Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film
The professionalization of moving image archives has
been accompanied by changes in film studies, which have
precipitated a new consciousness not only in media historians but also in the archivists themselves. While the
previous generation of film historians perceived film
history in a teleological fashion, as a progressive evolution
toward film art, the new film historians have been much
more interested in contextualizing film and television
history in the broader arena of cultural studies and cultural critique. They have attempted to ground film history in an empirical methodology, based on academic
conventions of evidence gathering and presentation. No
longer is film history a matter of connoisseurship and the
analysis of individual examples of film art or the oeuvre of
so-called film auteurs; rather, the new historians see film
and television as one form of evidence in a historical
discourse. While the goal of standard film histories of
the past was to establish aesthetic norms of quality for
cinema history, the new film history is interested in
describing and analyzing the technological, economic, social, political, ethical, and aesthetic development of the
medium of film and the institution of cinema. The new
methodologies, furthermore, have shifted the focus from
a critic’s reading of the artifact to a reconstruction of the
historical audience’s readings and usage of cinema and
television.
Such an agenda means that virtually any form of
moving image can function as historical evidence,
whether fiction feature film or short, documentary or
avant-garde film, advertising film or ethnographic film,
industrial or medical film, amateur film or newsreel. It
also means that the material culture of moving image
media has become a much more important factor in the
construction of history. The inevitable conclusion for
moving image archivists must be that they should neither
exclude material from their archives nor actively participate in the judgmental game of deciding what is important and what is not. Finally, it means that a symbiotic
relationship now exists between archivists and historians:
new academic research leads to the formulation of new
preservation priorities. For example, a new sensitivity in
the archives to amateur film was brought about by academic research concerned with the cultural value of such
material. Conversely, the preservation of materials outside of the classical canon has led to further reevaluation
of moving image history. For example, the FIAF
Brighton Conference in 1978 led to the creation of a
whole new subfield of early cinema studies; previously
academics had relegated cinema from the first fifteen
years to the arena of the ‘‘primitive.’’ Only the continual
interplay between archives and academics will lead to
increased knowledge of these media that have had such
a vital impact on our perceptions of the world.