Artikel: On the prospect of writing cinema history from below

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theoretically informed historicizing of its objectives. No longer a simple matterof “excavating” original documents and material traces and causes of an objectivelyexisting past, film history has taken on a self-reflective awareness of itsown discursive processes of writing and mediation.’ 29 Sobchack certainly talksthe talk of the historical deconstructionists, describing a dichotomy between an‘old’ and a ‘new’ history, in which‘Grand, coherent, and evolutionary narratives have given way to local andmicro histories – and the gaps and ruptures in our knowledge of the past areforegrounded rather than smoothed over (...). history has lost its stability asthe grounded site upon which knowledge of the past is accumulated, coherentlyordered, and legitimated; rather, it has become an unstable site inwhich fragments of past representations do not necessarily ‘add up’ or coherebut, instead, are subject to “undisciplined” (and often “undisciplining”)contestation and use’. 30Exactly where this new self-reflective history has displayed its self-awareness is,however, more difficult to discern either in Sobchack’s essay or in the referencesit lists. Instead, Sobchack elevates a somewhat quirky but otherwise unremarkableproject in historical archaeology – the excavation of the remains of the setsfor Cecil B. deMille’s 1923 movie the ten commandments in the GuadalupeDunes near Santa Barbara, California – into ‘a symbol of the destabilisedgrounds of contemporary historical theory and practice’, a ‘revelatory allegory’of ‘our increased estrangement from and desire to recuperate a history we knowwe never knew’. 31 Asserting that ‘a traditionalist empiricist [sic] film historywhose temporal trajectory, causations, and meanings can be excavated, represented,and understood in terms of some linear, unidirectional, and progressivenotion of “original” events and chronological “order” based upon the “coherence”,“consistency”, and “reliability” of an accumulation of “authentic” trace“evidence” left by the past’ is no more than a ‘crazy dream’, Sobchack argues thatthe buried set represents ‘a fabricated version of yet another lost Egyptian citywhose “authenticity” and “origins” are irrecoverable, unknowable and hencehistorically “fabulous”’. 32 What she fails to do, however, is to demonstrate whatthe destabilised and undisciplined ‘historical nomadism’ she advocates wouldtell us. Remaining true to her theoretical premises by declining to confront aconcrete (or even a plaster-of-Paris) historical subject matter, Sobchack’s essayenvisions historical journeys that she might embark on, but goes nowhere. 33Richard Maltby | 79
80 | tmg — 9 [2] 2006Total histories of the film textThe grand, coherent, evolutionary narratives of cinema history to whichSobchack alludes have been more imagined than actually written. 34 In 1973, JeanMitry proposed an ideal of film history as‘simultaneously, a history of its industry, its technologies, its systems ofexpression (or, more precisely, its systems of signification), and aestheticstructures, all bound together by the forces of the economic, psychosocialand cultural order’. 35This version of film history as simultaneously medium-specific and totalisingremains common to much contemporary film historiography, although itsintellectual origins in the Annales School of French history are less often acknowledged.French film historian Michèle Lagny follows Mitry in describingher version of a preferred film history as ‘a part of a larger ensemble, the socioculturalhistory (...) conceived as an articulation among three types of analysis,dealing with cultural objects, with the framework of their creation, making andcirculation, and finally with their consumption’. She sees the desirable conditionof film history as being that of ‘an open field where different forces (economic,social, political, technical, cultural or aesthetic) come into being and confronteach other’. She insists, however, that films are central to film history: ‘thecore is the film text, because only the film is the sign that cinema does exist (ordoesn’t exist any longer). Working from the cinema or on the cinema meansstarting from the film, and going back to it’. 36In her 1997 Screen essay, ‘Film History Terminable and Interminable’,Barbara Klinger invokes Fernand Braudel’s unattainable ambition ‘if not to seeeverything, at least to locate everything, and on the requisite grand scale’ beforedescribing ‘a cinematic histoire totale’ that places ‘a film within multifariousintertextual and historical frames’, to produce a ‘rashomon-like effect wherethe researcher uncovers different historical “truths” about a film as she/he analyseshow it has been deployed within past social relations’ and ‘the film’s variable,even contradictory, ideological meanings come into focus’. 37 The ‘totalisedperspective’ that Klinger proposes ‘provides a sense of what the historical prospectswere for viewing at a given time by illuminating the meanings made availablewithin that moment’. 38 In keeping with Lagny’s prescription, however,Klinger places the individual film text at the centre of the multifarious intersectionsshe describes.A consequence of the expectation that the film text must be the central objectof film history surfaces in Richard Abel’s argument, in his essay in the CinemaJournal forum, that Robert Allen’s recent work on audiences in the AmericanSouth
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Page 23: 96 | tmg — 9 [2] 200688 Ibid., p.

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