Homepage Download PDF. Pdf free Film History: An Introduction. Kristin Thompson, David Bordwell. Copyright Disclaimer:This site does not store any files on its server. The techniques of descriptive research are specialized and require a wide range o f background knowledge. For example, some experts o n early silent cinema can determine when a film copy was made by examining the stock on which it is printed.
The number and shape of the sprocket holes, a l o ng with the manner in which a manufacturer's name is printed along the edge of the film strip, can help date the print.
Knowing the age of the stock can in turn help narrow down the film's date of production and country of origin. Here are some of them. The historian needs to know that this film was made before that one or that event B took place after event A. But history is not mere chronology. Causal ity Much historical explanation involves cause and effect.
Historians work with conceptions of various kinds of causes. People have beliefs and desires that affect how they act. In acting, they make things happen. It is often reasonable to explain a historical change or a past state of affairs in light of the attitudes or behavior of individuals.
It is simply to say that historians may j ustifiably appeal to what people think and feel and do as part of an explanation. This view is sometimes called the Great Man theory of history, even though it is applied to women as well. Group Causes People often act in groups, and at times we speak of the group as having a kind of existence over and above the individuals who compose it.
Groups have rules and roles, structures and routines, and often these factors make things happen. When we say that Warner Bro s. Some historians assert that any historical explanation must, sooner or later, ground itself in group-based causes.
This position is usually called holism, or methodological collectivism, as opposed to methodological individualism. Several sorts of groups are important to the history of cinem a. Throughout this book we will be talking about institutions-government agencies, film studios, distribution firms, and other fairly forma l , organized groups. Influence does not mean simple copying. You may have been influenced by a parent or a teacher, but you have not necessarily mimicked his or her behavior.
The result may be quite different from the initial work that stimulated it. The contemporary director Jean-Luc Godard was influenced by Jean Renoir, although their films are markedly dif- ferent.
A body of work by a group o f directors may also influence later films. Influences are particular kinds of causes, so it is not surprising that influences may involve both individual activity and group activity.
Any historical question opens up a body of data for investigation. It i s like looking into a microscope and discovering that a drop of water teems with organisms of confounding variety, all going about very different business. Every historian omits certain materi a l. For one thing, the historical record is already incomplete.
Further, historians inevitably select. They reduce the messy complications of history to a more coherent, cogent story. Most Hollywood films of the s were made in black and white, but most Hollywood films today are in color.
On the whole, there has been a change, and we can see a trend toward the increasing use of color film stock between the 1 s and the s. Our task is to explain how and why this trend occurred. By positing trends, historians generalize. But this is no sin, because the answer to a question is necessarily pitched at a certain level of generality. All historical explanations pull back fro m the thro b bing messiness of reality. Historians necessarily limit the stretch of time they will explore, and they go on to divide that stretch into meaningful phases or segments.
She might break it down by decade the 1 9 0 0 s, the 1 9 1 0s, the 1 92 0 s , by changes extern al to film say, pre-World War I, World War I, post-World War I , or by phases in the development of storytelling style say, 1 8 , 1 90 9 1 7, 1 9 1 Every historian periodizes according to the research program he adopts and the question he asks.
Historians recognize that periodization can't be rigid: trends do not follow in neat order. It is illuminating to think of the American " structura l " film of the early 1 9 70s as a kind of response to the " underground " film of the 1 s, but underground films were still being made well into the 1 9 70s. Similarly, we ought not to expect that the history of technology or styles or genres will necessarily march in step with political or social history.
The assassination of President Kennedy was a wrenching event, but it had little if any effect on the film world. Here, as ever, the historian's research program and central question will shape her sense of the relevant periods and parallel events. This is one reason that scholars often speak of film histories rather than a single film history. In mounting explanations, historians of all arts make assumptions about the significance of the artworks they discuss.
We might trea t a work as a " monument, " studying it because it is a highly valued accomplishment. Alternatively, we might study a work as a " document " because it records some noteworthy historical activity, such as the state of a society at a given moment or a trend within the art form itself.
They are rich, moving, complex, thought-provoking, intricate, meaningful, or the like. At least partly because of their quality, such films have played a key role in the history of cinema.
Influence: A film may be historically significant by virtue of its influence on other films. It may create or change a genre, inspire filmmakers to try something new, or gain such a wide popularity that it spawns imitations and tributes.
Since influence is an important part of historical explanations, this sort of film plays a prominent role in this book. Typicality: Some films are significant because they vividly represent instances or trends. They stand in for many other films of the same type. A particu lar film might b e significant on two or even all three of these counts.
A highly accomplished genre film, such as Singin ' in the Rain or Rio B ravo, is often considered both excellent and highly typ ical. Many acclaimed m asterworks, such as The B irth of a Nation or Citizen Kane, were a l s o highly influential, and some also typify broader tendencies. That would give us no help in setting about our research and organizing the material we find. Following the aspects of film history outlined here, we have pursued three principal questions.
How have uses of the film medium changed or become normalized over time? O ften this involves telling a story, but a film's overall form might also be based on an argument or an a bstract pattern. So we al so examine these phenomena. All such matters are central to most college and university survey courses in film history.
Films are made within modes of production, habitual ways of organizing the labor and materials involved in creating a movie. Some modes of production are industrial. Other modes of production are less highly organized, involving small groups or individuals who make films for specific purposes. In any event, the ways in which films are made have had particular effects on the look and sound of the finished products.
Each could have been developed before the 1 9 50s, but the U. Only when attendance dropped precipitously in the late 1 s were producers and exhibitors impelled to introduce new technologies to lure audiences back into theaters. How have international trends emerged in the uses of the film medium and in the film market?
In this book we try to balance the consideration of important national contributions with a sense of how international and cross-cultural influences were operating. Genres are vagabond as well. We have paid particular attention to conditions that allowed people to see films made outside their own country. Each of these h o w questions accompanies a great many why questions. For any part of the processes we focus on, we can ask what conditions caused them to operate as they did. Why did Hollywood's studio system begin to fragment in the late 1 94 0 s?
Why are more films produced now with international investment than in the 1 9 3 0 s or 1 94 0 s? Historians are keen to know what factors made a change occur, and our general questions include a host of subquestions a bout causes and effects. Recall our five general explanatory approache s : biographical, industrial, aesthetic, technological, and social. If we had to squeeze our book into one or more of these pigeonholes, we could say that its approach is predominantly aesthetic and industrial.
But this summary of our approach is too confining, as even a cursory look at what follows will indicate. S o metimes we consider technology. Take, for example, our central question: How have uses of the film medium changed or become normalized over time?
This is a question about aesthetic matters, but it also impinges on factors of technology. In the early era of cinema, films circulated freely among countries, and viewers often did not know the nationality of a film they were seeing. At the same time, the growth of particular film industries, notably Hollywood, depended on access to other markets, so the degree to which films could circulate boosted some nations' output and hindered that of others.
In addition, the circulation of U. History as Story Our answers to historical questions are, however, not simply given in a list or summary. Like most historical arguments, ours takes a narrative form.
But historical explanations require a more complicated crafting. Sometimes historians frame their explanations as persuasive arguments. To take an example already cited, a historian investigating the development of sound by Warner Bros. More often, historians' explanations take the form of stories. It produces a chain of causes and effects, or it shows how a process works, by telling a story.
Or, if we are seeking to explain what led the Hays O ffice to be created, we might lay out the causal factors as a story. Narrative is one of the basic ways in which humans make sense of the world, and so it is not surprising that historians use stories to make past events intelligible.
We have accordingly framed this book as a large-scale narrative, one that includes several stories within it. But we also believe that there are advantages to working on a wide canvas. The periodization cannot be exactly synchronized for all three areas, but it does indicate approximate boundaries for the changes we try to trace.
In our attempt to systematically answer the three principal questions outlined earlier, we have relied on secondary sources, principally other historians' writings on the matters we consider.
We have also used primary sources : trade papers, the writings of filmmakers, and films. Because films constitute our major primary source, we need to say a few more words about how they serve as evidence in writing film history. Although the cinema is a relatively young medium, invented only a little over a century ago, many films have already been lost or destroyed.
For decades, movies were seen as products with temporary commercial value, and companies did little to ensure their preservation. Moreover, the nitrate film stock, upon which most films up to the early s were shot and printed, was highly flammable and deteriorated over time.
In the frame above , severe nitrate deteri oration has all but obliterated the figures. Even more recent films may be inaccessible to the researcher. Small archives may not have the facilities to preserve films or show them to researchers. We have attempted to examine a great range of types of international films. Inevitably we could not track down every film we hoped to see, and sometimes we were unable to include photographs from those we did see. Harpham, Jason P. Steve Albrecht , Chad O. Albrecht , Conan C.
Albrecht , Mark F. Powered by Blogger. Report Abuse. About Me eBookrd. Search This Blog. Mimetic theories of narration - Diegetic theories of narration - The viewe's activity - Principles of narration - Sin, murder, and narration - Narration and time - Narration and space - Modes and norms - Classical narration : the Hollywood example - Art-cinema narration - Historical-materialist narration : the soviet example - Parametric narration - Godard and narration.
Too often, film and the cinema have been treated primarily as a visual medium, with the consequence that spectatorship has come to be regarded as a matter of the eye alone. In Film History: An Introduction through the Senses, Thomas Elsaesser and Michael Wedel put the other senses at the centre of the cinematic experience, charting the dynamics along which the cinema has configured, positioned, and rearticulated itself over time within the larger cultural force field of media technologies, the body, and the senses.
Much like Film Theory: An Introduction through the Senses, each chapter in this new book begins by identifying the major terms of a particular period--including early cinema, classical cinema, modern art cinema, post-classical cinema, avant-garde cinema, world cinema, and digital cinema--and closely analyzing of one or more of the era's key films. Using major twentieth century media theorists, the authors then examine the way in which media technologies have affected, altered, traversed, or perverted the body and the senses.
For example, they consider: -the cinema as a site for the training of the body and the mass production of the senses -the cinema as the exploitation of the body and the commodification of the senses -the cinema as a public space to adapt the body and educate the senses to the demands of society By broadening our understanding of spectatorship Elsaesser and Wedel are able to provide an account of film history that more easily accomodates the new forms that the cinematic experience is taking in the 21st century.
The advanced undergraduate will find this book to be an excellent introduction to both major media theorists like McLuhan and Kracauer and also film history more generally. Film is an art form with a language and an aesthethic all its own.
This edition has been re-designed in colour greatly enhancing the text's visual appeal and overall accessibility to today's students.
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