Abstract
The New Film History is a collection of essays bringing together some of the latest research in American, British and European film history. It is not intended as a comprehensive history of film: there are already enough surveys providing a historical overview of the development of the medium from its origins to the present.1 Our collection is a close up rather than a long shot: it presents the fruits of current research in a series of self-contained case studies that are nevertheless linked by common themes and methods. The intellectual context of this volume, as indicated in its title, is the ‘New Film History’: each contributor is engaged in original research that advances our knowledge of the field. The chapters herein contain the fruits of new and often ground-breaking research that represents the intellectual issues currently at stake in the study of film history. The book’s subtitle — sources, methods, approaches — indicates that it is based on the principle of empirical investigation and inquiry: this is a work of historical scholarship that emphasizes the critical analysis of primary sources relating to the production and reception of feature films. Film history is both like and unlike other types of history. It is similar in so far as it is concerned with historical structures and processes: the film historian focuses on the cultural, aesthetic, technological and institutional contexts of the medium.
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See, for example, Eric Rhode, A History of the Cinema from its Origins to the 1970 ( London: Allen Lane, 1976 )
Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell, Film History: An Introduction ( New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994 )
Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (ed.), The Oxford History of World Cinema ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995 )
James Chapman, Cinemas of the World: Film and Society from 1895 to the Present ( London: Reaktion, 2003 ).
Terry Ramsaye, A Million and One Nights ( New York: Simon & Schuster, 1926 )
Paul Rotha, The Film Till Now: A Survey of World Cinema ( London: Spring Books, 1930 )
David A. Cook, A History of Narrative Film ( London: W. W. Norton, 1990 ).
Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological Study of the German Film ( Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1947 ), p. 6.
Paul Monaco, Cinema and Society: France and Germany During the Twenties ( New York: Elsevier, 1976 ), p. 160.
Raymond Durgnat, A Mirror for England: British Movies from Austerity to Affluence ( London: Faber & Faber, 1970 )
Jeffrey Richards, Visions of Yesterday ( London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973 )
Robert Sklar, Movie-Made America: A Social History of American Movies ( New York: Random House, 1975 ).
Graeme Turner, Filin As Filin ( London: Routledge, 1988 ), p. 129.
John Belton, American Cinema/American Culture (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994), p. xxi.
Tony Aldgate ‘Ideological Consensus in British Feature Films, 1935–1947’, in K. R. M. Short (ed.), Feature Films as History (London: Croom Helm, 1981), p.111.
See Justine Ashby and Andrew Higson (eds), British Cinema, Past and Present ( London: Routledge, 2000 ).
Thomas Elsaesser, ‘The New Film History’, Sight and Sound, 55:4 (Autumn 1986), pp. 246–51.
David Bordwell, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 ( London: Routledge, 1985 ).
Robert C. Allen and Douglas Gomery, Film History: Theory and Practice ( New York: McGraw-Hill, 1985 ).
Anthony Aldgate, Cinema and History: British Newsreels and the Spanish Civil War ( London: Scolar Press, 1979 )
Richard Taylor, Filin Propaganda: Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany ( London: Croom Helm, 1979 )
David Welch, Propaganda and the German Cinema, 1933–1945 ( Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983 ).
Examples include, but are not limited to, Tino Balio, United Artists: The Company Built by the Stars ( Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1976 )
Thomas Schatz, The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era ( New York: Pantheon, 1988 )
Gregory D. Black, Hollywood Censored: Morality Codes, Catholics, and the Movies ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994 )
H. Mark Glancy, When Hollywood loved Britain: The Hollywood ‘British’ film 1939–45 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999 ). The annotated Warner Brothers screenplay series are an invaluable resource for understanding the cultural dynamics and institutional practices of the studio system.
Jeffrey Richards, The Age of the Dream Palace: Cinema and Society in Britain, 1929–1939 ( London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984 ).
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Chapman, J., Glancy, M., Harper, S. (2007). Introduction. In: Chapman, J., Glancy, M., Harper, S. (eds) The New Film History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/9780230206229_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/9780230206229_1
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