James Chapman, Mark Glancy & Sue Harper (eds.),
The New Film History: Sources, Methods, Approaches.
Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
ISBN: 978 023000169 5
US$85.00 (hb)
288pp
(Review copy supplied by Palgrave)
The New Film History is an accessible and wide-ranging account of the methods, sources and approaches used by modern film historians. This compilation of essays, drawn together from some of British academia’s most established researchers and theorists, contains the fruits of new and ground-breaking research that attempts to elide the increasingly fraught oppositional frameworks and methodologies of Film Studies and Film History. As an introductory text that seeks to highlight the current areas of focus, the book offers detailed case studies on a number of interesting topics, including the national identity and the historical film, the place of the screenwriter in authorship studies, the relationship between gangster and ‘gangsta’, and the use of the Internet in reception studies.
The book’s subtitle is revealing. Sources, methods, and approaches. In other words, empirical investigation and critical enquiry, the bread-and-butter of the film historian. This is a book that uses primary sources as its core theoretical component – sources as diverse as promotional material, studio archival data, web-based fan forums, and cross-cultural marketing – in order to better ascertain “the cultural, aesthetic, technological and institutional contexts of the medium” (1). What follows is a fascinating end-product – the principles of historical investigation are brought to bear on films as divergent as Blackmail (UK 1929), The Wicker Man (UK 1973) and Gallipoli (Australia 1981), in turn showing these films in a newer light.
In their Introduction, editors James Chapman, Mark Glancy, and Sue Harper map out their proposed terrain. As they make clear, if a book appears entitled ‘A New Film History’, we need to be aware of what, if anything, ‘Old Film History’ is. For the editors, there are two paradigms within the old, or traditional history: ‘one focused on the history of film as an art from, the other on the idea of film as a reflection or mirror of society’ (2). It is this latter reflectionist model in particular – exemplified by Siegfried Kracaeur’s From Caligari to Hitler (1947) – that The New Film History seeks to develop out of. Instead of reflection, the new metaphor is mediation. Films no longer ‘reflect’ social reality, although they do, as Graeme Turner has highlighted, still ‘reveal something about the cultural conditions that produced them and attracted audiences to them.’[1] Instead, The New Film History appropriates and remodulates three key features: a greater level of methodological sophistication, the central importance of primary sources, and an appreciation of the visual and aural (and not just narrative) properties of film. It is a combination of these three aspects which structure the rest of the book. There then follows four parts – History, Authorship, Genre, and Reception – each of which treats numerous films and personalities through the various prisms of the New Film History.
The four chapters in the History section exemplify the new methodologies highlighted in the Introduction. Melvyn Stokes’ and James Chapman’s chapters on Gone With The Wind (USA 1939) and Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (USA 2003) respectively examines how particular historical periods – namely the American Civil War and the Napoleonic Wars – are recreated and reconceptualised in accordance with the priorities – political, ideological, otherwise – of their creators. For Chapman, Master and Commander is an exemplary text. He argues that New Film History not only “regards all films, whatever their critical or cultural status, as worthy objects of analysis” (55), but also treats films like Peter Weir’s meticulous ocean-bound blockbuster as indicative of “the recognition of the extent to which popular cinema contributes to discourses of nationhood and national identity” (65). As such, Chapman elucidates the film’s conservative ideology (in its representation of the codes of honour, duty and patriotism) but also teases out how the power structures within the film resonate closely with current ideological and propagandistic discourse. To wit, the film’s two main protagonists, Jack Aubrey (Russell Crowe) and Stephen Maturin (Paul Bettany) represent, respectively, the ‘old’ view of the world (i.e. ‘The Master and Commander’), and the newer, enlightened, scientifically-rational new world view. Chapman then moves on to suggest how such a reading maps all too neatly onto global geo-political processes unravelling in 2003 in the run-up to the Iraq invasion and US Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld’s infamous ‘Old Europe’ and ‘New Europe’ rhetoric.
Elsewhere, the book tackles the vexing issue of authorship, and attempts to move away from a director-central approach to encompass a wider range of historical discourses within the film text. As Andrew Spicer argues in his chapter on Richard Curtis, one of the more damaging consequences of the cult of the director has been “to obscure the contribution of others in the production process” (89). Laurie Ede’s chapter on British production design and art direction in the 1940s and Peter Krämer’s study of Jane Fonda and her industrial and political clout both attempt to appreciate the complexity of their subjects’ work as well as locating them in broader socio-cultural terms. The chapters on genre move away from tried-and-tested reappraisals of familiar genres. Instead, there are chapters on the Stalinist musical – in which Richard Taylor highlights the differences and similarities with its Hollywood counterpart – and the swashbuckler picture. In the later, Jeffrey Richards’ erudite and scholarly approach brings to light both the anti-Communist propaganda buried in texts as seemingly innocuous as Ivanhoe (UK/USA 1952) and The Black Knight (UK 1954), and the allegorical concerns of blacklisted writers in early 1950s Hollywood.
The final chapters of the book are perhaps the most interesting. Subtitled ‘Reception’, each author emphasises the importance of recreating what Janet Staiger has termed the ‘discursive surround’ of a film text. This entails the examination of a wide range of review, publicity materials, and studio documents, and, in the age of the Internet, fan-based forums and web reviews. The ethnographer-archaeologists are working at the coalface of the New Film History, refraining from theoretical flights of fancy and highfalutin discourse and instead “locating evidence that may shed light on audiences” (182). For instance, Sarah Street’s masterful chapter looks at how censorship records can be used to explicate why Black Narcissus (UK 1947) could be passed uncut in its native Britain but severely trimmed in America. Although Street laments that British film historians are more often than not faced with “a paucity of archival source material” (201), the primary material that is available and the way it might be marshalled and engaged opens up new and illuminating paths of scholarship. Justin Smith follows a similar path, and examines how reception and appreciation of The Wicker Man (1973) has been governed by the film’s website format and the codes and conventions of the multiple web-base communities that have emerged around the film. Smith argues that the format “constitutes a balance of free expression and stimulation with the group dynamics and the subjective rituals of belonging” (243) and enables a freer, less self-conscious engagement with film.
All in all, then, an excellent book that should open up some interesting and exciting empirical and investigative pathways for the future of film scholarship. Throughout, there is an insistence that film history is not about the study of canonical texts, but rather a fresh look at pre-existing discourses and approaches. As each case study makes clear, what is more at stake in the New Film History is the illustration of how film is “in a constant state of flux as it responds to changing historical determinants and circumstances” (9). This book makes a great start.
Ben McCann,
The University of Adelaide.
Endnotes
[1] Graeme Turner.
.
Created on: Monday, 3 December 2007