On the History of Film Style (2018)

290 2. DEFENDING AND DEFINING THE SEVENTH ART The period of film history considered in this chapter is surveyed in Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell, Film History: An Introduction 4th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2018), chaps. 1-9. On French film culture of the post-World War I era, see Richard Abel, ed., French Film Theory and Criticism, 1907-1939: A History/Anthology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988). See also Vincent Pinel, Introduction au ciné-club: Histoire, théorie et pratique du ciné-club en France (Paris: Editions Ouvriéres, 1964); and Georges Sadoul, “Les ciné-clubs en France et dans le monde,” Synthéses no, 2 (1947): 155-161. German film culture and film theory are surveyed in Sabine Hake, The Cinema’s Third Machine: Writing on Film in Germany, 1907-1933 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993). Myron Lounsbury’s The Origins of American Film Criticism: 1909-1939 (New York: Arno Press, 1973) provides a fine analysis of American writing about film before World War II. Two useful anthologies are Stanley Kauffmann and Bruce Henstell, eds., American Film Criticism: From the Beginnings to Citizen Kane (New York: Liveright, 1972); and Stanley Hochman, ed., From Quasimodo to Scarlett O’Hara: A National Board of Review Anthology, 1920-1940 (New York: Ungar, 1982). In addition, there is the indispensible George C. Pratt collection, Spellbound in Darkness: A History of the Silent Film (Greenwich, Conn.: New York Graphic Society, 1973). For discussions of this tradition, see Myron O. Lounsbury, ““The Gathered Light’: History, Criticism, and The Rise of the American Film,” Quarterly Review of Film Studies 5, no. 1 (Winter 1980): 49-85; and Robert C. Allen and Douglas Gomery, Film History: Theory and Practice (New York: Random House, 1985), pp. 51-62. Janet Staiger discusses the creation of the repertoire of classics in “The Politics of Film Canons,” Cinema Journal 24, no. 3 (Spring 1985): 4-23. The literature on the development of modernism is enormous. A thoughtful over-view is Christopher Butler, Early Modernism: Literature, Music and Painting in Europe 1900-1916 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). Robert Hughes’s The Shock of the New (New York: Knopf, 1981) is an incisive popular survey. Peinture cinéma peinture (Paris: Hazan, 1989), a stunning exhibition catalogue, contains important essays on the relations between film and modernism in the visual arts. On the history of film archives see Penelope Houston, Keepers of the Frame: The Film Archives (London: British Film Institute, 1994); and Raymond Borde, Les cinémathéques (Lausanne: L’Age d’Homme, 1983). More specific studies are Anthony Slide, Nitrate Won’t Wait: Film Preservation in the United States (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1992); Ivan Butler, To Encourage the Art of the Film: The Story of the British Film Institute (London: Hale, 1971); Anne Head, ed., A True Love for Cinema: Jacques Ledoux, 1921-1988 (The Hague: Universitaire Pers Rotterdam, 1988); and “Jacques Ledoux, L’éclaireur,” special issue of La revue belge du cinéma no. 40 (November 1995). The history of MOMA’s Film Department is traced by Russell Lynes in Good Old Modern: An Intimate Portrait of the Museum of Modern Art (New York: Atheneum, 1973) and by Mary Lea Bandy and Eileen Bowser in “Film,” in The Museum of Modern Art, New York: The History and the Collection (New York: Abrams, 1984), pp. 527-530. See also John E. Abbott and Iris Barry, “An Outline of a Project for Founding the Film Library of the Museum of Modern Art,” Film History 7, no. 3 (1995): 325~335. A major contemporary statement of the film archive’s mission is Catherine A. Surowiec, ed., NOTE TO PAGE 12