ically respectable trivia contest. It has the much
more important and complex task of explaining the
historical development of a phenomenon on which
billions of dollars and countless hours have been
spent.”^1
Like other historians, film historians use arti-
facts to study the past. These artifacts include the
various machines and other technology—the cam-
eras, projectors, sound recording devices, etc.—
without which there would be no movies. They
might also include notes from story conferences,
screenplays, production logs, drawings, outtakes,
and other objects relevant to the production of a
particular movie, as well, of course, as first-person
accounts by people involved with the movie, news-
paper and magazine articles, and books about the
production and the people involved in it. Obviously,
the most important artifacts to the film historian
are the movies themselves.
Film history includes the history of technolo-
gies, the people and industrial organizations that
produce the movies, the national cinemas that dis-
tinguish one country’s movies from another’s, the
attempts to suppress and censor the movies, and
the meanings and pleasure that we derive from
them. Gaining knowledge about these and other
aspects of film history is pleasurable and interest-
ing in and of itself. But as you graduate from
merely watching movies to looking at movies in a
critically aware way, your knowledge of film history
will also provide you with the perspective and con-
text to understand and evaluate the unique attrib-
utes of movies from the past as well as the more
complex phenomena of today’s movies.
Basic Approaches to Studying Film History
Although there are many approaches to studying
film history (including studies of production, regu-
lation, and reception), the beginner should know
the four traditional approaches: the aesthetic, tech-
nological, economic, and social. In what follows, we
describe each approach and cite one or two studies
as exemplary models of each.^2The Aesthetic Approach
Sometimes called the masterpiece approachor great
man approach, this approach seeks to evaluate indi-
vidual movies and/or directors using criteria that
assess their artistic significance and influence.
Ordinarily, historians who take this approach will
first define their criteria of artistic excellence and
then ask the following questions: What are the sig-
nificant works of the cinematic art? Who are the
significant directors? Why are these movies and
these directors important? Historians who take the
aesthetic perspective do not necessarily ignore the
economic, technological, and cultural aspects of
film history—indeed, it would be impossible to dis-
cuss many great movies without considering these
factors—but they are primarily interested in
movies that are not only works of art but are also
widely acknowledged masterpieces. The most com-
prehensive, one-volume international history that
takes an aesthetic approach is David A. Cook’s A
History of Narrative Film, 4th ed. (New York: Nor-
ton, 2004). Other aesthetic studies are on the
auteur theory, which holds that great movies are
the work of a single creative mind; one outstanding
study in this field is James Naremore’s On Kubrick
(London: BFI, 2007).^3(^1) Robert C. Allen and Douglas Gomery, Film History: Theory
and Practice(New York: Knopf, 1985), p. 21.
BASIC APPROACHES TO STUDYING FILM HISTORY 433
(^2) These four traditional categories are covered in Allen and
Gomery, chs. 4–7. Jon Lewis and Eric Smoodin, eds., Looking
Past the Screen: Case Studies in American Film History and
Method(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007), pp. 4–5,
identify four other categories: industrial systems, regulatory
systems, reception, and representation.
(^3) Film critic Andrew Sarris defines the auteur theory in his
The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929–1968
(New York: Dutton, 1968), pp. 19–37. See also Pauline Kael’s
famous rebuttal, “Circles and Squares,” in Film Theory and
Criticism: Introductory Readings, ed. Gerald Mast and Mar-
shall Cohen, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press,
1979), pp. 666–691. Sarris’s essay is also included in this
anthology (pp. 650–665), but it should be read in the context
of his pioneering 1968 study, cited here.