Journal of Contemporary
History
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Film Studies and the Turn to History
Andrew Spicer
Journal of Contemporary History 2004; 39; 147
DOI: 10.1177/0022009404039890
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Journal of Contemporary History Copyright © 2004 SAGE Publications, London, Thousand Oaks, CA and
New Delhi, Vol 39(1), 147 155. ISSN 0022 0094.
DOI: 10.1177/0022009404039890
Andrew Spicer
Review Article
Film Studies and the Turn to History
James Chapman, Saints and Avengers: British Adventure Series of the 1960s,
London, I.B. Tauris, 2002; pp. xii + 282; ISBN 1 86064 754 5
Joshua Feinstein, The Triumph of the Ordinary: Depictions of Daily Life in
the East German Cinema, Chapel Hill and London, The University of North
Carolina Press, 2002; pp. xiii + 331; ISBN 0 8078 5385 2
Sue Harper, Women in British Cinema: Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know,
London, Continuum, 2000; pp. viii + 261; ISBN 0 8264 4733 3
Lutz Koepnick, The Dark Mirror: German Cinema between Hitler and
Hollywood, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2002; pp. xii + 322; ISBN
0 520 23311 5
Annette Kuhn, An Everyday Magic: Cinema and Cultural Memory, London,
I.B. Tauris, 2002; pp. xii + 273; ISBN 1 86064 867 3
Peter Stanfield, Hollywood, Westerns and the 1930s: The Lost Trail, Exeter,
University of Exeter Press, 2001; pp. ix + 258; ISBN 0 85989 694 3
In a recent keynote address, Jeffrey Richards argued that the study of cinema
had suffered from a disabling split between Film Studies and Cinema History.
The former, deriving from English Literature, was characterized by a preoccu-
pation with the text, with close readings of its style and structure; the latter,
deriving from History, was characterized by a concern for context, with the
production and reception of films situated in their historical moment.1 Indeed,
one could go further and remark how both sides of the divide generally tried to
ignore each other, or, if pressed, resorted to caricature. Film Studies was
judged by historians to be enmeshed in impenetrable, redundant and uni-
versalizing theory in which texts seemed to operate in a historical and social
vacuum. Cinema History was regarded as the province of a naïve, untheorized,
positivist empiricism that reduced all film texts to a simple set of messages that
could be read out from their historical context. However, as Richards goes on
to argue, this divide is no longer so sharp or so polarized. Each side has
learned from the strengths of the other s approaches and preoccupations
1 Jeffrey Richards,  Rethinking British Cinema , paper given at  Cinema, Identity, History: An
International Conference on British Cinema , held at the University of East Anglia in July 1998.
Published in Justine Ashby and Andrew Higson (eds), British Cinema, Past and Present (London
2000), 21 34.
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148 Journal of Contemporary History Vol 39 No 1
leading to a  rewarding convergence in which  many scholars on both sides
would regard themselves more broadly as cultural historians .2
This review will examine six studies that exemplify this  convergence . Each,
albeit in rather different ways, addresses this divide, what Annette Kuhn calls
the  text context dualism , and collectively they show the move away from the
determinist theories that characterized the 1970s and 1980s towards a histori-
cal contextualizing of film, the  turn to history that has characterized the
1990s and beyond. Each uses a wide variety of sources, taking a broad but
rigorously critical view of whatever might constitute potentially relevant evi-
dence. In order to make sense of a huge array of recent studies, I have selected
ones that exemplify some (by no means all) of the typical preoccupations of
film specialists: a concern with genre, gender, national cinemas, the relation-
ship of Hollywood and European cinema, reception (cinema-going) and the
embrace of television history.
Peter Stanfield s Hollywood, Westerns and the 1930s attempts  a more his-
torically grounded and culturally responsive understanding of the genre than
has hitherto been undertaken (225). He deliberately examines a neglected
period and covers both  prestige productions from the major studios and
little-known B-feature series Westerns customarily derided as formulaic
Poverty Row hokum, if not ignored altogether.3 In addition to an impressive
knowledge of the genre itself (both in film and in printed fiction), Stanfield
situates his thoughtful textual analyses of selected films within their variable
contexts of production, marketing, exhibition and reception. This analysis
reveals many unexpected insights. It was the studios production strategies
that created a series of unpredictable rises and falls as they tried to ensure
profitability in a volatile market-place. Westerns had a marked appeal for
women as well as men and were promoted so as to attract as wide an audience
as possible. A-feature Westerns were often elaborately marketed as  outdoor
pictures , historical melodramas set in the West, romantic and sentimental
adventure stories in an evocative setting.
Stanfield s turn to history builds on recent revisionist genre studies including
those by Steve Neale, who argues that genres must be determined empirically
rather than theoretically.4 Stanfield is particularly indebted to Rick Altman,
who suggests that genres are characterized by transience, hybridization and
mutation, often demonstrating a series of dislocations and renewals rather
than stability and smooth evolution.5 Stanfield s historical focus enables him
2 Ibid., 21.
3 The Western has undergone a critical revival of late; see Edward Buscombe and Roberta
Pearson (eds), Back in the Saddle Again: New Essays on the Western (London 1998); Michael
Coyne, The Crowded Prairie: American National Identity in the Hollywood Western (London
1998).
4 Steve Neale,  Questions of Genre , Screen, 22, 1 (1990), 45 66; Steve Neale, Genre and
Hollywood (London 2000). Neale s earlier Genre (London 1980), was high structuralist, his shift
in position is representative of the turn to history in the 1990s.
5 Rick Altman,  Reusable Packaging: Generic Products and the Recycling Process in Nick
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Spicer: Film Studies and the Turn to History 149
to take issue with  critical orthodoxies that produce ahistorical, mythical
readings of the Western, which are evolutionary and teleological. Rather than
telling, in various guises, the same epic tale of opening up the frontier,
Stanfield argues that Westerns tell different types of stories. In this period the
dominant narrative, as demonstrated by Gene Autry and the phenomenon of
the singing cowboy, offered a synthesis of Old and New World values through
which audiences could accommodate the experience of modernity. Stanfield s
Conclusion usefully sets out some avenues for further work that his approach
has opened up.
If the study of genre was dominated, until recently, by structuralist analyses,
gender was the province of ahistorical psychoanalytical discussions that iden-
tified popular Hollywood films as purveyors of patriarchal values, addressing
a male spectator through the objectification of women and valorizing com-
petitive males as ego-ideals.6 But gender studies has also turned to history and
discussions have emerged arguing that gender is both culturally constructed
and changes over time.7 Hollywood cinema continues, for obvious reasons, to
be seen as a crucial site for images of masculinity and femininity, but studies of
gender in other cinemas have emerged, demonstrating that Hollywood s con-
struction of gender, however anatomized, is far from universal or completely
dominant.8 Sue Harper s Women in British Cinema is a major contribution to
this growing body of literature. She combines a combative and engaged femi-
nism with a scholarly analysis of a wide variety of primary sources that allow
her to contextualize her acute analyses of the constructions of women in over
600 films, providing a comprehensive mapping of images of women in British
films from 1930 through to 1990. Of particular importance is her delineation
of the various forms of agency that determined what images reached the
screen. Production companies and heads of studios (Alexander Korda,
Michael Balcon) dominated the 1930s and 1940s. In the 1950s the distributors
took control, less prescriptive and more market-orientated, while in the 1960s
directors came to the fore because American finance gave them a surprisingly
free hand. However, this freedom had counter-productive effects, as  British
films of the 1960s were in fact far more prescriptive towards women than they
had been in the 1950s (102). The 1970s and 1980s were characterized by an
 unpredictable melange in which various elements struggled for dominance.
Harper s model of change is a dynamic one. During the war, while the
Browne (ed.), Refiguring American Film Genres: Theory and History (Berkeley, CA 1998), 1 41;
Rick Altman, Film/Genre (London 1999).
6 The seminal account was Laura Mulvey,  Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema , Screen, 16,
3 (1975), 6 18. Mulvey has subsequently modified her position and her more recent essays have
argued for the importance of historical context, as in Fetishism and Curiosity (London 1996).
7 The most influential has been Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of
Identity (London 1990); see also Michael Roper and John Tosh (eds), Manful Assertions.
Masculinities in Britain since 1800 (London 1991).
8 A recent example is Ulrike Sieglohr (ed.), Heroines Without Heroes. Reconstructing Female
Identities in European Cinema, 1945 51 (London 2000).
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150 Journal of Contemporary History Vol 39 No 1
Ministry of Information tried to straightjacket images of women within
narrow bounds of middle-class decorum, unruly companies such as Gains-
borough Pictures made a series of risqué  bodice-rippers which included The
Wicked Lady (1945), orientated towards the desires of working-class females.
Remarkably, Harper s study also discusses the contributions made by
women as industry practitioners: as directors, producers, screenwriters, cos-
tume designers, art directors and editors. Harper s intention is to celebrate the
creative energy of women, under even the most unpropitious conditions. Her
analysis is made all the more persuasive by being so fully documented as she
charts the careers of producers such as Betty Box at Rank, or Aida Young at
Hammer Films who only got her chance because one of the male incumbents
broke his leg at a crucial moment. These histories invite the reader to reflect
back upon the chronology of the first half. Actresses, perhaps surprisingly, are
not included, as Harper contends that they did not possess sufficient institu-
tional power. However, their personae feature prominently in the first half.
There is, for instance, an excellent account of the importance of Diana Dors,
whose sensual image stares out from the front cover. As a whole, Women in
British Cinema demonstrates the richness of historical studies of gender, one
that can account for fluctuations in representation and for the changes in
what women could achieve within a patriarchal, not to say misogynist film
industry.9
The study of national cinemas has generally been the province of film
historians and the 1990s witnessed a renewed burst of energy.10 Of particular
interest are those studies that open up previously unexplored cinemas, hence
the importance of Joshua Feinstein s The Triumph of the Ordinary, a sub-
stantial contribution to the fast-growing literature on East German cinema, for
so long ignored or marginalized in the West and which has been generated,
in part, by the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989.11 Making use of pre-
viously banned and unseen films and newly-opened archives together with
interviews with East German directors, actors and state officials, Feinstein
provides an overview of the function of the state film studio, Deutsche
Film-Aktiengesellschaft (DEFA). At the heart of his study is the detailed analy-
sis of six films  Alltagsfilme  produced in the period from the late 1950s to
the early 1970s that depict daily life in the GDR. Feinstein gives close
attention to their qualities as films, their strikingly different visual styles  the
neo-realism of Berlin-Ecke Schönhauser (1957) or the  socialist surrealism of
Der geteilte Himmel (1964)  their themes and subject matter, but set in the
9 For a complementary study of images of men see Andrew Spicer, Typical Men: The Repre-
sentation of Masculinity in Popular British Cinema (London 2001).
10 As in the  National Cinema series under the general editorship of Susan Hayward. For a
stimulating and wide-ranging collection of essays see Mette Hjort and Scott MacKenzie (eds),
Cinema and Nation (London 2000).
11 Seán Allan and John Sandford (eds), DEFA: East German Cinema, 1946 1992 (New York
and Oxford 1999); Robert R. Shandley, Rubble Films. German Cinema in the Shadow of the
Third Reich (Philadelphia 2001).
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Spicer: Film Studies and the Turn to History 151
context of a detailed analysis of their production and reception, both for audi-
ences and within the ongoing debates about the role of film within the GDR.
He argues convincingly that their concentration on the lives of ordinary citi-
zens could contest, without overt political criticism (impossible under such a
regime), official notions about the inevitability of progress under a communist
state. They helped construct collective identity in a society that lacked mythic
origins of nationhood, an acceptance of East German society for
what it was rather than for what it might ideally be, one that was profoundly
affected by a taste for American popular culture. Through this specific focus,
The Triumph of the Ordinary opens out into wider issues: to the role of cul-
ture within repressive regimes, to a re-examination of Cold War myths, and
towards a more inclusive history of German cinema.12
If Feinstein s book is an excellent example of how to conduct a balanced
and judicious history of a national cinema, Lutz Koepnick shows just how
permeable and uncertain national boundaries are when considering such an
international industry as film. The Dark Mirror  builds on recent work in
German film scholarship that has emphasized the extent to which German
cinema has been from its very inception a cinema of cultural transfers and
transcultural fusions, of border crossings and transgressive identifications
(2).13 The first half of Koepnick s account reconfigures nazi cinema as one that
appropriated Hollywood strategies, using stars, high production values, elabo-
rate promotions and genres in very similar ways. However, this occurred at
the same time as the adoption of sound offered the chance to construct a
national cinema in a way that had been impossible in the international com-
merce of silent cinema. Nazi Westerns, for instance, borrowed from American
models but were avowedly German, blending Siegfried with Tom Mix and
using speech to promote a national identity: Luis Trenker s thick Tyrolean
accent in Johann Sutter s The Emperor of California (1937). The second half
of the book discusses the Diaspora of Weimar film-makers, emphasizing the
disparate nature of their impact on an American cinema that was experiencing
profound changes postwar. As his selection of little-known examples shows,
this influence cannot be confined to the well-known case of film noir, though
Koepnick has a discerning chapter on Robert Siodmak. Of particular interest
in a discipline wedded to the power of the image is his discussion of music, the
ways in which composers Max Steiner or Eric Korngold reworked their
Wagnerian heritage within an American context.
The Dark Mirror raises important questions about the form and function of
national cinemas and about the formation of national identity in general. Its
history of German cinema demonstrates the importance of contingency, messy
incoherence and simultaneity in its construction. If this emphasis on fractures
12 The complementary study is Heide Fehrenbach, Cinema in Democratizing Germany:
Reconstructing National Identity after Hitler (Chapel Hill, NC and London 1995); see also Sabine
Hake, German National Cinema (London 2002).
13 Koepnick s study is indebted to Thomas Elsaesser, Weimar and After: Germany s Historical
Imaginary (London 2000).
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152 Journal of Contemporary History Vol 39 No 1
and discontinuities seems conventionally postmodern, in the Epilogue Koep-
nick takes issue with universalizing conceptions of postmodernity in favour of
accounts that are sensitive to historically-specific constellations. His work con-
tributes to the growing number of accounts of cross-cultural, transnational
studies that examine the complex and shifting exchange, interchange and
rivalry between European national cinemas and Hollywood.14 Far from illus-
trating a simple thesis about American cultural imperialism trying to over-
whelm a struggling European Art Cinema, these studies show a fluctuating
and dynamic relationship in which both cinemas engage in complex assimila-
tion and reworking of each other s characteristic modalities.
Annette Kuhn s An Everyday Magic is an important and groundbreaking
book, the fruit of a decade-long ethnohistorical enquiry that attempts to revise
our understanding of audiences and cinema-going. Collected and discussed
here are the personal memories of the  first movie-made generation , the men
and women who went to the pictures in the 1930s when two-thirds of the
British population were regular and frequent cinema-goers. Some 78 respond-
ents were interviewed in four contrasting locations: Glasgow, Greater
Manchester, East Anglia and Harrow. What comes through vividly is the
power of films to affect viewers emotions, including those of Tom Affleck
who was so terrified by seeing The Werewolf of London (1935) at the age of
eleven that he developed a nervous compulsion to blink. As Kuhn notes, the
recollected moments from films are ones that are particularly cinematic. There
are also memories of going to the cinema as child, adolescent or adult, of visit-
ing particular cinemas, recollection of which evokes memories of place,
lifestyle and relationships. Pronounced gender differences emerge, causing
Kuhn to suggest that women possibly have a deeper and more complex invest-
ment in cinema than men.
The great strength of this study is that this oral history is not taken as
unproblematic evidence, affording authentic access to how things really were,
but understood as a complex discourse that is produced in the activity of
remembering itself. Kuhn supplements the respondents memories with an
analysis of 1930s film culture, derived from popular periodicals such as Film
Fashionland, a hybrid of film magazine and woman s magazine, public
debates that included the effects on children of seeing films (especially horrific
or frightening ones) that formed part of a wider discourse about how child-
hood was to be understood, and the textual analysis of some of the most
popular films of the decade. There is an excellent examination of the pleasures
offered by Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers (the book is published in America
as Dreaming of Fred and Ginger). This multifaceted approach not only offers
14 Other studies include: Peter Lev, The Euro-American Cinema (Austin, TX 1993); Geoffrey
Nowell-Smith and Steven Ricci (eds), Hollywood and Europe: Economics, Culture, National
Identity 1945 95 (London 1998); Andrew Higson and Richard Maltby (eds),  Film Europe and
 Film America Cinema, Commerce and Cultural Exchange 1920 1939 (Exeter 1999); Graham
Petrie, Hollywood Destinies: European Directors in America, 1922 1931 (Detroit 2001).
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Spicer: Film Studies and the Turn to History 153
suggestive possibilities for reconstructing an  historical social audience (which
reception studies has generally shied away from), but also provokes a rethink-
ing of the cinema spectator connection  admitting a broader range of
embodied engagements into that relationship (237).15 It also raises questions
about canonicity, as the films and stars celebrated in recollection are not
always the same ones that were most popular during the period itself. Most
generally, it uses a specific focus on cinema-going as part of a wider explo-
ration of the processes of cultural memory, one of the most dynamic arenas of
current historical scholarship.16
James Chapman s study of 1960s adventure series on British television,
Saints and Avengers, is in part a celebration of the time when Britain was at
the forefront of television culture, producing series  including Danger Man,
The Avengers, The Saint and Department S  that were popular at the time
and have now acquired cult status. However, although an enthusiast,
Chapman is first and foremost a disciplined cultural historian, rescuing the
material from uncritical aficionados and from what he refers to as  theory-
driven cultural studies analyses . In a sequence of ten case studies that pay
meticulous attention to the programmes textual properties, Chapman brings
out the particular interest of the series under discussion. For instance,
his analysis of The Avengers examines its symptomatic change from a
noir-inflected realism to a Pop Art aesthetic, whereas his examination of The
Saint rightly emphasizes the longevity of Charteris s creation and its mut-
ability. Chapman demonstrates how these series were international, but
rooted in British popular culture, not an ersatz Americanism. In addition to
detailing their production histories, Chapman scrutinizes their critical and
popular reception. Uniformly derided at the time by censorious critics scornful
of popular culture, these series, Chapman argues, are still resistant to con-
ventional critical analysis. Television Studies has been preoccupied with social
realist dramas or  quality programmes (literary adaptations or single plays) or
with more modern police series or  soaps and lacks a language to discuss
programmes that are  unauthored , anchored neither to their directors oeuvre,
nor to that of their writers. In making such an eloquent case for the signifi-
cance of these programmes, Chapman s substantial volume lays the ground-
work for a new series of scholarly studies of popular television genres for
which he will act as general editor. And, like his study of James Bond, it
situates a particular form within a wider social and cultural history.17
15 See also Janet Staiger, Interpreting Films: Studies in the Historical Reception of American
Films (Princeton, NJ 1992); and the three collections edited by Melvyn Stokes and Richard
Maltby: American Movie Audiences: From the Turn of the Century to the Early Sound Era
(London 1999); Identifying Hollywood s Audiences: Cultural Identity and the Movies (London
1999); Hollywood Spectatorship: Changing Perceptions of Cinema Audiences (London 2000).
16 For an overview, see the Introduction to T.G. Ashplant, Graham Dawson and Michael
Roper (eds), The Politics of War Memory and Commemoration (London 2000).
17 James Chapman, Licence to Thrill: A Cultural History of the James Bond Films (London
1999).
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154 Journal of Contemporary History Vol 39 No 1
All these six studies are revisionist, interrogating the procedures and objec-
tives of both Film Studies and Cinema History, arguing for an approach that
is attentive equally to historical, social and cultural contexts and to textual
interpretation (including judgments about aesthetic quality), recognizing films
(or television programmes) as complex and often contradictory texts. There is
a pronounced willingness to widen the canon, to scrutinize little-known or
marginalized examples in order to construct an objective account of the range
of films actually being produced at particular moments. In each case, the
author proceeds from a solid base of empirical research, from a close scrutiny
and evaluation of the available sources, official documents, production histo-
ries, the trade press, contemporaneous magazine, newspaper and journal
articles, autobiographies, memoirs and oral accounts. There is a concern with
methodology, of the need to be explicit about procedures, and each is theo-
retically informed without allowing those theories to dominate discussion of
the material under consideration. Importantly, each has a place for agency,
often eliminated in determinist theory: structuralists insistence on the deep
structures or  grammar that subtended all texts, or post-structuralists insist-
ence on competing discourses. But that agency is seen as variable and histori-
cally conditioned, working within particular constraints that operate in
different ways at different times. And audiences, so long reified out of exist-
ence as hypothesized spectators, are now an important presence as social and
cultural entities. In important ways each conceives of historical change as
being discontinuous and unpredictable, subject to unexpected contingencies
rather than evolutionary and teleological. However, this does not preclude
their ability to take on broad issues, including modernism and postmodernism,
but through a specific and detailed focus that reveals their complexities.
Finally each, in my opinion, recasts film history as cultural history without
losing sight of the textual properties of films, the specificity of the film
industry, and of cinema as a social institution.18
Taken as a representative group, these six books show that film history is
now a well-established and self-confident field of enquiry, one that has made
significant advances since Allen and Gomery s 1985 apologia.19 We can look
forward to further studies in the historical construction of gender or genre or
audiences, the uneven and problematic creation of national cinemas, and to
accounts of the shifting relationship of Hollywood and European cinema.20
Koepnick s perceptive analysis of the role in nazi cinema of the Swedish-born
Zarah Leander, whose star persona became a site for negotiating complex and
unstable gender identities, sexual mores, and cosmopolitan modernity, a
18 As Peter Burke has remarked, the aim of cultural history is to resist endless fragmentation
without returning to the misleading assumption of the homogeneity of a given society or period,
Varieties of Cultural History (New York 1997), 201.
19 Robert C. Allen and Douglas Gomery, Film History: Theory and Practice (New York 1985).
20 For an interesting rehearsal of some of the issues see Dimitris Eleftheriotis, Popular Cinemas
of Europe (London 2001).
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Spicer: Film Studies and the Turn to History 155
multiple space for contradictory allegiances, indicates the importance of star
studies, still an under-researched area of film history.21 If the director is not
always the key creative source, we should be encouraging further work on
producers and screenwriters, cinematographers and set designers, taking
cognizance of Pierre Bourdieu s concept of the shifting field of cultural pro-
duction.22 The study of Third World cinema is becoming an increasingly
important subject, with Bollywood, another transcultural phenomenon, con-
stituting its own critical industry.23 Chapman s study emphasizes the need to
expand the scope of film history into television, and beyond that to try to con-
nect electronic images with wider cultural processes and histories. This needs
to take place in two directions, back into cinema s pre-history and forward
into its perilous future. Ben Singer s recent Melodrama and Modernity is an
important contribution to work on pre- and early cinema which emphasizes
that perception itself has a social and cultural history.24 That cultural history
now needs to engage with the impact of digital technologies, which have all
manner of profound implications for how we understand film history and cin-
ema itself.25 These are exciting times for the cultural historian.
Andrew Spicer
is Senior Lecturer in Visual Culture in the Faculty of Art, Media and
Design at the University of the West of England. He is the author of
Typical Men: The Representation of Masculinity in Popular British
Cinema (London 2001) and Film Noir (London 2002). He is
currently editing a collection of essays on European film noir and
completing a study of the producer Sydney Box for the  British Film
Makers series.
21 Recent star studies include Ginette Vincendeau, Stars and Stardom in French Cinema
(London 2000); Bruce Babington (ed.), British Stars and Stardom (Manchester 2001).
22 Pierre Bourdieu,  The Field of Cultural Production, or: The Economic World Reversed in
The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, selected and edited by Randall
Johnson (Cambridge 1993), 29 73.
23 See, for instance, Vijay Mishra, Bollywood Cinema: Temples of Desire (London 2002).
24 Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and its Contexts (New
York 2001); see also Leo Charney and Vanessa R. Schwartz (eds), Cinema and the Invention of
Modern Life (Berkeley, CA 1995); Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception Attention,
Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA and London 1999).
25 For a stimulating collection see Thomas Elsaesser and Kay Hoffmann (eds), Cinema Futures:
Cain, Abel or Cable? Media Kinships in the Digital Age (Amsterdam 1998).
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