4/16/24, 10:12 PM Films as Social and Cultural History

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Increasingly historians have moved away from a history that chronicles battles,
treaties, and presidential elections to one that tries to provide an image of the
way daily life unfolded for the mass of people: how they worked, what they did
for fun, how families were formed or fell apart, or how the fabric of daily life
was formed or transformed. Film has an important role to play in these histories.
While traditional historical documents tend to privilege great events and political
leaders, historians now use other records to discern the lives of "ordinary"
people: census records, accounts of harvests and markets, diaries and memoirs,
and local newspapers. Film is perhaps more like these records of daily life than it
is like the documents that record great events. Motion pictures may provide the
best evidence of what it was like to walk down the streets of Paris in the 1890s,
what a Japanese tea ceremony was like in the 1940s, what the World Series in
1950 looked like, or how people in factories did their work or spent a Sunday
afternoon in the park. All of these subjects could be staged and distorted, of
course, and film can be transformed in many ways. But as a record of time and
motion, films preserve gestures, gaits, rhythms, attitudes, and human interactions
in a variety of situations. In almost any film archive, and in numerous places on
the Internet, one can glimpse images of simple actions, from the way a Buddhist
monk in Ceylon folded his robe in 1912 to the way people boarded trolley cars
in New York City in the 1930s. While film shares much of this information with
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4/16/24, 10:12 PM Films as Social and Cultural History

other forms of documentation, especially still photography, motion pictures

allow viewers to see and compare the everyday physical actions of people across
the globe and throughout the twentieth century.

This is not to deny that film provides indelible images of some of the twentieth
century's great events. Our horrified consciousness of the Holocaust relies partly
on the filmed images from the liberation of the camps, and our knowledge of the
devastation of the Atomic bomb comes partly from motion pictures of Hiroshima
or of A-bomb test explosions. Conversely, twentieth-century disasters or traumas
that went unrecorded by motion pictures -- such as the genocide of the
Armenians or mass starvation in Asia -- are less present in public consciousness
because of the lack of vivid images. But when we focus on social and cultural
history, especially the important role of leisure in the lives of ordinary people,
film not only provides evidence and records but takes on a key role.

In addition to the primarily non-fiction or documentary films discussed above,

we must consider Hollywood's primary output, feature films. Can fictional film
be used as historical evidence? As evidence of what? Fictional films serve as
historical evidence in the same way that other representational art forms do -- by
making events vivid, portraying social attitudes, and even revealing the
unconscious assumptions of past societies. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation
cannot be viewed as an objective or accurate view of the era of Reconstruction,
but it does -- painfully, and even unintentionally -- indicate the sorts of hysterical
anxieties and aggressive fantasies that underlay American racism, especially in
the early twentieth century. Attitudes about gender, class, and ethnicity, as well
as heroism, work, play, and "the good life" are all portrayed in fictional films as
they are in an era's novels, plays, and paintings. But as a form of mass visual
entertainment, films reflect social attitudes in a specific and vivid manner.

From 1915 to about 1955, movies were arguably America's most popular form of
narrative entertainment. Movies, therefore, aimed at a wider target audience than
that of most novels and plays. Does this mean that movies reflect social attitudes
more accurately than any other medium, since they reached the greatest number
of people? Possibly. But a mass audience does not mean that movies in America
represented all points of view. It often indicates the opposite, with film studios
avoiding certain controversial points of view in order not to offend a wide-
ranging audience. Since films were released nationally and globally to make a
profit, producers tried not to offend groups they recognized as influential and
usually avoided political controversies or minority opinions.

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Further, from 1916 until the 1950s, movies were not protected by the First
Amendment guarantee of freedom of speech. A court ruling in 1916 (concerning
the state of Ohio's ban of The Birth of A Nation) held that film could legally be
subject to censorship because of its vivid psychological effects and audiences
(including women, children, and the "lower classes") who the court deemed
more impressionable than the readers of printed matter. A number of states and
localities created film censorship boards. Although Hollywood studios
occasionally released controversial films, they usually avoided such themes as
racial prejudice, child labor, and venereal disease. Likewise, in contrast to the
current trend of niche marketing, Hollywood ignored small specialized markets.
A small, and financially marginal, series of independent producers did make
films targeted at minority markets (such as the African-American films produced
by Oscar Micheaux or the Yiddish films directed by Edgar G. Ulmer). These
independent films provide fascinating evidence about the issues and assumptions
current in smaller communities, often in sharp contrast to Hollywood films.

Interpreting Hollywood movies as a reflection of prevailing social attitudes or

generalizing from specific films requires great caution. Fictional films are
complex industrial and social products and how they are made, distributed,
exhibited, and received by audiences and critics must be investigated to fully
evaluate their roles as historical evidence. For example, it is dangerous to
interpret a few films from a specific period as simple reflections of American
society. The attitudes portrayed in a specific film may represent a series of
compromises carefully designed to be non-offensive. In addition, individual
films can indicate very different attitudes toward labor unions, big business, race
relations, or women's rights.

One Hollywood strategy for creating and pleasing a mass audience included
designing films so that audiences could interpret movies in different ways. This
is clearest in the carefully regulated portrayal of sexual behavior during the
period of Hollywood's dominance (1917-1960). An adult or sexually aware
audience member may decide that Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart have
sex when Casablanca cuts from their passionate kiss to a brief image of the
control tower beacon at the nearby airport. But a child or a socially conservative
viewer may assume nothing happened. Most important, the studio could deny to
a censor that any sexual activity took place. The Production Code Administration
(an industry-created "watchdog" committee charged with locating scenes that
might be considered objectionable and proposing ways to modify them) often
suggested such ambiguous scenes to film producers to avoid problems with state
or local censorship boards.

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Ambiguous scenes provide rich material for studying social history, but they
require complex interpretation and investigation. Such investigation requires
moving beyond the evidence on the screen (whether movie theater, video, or
computer monitor) to ask how reviewers, censors, and fans understood films.
Likewise historians need to investigate the actual process of filmmaking and the
variety of viewpoints involved in production. Hollywood studio archives are
filled with discussions of what material should be cut from scripts, what might
be offensive to different audiences, how to soften images of sexuality or
violence, or how to blur political references. Every Hollywood film involved
compromises between divergent viewpoints, often aimed at creating room for
multiple interpretations.

Thus, a broad range of materials are needed to write a full history of the cinema
as part of cultural life. Film production and film-going are social practices and
important aspects of twentieth-century life. To understand them we need to
investigate technology, economics (including business and industrial
organization), advertising, and distribution -- all of which influenced where films
were shown and who came to see them. A wide range of documents provide
evidence in this quest, including letters, trade journals, movie reviews, contracts,
financial information, scripts, and studio memos. In addition, many non-
traditional sources are key to writing the social history of the movies. For
example, the design of movie theaters or the switch to video rental stores;
censorship and pressure group protests; fan magazines and movie-based
souvenirs; fashion designs introduced by films; educational matinees for school
children; and reactions by specific communities as gathered through oral
histories. The actual role films play in people's daily lives, in their sense of
themselves and their world, especially for the early part of the century, however
are extremely difficult to document. Those vanished audiences will always
remain somewhat elusive.

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