Film as an Agent, Product and Source of History

Abstract

In its relation to society and history, film was for a long time treated only as a work of art, its description and analysis being matters for appreciation and assessment. Film, the new spectacle which Eisenstein had claimed was the heir of all the existing arts, sublimating as much as superceding them, caught its apostles in its magic light: the critics and historians of film identified with the masters of this new, seventh art-form and gladly took up the cudgels on their behalf. The critics' first objective was to get the film-maker recognized as a creative artist. In a society of clerks and soldiers, which accepted only the traditional cultural forms and tended to treat the film with condescension, this was a very necessary task. At the beginning, cinema was something for 'helots', it was 'mechanical'; in addition, the places where the film-shows were held fairs, cafe-theatres and the like were, in Victorian and bourgeois eyes, disreputable, immoral. For a film-maker to try to rank himself with writers and artists was incongruous and obscene. Before the new cultural product could be accepted as a 'work' or even, beyond that, a 'work of art', its social and political function had to be established. This legitimation was first effected by the countersocieties, that is those societies the USSR of the twenties and nazi Germany which were challenging the bourgeois order of things. The other societies resisted for much longer. In the interwar years, a judge, a bishop, or a general in uniform was a rare sight in the cinema. It is not difficult to see how, in such circumstances, the men of the cinema felt obliged to found their own private republic, setting up their own conventions and laws, drawing their own line between