ABSTRACT
This book has been designed to appeal to film studies scholars wanting to know more about the history of film as a commercial enterprise, and hence the context within which films were made by capitalist organisations seeking profits. It is thus concerned with the business of the making, distribution and reception of a product that has played a very important part in the cultural and aesthetic lives of consumers in vast numbers across the globe during the course of the twentieth century. The work is novel in that it specifically uses microeconomic tools of analysis to help explain film business practices. However, it does so from a pragmatic viewpoint: if the authors featured in this book find an aspect of economic theory useful in coordinating and interpreting evidence from the archive, they use it. In this they are explicit. Here is the evidence, they say, and this particular theory helps make it intelligible. In doing this, the authors may be open to criticism: the evidence they provide may seem to be shaky in that its selection and its manner of collection may be questionable – of course, we believe this not to be the case! Furthermore, their interpretation of the evidence may also be challenged along with their choice of theory to illuminate their findings. But in all cases the methodologies used and interpretations arrived at by the authors are made explicit and accessible – deploying only where necessary basic statistical and model-building techniques – and based upon what we believe to be solid empirical evidence either collected by the authors from the archive or already available in the public domain.2 Almost certainly there are dimensions to our choice of theories that will appear to be narrow or limited to scholars from noneconomic backgrounds. We ask for their patience with, and understanding of, our position as economists/economic historians who, in reading articles and books about the aesthetic, philosophical, sociological and ideological evaluations of films, often cannot avoid being aware that many viewpoints confidently, sometimes zealously, asserted depend in part on implicit empirical assumptions that could be checked, tested and possibly refuted.3
