How Film Histories Were Made: Materials, Methods, Discourses

This book is specifically dedicated to film history’s own history: It provides insights into the fabrication of film histories and the discourses on their materials and methods in the past in order to better understand and reconsider film history today. The interventions unpack unspoken assumptions and hidden agendas that determine film historiography until today, also with the aim to act as a critical reflection on the potential future orientation of the field. The edited volume proposes a transnational, entangled and culturally diverse approach towards an archaeology of film history, while paying specific attention to persons, objects, infrastructures, regions, institutional fields and events hitherto overlooked. It explores past and ongoing processes of doing, undoing and redoing film history. Thereby, in a self-reflective gesture, it also draws attention to our own work as film historians.

Malte Hagener is Professor of Media and Film Studies at Philipps-Universität Marburg, Germany. His publications include (with Thomas Elsaesser) Film Theory. An Introduction through the Senses (Routledge 2010, 2nd revised edition 2015). He is the co-editor of Handbuch Filmanalyse (Wiesbaden: Springer 2020; with Volker Pantenburg) and the editor of The Emergence of Film Culture. Knowledge Production, Institution Building and the Fate of the Avant-garde in Europe, 1919-1945. London: Berghahn 2014. Yvonne Zimmermann is Professor of Media Studies at Philipps-University Marburg. Recent books include the co-authored Advertising and the Transformation of Screen Cultures (AUP 2021) and the co-edited Films That Work Harder: The Global Circulations of Industrial Cinema (AUP 2023). She is the editor of a special issue on Asta Nielsen, the film star system and the introduction of the long feature film in Early Popular Visual Culture (2021).