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When you use film as a historical source, explains Douglas Allen, you must first understand the person behind the camera.
When we look at old film (and its 'big brother' still photography for that matter), some basic questions come to mind. Why was it made? By whom was it made and for whom? Who used it, and how? We know that historians are amongst the current most avid consumers of film, since its academic 'discovery' in the 1970s as a valid historical primary source. Their most immediate concentration was on the more obviously respectable 'semi-official' sources such as newsreel and documentary. But in recent years, feature films have entered into the reckoning as primary sources for the ideological and social attitudes of their time. Historians have found great value in studying both the 'texts' of films as well as the 'contexts' of their production.
But who made and used the original - primarily non-fiction - films which historians still mostly study? How and why did film-makers use this medium? Three broad categories of user come to mind - professionals, amateurs and organisations. The professionals were those who embraced the new medium of film from the late nineteenth century as a way of making a living or expressing themselves. They ranged from the entrepreneurial showmen, who filmed local events and toured the shows and fairgrounds with them, to the artists, who exploited the realistic - or sometimes in their creative hands, surrealistic - view of the world afforded by the still or moving picture. The amateurs were those who came in their wake, hobbyists embracing the excitement of the new technology. With their small gauge cameras, they documented their world - a mixture of domestic and public spheres - but with little awareness of their value to future generations of film archivists and historians. The organisations were the bodies, from government level downwards to anti-establishment militants, who sought to harness the medium to help spread their message. Sometimes it was 'official' information and education that emerged, about the latest initiative and improvement to the system; other times the films' content was 'unofficial', agitational propaganda against the current order.
Taking all these users together, a number of common threads emerge as to how and why they used film - what might be defined as the personal/psychological, the social/cultural and the political/ideological motivations.
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Content last updated: 07/01/2005
