Brno Lecture 1 “What the Hell, It’s Only History …”: American Cinema History and the Problem of Interpretation Opening Remarks about the series: Does Cinema History matter? What is involved in writing it? Why care about what old pictures people saw, how and where they saw them, and what they thought about them? And how do you find out? In this paper, I’m seeking to explore a question that I’ve worried about, one way or another, for most of my working life. One version of the question is … why would you want to write a history of entertainment? And if you were to do that, what sort of history should it be? “What the hell, It’s only history.” (and the anecdote may be apocryphal, but what the hell … ) Valenti’s use of the term “history” is, I think, a specifically American usage most clearly explained to me by the advertising tag-line for the 1994 Jean-Claude Van Damme movie, Timecop , “Turn back the clock, and you're history.” “History” is something completed, dead, and therefore irrelevant because it is situated in the past. Dokument2 2 of 28 As a visit to the film section of any bookstore will tell you, there is a fair-sized industry in publishing books about how Hollywood has got history wrong—a publishing industry almost as substantial and about as turgidly wrongheaded as those interminable discussions of whether movie adaptations of literary works are sufficiently “faithful” to their sources. It is self-evidently true that the movie industry has displayed a persistent lack of concern over the historical accuracy of its representations, adapting historical events, like any other source material, to an already established set of commercial and ideological conventions. In Hollywood, history is first of all a production value; it first obligation is to be entertaining,. As the terms of a Warner Bros. contract with the subject of a biopic explained, the studio considered itself “free to dramatize, fictionalize, or emphasize any or all incidents, or interpolate such incidents as [the] Producers may deem necessary in order to obtain a treatment or continuity of commercial value.” 1 Hollywood has been no less cavalier with its own historical record. At one level it has simply destroyed a good deal of that record, destroying prints to recover the silver, burning script libraries to save on the rental costs of their storage … In another register, the industry has treated its own history in the sense implied in Timecop ’s other tagline: “They killed his wife ten years ago. There's still time to save her. Murder is forever... until now.” History, the dead past, can be returned to and rewritten “in order to obtain … a continuity of commercial value”: we do, to paraphrase Rambo , get to win this time. Dokument2 3 of 28 To my horror, I recently came across the declaration, by a self-styled “film history professor,” that he has “occasionally used Singin’ in the Rain in class to show the introduction of sound, since it is a reasonably accurate portrayal of the period.” 2 During the movie, you may recall, Donald O'Connor discovers the principles of sound dubbing by standing in front of Debbie Reynolds and moving his mouth while she sings. Hollywood's history of itself offers history as entertainment. It's not accurate, but it's entertaining, and we share the curious expectation that the history of entertainment must itself be entertaining. Film history continues to be written under this expectation. The most widely reproduced version of the introduction of sound—that it was introduced as a last desperate gamble by an almost bankrupt Warner Bros.—persists in circulation because the fantasy of the kids from the ghetto making good with an invention the big studios had turned down corresponds far more closely to the expectation of a Hollywood story than does the prosaic account of actual industrial practice. Jack Valenti and his predecessors have participated just as enthusiastically in this repackaging of material from the past to suit present entertainment needs: in a statement celebrating 30 years of the movie ratings system in 1998, for example, the MPA happily repudiated the instrument of self-regulation it had administered from 1930 to 1968 as “an absurd manifesto called the Hays Code [which] literally offered a list of do's and don'ts for filmmakers and performers.” 3 In 1934, the MPPDA similarly repudiated the history of the evolution of self- regulation for a more melodramatic account in which it was rescued from sin and federal censorship by virtuous hero Joe Breen riding at the head of the Catholic Dokument2 4 of 28 Legion of Decency. It’s not accurate—every major claim in the standard historical account of the introduction of the Production Code is factually incorrect—but it’s entertaining, and thus it remains the standard account of a history obliged to conform to the conventions of a Hollywood narrative. Frustrating as I find it, simply saying “It ain’t so,” or even demonstrating it, doesn't seem to be enough—in large part because all the industrial pressures of Hollywood both then and now act against the revelation of a prosaic history of economic forces. I want to propose a distinction between what I will call film history on one hand, and cinema history on the other. The distinction I am proposing is between an aesthetic history—essentially of relationships of influence between individuals or individual objects, and the history of a social and cultural institution. The history of stylistic influence borrows its methods and rationale from the practices of art and literary history, and it is predominantly a history of production and producers, concerned with issues of intention and agency underpinning the process of cultural production, usually at the level of the individual, and relatively little interested in anything—other than influence—that happens after the point of production. The writing of such histories requires very few sources, which may be one of the reasons why it was the most substantial form of history writing in the early development of Film Studies, when there were few primary sources available and few trained historians to use them. Perhaps the most prominent residue of this form of film history is the continued prominence of the idea of genre as a way of understanding Hollywood history, and I would suggest, a Dokument2 5 of 28 principal means by which a history of the relations between films has substituted for a history of cinema as a social and cultural institution. As Rick Altman argues, genre critics have succeeded in avoiding a serious engagement with historical issues by adopting “the transhistorical model offered by myth,” 4 essentially establishing a mechanistic procedure by which social and political meanings are ascribed to genres, compartmentalizing their cultural function as a predetermined textual property. 5 The history of the American cinema is, however, not the history of its products any more than the history of railroads is the history of locomotives. The development of locomotive design forms part of the history of railroads, but so, far more substantially, do government land policies and patterns of agricultural settlement. To write a history of texts and call it a history of Hollywood involves omitting the social process and cultural function of cinema, and denies the contextual significance of the material conditions under which movies were produced and consumed. As an academic discipline, Film Studies has been formed primarily in the image of literary studies. Its earliest academic practice was—and predominantly still is—textual interpretation. Methodologies of textual interpretation have also dominated most attempts to construct cultural histories of the movies, including most historians’ use of film as symptomatic evidence. Social and political historians have, in the main, borrowed from film historians, and thus incorporated back into their histories the genre-based, mythological, and therefore ahistorical assumptions about the relationship of movies to the culture of which they are a Dokument2 6 of 28 part. Even as they are incorporated into a larger version of social history, the movies remain under the obligation to entertain. Thus you will find accounts of I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang or Scarface appearing as diverting boxed features on “social realism in the movies” to alleviate the statistical tedium of histories of the early Depression. These accounts rely heavily on a largely undeclared application of an idea of reflection, which has proved to be the most persistent metaphor for understanding cinema’s relationship to the society it forms part of. Aesthetic presumptions about the camera’s reflection of the optically real are transformed into expectations that the artefacts of popular culture must reflect a social reality connected to their production. How this relationship functions is seldom articulated, but while the word “reflection” is itself often avoided, the talismanic powers of the term “ideology” are frequently invoked. The terminology of ideological analysis has, however, often done little more than complicate and obfuscate what is usually a fairly straightforward analytical procedure relying on a concealed metaphor of reflection. The metaphor of reflection encourages the historian to span the distance between artefact and context by engaging in critical interpretation rather than occupying too much time and energy in empirical research. Because the movies as cultural objects are positioned for interpretation, it seems to follow that they should themselves be understood as interpretations of or commentaries on their historical, political or social context, or alternatively as historical symptoms inviting such interpretation. Theories of ideology encourage acts of interpretation Dokument2 7 of 28 as necessary to the process of decoding an encoded text.