Uploaded 16 April 1999

When the American Historical Review published a special forum on film and history all those who had long contended that cinema was an important source for the study of the 20th century thought: “We have won. Now that they have been legitimated by AHA, the world’s leading association of historians, nobody will dare say that moving pictures are useful only for lazy students and teachers. Films will be regarded as reputable documents in the same way as the more traditional written texts”. Today, after ten years, we can wonder whether this recognition did not happen too late.

The quick development of cinema audience was a signficant feature of the early twentieth century; it is estimated that by 1910 twenty six million Americans, one quarter of the population of the United States, went to the pictures once a week and that, in Chicago, almost half the inhabitants frequented movie theatres. Even if these figures are fanciful, the very fact that they were printed in papers shows how much people were impressed by the success of cinema. Movies maintained their popularity during the following decades. Film attendance was at its peak in the 1940s and 50s. After World War II, cinema was not only the most important form of entertainment, it was also a source of information, assuming, in many areas, the attitude-forming role formerly fullfiled by the popular press. The movies transcended people’s daily reality while maintaining a close connection with their ordinary concerns: they told them about regions or customs which did not belong to their immediate surroundings and fulfilled their longing for visual information. More importantly, films helped to spread the attitudes and values of other societies, above all those of the Americans. There is little doubt that the impact of cinema in the middle of the century, its influence over its viewers, was considerable. Films are therefore an invaluable source of knowledge about the concrete reality of societies’ evolution. Whereas it is difficult to imagine what London or Berlin looked like in the 1850s, pictures introduce us into the streets of these cities as they were in the 1930s: we can watch the traffic, count the passers-by, evaluate the respective importance of horse and lorry transport, and become aware of what the patterns of behaviour were. Pictures inform us about outdated technologies, they show us plough-horses at work, blacksmiths in their forge, steam locomotives – in other words, they introduce us to a world that no longer is ours.

For, on the eve of the twenty first century, cinema is dying. More precisely the cinema that was typical of the mid-twentieth century has vanished, swallowed by television. And the difference is not merely the dimension of the screen; television is another world. To begin with, there is no immunity against it: even people who have no television set are surrounded by its messages. In order to go to the pictures you had to make up your mind and decide that you would not stay at home. And you did not spend more than two or three hours in the theatre. With television, the universe intrudes into our living room and even if we are distant, absent-minded listeners, we cannot ignore it. Unlike cinema or the press, television is more than an important means of information or a form of entertainment, more than simply a precious source available to the sociologist: it is the background of everybody’s life, our common fellow traveller.

I need hardly add that few people would question the importance of television in our days, or that in terms of soical importance we should look at the silver screen up to the 1960s and afterwards at the small screen. Right, but how is it, then, that now, and only now, academic structures take an interest in the use of cinematic materials? A possible answer might be that, while looking up-to-date, movies perpetuate a nostalgic vision of the past.

Film screenings were always based on the duality between factual movies – newsreels or documentaries, and feature films – what has often been labelled the Lumiére and the Meliés traditions. Of course, nobody was naive enough to believe that cinematic images were an accurate reflection of the actual world. Already in the 1910s critics like Hugo Munsterberg, whose Psychological study of the film (1916) was perfectly clear on the topic, warned their readers that pictures were artefacts and that the angles chosen by the cameraman or the cuts made by the editor, distorted reality.

Anyhow, according to Siegfried Kracauer, the founding father of cinema and history studies, in spite of these distortions, it was still possible to deduce from the pictures evidence about the environment, the life-styles, the ceremonies of past periods. This record had the advantage of being permanent, it could be endlessly rescreened and, in producing a permanent testimony, it could be a means of resisting the passage of time. In a period of accelerated change like ours, when autonomous local ways of life are absorbed by the world system, cinema easily becomes a pretext for mourning the good old days. How is it possible to account for the permanent recycling of the same images of the years 1930-1960 without taking into consideration this sense of loss? The wonder is that, seen from the far end of the century, the pictures of Hitler, of the Nazi parades, of the fights of World War II, all in black and white, seem to give the flavour of a highly decent epoch when kings, presidents and other leaders were shown reverence and when war, however dramatic it was, never looked like bloodshed.

In this respect, television is the opposite of cinema. Every news bulletin brings us its share of casualties, accidents, massacres on the road, extensively filmed in colours by a jerky, hand-held camera. It is extremely difficult to envision that a murder in the 1930s was not fairly different from a contemporary homicide and that the contrast between what people saw then and what we see now merely results from another conception of photography. There is, however, much more than that. Television, because it is obliged to broadcast a permanent flow of images, has no time for selection. It lingers on ordinary aspects of life and collects facts likely to illuminate people’s daily activities. The greater part of our life is spent in humdrum, nondescript moments and it is impossible to remember each of them. Only exceptional circumstances are accompanied by emotions strong enough to ensure the endurance of the memory, and only such memories prompt us to record and describe them vividly. The aim of history, what distinguishes it from chronicles, is to take these events into account and introduce them into a continuous narration. But television, surfing the world for news of the now, catches us in a perpetual present, ignores foregone centuries, hints, sometimes, at the dictators, wars and crises of the 20th century, but zooms in mostly onto the present. The men or women in the street are permanently interviewed and give their opinion about everything; I write “they” but I had better say “we” since, potentially, we are all the actors/interviewees of the small screen. We are twice here when we are at home, personally and through our proxy, there, on the box. As they are continuously questioned, just like us, “the great” no longer appear so remote and impressive, the distance between us and them has been reduced to very little. An American president is obliged to answer the most touchy questions, as if he were taking part in a reality show. Or is it in a television series? (When tuning in, we often have problems in deciding whether what we are offered is a documentary, a reality show or a serial). Here are a few people, locked up in one room; the camera moves slowly from left to right, trying to catch the face of those who are speaking; the dialogue sounds familiar, it turns on practicalities, just like our talk with a neighbour we have met on our way home.

The difference with cinematic fiction is obvious. Feature films were the bulk of cinema, what made thousands of spectators move every week, and they were all ideological messages not because they conveyed propaganda, which few of them tried to do, but because they drew a picture of human destiny outside the context of a lived life. It is what makes it so easy to analyse a film and to show brilliantly how it mirrors “the spirit of an epoch”: the plot is built on simple situations, the characters have to face clear-cut dilemmas, they succeed or they die and no individual case extends beyond the word “end”. What was shown on the silver screen was exceptional and implied an exploratory quest to discover the meaning of the world; any feature film incorporated social dramas pertaining to order and change and was therefore easy to characterize.

On the other hand, what lingers on the box is endlessly reflexive of the form of life within which it is used and, consequently, very difficult to observe from without. People talk about themselves but autobiographical memories are not accurate historical accounts of events as they happened, but rather reconstructions based on affective and impassioned factors. Contaminated with information from similar events, memories change over the years as people encounter new experiences. What we remember about an event depends on when and for what purpose we are remembering, reflecting our beliefs about ourselves and the world at present. There is also a tendency to dramatize and elaborate in order to evoke the emotion people wish their listeners to feel. In particular, the desire to belong can drive people to recount their stories to meet the expectations of the group.

Let us be cynical: dissecting a film is much more rewarding than studying a television serial. The former has been produced in a social framework by filmmakers and their crews, it expands on a subject-matter and, when it is first released, it gets a coverage in the press (which helps figure out what spectators felt at the time). In contrast, we do not know who has manufactured television programmes which bring together unlikely associations of circumstances and characters. My initial allusion to nostalgia was, perhaps, too far fetched. Maybe what makes historians focus on films and hinders them from taking television seriously is, possibly, the difficulties they encounter when they want to study what has been put on the air: the use of televised material is a great deal more laborious and complicated than printed sources or cinematic documents. Most film archives are well organised, catalogues have been computerized, it does not take a long time to discover where the pictures have been stored, and more and more movies can be seen on video players. The problem of creating and systematizing television archives has not only not been solved, it has not even been recognized in all its political and cultural importance. In some cases the networks keep their own archives, but sometimes they also donate footage to archives that can be either public or private. The International Federation of Television Archives (FIAT) has accomplished an enormous undertaking in re-locating existing sources, but their results are not yet available to historians.

Locating the material is only the first step. It is then necessary to establish if it has been catalogued. The problems of archiving are complex from the technical and organizational point of view, and also from the financial point of view. Usually the cataloguing has been carried out with the end purpose of a further television broadcast: the researchers or those who have compiled the lists have taken note of what could be re-used for future programmes . . . their logic does not tally with historians’ questions. Furthermore, various generations of researchers have been involved, each having their own way of working; for instance, according to the mood of the researcher, the first items on “mad cow disease” were catalogued under the disparate labels of “cattle”, or “feeding”, or “epizootic desease,” and it will take historians a long time to locate these pieces in the inventory.

Nor does indexation mean accessibility. For various reasons some material exists on the shelves but is not available for viewing. There is first the variation of standards: from the old “two inches” and the tapes used in the 1950s or 1960s to the present virtual images, many kinds of equipment have been employed and some of them no longer exist, which makes it impossible to view the pictures. There is also the problem of rights: a programme bought from an independent producer cannot be seen without permission and, as happens quite often, if the firm has closed down, there is no hope. When entering the archive historians have to accept a pre-selection stipulated by empirical or legal restrictions.

Let us be optimistic: now that, after long hours spent in front of the computer, we have listed the items we would like to consult. We are deterred by the gigantic quantity of material that we should check. Suppose that we are interested in some political or diplomatic events: in Britain, today, the total amount of news that is broadcast every day comes to more than twenty four hours of footage which means that if we want to see all the news put on the air in a given year we shall have to spend more than a year, full-time, in front of our video screen. But, perhaps, we would rather take television as a source for the study of social roles and institutions, of models of behaviour, of individual and collective orientations to action: even then our life-span will not be sufficient since everything, on the box, has to do with these topics. Historians and all those involved in the study of television have no choice but to start considering the ways of carrying out a legitimate and accurate pre-selection of the relevant programmes.

Even then, that is not the final word. Viewing is not enough, the moving images and their soundtrack cannot be quoted as if they were pieces of written texts. They must be shown and heard, which might be easily done with a computer (which once more raises the complicated issue of rights). I confess that the title I have chosen and the first pages of my paper are provocative. Historians are well aware of the importance of television; they know that it is, today, the most influential source of information throughout the world, that it reveals instantly events that are taking place at various points around the globe, and also that, in some cases, it causes these events by prompting politicians towards a decision whose motivation lies in seeing it shown on the box. But, whereas sociologists, anthropologists and political scientists have begun to tackle the medium, historians have not yet produced any significant work in this vast and complex field. Concentrating on films, which tell a lot about the period before the1950s but little about our own days, could be a way of avoiding the problem.