Film History: Beyond the Archive?

Abstract

Academic writing on the cinema in the last 30 years can be characterized as the demise of one analytical system and the consequent emergence of another. Theoreticism and grand theory have been ousted from centre stage by the new 'revisionist history'. Grand theory had its own explanatory power and coherence, and it did alert readers to the complexities of decoding film texts, but grand theoreticians tended to be obfuscatory, and to defend their boundaries with undue rigour. From autumn 1975, the journal Screen led the way in foregrounding analyses based on Lacanian and psychoanalytical insights, and debates became increasingly purist. Feminist and Marxist orthodoxies carved up the remaining space. Partly in exasperated response to this tyranny of theory, a school of 'revisionist' film history emerged in Britain, which was based on a reading of official documents, manuscript materials, interviews, profit-and-loss accounts and studio publicity handouts. The most crucial and ground-breaking British revisionist history was Jeffrey Richards' 1984 Age of the Dream Palace: Cinema and Society in Britain 1930-39, which argued implicitly that the most fruitful way to approach film was through its institutional and industrial contexts. Subsequently, respectable film scholarship came to be defined as primarily archive-based, and a range of writers addressed themselves to the question of governmental and financial controls.' The books