Jargon and the Crisis of Readability: Methodology, Language, and the Future of Film History

Abstract

There is no one best way to write film history. Different questions require different methodologies. My own scholarship and teaching focus on problems concerning film, ideology, and power in America. Consequently, I see film as simultaneously reflecting and shaping people's understanding of the world around them. I am concerned not simply with what is seen on the screen but with what is not seen. Why are certain images and ideologies included or excluded from films? What are the everyday material forces that shape the ideology of American films? What techniques do filmmakers use to convey their messages? How are cinematic images received by audiences? How should we communicate our findings to readers? I would not pretend to be able to speak to all scholars in the field. Instead, I offer a methodological road map for those concerned with a materialist-driven approach to film studies: one that sees movies as an art form that stands on its own but also, like the chair in Marx's Das Capital, as an object whose creation reflects a wide range of human practices. Cinema scholars can certainly learn a great deal from historians, but historians can also learn from cinema scholars. Years ago, Tony Judt wrote a blistering critique of the fools and angels writing social history.' Unfortunately, readers tended to focus more on the names he named than on the ideas and critiques he raised. Thus, rather than cite specific works, I prefer to speak about general approaches to doing a particular kind of film history, while also calling on cinema studies scholars to change the way they write. To my way of thinking, cutting-edge work in film history needs to deal with four key elements: text, context, reception, and language.2 Deconstructing and analyzing films as texts is something cinema scholars do far better than historians. Historians have tended to focus on plot lines and to downplay or ignore the significance of the images and the ways in which they are structured and used to convey ideas. We still do not know how to read the inner workings of film itself. The cinematic text, as film scholars have shown us, is composed of images that become imprinted on the imagination far more effectively than do plot lines. Reading in the field showed me how filmmakers use editing, lighting, costuming, casting, choreography, makeup, and other techniques to convey ideological messages without the need for words. In silent film, for example, radical agitators are almost always eastern, central, or southern European looking; strikers are usually choreographed as unruly mobs rather than as orderly groups of protestors. Today, drug dealers are naturally African Americans. No words are needed to convey these messages to audiences.