Toward a New Film History

My aim is to describe what one group of graduate students at New York University will be doing this year to improve or correct our present state of film history. It seems obvious that the best student minds are being encouraged to work in criticism and analysis, where the research materials can be limited and controlled. One of our intentions in increasing the emphasis on problems of film history is to deepen and broaden present critical work. These problems will take us into unused archive materials and unfamiliar films, and our concrete objective is to exploit this new material in drafting an experimental international film history in a fresh form. After a sampling this spring of a few needs that we feel such a book should answer, we are as clear about the traps that the book must avoid as we are about what it must attempt. No effort will be made to prepare a textbook. If the finished book can serve as a text for any group of students sympathetic to its aims, that's fine. But we don't want to add one more to the flood of film books issuing from the textbook departments of every enterprising American publisher, taking advantage of the current explosion of film interest on American campuses. In finding the right form for our book we want to be free of the taboos associated with textbooks on film history. We want a truly international film history, but we are determined to find an alternative to the usual structure of national chapters, country by country, because that is not the way the cinema was born or developed. Only in times of war did national boundaries play any limiting role in film invention or imagination. A German chapter could not do justice to the world's change of critical attitudes to cinema that The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari produced, nor could a narrowly Soviet chapter register the shock given the world's film-makers by The Battleship Potemkin. Ron Mottram shows the mutual dependence of the American and Danish narrative methods. Whether for good or evil is not the main question, but the fact is that neither the Japanese nor Chinese films could have grown in their particular ways without certain American films as models. We are also learning that such purely American pioneer artists as Edwin Porter or David Griffith required the stimulation of films made in England, France, Italy. Investigating these indivisible amalgams is only one of our tasks. Other categories will also be avoided. To build walls between technology

Art · Humanities · Visual arts · Cinema and Media Studies · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society

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  Open Access•Andrzej Dębski•Kwartalnik Filmowy•2026

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