ABSTRACT
The aim of this chapter is to present film history while simultaneously understanding film as history. The practice of film history, in other words, is not understood as itself a transparent or linear march of progress as charted by critics but instead as a practice by filmmakers and scholars alike of generating history. This approach provides the best way I’ve been able to come up with for addressing the imbrication of film with history, with historical understanding as an engagement with the past. It is necessary perhaps to say this right up front, since it’s an unorthodox emphasis in introductory approaches to film history, most of which survey crucial moments in the development of the cinema as a modern art form, industry, and social institution (much as I provided in the book’s opening pages, devoted to the emergence of cinema in the late nineteenth century). Influential history books treat cinema as a language that has invaded our bodies and lifeworlds and therefore needs vitally to be understood as the mechanism of deception and manipulation as well as of revelation and truth (Cook 2004). We need such overviews, and there are many good ones available to you; this chapter has a different focus.
