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Film History — the primer
Knowing what has already been tried, why it looked the way it did, and which of those reasons have expired.
HIS · Study · 32 lessons · 8h 29m
What it actually is
The practical argument for history is not reverence. It is that almost every idea you are likely to have has an earlier version, and the earlier version comes with the reasons attached — what problem it was solving, what it cost, and what it turned out to break. That is a substantial shortcut, and it is available to nobody who has only watched the last fifteen years.
The most useful thread running through it is that style is very often a constraint that outlived its cause. Films were shot a particular way because the stock was slow, because the camera was in a soundproof box the size of a wardrobe, because the studio owned the cinemas, or because a censorship code made the obvious version unfilmable. Many of those constraints are gone and the conventions they produced are still with us, now practised as taste by people who do not know they were once workarounds.
The other reason to bother is that it inoculates you against the belief that the current way of doing things is the natural one. Continuity editing, the shot–reverse–shot conversation, the ninety-minute runtime and the invisible cut are all inventions with dates and arguments attached. Knowing they were chosen makes it possible to choose otherwise.
What is still being argued about
Live disagreements between people who know what they are doing. You will find confident advice on both sides of each.
- Whether there is a canon — A shared body of films makes teaching possible and gives a common vocabulary. It is also, in its traditional form, overwhelmingly Western, male and mid-century, and it has been maintained by institutions with their own reasons. The reform position wants it widened; the abolitionist position holds that any canon is a claim about whose work counts. Nearly everybody teaching this now uses one and is uneasy about it.
- Technology as the driver — One reading of film history is essentially technological — sound, colour, portable cameras, video, digital, each arriving and reorganising the art around it. The objection is that this is determinism, that identical technology produced radically different cinema in different countries at the same moment, and that treating tools as the cause writes the people out of their own history.
- What the studio system was — The vertically integrated studios produced an extraordinary run of films with efficiency no modern production can approach, and this is regularly cited as evidence that constraint is generative. It is also true that the system was built on restrictive contracts, a censorship regime, and the exclusion of most of the people who wanted to work in it. Both of these are true simultaneously and any account that resolves the tension too neatly is selling something.
On the day
The payoff is that you stop reinventing solved problems and start knowing which rules are load-bearing. Most of what is presented to you as the correct way to shoot something is a convention with a date on it, and knowing the date is what tells you whether breaking it is a mistake or a choice.
Where to start
- Film Movements — The most efficient route in: each movement is a group of people responding to the same conditions, which makes the causes visible.
- Cinema Tech History — Where the constraints came from, and which of the conventions you have inherited were workarounds for problems you no longer have.
- Studio System — How the industry was structured when most of the canon was made, which explains a great deal about the films themselves.
Read next
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