Introduction: Art, Industry, Technology

M aking filmshas alwaysbeenanexceptionally untidy process, filled with conflict and contradiction, spectacular successes and innumerable dead-ends. Writing about films is a very different business, however, in which critics and historians work to clarify the messy traces that constitute the history of the medium. The project is much the same no matter what the author’s proclivities – order shall be brought out of this chaos – although the results are quite often a different matter. The taxonomies devised by the earliest film historians served usefully for decades, a categorization of discrete film styles, business strategies, producing nations, media technologies, etc., etc. Later refinements divided these categories even further, adding new items as required. The most interesting work today, however, is less involved in mining some clearly defined area of study than in exploring the web of connections that reaches across all aspects of moving image media. Instead of just digging deeper, these historians trawl across the landscape horizontally, drawing on the tool kits of many different disciplines to answer questions about the movies which no one before had ever thought to ask. As seen in this issue of Film History, that sort of horizontal analysis (cross-cultural is not the right word) can involve a number of distinct historical methodologies and a wide range of potential subjects. For example, Keith Johnston, who is working with the most recent historical period here, sheds new light on both post-war British exhibition practices and the development of 3-D technology (generally seen as a Hollywood project) by examining the point at which these two histories intersect. Two essays deal with pioneering examples of international film production, and the ways in which non-fiction material found itself shaped for a theatrical market. Ron van Dopperen and Cooper C. Graham (who have visited this subject in these pages before) provide further detail on the experiences of Great War journalist-photographer Albert K. Dawson. J.E. Smyth traces the disparate, and sometimes conflicting, energies behind Fred Zinnemann’s tribute to UNRRA, The Search (1948). That both projects emerged from the shadows of a World War may or may not be a coincidence. The brief life of a Weimar-era production company, Trianon, might seem to call for a fairly straightforward historical account of its films and filmmakers. yet Thomas Saunders finds a more interesting tale of boom and bust economics in the civil suits documented in the Landesarchiv Berlin. The role of film actors as high-salaried labour stars is a familiar topic today. But Denise McKenna looks at the least of these workers, the vast number of unskilled extras, and finds something that most earlier historians have overlooked: not just a bigger career opportunity (or problem) than work as a super or spear carrier in the gaslight theater, but a production-end counterpart to the “movie-struck girl” of the nickelodeons. And just what was the problem with double features? Did this strategy relate to production, marketing, or exhibition? Why were both studios and exhibitors so bitterly divided on its merits? And why was Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal so concerned about them that it did whatever it could to ban the “double feature evil” for all time? Gary D. Rhodes found the answers, but his search leads everywhere from Hollywood to Kansas City to the United States Supreme Court. Like the other essays collected here, his inquiry takes us all on a long and winding road. And what we find when we get there is not just a better picture of something we already thought we knew – but the answer to a question we may never have thought to ask.