Andrew Higson & Richard Maltby,
“Film Europe” and ” Film America”: Cinema, Commerce and Cultural Exchange, 1920-1939.
University of Exeter Press, 1999.
ISBN 0 85989 545 9 (hb)
ISBN 0 85989 546 7 (pb)
47.50 stg (hb)
20.00 stg (pb)
406pp.
(Review copy supplied by University of Exeter Press)
Uploaded 1 March 2000
“Film Europe” and ” Film America”: Cinema, Commerce and Cultural Exchange, 1920-1939, edited by Andrew Higson and Richard Maltby, is an interesting and useful anthology which focuses on various discourses surrounding the possibility of coordinated European efforts to offset the dominance of the American film industry in the 1920s. It is quite helpful in fleshing out the background of a still relatively little-known and fascinating chapter in film history – and in thereby countering an historical shortsightedness which would perceive Hollywood’s global hegemony at the end of the century as a relatively new phenomenon. Indeed, a number of the essays make at least passing note of the pertinence of interrelated issues of economic and cultural power and exchange in the 1920s to the trade and culture tensions of the 1990s, in particular issues of national sovereignty vs. pan-European solidarity highlighted by recent tensions within the European Union. The collection is thus relevant not only for film historians, but also for those whose work centres on considerations of globalisation and cultural exchange more broadly.
More specifically, key questions addressed by Higson and Maltby’s collection include: How and why did the notion of a coordinated “Film Europe” effort gain momentum, and what concrete forms did it finally assume? What kinds of strategies, in terms of film production and business practices, were pursued to allow the transnational circulation of film texts and monies – and what were the industrial and public responses to these strategies? And why was the “Film Europe” movement of the 1920s so short-lived? Not all of these questions are explored equally in depth (perhaps inevitable in an anthology comprising both new and previously published materials from a range of authors), nor are all of the essays equally compelling – but the quality of the scholarship is consistently strong, emphasising original research into a range of primary sources, and the aggregate account of this important juncture in film history is a thought-provoking one. Indeed, it is in hopes of actively provoking the reader that the editors include some essays that are at odds with one another in their interpretations of historical data and offer an appendix of some 70 pages of translated contemporary documents of various kinds which have not before been generally accessible. “Film Europe” and ” Film America” is in this sense a kind of “writerly text” and one which I suspect would have particular utility for advanced subjects in film history and historiography, affording students the opportunity both to compare different kinds of (albeit closely related) historical methods and to scrutinize some of the original data themselves.
In the tracing of this history, a particularly important debt is owed to Kristin Thompson’s earlier work in Exporting Entertainment: America in the World Film Market, 1907-34 (1985), which is referenced in many of the essays in the collection; Thompson’s work is here represented in a revision of a previously published essay (one covering some of the same ground as Exporting Entertainment) that concisely assays the rise and quick decline of the Film Europe movement. Where this collection most significantly attempts to expand on Thompson’s work is in making greater use of European primary sources – trade papers and various archival documents – and thereby adding more of a European perspective to our understanding of the complex European and transatlantic negotiations which were taking place at the time.
The collection opens with three general overviews – the aforementioned piece by Thompson, an introduction from the editors, and an essay by Maltby and Ruth Vasey detailing some of the specific European responses to the Hollywood presence in the 1920s to early 1930s, as well as Hollywood’s strategies to protect its business in the face of opposition to both its perceived cultural influence and its threat to European film industries. A number of themes from the Maltby/Vasey piece are reprised in several of the more specific case studies which make up the remainder of the contributions – most significantly a) that European criticism of Hollywood was by no means unified or consistent, varying not only from country to country, but also within different sectors of the industry (producers tending to oppose Hollywood competition, exhibitors tending to depend on Hollywood product to fill their theatres); and b) that the Hollywood product was itself designed to be culturally malleable, with adjustments made (albeit sometimes unsuccessfully) in order to adapt films for specific markets.
The most concrete example of this malleability is the fascinating phenomenon of the multiple-language film, which gained currency as a means of countering the problems of cultural and linguistic specificity highlighted by the arrival of sound. A number of the essays examine this practice of filming different-language versions of the same film, often with adjustments for cultural specificity, and speculate on the economic and cultural reasons why dubbing took as long as it did to become the dominant means of differentiating the texts for local markets. This is one of several areas in which contributors come to somewhat differing conclusions, and it points to myriad difficulties of interpreting data about the historical popularity and reception of film texts, as well as the problems of extrapolating general (in this case Europe-wide) conclusions based primarily on evidence about a single country or market. One essay which attempts to direct its efforts to the complexity of the transnational reception of film texts in this era is Tim Bergfelder’s extremely interesting closing analysis of the varying receptions of Anna May Wong’s European productions in its different markets. Bergfelder makes effective use of contemporary published reviews – but, like many of the other historians in this anthology, he is hesitant to offer much in the way of concrete textual description and analysis, out of concern that such analysis may “ultimately displac[e] historical spectators and their cultural context in favour of the relationship between an `ideal’ spectator and a relatively stable filmic text” (316). Most of us would indeed share these concerns today – but in neglecting the film text itself we underutilise one of the key historical artifacts we have at our disposal. I think it should be possible to partially allay such concerns, while making fuller use of the available historical evidence, by attempting concrete analyses which are at the least self-conscious about the historical and cultural dimensions of interpretation and using these as a tool for our larger historical assessments; and I would suggest that Andrew Higson’s illuminating essay on E.A. Dupont’s career in the late 1920s manages at points to do precisely this.
Other contributions to the volume include studies of United Artists’ European strategies, France’s film quota and taxation policies and their ultimate benefit to Hollywood, and Germany’s distinctive position of strength within the Film Europe context. Higson offers a study of how the idea of Film Europe evolved through a number of international film congresses in the 1920s (though he does not make completely clear whether and how directly these congresses influenced national policies and industrial strategies). And in another contribution Maltby traces the League of Nations’ involvement with issues of film policy – offering many interesting pieces of historical information but also putting a surprisingly heavy (and seemingly old-fashioned) emphasis on the roles of one or two individuals who attempted to effect change through the League (to the exclusion of more extensive discussion of the League’s significance to Film Europe). In the aggregate, what this collection makes clearest is that Hollywood dominance in 1920s Europe was by no means simple or assured – that it involved on-going tensions and negotiations among numerous competing interest groups and policies, and may have been just as much a result of the inability to resolve enough differences to create a unified European front as it was of the expansionist drives (and support in Washington) of the U.S. industry.
Adam Knee