Digital Methods in New Cinema History

Abstract

During the last decade a new direction has emerged in international research into cinema history, shifting focus away from analysing the content of films to considering their circulation and consumption, and examining the cinema as a site of social and cultural exchange. This body of work distinguishes itself from previous models of film history that have been predominantly constructed as histories of production, producers, authorship, and individual films most commonly understood as texts. This approach has now achieved critical mass and methodological maturity, and has developed a distinct identity as the ‘New Cinema History’.1 In this chapter we describe the emergence and concerns of New Cinema History and its relationship with digital methods and technologies through a discussion of several case studies and projects, focusing particularly on the ‘Mapping the Movies project, which has developed a geodatabase of Australian cinemas, covering the period from 1948 to 1971. The project’s data is used to examine the effects of the introduction of television on the Australian cinema industry, while its structure raises questions about the relationship between the microhistories of particular venues and the individuals attached to them, and larger-scale social or cultural history represented by the cinema industry’s globally organized supply chain.