About Film & History
Film & History's Biography
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."
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. For the past four decades, Film & History has been an inexpensive journal that, as John's successor, former editor-in-chief Peter C. Rollins, has explained, even small libraries can afford.
(John E. O'Connor) (Peter C. Rollins)
Film & History is now the leading peer-reviewed journal in its field, with an editorial board of international scholars from multiple disciplines in the humanities. Published in the spring and fall, the journal offers insightful reviews of books and films and a Featured Section of articles that looks closely at one significant topic. The journal is affiliated with the American Historical Association and operates under the direction of the Center for the Study of Film and History, currently hosted by the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh.
The editor-in-chief, Loren PQ Baybrook (PhD, University of Virginia, 1994), comes to Film & History with a background in film studies and American poetry, serving as a member of the Graduate Faculty at University of Wisconsin Oshkosh since 1998. He joins an august team of scholars and teachers at F&H dedicated to exploring the historical, philosophical, aesthetic, and pedagogical roles of film in diverse cultures. Peter Rollins continues to advise the journal as it carries forward the intellectual tradition established by John O'Connor and Martin Jackson four decades ago.
We hope you learn more about the journal by subscribing and by participating in our conferences, teaching seminars, and online discussions.
Film & History's Philosophy
Two perspectives on art and society must be considered when evaluating an artifact. Raymond Williams reminds us that we "cannot understand an intellectual or artistic project without also understanding its formation," by which he means its cultural and historical environment. By comparison, Helen Vendler reminds us that we cannot understand any artistic project without understanding the formal environment in which its objects or events are represented and arranged: a rose or a flag or a handshake "means" whatever it does primarily because of its function inside that constructed environment, be it simple or complex, historical or fictional, formulaic or avant-garde. For Vendler, "content" always refers to the arrangement of content: to content-in-context.
Both Williams and Vendler accept that context determines meaning, but Williams privileges the external context, the institutions of society (and the natural world), whereas Vendler privileges the internal context, the individual art and mind. Film, as we know, is rarely the work of just one person (and Foucault has reminded us that, at some level, neither is a novel or a poem), but even if it were, the question that Williams and Vendler ultimatley raise is this: If we are to preserve any pragmatic distinction--and we always do--between plural external forces ("history," "society," "modes of production") and singular internal forces ('fiction," "individual," "imagination"), then where and how do these forces determine what a text, a painting, a film, or any other form of art "is" or "means" or "does"? That stage--where the plural mind of history and the single mind of art compete, collaborate, or do something else to speak the language of moving-image art--is the principal focus of the journal Film & History.
Film & History's Methodology
In determining evidence, F&H works on the principal of "proximate cause": closer (internal) influences generally weigh more than distant (external) influences. This is a forensic rule in both the sciences and the humanities. Readers incapable of understanding the internal context of a film--its shape, its tone, its order--are, in whatever larger historical sense to which they aspire, helpless at saying anything useful about the film as a construction of experience.
In practice, Film & History examines the responses of the moving-image arts to contemporary pressures and the responses of contemporary pressures to the moving-image arts. While cautioning against reducing film to historical symptom, F&H looks to understand film--how it works formally, who makes or consumes it, why and where its forms succeed, how those forms mediate or reflect our understanding--in the context of social and historical themes, patterns, and events.
Film & History emphasizes the mutually constructed nature of both fields described by its title. How is each made, and how does each make or re-make the other? How does history create film? How does film create history (or our apprehension of it)? What modes, styles, devices, formulas, conventions, influences, or inventions do they share or impose on the other? How do films, like the historical narratives woven implicitly or explicitly through them, become artful or popular or both? Who makes them so? When and why does a film seem "bad" to one generation and "beautiful" to another? What stories do certain groups of people want or need or fear? In what style must those stories be told? When and why does cinematic genius arise?
These material questions about film construction always figure in the scholarly equation because they explain how film--rather than painting or literature or physics--uniquely reflects or shapes our knowledge of the world. Content cannot be separated from its form. Indeed, in its compression, its editing, its visual and aural lyricism, film is often closer formally to poetry than to prose, and it is almost always closer, even as documentary, to art than to history. To put it bluntly, film is not history; it is an art form (however successful) that can and should be read historically--but only after it has been read aesthetically, as a self-contextualizing whole, lest the film be dissolved by the historian into mere incoherent parts.
Film's aesthetic distance from history is, in fact, important in many ways. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., having long served as an F&H editorial advisor, routinely emphasized the contribution that film has made to the understanding of history itself as a genre, as a peculiar form of knowing--with its own rules of predication and standards of excellence--not as a mere transcript or ledger of facts (see John E. O'Connor's encomium, below). "History" is a set of interpretive stories. Although it is the epistemological antipode of "fiction," "history" is still narrative. Whatever graphs or statistics it employs, it is still firmly rooted in the structure of language and genre. So that is where any criticism of it, as with film, must begin.
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. (1917-2007): A Remembrance and Appreciation
by John E. O'Connor
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., 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.
