About Film & History
On December 29, 1970, John E. O'Connor and Martin A. Jackson founded the Historians Film Committee, with the intent to begin publishing a journal on film and its relation to history. They published the following statement:
The Historians Film Committee exists to further the use of film sources in teaching and research, to disseminate information about film and film use to historians and other social scientists, to work for an effective system of film preservation so that scholars may have ready access to film archives, and to organize periodic conferences and seminars dealing with film.
A journal of film and social sciences will be established at the earliest practicable date in order to facilitate the exchange of information among scholars and others concerned with film. Efforts will be made to contact interested scholars in other social-science organizations with a view toward creating a common association of film researchers. Similarly, contacts will be maintained with foreign scholars concerned with film use.
John E. O'Connor edited the journal until a few years back, when he suffered a health problem. Although John's editorial absence in guiding the journal and his persistence in building it from regional to national and international readership ended, John continues to advise the journal to ensure the highest standards. When the American Historical Association established the John E. O'Connor Film Award in 1993, it recognized John's pioneering role in enhancing scholarship, research, and production in history, film, and the visual image as forms of evidence.
(John E. O'Connor) (Peter C. Rollins)
For the past thirty-eight years, Film & History has been an inexpensive journal that, as John's successor, former editor-in-chief Peter C. Rollins, explains, even "poor" libraries can afford. The journal presents insightful studies of how film media and history shape each other. We examine the evolution of genre over time and how the changes in the film (and television) genre--in its formulas, its exceptions, its patterns--affect or are affected by contemporary pressures. Each issue typically offers a "Featured Section" that looks closely at one significant topic.
Film & History is published twice a year, now by the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh (as of June 1, 2007), in affiliation with the American Historical Association and under the direction of the university's Center for the Study of Film and History.
The new editor-in-chief, Loren PQ Baybrook (PhD, University of Virginia, 1994), comes to Film & History with a background in film studies and American poetry. He joins an august team of teachers and scholars dedicated to exploring the historical, philosophical, aesthetic, and pedagogical roles of film in diverse cultures. Peter.Rollins also continues to advise the journal as it carries forward the intellectual tradition established by John O'Connor and Martin Jackson almost four decades ago. (Read the news: UW Oshkosh News)
What is that intellectual tradition? Film & History is not a history journal; nor is it a film journal. F&H is a genre journal that grounds its study of film--how it works aesthetically, who makes or consumes its forms, why and where those forms succeed, how those forms mediate our understanding--in the context of historical themes, patterns, and factual events. F&H examines, that is, not just historical data and not just cinematic data but the form they take--as "history" and as "film"--by evolving together. Recognizing this historical-aesthetic point, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., routinely emphasized the contribution that film has made to historical understanding as a genre, as a form of knowing, not as a mere transcript or ledger of facts. If we remove the aesthetic study of film (its modes, styles, devices, etc.) from our scholarly equation, then we lose the very point of seeing how film--rather than painting or literature or physics--uniquely reflects or shapes our knowledge of the world.
The Center for the Study of Film and History welcomes you to our new Web site. And we hope you'll join us for our biennial conference in 2008.
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. (1917-2007):
A Remembrance and Appreciation
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., who died in January, played a central role in shaping the history of twentieth-century America. He did this both from behind his typewriter, where over his long career he produced some twenty-three important books, and as an actor on the stage of history.
In addition, Schlesinger was a gifted teacher. I remember as a PhD student, at the Graduate Center of C.U.N.Y. in the late 1960s, being totally engaged in stirring discussions about the weekly reading assignments in his seminar on the Age of Jackson, and being amazed at how much more those books meant to me after he had put them into context.
When fellow student Martin Jackson and I began developing the idea for establishing an affiliated society of the American Historical Association (AHA) and starting a little journal called Film & History, Schlesinger’s encouragement was heartening. For decades he remained associated as a member of our Editorial Advisory Board, and at key points he offered his special assistance. For example, one of the high points of Film & History’s involvement at the annual meetings of the AHA was the session he helped us organize with Oliver Stone. It was the event of the evening, with responses to Stone by Schlesinger himself and by George McGovern. The overflow attendance included luminaries such as George Plimpton and Daniel Ellsberg.
In his foreword to a book Jackson and I produced in 1979, American History/American Film: Interpreting the Hollywood Image, Schlesinger used four sentences (below) to summarize a message about film and television study that we are still trying to impress upon the profession today. He wrote with special interest in the history of the United States, but, as time passes and historians interested in film and television continue to expand the field, his observations about using motion pictures for insight into the past hold true even more broadly:
Film is the only art in which the United States has made a real difference. Strike the American contribution from drama, painting, music, sculpture, dance, even possibly from poetry and the novel, and the world’s achievement is only marginally diminished. But film without the American contribution is unimaginable. The fact that film has been the most potent vehicle of the American imagination suggests all the more strongly that movies have something to tell us not just about the surfaces but about the mysteries of American life.
John E. O’Connor
