Teaching Media History through—and in—the Twin Cities and Its Archives

Abstract

Teaching Media History through—and in—the Twin Cities and Its Archives Alice Lovejoy (bio) Where is media history? If you ask this question to students outside of cities such as New York, Paris, Beijing, or Los Angeles, the answer will probably be that it is not here. This is certainly the case in the Twin Cities, where I teach: a medium-sized metro area without a major studio or festival and a distant second to Chicago in terms of its exhibition culture. Decades of scholarship, however, have reminded us that media history can (and does) unfold anywhere and that it is not just a matter of studios and festivals, famous directors, or feature films. These ideas are at the core of the graduate seminar in media historiography that I developed and often teach at the University of Minnesota. Historiography of the Moving Image introduces students to the history of media history, while also instructing them in methods through which it can be uncovered, explored, and narrated. This dual focus is woven throughout the semester. Every week, we read and discuss an exemplary work in the history of the moving image, screen cultures, or media. These range from early film histories to work that set the agenda for the New Film History, from texts whose focus is institutional, ethnographic, economic, or industrial to those that examine media archaeology or media infrastructures or that take a transnational approach. For the most part, these texts are books, whose arguments and contributions we analyze and whose writing style, citations, illustrations, and sources we dissect. Moreover, because the course is primarily for doctoral students, these are typically not just books, but first books. This allows us to discuss both how to write a dissertation and how to turn a dissertation into a book: how to progress from a research question to a research plan, how to structure information, how to bring a topic into dialogue with larger questions and concerns. Many weeks, we also watch films, asking how the moving image organizes information about media history: Bill Morrison’s Decasia, Travis Wilkerson’s An Injury to One, and, in the last week of class, Peter Jackson’s Forgotten Silver (a film that usually finds at least one first-time viewer). The course’s methodological thread also unfolds outside the classroom. Armed with critical perspectives on media history and its approaches from our readings and discussions, the class visits a series of archives and collecting institutions in the Twin Cities. With archivists, curators, and librarians, we discuss the collections’ holdings and provenance, their scope and their organization. Indeed, while this is a course about media historiography, it is also about archives and how we can work with them— and in them— to write histories of the moving image. The local resources for this work are rich. At the University of Minnesota Archives, for instance, Erin George introduces the class to collections that touch on the university’s relationship to media history, in the process teaching students how to use finding aids, schedule research visits, and handle fragile material. From the boxes that she pulls for our visits— on university affairs, the student film society, or the medical school, for instance— students encounter firsthand the puzzle-like nature of much archival history as well as the “dust” that, echoing Carolyn Steedman (whose eponymous book we read), may or may not add up to much. We read Alison Griffiths’s Wondrous Difference and visit the university’s Bell Museum of Natural History, where we speak to curators about the museum’s long history of using the moving image for research and education. And, after reading books such Paolo Cherchi Usai’s Silent Cinema, Giovanna Fossati’s From Grain to Pixel, and Haidee Wasson’s Museum Movies, we visit the Walker Art Center, where curators, archivists, and programmers (over the years, Emily Davis, Ruth Hodgins, Dean Otto, and Jill Vuchetich) walk us through how an art museum, versus an archive, understands media objects and collections. At the Walker, students also visit the Ruben/Bentson Moving Image Collection, view and handle familiar and unfamiliar media objects (BETA and one-inch tapes, 16mm and 9.5mm film), and discuss the...