reconciling Violence and a life in Literature: An Interview with Dennis Lehane,” The Writer’s Chronicle 39.1 (2006): 8–13. Lehane wrote Mystic River (2001), basis of the movie of the same name (2003) directed by Clint Eastwood. Full quote, p. 9 (when Lehane was asked how film influenced him): “We’re all products of pop culture. Hard to escape it. Film and books, though, are as different as apples and giraffes, but what I learned most from film is the concept of perpetual motion. Keep the story evolving.”

2    See, for instance, GA, “Review of The Triumph of Love ,” Time Out London 1781 (October 6–13, 2004), http://www.timeout.com/film/ reviews/81472/the_triumph_of_love.html (ac­cessed Sept. 14, 2010): “It sounds like some boring corseted litflick.” Also see the amazon.com Listmania! list “LitFLicks: Movies For People Who Like Books,” http://www.amazon.com/LitFLicks-Movies-People-Like-Books/lm/GPF2P0Z0Z7U (accessed Oct. 29, 2010).

3    The Great Gatsby , directed by Herbert Brenon (1926, Paramount); Zabriskie Point , directed by Michelangelo Antonioni (1969, MGM/Carlo Ponti).

4    Aeschylus cited after Athenaeus 347e.

5    “Judicious, critical . . .” distinction neatly made by John Higham, “Historiography, American,” in The Oxford Companion to United States History , ed. Paul Boyer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

6    René Wellek, “Literature and its Cognates,” in Dictionary of the History of Ideas , ed. Philip P. Wiener, vol. III (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1973), 81–89.

7    A. M. Macdonald, ed., Chambers 20th Century Dictionary (Edinburgh: Chambers, 1972).

8    Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary , 10th ed. (Springfield, MA: Merriam-Webster, 1993).

9    Which is 26.6 seconds long and consists of 486 frames; see Zapruder Film of Kennedy Assassination (1963) at the Internet Movie Database, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0131658 (accessed Sept. 14, 2010).

10    JFK , directed by Oliver Stone (1991, Warner/Le Studio Canal/ Regency Enterprises/Alcor studio coproduction). See David R. Wrone, The Zapruder Film: Reframing JFK’s Assassination (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 2003).

11    E.g. with, respectively, accusations concerning the works of Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792), Alexander Pope (1688–1744), Isaac Newton (1642–1727), and Giovanni Bononcini (1670–1747).

12    The OED attributes its first use to the 1835–1840. Reeve translation of DeTocque­ville’s Democracy in America (1835; New York: Library of America, 2004).

13    Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man, Epistle V, To Mr. Addison, Occasioned By His Dialogues On Medals (1733; London: Knapton, 1748).

14    The first recorded Anglo-American use of plagiarism is in scholar and theologian Richard Montagu’s Diatribe upon the first part of the late History of Tithes (London: Felix Kyngston, 1621). But the term does not come into common play until the second decade of the 1700s. The U.S. Supreme Court opinions in Wheaton v. Peters (1834) subsequently established copyright in America as something that existed primarily for the public benefit rather than for the work’s creator. The convoluted controversies of plagiarism and copyright continue to the present day, as in the spring 2008 case of J. K. Rowling (Harry Potter versus Steven Vander Ark’s online Harry Potter Lexicon) which Rowling finally won. See Steven Fox, “Tracking the Origins, evolution of copyright,” Buffalo Law Journal 79.84 (2007): 1A–17A; Marissa Babin, “Potter in Court,” The Harvard Independent , 24 April 2008.

15    Peter Burke, Varieties of Cultural History (Cambridge: Polity Press-Blackwell, 1997), 195–96. Essentially Cultural Studies means that mode of inquiry which examines culture as power. Cultural Studies considers how hierarchies, social and cultural needs and inequalities shape cultural symbols, symbolic codes, and the cultural assignment of meanings within a social system.

16    George Bluestone, Novels Into Film (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1957), 7–8.

17    Rudolf Arnheim, Film as Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964), 215–16.

18    In an article probably written by Cameron under Ford’s name, as quoted in Charles M. Stowe article “Henry Ford and History That Is Not Bunk,” from: Clippings Books, Boston Evening Transcript , 38, p. 95, Saturday May 23, 1925, courtesy: Benson Ford Research Center, Henry Ford Museum, Dearborn, Michigan. For the “heroic political” versus “pluralistic, polyvalent” distinction, see: Kenneth Rexroth, Classics Revisited (1969; New York: New Directions, 1986), Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War , ch. 13, Herodotus, History, and ch. 14, 42–44, 45–47.

19    Karl Kroeber, Make Believe in Film and Fiction: Visual vs. Verbal Storytelling. (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2006).

20    Susan Bullington Katz, Conversations with Screenwriters (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann-Reed Elsevier, 2000), 198.

21    Léon Barsacq, Le Décor de Film , rev. and ed. by Elliott Stein (Paris: Seghers, 1970); see especially: “The Role and Conception of Set Design,” 121–26.

22    Arnheim, Film as Art , 216.

23    Arnheim, Film as Art , 206.

24    Ira Konigsberg, The Complete Film Dictionary , 2nd ed. (London, New York: Bloomsbury, 1997), 6.

25    Erik Barnouw, Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film , 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 5.

26    Barnouw, Documentary, 6.

27    Terry Gilliam’s History of the Movies , DVD, directed by Terry Gilliam (1995); see especially part 1 “Travels in time and space.”

28    As documented by Encyclopædia Britannica , Macropedia, vol. 12, 15th ed. (Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica, 1974), 514. The 1913 edition cost $1.50. For U.S. dollar inflation calculation see http://www.westegg.com/inflation.

29    “Nickelodeon”: combination of the U.S. five cent coin, the nickel —which was used to view short films in small, box like and hand-wound machines—and Odeon—after the famed Theatre Odeon in Paris.

30    Eric Hoffer, The Passionate State of Mind and Other Aphorisms (New York: Perennial Library, 1954), 59.

31    A direct lineage exists from the illustrated rolls of the Egyptian Ramesseum Papyrus ( c . 1980 B.C.), through the 5th Century A.D. illustrations of Virgil’s and Homer’s works in the Vatican Library, the Byzantine codices of the 6th and 7th cent, the Hiberno-Saxon illuminatied Book of Kells at Trinity College Library, Dublin, and the Lindisfarne Gospels , in the British Museum, through the “golden age of illumination” (books and stained glass) in the high European middle ages, the 15th Century development of the European block book, Thomas Bewick’s pioneering wood engraving for books dating from 1779, Aloys Senefelder’s invention of book lithography around 1796, the Victorian era production of illustrated books and magazines by such masters as Daumier, Doré, Gavarni, and the perfect Charles Dickens and George Cruikshank blend, plus the famed English Yellow Book (1894–97). While the 20th and 21st Centuries have seen the mass production and an absolute plethora of this two-part media.

32    Like the man himself, Quarles’ illustrated books expressed conflciting sympathies between divine right monarchy and Catholicism versus the strong individualistic and Puritan elements of his upbringing. In America Quarles’ work was specially popular in early New England, beginning with the Pilgrim and Puritan era of Plymouth Colony and Massachusetts Bay Colony down through the time of the New England Transcendentalists. Quarles’ influence on the poet Emily Dickinson (1830–1886), for example, was pronounced. See Francis Quarles, Emblemes (1635) and Hieroglyphikes of the Life of Man (1638), ed. by Karl Josef Höltgen and John Horden (New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 1993), introduction; Carmen A. Prioli, “Emily Dickinson’s Reading of Francis Quarles,” Dickinson Studies 25 (1979): 3–7; David F. Bland, A History of Book Illustration , 2nd ed. (London: Faber, 1969); Diana Klemin, The Illustrated Book (New York: Potter, 1970). Also important as key, common, visual communications in America’s Colonial and Revolutionary periods were tavern signs, coins, and childrens’ primers.

33    A common film-analysis distinction, made, e.g., in Louis Giannetti, Understanding Movies , 8th ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1999). See especially “Literary Adaptations,” 390–94; Konigsberg, The Complete Film Dictionary , 6, “adaptation.”

34    The Postman Always Rings Twice , directed by Tay Garnet (1946); The Postman Always Rings Twice , directed by Bob Rafelson (1981); filmed in Italian as Ossessione , directed by Luchino Visconti (1942); filmed in French as Le Dernier Tournant (The Last Turn), directed by Pierre Chenal (1939)—never released in the U.S.

35    Eros: The drive for love, creativity, sexuality, self-satisfaction and the continuation of life and the preservation of the human species. Thanatos (death): The drive of hatered, destruction, the asexual, the tormented and tantalizing, the death of life and the human species. See Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents , trans. and ed. by James Strachey (1929; New York: Norton, 1961), ch. VI: 73–79; ch. VIII: 104.

36    Michael Caine, What‘s It All About (New York: Ballantine Books, 1993), 41.

37    The Call of the Wild , directed by William Wellman (1935).

38    Jack Oakie, Jack Oakie‘s Double Takes (San Francisco: Strawberry Hill Press, 1980)—published posthumously.

39    Shaft , directed by Gordon Parks (MGM/Shaft Productions, 1971); Beverly Hills Cop , directed by Martin Best (Paramount, 1984). Murphy’s role was originally custom designed for Sylvester Stallone.

40    MacKinlay Kantor, Glory for Me (New York: Coward-McCann, 1945).

41    Harold Robbins, A Stone for Danny Fisher (1955; New York, Simon & Schuster 2007), which is about a tough Jewish kid growing up on New York’s lower east side–far from the New Orleans Elvis Presley version. Harold Robbins (1916–1997) was famous for his sex, money, and power schlock loved by readers and hated by critics, such as The Carpetbaggers (New York: Pocket Books, 1961) and The Betsy (New York: Pocket Books, 1971)—pulp fiction successfully adapted to pulp film.

42    David and Bathsheba, directed by Henry King (RCF, 1951).

43    Matthew Bunson, The Vampire Encyclopedia (New York: Random House-Gramercy, 2000).

44    George Bluestone, Novels into Film (1957), 148.

45    John Steinbeck on watching The Grapes of Wrath , as quoted in John Walker, ed., Halliwell’s Filmgoer’s and Video Viewer’s Companion, 10th ed. (New York: HarperPerennial, 1993), 289.

46    See: Grapes of Wrath taglines at http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0032551 (accessed Sept. 24, 2010).

47    Which has preserved 40 years of the best of the American stage.

48    Dore Schary (1905–1980) received Broadway‘s 1958 Tony Award for Best Play for Sunrise at Campobello . Schary was a staunch Democrat and liberal activist.

49    Zoot Suit , directed by Luiz Valdez (1981).

50    See Tennessee Williams, Memoirs (New York: Doubleday, 1972) as quoted by William Packard, The Art of Screening (New York: Paragon House, 1987), 45; John Dean, “Urban and Theatrical Iconography in ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’,”  in A Streetcar Named Desire: Critical Essays Anthology, eds. Gilles Menegaldo and Anne-Marie Paquet-Deyris (Paris: Ellipses, 2003), 233–40.

51    Vertrov quoted from Erik Barnouw, Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film , 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 58, in turn from David Robinson, The History of World Cinema (New York: Stein and Day, 1973).

52    Roger Ebert, review of Billy Bathgate , directed by Robert Benton, Movie Reviews (November 1, 1991), http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/ 19911101/REVIEWS/111010303/1023 (accessed June 22, 2009).

53    Cinematographer Vittorio Storaro (who filmed Apacalypse Now , 1979) on the cinematographer’s art, quoted from Visions of Light , directed by Arnold Glassman (American Film Institute and NHK, Japan Broadcast Corporation, 1992).

54    Vertrov quoted from Barnouw, Documentary , 58.

55    Barnouw, Documentary , 58.

56    Though allusions to propaganda exist in ancient writings (e.g., Aristotle’s Rhetoric ), organized use of propaganda didn’t develop until after the industrial revolution and modern political revolutions (spec. U.S.A. and France) when mass media communications allowed propagandists to easily reach huge audiences and civilian soldiers needed to be informed and encouraged.

57    Persian Gulf War: on Aug. 2, 1990, Iraqi military forces, on orders from President Saddam Hussein, invaded and occupied the small Arab state of Kuwait. Washington and Moscow cooperated intensely to oppose Iraq’s action. In November, 1990, the UN Security Council condemned the invasion. A U.S.-led military coalition gathered in the area. Then from January 16 to February 28, 1991, the Persian Gulf War was fought, Iraq expelled, and independence restored to Kuwait.

58    The Civil War, Episode One: The Cause (1861) , directed by Ken Burns (1990; PBS Home Video-Turner Home Entertainment).

59    John Fiske and John Hartley, Reading Television (New York: Methuen, 1978), 85–100 (Ch. 6, “Bardic Television”).

60    Michael P. McCauley et al., eds., Public Broadcasting and the Public Interest (Armonk, NY: Sharpe, 2002).

61    Gary Edgerton, “The Civil War—U.S. Compilation Documentary,” in Encyclopedia of Television , ed. Horace Newcomb (1997); see Museum of Broadcast Communications, Encyclopedia of Television at http://www.museum.tv/publicationssection.php?page=28 (accessed Sept. 8, 2010).

62    Walter Chaw, review of The Civil War , directed by Ken Burns, Film Freak Central Review (n.d.), http://filmfreakcentral.net/dvdreviews/civilwar.htm (accessed June 22, 2009).

63    Gary Edgerton, “The Civil War,” http://www.museum.tv/eotvsection.php?entry–code=civilwarth (accessed Oct. 29, 2010).

64    Elizabeth Jensen, “Some History, with Honey,” LA Times , January 11, 2003, http://articles.latimes.com/2003/01/11/calendar/et-jensen11 (accessed June 22, 2009); J. Hoberman, “Altered States: The power of nightmares: Russian thriller and Southern mock-doc imagine scary dystopias,” Villagevoice , February 7, 2006, http://www.villagevoice.com/ film/0606,hoberman1,72181,20.html (accessed Sept. 8, 2010).

65    Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884; New York: W. W. Norton, 1962), 180.

66    Mark S. Reinhart, Abraham Lincoln on Screen: A Filmography of Dramas and Documentaries Including Television, 1903–1998 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1999).

67    The first three ways suggested by David Lodge, Consciousness and the Novel: Connected Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 229, see especially ch. 7: 200–33, “Henry James and the Movies.”

68    Excellent coverage concerning whom can be found in Pat McGilligan, ed., Backstory: Interviews with Screenwriters of Hollywood’s Golden Age (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986).

69    Shelley Fisher Fishkin , Was Huck Black? Mark Twain and African-American Voices (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

70    Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie (1900; New York: Signet, 1979), 183.

71    Kenneth Rexroth, “Literature, Art of,” in Encyclopædia Britannica, Macropedia , vol. 10, 15th ed. (Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica , 1973), 1041–50.

72    David Lodge, Consciousness and the Novel , 201.

73    Lodge, Consciousness and the Novel , 209.

74    Dave Kehr, review of The Diary of Anne Frank , directed by George Stevens, The Chicago Reader (n.d.), http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/the-diary-of-anne-frank/Film?oid=1053770 (accessed June 22, 2009).

75    William Blake, Songs of Innocence and of Experience , edited, with a commentary, by Robert N. Essick (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 2008); see here “Songs of Experience: Introduction” (line 1–2).

76    Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884; New York: Norton, 1962), 7; Jerome D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (1951; London: Penguin, 1958), 5.

77    Konigsberg, Complete Film Dictionary , 449.

78    As Konigsberg notes, one should distinguish between off-screen voice and voice-over. Off-screen voice is not in the scene itself being shown; voice-over is when narrator or character is speaking on the sound track behind an image.

79    Erwin Panofsky, “Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures,” in Film: An Anthology, ed. Daniel Talbot (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1966), 257–87.

80    Packard, The Art of Screenwriting , 41.

81    Screenwriters. Word into Image: William Goldman , DVD, directed by Terry Sanders and Freida Lee Mock (1984; Santa Monica, CA: American Film Foundation, 1984 ) ; Packard, The Art of Screenwriting , 46–47.

82    Goldman quoting Zanuck’s partner David Brown, in William Goldman, Adventures in the Screen Trade: A Personal View of Hollywood and Screenwriting (New York: Warner Books, 1983), 292.

83    High Sierra , directed by Raoul Walsh (1941); The Asphalt Jungle , directed by John Huston (1950).

84    Moby Dick , directed by John Huston (1956).

85    Ralph Waldo Emerson, lecture, attributed in Sarah B. Yule and Mary S. Keene, Borrowings (New York: Dodge Publishing, 1889).

86    Jonathan Munby, Public Enemies, Public Heroes: Screening the Gangster Film from Little Caesar to Touch of Evil (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 64.

87    Michael Cox, “Reflections on Film Adaptation of Fiction,” in It’s a Print: Detective Fiction from Page to Screen , eds. William Reynolds and Elizabeth A. Trembley (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Press, 1994), 207–20, quote: 213. These six points are essentially a summary reading of Mr. Cox’s on the ground and in country experience as a professional Anglo-American producer, actor, stage manager, advertising and theatrical agent in his “Reflections on Film Adaptation of Fiction” essay.

88    Cox, “Reflections on Film Adaptation of Fiction,” 215.

89    Madonna Coughlin Marsden, “Twentieth Century: Popular Culture,” Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia, http://gme.grolier.com/cgi-bin/article?assetid=0296908-0 (accessed June 22, 2009).

90    The Great Gatsby , directed by Herbert Brenon (1926); The Great Gatsby , directed by Elliott Nugent (1949); The Great Gatsby , directed by Jack Clayton (1974); The Great Gatsby , directed by Robert Markowitz (2000).

91    Katz, Conversations with Screenwriters , 198.

92    Said by U.S. director John Carpenter ( The Fog , Christine ) in the documentary Big John , directed by Julien Dunand (2006).

pdf online pdf online pdf online pdf online pdf online pdf online pdf online pdf online : A video essay : Doubling Down Twenty-Five Years Along

Doing Film History September 2008 Nearly everybody loves movies. We aren’t surprised that people rush to see the latest hit or rent a cult favorite from the video store. But there are some people who seek out movies. And among those fans there’s a still smaller group studying them. Let’s call “old movies” anything older than twenty years. This of course creates a moving target. Baby boomers like us don’t really consider or to be old movies, but many twentysomethings today will probably consider (1994) to be old — maybe because they saw it when they were in their teens. Our twenty-year cutoff is arbitrary, but in many cases that won’t matter. Everybody agrees that from 1935 is an old movie, though it still seems fresh and vital. Now for the real question. Why would anyone be interested in watching and studying old movies? Ask a film historian, professional or amateur, and you’ll get a variety of answers. For one thing, old films provide the same sorts of insights that we get from watching contemporary movies. Some offer intense artistic experiences or penetrating visions of human life in other times and places. Some are documents of everyday existence or of extraordinary historical events that continue to reverberate in our times. Still other old movies are resolutely strange. They resist assimilation to our current habits of thought. They force us to acknowledge that films can be radically different from what we are used to. They ask us to adjust our field of view to accommodate what was, astonishingly, taken for granted by people in earlier eras. Another reason to study old movies is that film history encompasses more than just films. By studying how films were made and received, we discover how creators and audiences responded to their moment in history. By searching for social and cultural influences on films, we understand better the ways in which films bear the traces of the societies that made and consumed them. Film history opens up a range of important issues in politics, culture, and the arts—both “high” and “popular.” Yet another answer to our question is this: Studying old movies and the times in which they were made is intrinsically fun. As a relatively new field of academic research (no more than sixty years old), film history has the excitement of a young discipline. Over the past few decades, many lost films have been recovered, little-known genres explored, and neglected filmmakers reevaluated. Ambitious retrospectives have revealed entire national cinemas that had been largely ignored. Even television, with some cable stations devoted wholly to the cinema of the past, brings into our living rooms movies that were previously rare and little-known. And much more remains to be discovered. There are more old movies than new ones and, hence, many more chances for fascinating viewing experiences. We think that studying film history is so interesting and important that during the late 1980s we began to write a book surveying the field. The first edition of appeared in 1994, the second in 2003, and the third will be published in spring of 2009. In this book we have tried to introduce the history of cinema as it is conceived, written, and taught by its most accomplished scholars. But the book isn’t a distillation of all film history. We have had to rule out certain types of cinema that are important, most notably educational, industrial, scientific, and pornographic films. We limit our scope to theatrical fiction films, documentary films, experimental or avant-garde filmmaking, and animation—realms of filmmaking that are most frequently studied in college courses. Researchers are fond of saying that there is no film only film For some, this means that there can be no intelligible, coherent “grand narrative” that puts all the facts into place. The history of avant-garde film does not fit neatly into the history of color technology or the development of the Western or the life of John Ford. For others, means that historians work from various perspectives and with different interests and purposes. We agree with both points. There is no Big Story of Film History that accounts for all events, causes, and consequences. And the variety of historical approaches guarantees that historians will draw diverse conclusions. We also think that research into film history involves asking a series of and searching for in order to answer them in the course of an When historians focus on different questions, turn up different evidence, and formulate different explanations, we derive not a single history but a diverse set of historical arguments. While millions are watching movies at this moment, a few thousand are studying the films of the past. One person is trying to ascertain whether a certain film was made in 1904 or 1905. Another is tracing the fortunes of a short-lived Scandinavian production company. Another is poring over a 1927 Japanese film, shot by shot, to find out how it tells its story. Some researchers are comparing prints of an obscure film to determine which one can be considered the original. Other scholars are studying a group of films signed by the same director or set designer or producer. Some are scrutinizing patent records and technical diagrams, legal testimony, and production files. And still others are interviewing retired employees to discover how the Bijou Theater in their hometown was run during the 1950s. Why? One reason is evident. Most film historians—teachers, archivists, journalists, and freelancers—are lovers of cinema. Like bird-watchers, fans of 1960s television, art historians, and other devotees, they enjoy acquiring knowledge about the object of their affection. Movie fans may stop there, regarding the accumulating of facts about their passion as an end in itself. But whatever the pleasure of knowing the names of all the Three Stooges’ wives, most film historians are not trivia buffs. Film historians mount systematic inquiries into the past. A historian’s research program is organized around that require answers. A research program also consists of assumptions and background knowledge. For a film historian, a fact takes on significance only in the context of a research program. Consider this image, from a film of the silent era. A film archivist—that is, someone who works in a library devoted to collecting and preserving motion pictures—often comes across a film that is unidentified. Perhaps the title credit is missing or the print carries a title that differs from that of the original film. The archivist’s research program is, broadly, identification. The film presents a series of questions: What is the date of production or of release? In what country was it made? What company and personnel made the film? Who are the actors? Our mysterious film carries only the French title (“Wanda the Spy”)—most likely a title given to it by a distributor. It was probably imported rather than made in Belgium, where the print was discovered. Fortunately there are some clues in the print itself. The lead actress, seated in the foreground, is a famous star, Francesca Bertini. Identifying her makes it almost certain that the film is Italian. But Bertini was a star from 1907 into the 1930s. How can we narrow the dates further? The film’s style helps. The camera points straight toward the back wall of the set, and the actors seldom move closer to the camera than they are seen here. The editing pace is slow, and the action is staged so that performers enter and exit through a rear doorway. All these stylistic features are typical of European filmmaking of the mid-1910s. Such clues can be followed up by referring to a (a list of films) of Bertini’s career. A plot description of a 1915 film in which she starred, (“Diana the Seductress”), matches the action of the unidentified print. Note that the identification depended on certain assumptions. For example, the researcher assumed that it’s extremely unlikely for a modern filmmaker to create a fake 1915 Italian film, just to baffle archivists. (Film historians need not worry about forgeries, as art historians must.) Note, too, that the researcher needed some background knowledge. She had reason to believe that films staged and cut a certain way are characteristic of the mid-1910s, and she recognized a star from other films of the period. Most historians go beyond identification and tackle broader subject areas. Consider another common situation. An archive holds many films made by the same production company, and it also has numerous filing cabinets bulging with documents concerning that company’s production process. Its collection also includes scripts in various drafts; memos passed among writers, directors, producers, and other staff; and sketches for sets and costumes. This is a rich lode of data—too rich, in fact, for one researcher to tackle. The historian’s problem is now selecting relevant data and salient facts. What makes a datum relevant or a fact salient is the historian’s research program and its questions. One scholar might be interested in tracing common features of the company’s production process; he might ask something like, “In general, how did this firm typically plan, execute, and market its movies?” Another historian’s research program might concentrate on the films of a certain director who worked for the company. She might ask, “What aspects of visual style distinguish the director’s films?” Some facts would be central to one program but peripheral to another. The historian interested in the company’s business routines might not particularly care about a daring visual innovation introduced by the director who is the focus of the other historian’s inquiry. In turn, the stylistic historian might be uninterested in how the company’s producers promoted certain stars. Again, assumptions exert pressure on the researcher’s framing of questions and pursuit of information. The company historian assumes that he can trace general tendencies of production organization, largely because film companies tend to make films by following fairly set routines. The director-centered researcher assumes that her director’s films do have a distinct style. And both historians would mobilize background knowledge, about how companies work and how directors direct, to guide their research. Historians in any discipline do more than accumulate facts. No facts speak for themselves. Facts are interesting and important only as part of research programs. Facts also help us ask and answer questions. Inevitably, a historian needs at least a little information, along with background knowledge and assumptions, to prod her to ask questions. But the historian does not necessarily sift through mountains of facts and then judiciously ask a question. A historian may begin with a question, and sometimes that question might be better described as a hunch or an intuition or even just an itch. For example, one young historian saw a few of the “anarchic” American comedies of the 1930s and noticed that their vulgar gags and absurd situations were very different from the more sophisticated comedy of the period. Suspecting that stage comedy might have been a source, he framed a question: “Might vaudeville and its performance style have shaped these particular comedies of the early 1930s?” He began to gather information, examining films, reading coverage of the comedians in the Hollywood trade press, and studying shifts in American taste in humor. The process of research led him to refine his question and to mount a detailed account of how comedians introduced a vaudeville aesthetic into sound films but then muted it in accord with Hollywood’s standards of taste. Nonhistorians often visualize the historical researcher as a cousin to Indiana Jones, braving library stacks and crawling through attics in quest of the treasure-lode of documents that will overturn popular opinion. Certainly new documentation has a key role to play in historical research. One scholar gained entry to the long-inaccessible files of Hollywood’s self-censorship agency, the Hays Office, and she was able to put forth a new account of the office’s procedures and functions. Similarly, the increasing availability of films from cinema’s earliest era has created an entire subfield of cinema history. Still, many research programs rely more on asking new questions than on unearthing new data. Sometimes the research question seems to have been answered by previous historians, but another researcher comes along and suggests a more complete or complex answer. For example, no historian disputes the fact that Warner Bros. was quick to invest in talking pictures in the mid-1920s. For a long time most historians believed that Warners took this risky step because it was on the verge of bankruptcy and was desperate to save itself. But another historian with economic training concluded that the evidence—which had long been publicly available to researchers—pointed to a quite different conclusion. Far from facing bankruptcy, Warners was quickly expanding, and investing in sound films was part of a carefully planned strategy for breaking into the ranks of the major studios. Our examples all indicate that the historian’s research program aims to do at least two things. First, the historian tries to a process or state of affairs. She asks and and and What is this film, and who made it, and where and when? In what ways does this director’s work differ from that of others? What was the vaudeville comedic style? What evidence is there that a studio was nearly bankrupt? Who is the actor in this shot? Who was responsible for scripts at this company? Where was this film shown, and who might have seen it? Here the historian’s problem is largely one of finding information that will answer such questions. Accurate description is indispensable for all historical research. Scholars have spent countless hours identifying films, collating versions, compiling filmographies, establishing timelines, and creating reference works that supply names, dates, and the like. The more sophisticated and long-lived a historical discipline is, the richer and more complete its battery of descriptive reference material will be. Second, the historian tries to a process or state of affairs. He or she asks, and How did this company assign tasks, lay out responsibilities, carry a project to completion? How did this director’s work influence other films from the company? Why did Warners pursue talkies when larger companies were reluctant to do so? Why did some sound comedians adopt the vaudeville comedic style while others did not? The film historian, like a historian of art or politics, proposes an Having asked or she puts forward an answer, based on an examination of evidence in light of assumptions and background knowledge. In reading historical writings, we need to recognize that the essay or book is not just a mass of facts but an argument. The historian’s argument consists of evidence marshalled to create a plausible explanation for an event or state of affairs. That is, the argument aims to answer some historical question. Most arguments about film history rely on evidence. Evidence consists of information that gives grounds for believing that the argument is sound. Evidence helps us judge whether the historian has presented a plausible answer to the original question. Film historians work with evidence of many sorts. For many historians, copies of the films they study are central pieces of evidence. But this data set is partial. Although the cinema is a relatively young medium, invented only a little over a century ago, many films have already been lost or destroyed. For decades, movies were seen as products with temporary commercial value, and companies did little to ensure their preservation. Even when film archives began to be founded in the 1930s, they faced the daunting task of collecting and sheltering the thousands of films that had already been made. Archivists had to choose what they could afford to retain. Moreover, the nitrate film stock, upon which most films up to the early 1950s were shot and printed, was highly flammable and deteriorated over time. Deliberate destruction of films, warehouse fires, and the gradual decomposition of nitrate stored in bad conditions have led to the loss of many titles. In the frame below, from , an Irish film from 1918, severe nitrate deterioration has obliterated the most important figures. According to rough estimates, only about 20 percent of silent films are known to survive. Many of these are still sitting in vaults, unidentified or unpreserved due to lack of funds. More recent films may be inaccessible to the researcher as well. Films made in some small countries, particularly in Third World nations, were not made in many copies and did not circulate widely. Small archives may not have the facilities to preserve films or show them to researchers. In some cases, political regimes may choose to suppress certain films and promote others. Finding reliable copies to study is a major challenge for the historian whose questions center on the films. Historians also rely on print sources. These may be published sources, such as books, magazines, trade journals, and newspapers, or unpublished ones, like memoirs, letters, notes, production files, scripts, and court testimony. Historians of film technology scrutinize cameras, sound recorders, and other equipment. A film studio or an important location might also serve as a source of evidence. Usually historians must verify their evidence. Often this depends on using the sort of descriptive research we have already mentioned, such as combing primary documents, checking filmographies and reference works, and the like. The problem of verification is particularly acute with film prints. Films have always circulated in differing versions. In the 1920s, Hollywood films were shot in two versions, one for the United States and one for export. These could differ considerably in length, content, and even visual style. In addition, many old films have deteriorated and been subject to cutting and revision at the hands of censors or distributors. Even modern restorations do not always reproduce the original release version. Often, then, the historian doesn’t know whether the print she is seeing represents anything like an original, if indeed there can be said to be a single original version. Historians try to be aware of the differences among the versions of the films they are studying. The fact that there are different versions can itself be a source of questions. Historians generally distinguish between and sources. As applied to film, usually refers to sources most directly related to the research questions the historian is asking. For example, if you were studying Japanese cinema of the 1920s, the surviving films, interviews with filmmakers or audience members, and contemporary trade journals would count as primary material. Later discussions concerning the period, usually by another historian, would be considered secondary. Often one scholar’s secondary source is another’s primary source, because the researchers are asking different questions. A critic’s 1966 essay about a 1925 film would be a secondary source if your question centered on the 1925 film. If, however, you were writing a history of film criticism during the 1960s, the critic’s essay would be a primary source. There are distinct types of explanation in film history. A standard list would include: focusing on an individual’s life history focusing on business practices focusing on film art (form, style, genre) focusing on the materials and machines of film focusing on the role of cinema in the larger society This sort of inventory helps us understand that there is not history of film but many possible histories, each adopting a different perspective. Typically, the researcher begins with an interest in one of these areas, which helps him to formulate his initial question. Nevertheless, such a typology shouldn’t be taken too rigidly. Not all questions the historian may ask will fall neatly into only one of these pigeonholes. If you want to know a film looks the way it does, the question may not be purely aesthetic; it might be linked to the biography of the filmmaker or to the technological resources available when the film was made. A study of film genres might involve both aesthetic and cultural factors. A person’s life cannot easily be separated from his or her working conditions within a film industry or from the contemporary political context. We propose that the student of film history think chiefly in terms of questions, keeping in mind that some interesting questions are likely to cut across categorical boundaries. Finding an answer to a historical question may involve both description and explanation, in different mixtures. The techniques of descriptive research are specialized and require a wide range of background knowledge. For example, some experts on early silent cinema can determine when a film copy was made by examining the stock on which it is printed. The number and shape of the sprocket holes, along with the manner in which a manufacturer’s name is printed along the edge of the film strip, can help date the print. Knowing the age of the stock can in turn help narrow down the film’s date of production and country of origin. Historical explanation also involves concepts that organize the evidence produced by specialized knowledge. Here are some of them.    Chronology is essential to historical explanation, and descriptive research is an indispensable aid to establishing the sequence of events. The historian needs to know that this film was made before that one or that event B took place after event A. But history is not mere chronology. A chronology stops short of explanation, just as a record of high and low tides gives no hint as to why tides change. History, as we have already seen, centrally involves explanation.    Much historical explanation involves cause and effect. Historians work with conceptions of various kinds of causes.           People have beliefs and desires that affect how they act. In acting, they make things happen. It is often reasonable to explain a historical change or a past state of affairs in light of the attitudes or behavior of individuals. This is not to say that individuals make everything happen or that things always happen as people originally intended or that people always understand just why they did what they did. It is simply to say that historians may justifiably appeal to what individuals think and feel and do as part of an explanation.      Some historians believe that historical explanation must appeal to person-based causes sooner or later. This position is usually called A different, and even more sweeping, assumption is that only individuals, and exceptional individuals at that, have the power to create historical change. This view is sometimes labeled the Great Man theory of history, even though it is applied to women as well. Earlier generations of film historians, for example, were inclined to treat D.W. Griffith as the most important figure in the U.S. silent cinema because it seemed that he invented a number of editing techniques that became widespread. More recent historians have developed a counterargument, thanks to the greater availability of films by other directors and a more comparison-based method. These scholars claim that Griffith developed certain tendencies that were already present, pushing them to a new level of expression. Moreover, his most original techniques were not picked up by others, so in some respects other directors had more influence on standard editing practice. As an individual Griffith remains important, but he is probably not the Great Innovator that people once considered him.          People often act in groups, and at times we speak of the group as having a kind of existence over and above the individuals who compose it. Groups have rules and roles, structures and routines, and often these factors make things happen. We speak of a government’s declaring war, yet this act may not be reducible to more detailed statements about what all the individuals involved believed and did.      When we say that Warner Bros. decided to adopt sound, we are making a meaningful claim, even if we have no information about the beliefs and desires of the individual decision makers at the company; we may not even fully know who they were. Some historians assert that any historical explanation must, sooner or later, ground itself in group-based causes. This position is usually called or as opposed to methodological individualism.      Several sorts of groups are important to the history of cinema. Throughout our book we talk about —government agencies, film studios, distribution firms, and other fairly formal, organized groups. We also talk about more informal affiliations of filmmakers. These are usually called or small assemblies of filmmakers and critics who share the same interests, beliefs about cinema, conceptions of film form and style, and the like.  The Soviet filmmakers of the 1920s—Lev Kuleshov, Sergei Eisenstein, V.I. Pudovkin, Esfir Shub, and many others—are a classic instance of a movement. Despite their individual differences, these directors held in common a commitment to editing, often disjunctive editing, as central to a movie’s effects on a viewer. Less well-defined cases of a movement would be German Expressionist film of the 1920s, Italian neorealism after World War II, and French New Wave filmmaking during the 1960s. In these instances, the filmmakers often insisted that they shared no consciousness of belonging to a movement. Still, historians often find common trends in the films, in the production circumstances, and in the local film culture, and these factors justify treating the filmmakers as a group, even if not a full-fledged movement.    Most historians use some notion of influence to explain change. Influence describes the inspiration that an individual, a group, or a film can provide for others. Members of a movement can deliberately influence a director to make a film a certain way, but a chance viewing of a movie can also influence a director.        does not mean simple copying. You may have been influenced by a parent or a teacher, but you have not necessarily mimicked his or her behavior. In the arts, influence is often a matter of one artist’s getting ideas from other artists’ work but then pursuing those ideas in a personal way. The result may be quite different from the initial work that stimulated it. The contemporary director Jean-Luc Godard was influenced by Jean Renoir, although their films are markedly different. Sometimes we can detect the influence by examining the films; sometimes we rely on the testimony of the filmmaker.       A body of work by a group of directors may also influence later films. Soviet cinema of the 1920s influenced the documentary director John Grierson. The Hollywood cinema, as a set of films, has been enormously influential throughout film history, although all the directors influenced by it certainly did not see exactly the same films. Influences are particular kinds of causes, so it is not surprising that influences may involve both individual activity and group activity.    Any historical question opens up a body of data for investigation. Once the historian starts to look closely at the data—to go through a studio’s records, examine the films, page through the trade press—she discovers that there is much more to explore than the initial question touches on. It’s like looking into a microscope and discovering that a drop of water teems with organisms of confounding variety, all going about very different business. Every historian omits certain material. For one thing, the historical record is already incomplete. Many events go unrecorded, and many documents are lost forever. Further, historians inevitably select. They unweave the tangles of history and create a more coherent pattern. A historian simplifies and streamlines according to the question he is pursuing. One principal way historians go about such simplification is by postulating Lots of things are going on, they admit, but “by and large” or “on the whole” or “for the most part,” we can identify a general tendency. Most Hollywood films of the 1940s were made in black and white, but most Hollywood films today are in color. On the whole, there has been a change, and we can see a trend toward the increasing use of color film stock between the 1940s and the 1960s. Our task is to explain how and why this trend occurred. By positing trends, historians generalize. They necessarily set aside interesting exceptions and aberrations. But this is no sin, because the answer to a question is necessarily pitched at a certain level of generality. All historical explanations pull back from the throbbing messiness of reality. By recognizing that tendencies are “for-the-most-part” generalizations, the scholar can acknowledge that there is more going on than she is trying to explain. Historical chronology and causation are without beginning or end. The child who incessantly asks what came before that or what made that happen soon discovers that we can trace out a sequence of events indefinitely. Historians necessarily limit the stretch of time they will explore, and they go on to divide that stretch into meaningful phases or segments. For example, the historian studying American silent cinema already assumes that this period within film history ran from about 1894 to around 1929. The historian will probably further segment this stretch of time. She might break it down by decade, treating the 1900s, the 1910s, and the 1920s. Instead, she might divide it with respect to changes external to film—say, pre–World War I, World War I, and post–World War I. Another possibility is creating periods that mark phases in the development of storytelling style, such as 1894–1907, 1908–1917, and 1918–1929. Historians mark out periods according to the research programs they adopt and the questions they ask. Historians recognize that periodization can’t be rigid: trends do not follow in neat order. It is illuminating to think of the American “structural” film of the early 1970s as a response to the “lyrical” film of the 1960s, but lyrical films were still being made well in the 1970s and afterward. Histories of genres often mark off periods by innovative films, but this is not to deny that more ordinary movies display a great deal of continuity across periods. (1968) brought Satanic horror into the A-picture realm, but in the years that followed, most horror films continued to be low-budget product. Similarly, we ought not to expect that the history of technology or styles or genres will march in step with political or social history. The period after World War II was indeed distinctive, because this global conflict had major effects on film industries and filmmakers in most countries; but not all political events demarcate distinct periods in relation to changes in film form or the film market. The assassination of President Kennedy was a wrenching event, but it had little effect on activities in the film world. Here, as ever, the historian’s research program and central question will shape her sense of the relevant periods and parallel events. This is, again, one reason that scholars often speak of film rather than a single film history.    In mounting explanations, historians of all arts make assumptions about the significance of the artworks they discuss. We might treat a work as a “monument,” studying it because it is a highly valued accomplishment. Alternatively, we might study a work as a “document” because it records some noteworthy historical activity, such as the state of a society at a given moment or a trend within the art form itself. Most historians assume that the films they discuss have significance on any or all of the following three criteria: Some films are, simply, outstanding by artistic criteria. They are rich, moving, complex, thought-provoking, intricate, meaningful, or the like. At least partly because of their quality, such films have played a key role in the history of cinema. A film may be historically significant by virtue of its influence on other films. It may create or change a genre, inspire filmmakers to try something new, or gain such a wide popularity that it spawns imitations and tributes. Since influence is an important part of historical explanations, this sort of film plays a prominent role in most histories. Some films are significant because they vividly represent instances or trends. They stand in for many other films of the same type. The three criteria don’t have to combine. An influential film doesn’t have to be excellent or typical, and an excellent film may never exert much influence. The films of Robert Bresson are usually considered exceptionally good, but for a long time they influenced no other filmmaking. But of course in some cases the criteria can combine. A highly accomplished genre film, such as or is often considered both excellent and highly typical. Many acclaimed masterworks, such as or were also very influential, and some also typify broader tendencies. The preface to , third edition, outlines the questions we focus on, but it’s probably worth mentioning them here as well. Although the book surveys the history of world cinema, we could hardly start with the question That would give us no help in setting about our research and organizing the material we find. Instead, we have highlighted three major questions. 1.  Within “uses of the medium” we include matters of film form: the part/whole organization of the film. Often this involves telling a story, but a film’s overall form might also be based on an argument or an abstract pattern. The term “uses of the medium” also includes matters of film style, the patterned uses of film techniques ( or staging, lighting, setting, and costume; camerawork; editing; and sound). In addition, any balanced conception of how the medium has been used must also consider film modes (documentary, avant-garde, fiction, animation) and genres (for example, the Western, the thriller, or the musical). So we also examine these phenomena. All such matters are central to most college and university survey courses in film history. A central purpose of our book is to survey the uses of the medium in different times and places. Sometimes we dwell on the creation of stable norms of form and style, as when we examine how Hollywood standardized certain editing options in the first two decades of filmmaking. At other times, we examine how filmmakers have proposed innovative ways of structuring form or using film technique. 2.  Films are made within habitual ways of organizing the labor and materials involved in creating a movie. Some modes of production are industrial; that’s when companies make films as a business. The classic instance of industrial production is the in which firms are organized in order to make films for large audiences through a fairly detailed division of labor. Hollywood’s studio system is the most famous, but there have been studio systems of production in many countries. Another sort of industrial production might be called the or approach, in which a production company makes one film at a time (perhaps only one film, period). Still other modes of production are less highly organized, involving small groups or individuals who make films for specific purposes. In all these instances, the ways in which films are made have had particular effects on the look and sound of the finished products. An avant-garde film, made on a low budget by an individual filmmaker, is more likely to be a personal expression than a big-budget Hollywood blockbuster. The ways in which films are exhibited have also affected film history. For example, the major technological innovations associated with the early 1950s — wide-screen picture, stereophonic sound, increased use of color — were actually available decades earlier. Each could have been developed before the 1950s, but the U.S. film industry had no pressing need to do so since film attendance was so high that spending money on new attractions would not have significantly increased profits. Only when attendance dropped precipitously in the late 1940s were producers and exhibitors pushed to introduce new technologies to lure audiences back into theaters. 3.  In we try to balance the consideration of important national contributions with a sense of how international and cross-cultural influences were operating. Many nations’ audiences and film industries have been influenced by directors and films that have migrated across their borders. Genres are vagabond as well. The Hollywood Western influenced the Japanese samurai film and the Italian Western, genres that in turn influenced the Hong Kong kung-fu films of the 1970s. Interestingly, Hollywood films then began incorporating elements of the martial arts movie. Just as important, the film industry itself is significantly transnational. At certain periods, circumstances closed off countries from the flow of films, but most often there has been a global film market, and we understand it best by tracing trends across cultures and regions. We have paid particular attention to conditions that allowed people to see films made outside their own country. Each of these questions accompanies a great many questions. For any part of the processes we focus on, we can ask what conditions caused them to operate as they did. Why, for instance, did Soviet filmmakers undertake their experiments in disturbing, aggressive narrative? Why did Hollywood’s studio system begin to fragment in the late 1940s? Why did “new waves” and “young cinemas” arise in Europe, the Soviet Union, and Japan around 1960? Why are more films produced now with international investment than in the 1930s or 1940s? Historians are keen to know what factors made a change occur, and our general questions include a host of subquestions about causes and effects. Recall our five general explanatory approaches: biographical, industrial, aesthetic, technological, and social. If we had to squeeze our book into one or more of these pigeonholes, we could say that its approach is predominantly aesthetic and industrial. It examines how types of films, film styles, and film forms have changed in relation to the conditions of film production, distribution, and exhibition within certain countries and within the international flow of films. But this summary of our approach is too confining, as even a cursory look at what follows will indicate. Sometimes we invoke an individual — a powerful producer, an innovative filmmaker, an imaginative critic. Sometimes we consider technology. And we often frame our account with discussions of the political, social, and cultural context of a period. Take, for example, our central question: How have uses of the film medium changed or become normalized over time? This is a question about aesthetic matters, but it also impinges on factors of technology. For instance, conceptions of “realistic” filmmaking changed with the introduction of portable cameras and sound equipment in the late 1950s. Similarly, our second question — How have the conditions of the film industry affected the uses of the medium? — is at once economic, technological, and aesthetic. Finally, asking how international trends have emerged in the uses of the film medium and in the film market concerns both economic and social/cultural/political factors. In the early era of cinema, films circulated freely among countries, and viewers often did not know the nationality of a film they were seeing. In the 1910s, however, war and nationalism blocked certain films from circulating. At the same time, the growth of particular film industries, notably Hollywood, depended on access to other markets, so the degree to which films could circulate boosted some nations’ output and hindered that of others. In addition, the circulation of U.S. films abroad served to spread American cultural values, which in turn created both admiration and hostility. In sum, we have been guided, as we think most historians are, by research questions rather than rigid conceptions of the type of history we are writing. And what we take to be the most plausible answer to a given question will depend on the strength of the evidence and the argument we can make for it — not on a prior commitment to writing only a certain kind of history. Our answers to historical questions are, however, not simply given in a list or summary. Like most historical arguments, ours takes a narrative form. Historians use language to communicate their arguments and evidence to others. Descriptive research programs can do this through a summary of findings: this film is made in Italy by Caesar-Film in 1915, directed by Gustavo Serena, and so on. But historical explanations require a more complicated crafting. Sometimes historians frame their explanations as persuasive arguments. To take an example already cited, a historian investigating the development of sound by Warner Bros. might start by considering the various explanations already offered and taken for granted. Then he might set forth the reasons for believing his alternative interpretation. This is a familiar form of rhetorical argument, eliminating unsatisfactory beliefs before settling on a more plausible one. More often, historians’ explanations take the form of stories. as it is called, seeks to answer and questions by tracing the relevant circumstances and conditions over time. It produces a chain of causes and effects, or it shows how a process works, by telling a story. For instance, if we are trying to answer the question we can frame a step-by-step narrative of the censorship process. Or, if we are seeking to explain what led the Hays Office to be created, we might lay out the causal factors as a story. As these examples indicate, the story’s “characters” might be individuals or groups, institutions or even films; the “plot” consists of the situations in which the players operate and the changes they initiate and undergo. Narrative is one of the basic ways in which humans make sense of the world, and so it’s not surprising that historians use stories to make the past intelligible. follows tradition in creating a large-scale narrative, one that includes several stories within it. We divide film history into six large periods — early cinema (to about 1919), the late silent era (1919–1929), the development of sound cinema (1926–1945), the period after World War II (1946–1960s), the period running from the 1960s to the 1980s, and the contemporary era (1980s-the present). These divisions reflect developments in (1) film form and style; (2) major changes in film production, distribution, and exhibition; and (3) significant international trends. The periodization can’t be exactly synchronized for all three areas, but it does indicate approximate boundaries for the changes we try to trace. An alternative organizational pattern is that of the . Topical history treats an idea or theme rather than a story. If you were writing a book-length history of Manhattan, for instance, you might devote one chapter to geography, another to political dynamics, another to social changes, another to the events of 9/11, and so on. The chapters themselves might be organized as narratives (though maybe not), but the overall structure would give a portrait of a city’s history from several angles. The historian must decide, at various levels, between narrative organization and topical organization. Suppose your question was Once you’ve done your research and come to some conclusions, you could organize your presentation narratively or topically. That is, your chapters could proceed in chronological order to trace the changes in the industry between 1945 and the early 1950s. Or each chapter could deal with events occurring across the entire period, but in different spheres — production, censorship, journalism, exhibition, and the like. In another topical layout, you could organize the book around key films or film policies that had an impact on different spheres of German life. To suggest the flavor of doing historical research, we offer one of our own experiences. Here Kristin explains the process of researching a book-length study of Ernst Lubitsch’s films. (University of Amsterdam, 2005). Of the directors widely considered to be among the greatest, Ernst Lubitsch has had relatively little of substance written about him. The other directors of Germany’s “golden age” of the silent cinema, F. W. Murnau and especially Fritz Lang, have received more attention. Perhaps this has been the case because Lubitsch has no one thematic concern underlying his work. Murnau and Lang also are linked to the German Expressionist movement, while Lubitsch worked outside it. His habit of moving between vast historical epics and broad comedies for his German films makes him hard to pin down. But why is he important? Filmmakers and cinema buffs love Lubitsch, partly for the sheer quality of his work, from the hilarious silent comedies of the late 1910s, like and to the masterpieces of the sound period, most notably (1932) and (1940). Apart from his being a great director, though, why is Lubitsch significant? There are many things a historian could say about Lubitsch. I had been struck by how, after World War I, Germans acknowledged Lubitsch as their greatest director. After he moved to Hollywood, he quickly came to be considered the greatest director there as well. Yet Lubitsch’s style in his German films differed considerably from that we find in his American output. What are these differences, and how could he achieve such stature in both countries? A study of Lubitsch could also highlight how American and German national films styles differed during these crucial years in the development of the cinema as an art. According to traditional historical accounts, during the 1920s, imaginative German techniques like Expressionist set design and the freely moving camera quickly influenced Hollywood films. Historians had not considered the influence might move in the opposite direction, from Hollywood to Germany. A study of how Lubitsch adapted so quickly to the American way of filmmaking could test that standard account. How long a period should the book cover? Lubitsch had begun as a silent-film comedian, directing some of his own shorts and short features during the war. He moved into features in 1918. I decided to limit my focus to the ten-year period from 1918 to 1927, the year of Lubitsch’s last surviving silent film. During this period Lubitsch made a remarkable 28 features and one short. Of these titles, seven are not known to survive. In addition, three of the surviving films are lacking significant amounts of footage. The 21 available films became the core body of evidence for my study. Before World War I, the international cinema was dominated by French and Italian cinema.  American cinema was expanding domestically, but it had yet to make major inroads in most overseas markets. During the war, however, production declined in France and Italy, and the American firms quickly stepped in to supply theaters in many territories. Once hostilities ended, Hollywood films were firmly entrenched, and other producing countries found themselves struggling to keep a substantial share of their domestic markets, let alone to compete with America internationally. The war had, ironically, strengthened the German industry. In 1916, the government banned the import of all but Danish films. This ban was kept in place until December 31, 1920.  Thus for nearly five years, German film production was free to expand, and the industry emerged from the war second in size and strength only to Hollywood. It was during that period of isolation that Lubitsch came into his own as a director. Institutional circumstances played a role in making him the finest proponent of the German approach to filmmaking (a style which was largely the same as that used in most European producing countries). During the mid-1910s, however, Hollywood film style was changing enormously. What has been termed the “classical” style emerged, the underlying principle of which was to tailor film technique to tell a story as comprehensibly and unobtrusively as possible. Scenes were broken up into closer shots through analytical editing, shifting the spectator’s eye to the most salient part of the action at each moment. Filming in diffused light in the open air or in glass-sided studios was abandoned in favor of “dark” studios illuminated entirely by artificial lighting. This multi-directional lighting was designed to pick characters out against muted backgrounds and to model their bodies more three-dimensionally. The technique became codified as three-point lighting. Acting styles became less broad, depending more on glances and small gestures than on pantomime. Set design evolved to make the space containing the action simpler and hence less distracting. In sum, a new trend had begun, led by American filmmaking. Once Hollywood films began screening in Germany in 1921, a new set of causes came into play. German filmmakers started absorbing the American style, and Lubitsch was in the forefront of this change. His German films of 1921 and 1922 reflect his new knowledge of classical technique, and he was clearly ready to make the leap into Hollywood filmmaking even before he went there. Once in America, he rapidly honed his application of classical principles, and soon he was in turn influencing the filmmakers there with a string of masterpieces, including (1924) and (1925). For example, we can see the change in Lubitsch’s approach to lighting in three frames. The first, from (1918), shows lighting coming entirely from the front; there’s no backlighting to pick out the gray uniform against the gray background. By 1921, after Lubitsch had seen Hollywood films, he used light from the front, side, and rear in . In Hollywood, Lubitsch routinely used back lighting to make his actors stand out against the sets, as in this frame from (1923). In setting out on my project, I asked a small number of questions. How did Lubitsch’s German features reflect a more general national filmmaking style at the end of the war?  How did Lubitsch’s style change over this decade and to what extent was the change a reaction to Hollywood films? What impact did the new classical Hollywood style have more generally on German filmmaking in the 1920s? I was already familiar with American films of this period, having collaborated on (1985, Columbia University Press) with David and with Janet Staiger. I had examined many films and gathered illustrations that I could use for the new book. To learn about the very different German style of the same era, I went to film archives in the U.S. and abroad to study Lubitsch’s films in detail, watching them on an editing table and making frame reproductions for use as illustrations. I examined Lubitsch’s context by watching about 75 films by other directors, also collecting images for illustrations. (I did not include Expressionist and films, as these were avant-garde alternatives to classical Hollywood style.) I wasn’t looking at acknowledged masterpieces, for I wanted to track typical trends in German film style. In libraries I went through film-industry publications, primarily the and , and the two main technical journals of the 1920s, and . Cinematography manuals and the memoirs of people who had worked with Lubitsch filled in details of the director’s working methods. Legal papers in the United Artists collection of the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research shed light on Mary Pickford’s dealings with Lubitsch during and after their work on (1923) — dealings about which some widely believed myths had persisted. Reviews of Lubitsch’s films in the German and American press revealed how Lubitsch’s films were viewed and what expert viewers noticed about their look. All this evidence allowed me to answer my initial questions. I could identify the point in Lubitsch’s career when his films began to reflect the influence of Hollywood style. I was able to do the same with more ordinary German films of the post-war era. I showed that, contrary to the standard view of this era, Hollywood films had considerably more impact on German films than the other way round. In writing the book, I didn’t organize the chapters to give a chronological account of Lubitsch’s career during this ten-year period. Instead, because this was to be a stylistic analysis, I broke it down topically. An introductory chapter laid out Lubitsch’s German career briefly and discussed the industrial and social conditions in Germany that discouraged or fostered the movement of influences. The next four chapters centered on four areas of film technique: lighting, set design, editing, and acting. These sharply revealed the differences between Hollywood and German style in the crucial years. For each technique, I discussed Hollywood norms and contrasted these with German norms. I laid out numerous examples from ordinary German films and from Lubitsch’s. Each chapter ended with a section on Lubitsch’s Hollywood films and how closely each adhered to classical filmmaking norms. The final chapter dealt with the influences of Hollywood film on mainstream commercial German cinema of the era after Lubitsch had left his native country. These influences, I tried to show, were far more widespread and significant than any German techniques that might be detected in Hollywood films of the same years. Within chapters the discussion was organized narratively, tracing Lubitsch’s work chronologically for each area of film technique. The overall argument moved from specific to general. While the opening chapter dealt largely with Lubitsch’s career and work, the last one left Lubitsch and concentrated almost entirely on German cinema of the 1920s. When was published, few of Lubitsch’s silent features were widely known. Since then, DVD releases have made it possible for a broad audience to see some of the classic films he made in each country.  (1918) is available. The “ ” set contains several German features: , , , , Anna Boleyn, and plus a documentary on Lubitsch’s early career. (Each is available separately as well.) Lubitsch’s two most important Hollywood films are also on DVD: His romantic comedy (1924) is available, and a restored print of what is arguably his masterpiece of the silent period, (1925), is part of the “ ” set. Perhaps now readers can evaluate my answers to the questions my book seeks to answer, and I hope that other historians will ask new ones of their own. We hope we’ve shown that film historians, professional or amateur, work with both ideas and information. They mount projects within research programs. They don’t simply state facts; they try to ask questions. They don’t just pile up data. They make arguments and tell stories. The facts and questions, data and arguments and stories combine to make doing film history a fascinating pursuit. Historical writing about films will probably never be as common as film criticism; most people prefer to comment about films by analyzing, interpreting, and evaluating them. Writing an essay on film history takes a lot more time and effort than writing a review of a current film. Nonetheless, historical study offers unique pleasures.  If you want to understand the context of a film that you admire, you would enjoy reading film history. Just as important, a deeper understanding of film history introduces you to a range of new films to enjoy. Finally, if we have any curiosity about the films that captivate us now, we can start to satisfy it by thinking historically. What happens today springs from what happened yesterday. By trying to understand film history, we better understand the movies of our moment.     : This research program is described in Henry Jenkins, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992). : See Lea Jacobs, (1991; reprint Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). : See, for example, Yuri Tsivian, et al., (Pordenone: Giornate del Cinema Muto, 1989); Charles Musser, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); Tom Gunning, (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991); and Ben Brewster and Lea Jacobs, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). : Douglas Gomery, “The Coming of Sound: Technological Change in the American Film Industry,” in Tino Balio, ed., , rev. ed. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), pp. 229–51. : See Jennifer Fay, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). : See David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, , eighth ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2008), 128-130. : In our weblog, we often try to put recent films into various historical contexts. See .       have comments about the state of this website?   The Historical Value of Film By lauren ball, edited by walid hasan. Film as an academic medium for historiography has several advantages over textual sources. The phrase, “a picture is worth a thousand words” comes to mind; if so, then film’s value for history should be self-evident. When watching a film or documentary, the average viewer is immersed in a moment in history in a way that reading a text could never accomplish. When viewing a film through a historian’s lens, we can be more objective in our observations of footage from the past. As historians, we can identify whether the events being filmed did indeed happen, assuming the footage wasn’t doctored. We must recognize however, that humans are creatures ruled by their senses. We interact with the world visually, thus it makes sense for a visual medium to have a more profound emotional impact on us. Still images via photography can capture iconic moments which on their own can alter the “course of history”. Films about history bring the “past to life” and helps viewers relate better to the characters or events of that past. Narratives within film can be powerful motivators and allow filmmakers and historians to more fully engage with their audience. Non-textual sources such as film and photography are therefore uniquely positioned to communicate the emotional impact of historical events and for historiography, their value cannot be understated. I will discuss film specifically in this essay, both its advantages for history as well as the criticisms against it. I will argue that, like historical texts and novels, it does not matter if film as history cannot be proven to be 100% accurate. What matters most are the emotions and thoughts films invoke, the narratives and stories filmmakers and historians choose to remember and value. Unedited Film and Original Documentation There are two basic types of film that can be used as historical artifact with an entire spectrum of possible expression in-between. The first is “unedited” or “raw” footage , representation as close to the “true” event as possible and the second is film which has been carefully crafted and shot with some intention in mind, be it propaganda or art. Everything along this spectrum is valuable as a historical artifact, though of course they must always be viewed with a critical eye to properly grasp their value. First, let’s examine “unedited” or “raw” footage. Footage of this nature has been used to document history since the end of the 19th century with early examples such as when Thomas Edison famously took a short film of soldiers unloading cargo in Tampa, Florida in May of 1898. These images carry a curious potency to the historian; to quote Janna Jones in her work, The Past is a Moving Picture: Preserving the Twentieth Century on Film , “These moving images resurrected the city and the soldiers in a way photographs could not. Edison’s moving images of a Tampa that existed one hundred years ago were a compelling reminder of how a city’s past can disappear from the landscape and from memory” (Jones, 3-4). This sort of footage can bring more poignant memories to light, forcing society to accept the reality of a situation it would rather avoid. For example, footage taken of Jewish internment camps (WWII) was used as evidence for the first time during the Nuremberg trials (1945-1946, trials held by the Allied forces against twenty-two Nazi criminals). Camera operators and filmmakers such as George Stevens, John Huston, Frank Capra, Samuel Fuller and Billy Wilder were deployed to capture the horrific conditions of the war. Filmmakers were allowed into concentration camps to document the atrocities committed there (Wilson, 7). Nazis soldiers and officers, however unwittingly, aided in their own prosecution by utilizing photographers such as Wilhelm Brasse to take portraits of their victims. “From clandestine glimpses of persecution and extermination snatched by bystanders and underground members and the grinning, shameless, and triumphant images captured by the Nazis and their collaborators to record their ‘mastery,’ to the newsreels and photojournalism of liberation taken as twofold evidence: here is evidence of the unthinkable crimes committed and also literal, judicial evidence collated for the anticipated war crimes trials.” (Wilson, 22-23). George Stevens’ footage, as well as that of many others, formed the backbone of evidence against many Nazi party members and leaders. The sheer emotional impact of the haunting images from these camps is staggering. Barbie Zelizer notes, “Although atrocity stories had been around as long as war itself, never before had the press come face to face with such extensive evidence of mass brutality and such an ability to document it. Covering the scenes of horror in the camps required overcoming both assumptions about earlier atrocity stories and inadequate standards that existed for depicting violence in word and image” (Wilson, 7). Texts may capture a broader theme, a larger story, but film has the ability to narrow in on the particular horrors or scenes of hope from a past occurrence. While texts might be dismissed as exaggerated or misconstrued, the films and photos of the Holocaust taken by Stevens are hard to deny. I argue here for the inherent value in this type of footage, yet I will also address the flaws films such as these share with textual history later on. The images of the Holocaust provide an important tool for historians. If one of the purposes of studying history is to remember past mistakes and avoid them in the future, then genocide may be the biggest mistake of all to avoid. Even so, Holocaust deniers make headlines to this day (Stack, 2018). As the last of the survivors of the Holocaust die of old age, how are we as a society to remember their pain and loss? “…such material, utilized as evidence, defends against both Holocaust denial and the more understandable desire of society to believe that ‘such things cannot be possible’…” (Wilson, 21). “Unedited” footage of historical events provides a substantial counterpoint to claims that atrocities have been faked. Just as important, looking into the eyes of a prisoner of a concentration camp is extremely emotional and haunting in a way that a textual source could not achieve. “The camera readily changes our audience perspective from zero to internal focalization (when the agent becomes the focaliser). Thus, focalization changes meaning, understanding and explanation” (Munslow, 50). This is not to say that unedited footage is not without flaws. For one, current technology undermines the authenticity which is its cardinal virtue. For example, even with the footage taken of Nazi concentration camps, some of the images were staged. “In one instance, Fuller and some fellow soldiers ordered local Germans, under threat of death, to carry out a burial and funeral procession for those who had perished in the camp” (Wilson, 7-8). If one cannot absolutely trust that a film has not been staged or edited, that the images it contains are accurate, then what is the use of such films? To this day we still have some conspiracy theorists who deny the Moon Landings despite “visual evidence” to the contrary. Ricoeur makes the point that, “history ‘reinscribes the time of narrative within the time of the universe’ Without doubt the ‘temporal turn’ is central to historical narrative thinking and practice. Given that the past cannot be re-lived as it actually was (because it no longer exists), all the historian can do is ‘manage’ recorded memories of it by putting them into a narrative and regulating ‘real time’ in the process” (Munslow, 51). Perfect trust in accuracy is not a viable standard to achieve in any medium, as one can see from the case of the Donation of Constantine , a faked document which was accepted as historical truth for centuries (Popkin, 2016, 48). Staged Film and Propaganda What about films that occupy the other end of the spectrum? Films which have obviously been carefully crafted and staged with the intention of manipulating the audience? Films in this sense can be used as a “tool, or even a weapon, for change” (Steven Speilberg, Five Came Back, ep. 1) At the beginning of the World War II, Americans were not interested in European affairs, “Americans want no more war. Most of all, they want no more participation in foreign wars.” (Senator Gerald Nye, FCB, ep. 1). As the war progressed however, it became clear the US would indeed have to participate and the US government needed a way to justify the country’s involvement in the war. Propaganda through films offered a way to unify the country and rally the troops for the cause. “By the late 1930s, moviegoing had become an essential part of American culture. More than half the adult population went to the movies at least once a week, and before every film theaters played newsreels, which were the only source of visual news at the time” (Narrator, FCB, ep. 1). Propaganda footage could easily be incorporated into the American moviegoer’s field of vision. Propaganda through film was not a new concept; the German Nazi party had already taken advantage of film’s potential to establish influence over a population with the film Triumph of the Will , by Leni Riefenstahl (1935). “Cinema, in its purest form, could be put in the service of propaganda. Hitler and Goebbels understood the power of the cinema to move large populations towards your way of thinking.” (Francis Ford Cappola, FCB, ep. 1), When filmmaker, Frank Capra , saw the footage from the Nazi film he was both appalled and entranced. Capra was vehemently against Hitler’s agenda. During a public rally in 1939, he told American audiences that, “capitulation to Hitler would mean barbarism and terror.” (Narrator, FCB, ep. 1). Capra had already been collaborating with the US war department to create a series of seven propaganda films called Why We Fight . After seeing Triumph of the Will , Capra decided to use the enemies’ own strategies against them by integrating into his films, footage taken directly from Riefenstahl’s work under a different pro-American narrative (FCB, ep. 1). ‘So, I said, ‘Aha. Let’s let the boys see only their stuff. We make nothing. We shoot nothing. We use their own stuff as propaganda for ourselves’” (Capra, FCB, ep. 1). Capra’s films as well as many others during WWII were able to help forge American pride in the war effort. The films were somewhat misleading and often racist against the German and Japanese people, but extremely powerful politically. It must be noted that the deceptive nature of these films does not negate their potential use as a viable historical source. For historiography, the value of these films comes not from their accuracy of events, but rather as a way to note the power film has to influence societies, the power to instill fear or hope, and the power to drive wars. One must look at them with a critical eye towards their unreliable narrator. Through a critical lens, a historian can still derive knowledge from what the filmmakers wanted to portray and what they unintentionally portrayed. Historian John E. O’Connor proposed four means for analyzing films: “(1) moving-image documents as representations of history; (2) moving-image documents as evidence for social and cultural history; (3) moving-image documents as evidence for historical fact; and (4) moving image documents as evidence for the history of film and television” (O’Conner, 23). History Through Film Drama Historical dramas, on the other hand, present a dilemma to historians that are different from propaganda or unedited footage. Richard N. Current, a Civil War historian, observed that historical dramas “take liberties with the facts, or at best, select those that have the greatest visual effect.” He complained, reality and fantasy “blend more and more into an inseparable mix” in television and Hollywood productions (Toplin/Eudy, 9). Historian, David Herlihy critiqued that, “film, unlike scholarship, did not reveal the source of its evidence and, therefore, often it did not allow the quality of criticism leveled against its narratives.” (Toplin/Eudy, 8) The fact that many people seem to take historical films as factual can be even more dangerous. Historian Robert Rosenstone notes, “We now know that many people outside the classroom are not learning about history from reading books or from engaging in primary source research; instead, they are learning what they know about the past from engaging with media such as film, web based media, or videogames” (Stoddard, 2010, 84). As I have said before, criticisms such as these do not negate the use of historical film or dramas so much as shape the way those narratives can be used and taught by historians. Mark Carnes, for example, argues that historical film and dramas are still useful, as they “often teach truths about the human condition.” (Toplin/Eudy, 9). While the history depicted is certainly inaccurate in every detail, it can stimulate useful dialogues about the past. In The Past is a Foreign Country, David Lowenthal took the somewhat postmodernist stance (see Jacob’s essay on Postmodernist historiography) that any depiction of history incorporates a certain amount of distortion. “Better a misinformed enjoyment of history than none, a lighthearted dalliance with the past than a wholesale rejection of it” (Popkin, 154-156). Robert Rosenstone argued that it is this inaccuracy of the details which allows the history to feel more immersive. “The camera’s need to fill out the specifics of a particular historical scene, or to create a coherent (and moving) visual sequence, will always ensure large doses of invention in the historical film… All films will include fictional people or invented elements of character…to keep the story moving, to maintain intensity of feeling, to simplify complexity of events into plausible dramatic structure that will fit within filmic time constraints…on the screen, history must be fictional in order to be true!” (Popkin, 177). If accompanied with sufficient correction of facts, even blockbuster films can have their place in drawing the interest and emotional intensity of students and moviegoers. It is important to note that film as history can have substantial cultural significance as well. This is usually within the context of history as a source of cultural identity. Take, for example, the role film has played in the lives of African Americans. The film Birth of a Nation* (1915) explored the story of the Reconstruction era within America. The film was largely lauded (including by President Woodrow Wilson), despite being criticized as overtly racist by the NAACP (Popkin, 108). This and many other popular misrepresentations of African Americans within ‘historical’ dramas of the time, may have caused the thirst for positive cultural identity and a more truthful representation leading to the creation of shows such as Roots (1977), a historical drama tracking the role of Africans in revolutionary American society , Roots was also criticized for potential flaws in its accuracy. As Popkin explains, “Skeptics wondered, however, whether the “griots” Haley found in Ghana, who he claimed had told him stories handed down for generations about his ancestor Kunta Kinte, had not in fact made up tales to please their interviewer” (Popkin, 154) Nevertheless, the appeal of being able to track one’s cultural identity (especially after centuries of erasure) is obvious. Video Recording in the Present Day Film has taken on new roles in provoking cultural backlash among African Americans in the present day as well. Once again, “raw” footage comes into play. Live video and dashcam footage taken of the immediate shooting and subsequent death of Philando Castile , an African American man killed by a St Francis, Minnesota police officer, went viral shortly after it was released ( Dashcam video of Philando Castile shooting , 2017). There was some ambiguity in the case that followed the shooting. The framing of the videos made some of what occurred mildly unclear and the officer involved was subsequently acquitted of the murder, though whether this was a just ruling by the court is a topic that is still subject to vigorous debate (Smith, 2017). Despite the ambiguity, this did not prevent the footage from being seen as another instance in a long history of police violence towards people of color thus triggering massive protests across the country ( Protesters clash with police in St. Paul over death of Philando Castile , CBS, 2016). The videos, for all their potential unreliability as pieces of factual truth, still provided a story that fit into the overall narrative of the Black Lives Matter movement . Supporters of the movement argue that videos which show the deaths of innocent African American men and women via police brutality are extremely valuable to show the public the reality of the situation and curve the extreme racism still present in our society today (LaFraniere/Smith, 2016). Is Film Reliable? This critique of film being somehow ‘unreliable’ as a historical source is not unique to film itself. Indeed, any of the critiques that can be made against film as a source can be equally applied to textual sources with some validity. After all, it is just as easy if not easier to fake or misrepresent a text as it is to do with a film. “But the crucial point is that because the historian takes past reality and explains its meaning in a way that makes us experience it, it can only be undertaken through the creation of a particular story space. Subjectivity can be defined, therefore, in terms of the process of narrative making that allows us to experience the past. Every literary act is subjective because it is authored” (Munslow, 2007, 115-116). This does not mean that films are useless as historical sources, any more than it invalidates texts. The postmodernist approach to historiography teaches us that neither film nor text can really avoid being framed as a story by the aspiring historian, and as such, all the same rules of narration apply. As British historian, Alun Munslow notes, “Because the vast data set that is ‘the past’ cannot be rendered in all its richness, it has to be selectively raided and presented, and the only mechanism for that is narrative. Only once we acknowledge this can we gain a better insight into the complexity of historical explanation and meaning (Munslow, 2007, 97) There is an artistic license inherent in the way films are created, through framing and focal point, just as there are in texts. There is a balance to be struck here, between a fully postmodernist assertion of a narrative fully divorced from any assertions of fact and an Enlightenment-era rigidity of truth and form. Munslow refers to historian and film analyst Siegfried Kracauer in explaining this balance, “Kracauer believed (as does Ankersmit today) that we need to understand that, like the photographer, the historian is always trying to balance the empirical with the creative with all the preconceptions and choices that involves.” (Munslow, 2007, 68). Historians are directors, whether they wish to admit it or not. Non-textual forms of history, especially film, will never be purely objective and accurate, but neither will historical novels, texts, or scholarly articles. Postmodernist arguments about the potential reliability of footage is pointless when it disregards the public’s view of history. History through film will never and can never be one hundred percent accurate (nor can textual history), but that does not mean that all of the historical footage we possess are staged or doctored either. What matters is the narrative and immersion films provide. These stories help us remember and understand the past in a much more visceral, immediate way than texts cannot necessarily achieve. Historical films and movies should still absolutely be subjected to rigorous analysis. However, to say that film is worthless as a historical medium due to its potential or realized inaccuracies is to miss the point of how humanity views itself. Humanity uses the study of history to define and understand its existence, to preserve and honor the memory of those long dead. History lets us believe that our lives and accomplishments are not meaningless and allows us to condemn atrocities against one another. History is a narrative, it is a story of the past. History through film is just one more way to let the stories of the past be remembered and understood for our present environment. Bibliography “(5) Five Came Back Trailer: Netflix WWII Documentary - YouTube.” Accessed April 9, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmQvEVeGj5c. “(31) Dashcam Video of Philando Castile Shooting - YouTube.” Accessed May 4, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vd7zW4aRlYE. “(31) Demonstrators Raise Their Voices against Police Brutality - YouTube.” Accessed May 4, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gipyA2_dZQ. “(31) Protesters Clash with Police in St. Paul over Death of Philando Castile - YouTube.” Accessed May 4, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EoDaesrJniI. Barber, Sian. “Film Historiography - Manchester Scholarship,” July 1, 2015. http://manchester.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.7228/manchester/9780719090301.001.0001/upso-9780719090301-chapter-004. Barber, Sian. Using Film as a Source. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015. Card, James. “Problems of Film History.” Hollywood Quarterly 4, no. 3 (1950): 279–88. https://doi.org/10.2307/1209399. Chepesiuk, Ron. “Preserving History on Film at the Newsfilm Library.” American Libraries 31, no. 6 (2000): 88–91. Dennett, Bruce. “Teaching Historiography through Film.” Teaching History 44, no. 3 (September 2010): 20. Jones, Janna. The Past Is a Moving Picture: Preserving the Twentieth Century on Film. Florida, UNITED STATES: University Press of Florida, 2012. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/unm/detail.action?docID=990868. LaFraniere, Sharon, and Mitch Smith. “Philando Castile Was Pulled Over 49 Times in 13 Years, Often for Minor Infractions.” The New York Times, July 16, 2016, sec. U.S. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/17/us/before-philando-castiles-fatal-encounter-a-costly-trail-of-minor-traffic-stops.html. Lameris, Bregt. Film Museum Practice and Film Historiography: The Case of the Nederlands Filmmuseum (1946-2000), 2017. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&scope=site&db=nlebk&db=nlabk&AN=1593136. Munslow, Alun. Narrative and History. Theory and History. Basingstoke : Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. O’Connor, John E. “Image as Artifact: Historians and the Moving-Image Media.” OAH Magazine of History 16, no. 4 (2002): 23–23. Popkin, Jeremy D. From Herodotus to H-Net: The Story of Historiography. New York ; Oxford University Press, 2016. Rosenstone, Robert A. “History in Images/History in Words: Reflections on the Possibility of Really Putting History onto Film.” The American Historical Review 93, no. 5 (1988): 1173–85. https://doi.org/10.2307/1873532. Schaber, Robin L. “Film and History.” OAH Magazine of History 16, no. 4 (2002): 48–49. Smith, Mitch. “Minnesota Officer Acquitted in Killing of Philando Castile.” The New York Times, June 16, 2017, sec. U.S. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/16/us/police-shooting-trial-philando-castile.html. Southgate, Beverley. What Is History For? 1st ed. London and New York: Routledge, 2005. Stack, Liam.“Denounced by His Party as a Nazi, Arthur Jones Wins Illinois G.O.P. Congressional Primary - The New York Times.” Accessed May 7, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/20/us/politics/arthur-jones-illinois.html. Stevenson, Brenda E. “12 YEARS A SLAVE: NARRATIVE, HISTORY, AND FILM.” The Journal of African American History 99, no. 1–2 (2014): 106–18. https://doi.org/10.5323/jafriamerhist.99.1-2.0106. Stoddard, Jeremy D., and Alan S. Marcus. “More Than ‘Showing What Happened’: Exploring the Potential of Teaching History with Film.” The High School Journal 93, no. 2 (2010): 83–90. Stover, John a. “Framing Social Movements through Documentary Films.” Contexts 12, no. 4 (2013): 56–58. Talens, Jenaro, and Santos Zunzunegui. “Toward a ‘True’ History of Cinema: Film History as Narration.” Boundary 2 24, no. 1 (1997): 1–34. https://doi.org/10.2307/303750. “THE WAR . At Home . Communication . Propaganda PBS.” Accessed May 5, 2018. http://www.pbs.org/thewar/at_home_communication_propaganda.htm. Thompson, David. “History Composed with Film.” Film Comment 26, no. 5 (1990): 12–16. Toplin, Robert Brent. “From the Editor: Invigorating History: Using Film in the Classroom.” OAH Magazine of History 16, no. 4 (2002): 5–6. Toplin, Robert Brent, and Jason Eudy. “The Historian Encounters Film: A Historiography.” OAH Magazine of History 16, no. 4 (2002): 7–12. Vonderau, Patrick, ed. Film as History, History as Film. Working Papers “Gemenskaper-Gemeinschaften,” v. 21. Florence, Italy : Berlin: European University Institute ; Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, 1999. Wilson, Kristi M., Tomas F. Crowder-Taraborrelli, and Tomas F Crowder-Taraborrelli. Film and Genocide. 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Your documents are now available to view. 14. Of The History of The Essay Film: Vertov to Varda (2011) From the book essays on the essay film. Timothy Corrigan X / Twitter Supplementary Materials Please login or register with De Gruyter to order this product. Chapters in this book (33) 472 COMMENTS History of film history of film, history of cinema, a popular form of mass media, from the 19th century to the present. (Read Martin Scorsese's Britannica essay on film preservation.) Early years, 1830-1910 Origins. The illusion of films is based on the optical phenomena known as persistence of vision and the phi phenomenon.The first of these causes the brain to retain images cast upon the retina of the ... Essay Film The term "essay film" has become increasingly used in film criticism to describe a self-reflective and self-referential documentary cinema that blurs the lines between fiction and nonfiction. Scholars unanimously agree that the first published use of the term was by Richter in 1940. Also uncontested is that Andre Bazin, in 1958, was the ... History of Film Timeline Pre-Film: Photographic Techniques and Motion Picture Theory. The Nascent Film Era (1870s-1910): The First Motion Pictures. The First Film Movements: Dadaism, German Expressionism, and Soviet Montage Theory. Manifest Destiny and the End of the Silent Era. Hollywood Epics and the Pre-Code Era. The secret history of the essay film 1940 - Hans Richter's The Film Essay. The term "essay film" was originally coined by German artist Hans Richter, who wrote in his 1940 paper, The Film Essay: "The film essay enables the filmmaker to make the 'invisible' world of thoughts and ideas visible on the screen...The essay film produces complex thought - reflections that are not necessarily bound to reality, but can also ... Deep focus: The essay film The Sight & Sound Deep Focus season Thought in Action: The Art of the Essay Film runs at BFI Southbank 1-28 August 2013, with a keynote lecture by Kodwo Eshun on 1 August, a talk by writer and academic Laura Rascaroli on 27 August and a closing panel debate on 28 August. To take this film-lovers' tiff to a more elevated plane, what it ... A very short history of cinema You are reading in A very short history of cinema. contents. Learn about the history and development of cinema, from the Kinetoscope in 1891 to today's 3D revival. Cinematography is the illusion of movement by the recording and subsequent rapid projection of many still photographic pictures on a screen. Originally a product of 19th-century ... Essays on the Essay Film Essays on the Essay Film is accordingly divided into four sections: 1. Theoretical essays on the essay as a literary form by Georg Lukács, Robert Musil, Max Bense, Theodor W. Adorno and Aldous Huxley. 2. Previously published essays on the essay film by Hans Richter, Alexandre Astruc and André Bazin. 3. Essays on the Essay Film The Essay Film Through History 6. "The Film Essay: A New Type of Documentary Film," by Hans Richter 7. "The Future of Cinema," by Alexandre Astruc 8. "Bazin on Marker," by André Bazin Part III. Contemporary Positions 9. "In Search of the Centaur: The Essay-Film," by Phillip Lopate Godard and the Essay Film Published: July 2018. $34.95. BUY. Description. Contents. Authors. Praise. offers a history and analysis of the essay film, one of the most significant forms of intellectual filmmaking since the end of World War II. Warner incisively reconsiders the defining traits and legacies of this still-evolving genre through a groundbreaking examination ... Defining the Cinematic Essay: The Essay Film by ... The Essay Film: Dialogue, Politics, Utopia includes articles by several prominent scholars that explore the essay film's place throughout history as well as within various cultural settings. Like Alter and Corrigan, they also present a convincing argument that the essay film is distinct from both documentary, avant-garde and narrative ... Essays on the Essay Film Nora M. Alter is professor of film and media studies in the School of Theater, Film and Media Arts at Temple University. She is author of Vietnam Protest Theatre: The Television War on Stage (1996), Projecting History: German Nonfiction Cinema, 1967-2000 (2002), and Chris Marker (2006), and co-editor (with Lutz Koepnick) of Sound Matters: Essays on the Acoustics of Modern German Culture (2004). History of film The history of film chronicles the development of a visual art form created using film technologies that began in the late 19th century.. The advent of film as an artistic medium is not clearly defined. There were earlier cinematographic screenings by others, however, the commercial, public screening of ten Lumière brothers' short films in Paris on 28 December 1895, can be regarded as the ... Video essay Video essay. A video essay is an essay presented in the format of a video recording or short film rather than a conventional piece of writing; the form often overlaps with other forms of video entertainment on online platforms such as YouTube. [1][2][3][4] A video essay allows an author to directly quote from film, video games, music, or other ... 6. The Film Essay: A New Type of Documentary Film The Film Essay: A New Type of Documentary Film". , edited by Nora M. Alter and Timothy Corrigan, New York Chichester, West Sussex: Columbia University Press, 2017, pp. 89-92. Please login or register with De Gruyter to order this product. Subjects. Architecture and Design. Adapting History and Literature into Movies Cultural History. Final introductory note: This essay about adapting history and literature into film is a cultural history approach to the question of cinematographic adaptation. It highlights concern for cultural translation, with how the culture and language of the past has been transformed into the present. Doing Film History Writing an essay on film history takes a lot more time and effort than writing a review of a current film. Nonetheless, historical study offers unique pleasures. If you want to understand the context of a film that you admire, you would enjoy reading film history. Just as important, a deeper understanding of film history introduces you to a ... The History of Film Essay The history of film spans over one hundred years ago, with classical narrative emerging in Hollywood around the nineteen thirties. The classical narrative period had a strong emphasis on linearity and coherence, where characters where goal centred and consistent in personality and action. In the nineteen sixties a change began to emerge in ... The Story of Film: An Odyssey The Story of Film: An Odyssey is a 2011 British documentary film about the history of film, presented on television in 15 one-hour chapters with a total length of over 900 minutes.It was directed and narrated by Mark Cousins, a film critic from Northern Ireland, based on his 2004 book The Story of Film. [1] [2]The series was broadcast in September 2011 on More4, the digital television service ... JSTOR: Viewing Subject: Film Studies Film History 1987 - 2020 Film Quarterly 1958 - 2020 The Quarterly of Film Radio and Television ... Fields of Vision: Essays in Film Studies, Visual Anthropology, and Photography 1995 Fight Pictures: A History of Boxing and Early Cinema 2008 The Fighting Sullivans: How Hollywood and the Military Make Heroes ... The Historical Value of Film By Lauren Ball. Film as an academic medium for historiography has several advantages over textual sources. The phrase, "a picture is worth a thousand words" comes to mind; if so, then film's value for history should be self-evident. When watching a film or documentary, the average viewer is immersed in a moment in history in a way that ... Film History Essay Topics The essay topics suggested below will offer your students directed guidance to research and explore film history. The topics will allow them to learn through composing informational essays. CSUSM Library Guides: AMD 328: Video Art History and Theory : Home Photo by Maxim Hopman on Unsplash. Your assignments: Two 500-word Essays (5 pts each/10 pts total) Discuss a film of your choice that was screened in class. The essay will be a "close-read" analysis of the film in which the historical context of the work and the theory or theories it represents must be discussed. The essay should also include an analysis of how successful the project was ... 14. Of The History of The Essay Film: Vertov to Varda (2011) Of The History of The Essay Film: Vertov to Varda (2011)". Essays on the Essay Film , edited by Nora M. Alter and Timothy Corrigan, New York Chichester, West Sussex: Columbia University Press, 2017, pp. 197-226. Essay A history essay sometimes referred to as a thesis essay describes an argument or claim about one or more historical events and supports that claim with evidence, arguments, and references. ... A film essay (also essay film or cinematic essay) consists of the evolution of a theme or an idea rather than a plot per se, ... assignment essay homework paper phd report resume review speech thesis