How Film Magazines Shape Movie Industries the World Over

Abstract

How Film Magazines Shape Movie Industries the World Over Paola Banchero (bio) Mapping Movie Magazines: Digitization, Periodicals and Cinema History. Daniel Biltereyst and Lies Van de Vijver (eds.). Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. 405 pp. $119.99 hardcover. Going to the movies is more than just about film itself. It is about the cultural, economic, and social aspects of the cinematic experience, from the movie house to the conditions that exist for the film to be made, distributed, and received. How do we consider these elements of film, and in what ways are they reflected in other media? Cinematic history has been forging a new path into this territory for about fifteen years as scholars investigate aspects of film that might have once seemed peripheral—particularly focused on audience experiences—and reconsider underutilized movie magazines for this purpose. Some of the scholars interested in this newer ground met at an international conference in 2015 on digitization, movie magazines, and audience research. From that meeting was born the recently published book Mapping Movie Magazines: Digitization, Periodicals and Cinema History. It is part of Palgrave Macmillan’s Global Cinema series. The book is edited by Daniel Biltereyst, professor of film and media history and director of the Centre for Cinema and Media Studies (https://www.ugent.be/ps/communicatiewetenschappen/cims/en) at Ghent University, Belgium, and by Lies Van de Vijver, a postdoctoral fellow at the same center. Reflecting the international nature of the original conference, the book includes chapters on the movie magazine markets in the United States, Britain, France, Canada, South Africa, the Netherlands, and Chile. As such, it affords readers opportunities to consider the differences between countries that tend to be receivers of cultural products, such as [End Page 102] Chile, and countries whose movie industries export films globally, such as France and Great Britain. These nodes of intercultural differences underlie much of the content of the book, which invites readers to compare film magazines’ editorial systems in a range of countries. The book’s thirteen chapters (not including the editors’ introduction) are organized into three sections. The first one, “Magazines, Digitization and Cinema Historiography,” opens with a chapter about Variety, the longest-running magazine about the movie industry. The chapter’s authors made issues of Variety from 1905 to 1949 freely accessible and searchable online through a collaboration with the Media History Digital Library (https://lantern.mediahist.org/), Library of Congress Packard Campus, and the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Digging through the digitized archives with keyword searches is speedy and efficient, but the authors recognize that this method alone lacks context, as they explain and consider some of the intellectual and data-related dilemmas of using digitized archives. The chapter further offers insights into how Variety—the go-to publication for film history—made strategic editorial and advertising decisions. Although at its inception Variety simply covered vaudeville, burlesque, and film, over time it became more than an observer of the entertainment media of its day; it was also a participant in the film industry. This chapter and many others are useful to magazine-media scholars in explaining how to use magazine digital archives, which are increasingly coming online. For example, the second chapter in the book uses the same Variety archive through the Media History Digital Library to consider how American Jews of the early twentieth century used “picture palaces,” high-end vaudeville venues, and theater during Passover, Rosh Hashanah, and the end of Yom Kippur. The authors analyzed the archive with computational survey methods and also conducted more traditional research by doing distant and close readings of the source material. The book’s second part is called “Magazines, the Film Industry, and the Cultural Economy.” It includes a chapter about how Hollywood embarked on a gatekeeping campaign to try to police fan magazines and the sometimes-scandalous material they printed. Another chapter in this section serves as a biography of Ray Lewis, a pioneering editor of the Canadian Moving Picture Digest for thirty-six years. The third part is titled “Authors, Stars, and Fans.” This section includes an intriguing study of a Chilean magazine called Ecran, which flourished [End Page 103] in Chile in the 1940s as the country...