Problems of Film History

Abstract

tended reader, the film student. It would appear to be for his benefit that detailed accounts of the travails of Muybridge and Edison, Friese-Greene and Birt Acres, the Lumieres and Demeny, Paul, Melies, Porter, and Uchatius are now being so generously published. Are there, then, really many students in a field that covers so small a segment in the history of human activity? The line is very thin between the student for whom these books are supposedly written and the writers themselves, for the metamorphosis of student into scholar into historian has rarely been complete. The student turns to the film histories and there finds confusion, gossip, and the wildest sort of speculation. He quickly sees that scholarship is no prerequisite to the writing of motion picture history. Adding his own speculations to the general muddle, he often becomes himself an author of film history. His work may bear a new adjective-critical, phychological, or encyclopedicbut rarely does it present a new historical fact. Film historiography has taken a pattern somewhat akin to that of the film's own historic development. The film moved from the factual, simple pieces of Lumiere and Edison to the "made-up"