Mon Feb 18, 2008 1:37 pm
I just finished reading Robert C. Allen and Douglas Gomery's FILM HISTORY THEORY AND PRACTICE (1st ed., 1985). I highly recommend it with the caveat that it might be a bit too much belly button gazing for some of you, since it is a book on historiography rather than history.
Like any discipline, history has its own craft toolkit; texts and treatises covering the historiography of EVERYTHING abound. Since my degree is in history I ended up reading quite a few of them while in college. Although the only one I remember distinctly is Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, the formal training does help focus you on the assumptions underlying any historical text. I have never yet seen a book on theory and method in film history, possibly because the discipline itself is rather new. From the preface:
"One of the signs of maturity of any new discipline is a consciousness of its own methods and approaches, successes and shortcomings. We believe that film history has reached the point that it deserves an examination of the historical questions that have been asked about the cinema's past and of the approaches that have been and might be taken in answering them. It is this function that Film History: Theory and Practice attempts to serve."
The book is divided into three parts:
1. Reading, Researching, and Writing Film History
2. Traditional Approaches to Film History (with four chapters covering Aesthetic, Technological, Economic, and Social film history)
3. Doing Film History
One of the longer discussions in the book uses Kracauer's From Caligari to Hitler as a case study for certain types of film histories. There was a recent discussion of Kracauer on this group; I have not read Kracauer but those of you who have may find the dissection interesting. The book is not aimed completely at historians and writers, but is also intended to provide the film history reader a more critical approach to the available materials.
Fred
Like any discipline, history has its own craft toolkit; texts and treatises covering the historiography of EVERYTHING abound. Since my degree is in history I ended up reading quite a few of them while in college. Although the only one I remember distinctly is Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, the formal training does help focus you on the assumptions underlying any historical text. I have never yet seen a book on theory and method in film history, possibly because the discipline itself is rather new. From the preface:
"One of the signs of maturity of any new discipline is a consciousness of its own methods and approaches, successes and shortcomings. We believe that film history has reached the point that it deserves an examination of the historical questions that have been asked about the cinema's past and of the approaches that have been and might be taken in answering them. It is this function that Film History: Theory and Practice attempts to serve."
The book is divided into three parts:
1. Reading, Researching, and Writing Film History
2. Traditional Approaches to Film History (with four chapters covering Aesthetic, Technological, Economic, and Social film history)
3. Doing Film History
One of the longer discussions in the book uses Kracauer's From Caligari to Hitler as a case study for certain types of film histories. There was a recent discussion of Kracauer on this group; I have not read Kracauer but those of you who have may find the dissection interesting. The book is not aimed completely at historians and writers, but is also intended to provide the film history reader a more critical approach to the available materials.
Fred
