The Future Film Historian: Less Art and More Craft

Abstract

In the study of motion pictures the historian's craft lags behind other young disciplines such as social history, urban history and even black history, with all its victimization by shrill ax-grinders. The reasons may not be totally clear because they are deeply entangled with and contribute to the thin line of successful historical works. To sort out the negative elements from the positive may help project a more productive future for the craft. The central paradox is found in the close interlocking of the film buff's enthusiasms with a contempt for the scholar's discipline. Long ago Vachel Lindsay predicted that when these are ancient times, we will have scholars and critics learned in the flavors of early moving picture traditions with their histories of movements and schools. But more than half a century later a reviewer of some experience writing in Cinema Journal, the periodical which makes the strongest claim to scholarly ambition, could praise Raymond Fielding's important history of the American newsreel with the left-handed assertion that although the work is the outgrowth of the author's Ph.D. dissertation, the impedimenta of scholarship rarely intrude. Such a cavalier contempt for scholarly forms and functions cannot be blamed entirely on cinema historians, for of all forms of historical writing that of cinema commands the most enthusiastic exploitation audience of readers, much like old movie audiences whom Variety characterized as sure seaters. The resulting demand forces writers to rush into print long before their work is ready and before they have achieved what their publishers will claim on the dust jacket. So in the beginning the enemy of scholarship has been commercialism. Everyone knows the publishers who feed off each other's exhausted plates and grainy illustrations while diverting attention and money away from fresh writing-Crown, Bonanza and their siblings. Worst of all in recent years has been A. S. Barnes, a press associated for years with the ambition to bring out photography essays, which has turned to running off empty collections of stills from the cellars of egocentric buffs. Only a notch above them are the presses which range from the small Scarecrow to the massive Simon and Schuster whose titles serve as carnival barkers promising more than they deliver. Edward Mapp's brief chronicle of blacks in recent films