Towards a Historiography of American Film

Abstract

situation is both exciting and dangerous. Exciting because new facts and analyses are constantly being offered: forgotten films are rediscovered or reconstructed, documents are sifted and published, novel hypotheses about the development of the American film are extended and explored. Such an abundance of new material also presents a danger, however, for it appears at so fast a pace that we have difficulty assimilating it all. If ever there was a time when it was possible to know everything there was to know about American film, and to present it in a single book, surely that time has passed. Faced with an overabundance of material we must constantly make choices-in our courses, in our writing, and in our viewing habits. What we at times forget is that each one of these choices is laden with implications of far-reaching importance. What material should be taught with The Grapes of Wrath? Another film directed by John Ford? Another scripted by Nunnally Johnson? Shot by Gregg Toland? Produced by Darryl Zanuck? Starring Henry Fonda? Or should we read Steinbeck's novel? Or see another film of the same era, the same theme, the same narrative structure, the same studio, or the same genre? Perhaps we should mimeograph the facts and figures concerning the film's distribution. Whatever decision we make-and we all make decisions like this one on a regular basis-we have simultaneously decided against many other alternatives, thus implicitly choosing one mode of historical explanation over another. What are the modes of historical explanation commonly employed in dealing with the American film? Just what facts do we bring to bear on the study of cinema? How are these facts to be used? As basic as these questions may seem, they have not often been asked publicly by historians of American film. Clearly, however, today's abundance of historical material forces us to consider these questions. No longer can a film historian deal with all the facts, nor can he pretend that they are objective phenomena divorced from a particular way of looking at them. Film history has now reached its second stage: from the who, what, where, and when we have moved to the how and why; from establishing facts we have progressed to explaining facts. Along with this change American film history has broken down into separate schools, each having its own object and methodology, each depending on a different hypothesis about the fundamental determi-

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