How film became history the rise of the archival documentary in 1930s America Thomas Doherty

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Doherty, Thomas Patrick, author.

Series:

Film and culture series

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Documentary films--United States--History and criticism.

Documentary films.

Motion picture industry--United States--History--20th century.

Motion picture industry.

Documentary films--History and criticism.

Motion picture industry--History.

United States.

Physical Description:

1 online resource

Place of Publication:

Columbia University Press (Lightning Source), 2026.

New York Columbia University Press 2026

Summary:

By the 1930s, filmmakers had access to a backlog of footage from nearly forty years of motion pictures, allowing them to create a new kind of film stitched together from the raw material of older films. At around the same time, the transition to synchronous sound added a transformative new element to the grammar of cinema: the voiceover narration. Together, the film inventory and offscreen commentary gave rise to the archival documentary, the motion picture genre that preserves and rewinds history. Thomas Doherty tells the story of the archival documentary, spotlighting the first films that set out deliberately to preserve history on screen. He shows how newsreels and documentaries challenged the era's restrictive censorship and how film began to engage with the great political issues of the day. Doherty considers a range of films--some well-known, others obscure--including J. Stuart Blackton's The Film Parade (1933), Laurence Stallings and Truman Talley's The First World War (1934), Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr.'s Hitler's Reign of Terror (1934), Max Eastman and Herbert Axelbank's Tsar to Lenin (1937), and the March of Time screen magazine. Tracing the creation of the archival documentary, How Film Became History illuminates how motion pictures have come to shape our vision of the past

Contents:

Frontmatter CONTENTS Acknowledgments and Author's Notes Prologue: Archival Apparitions 1 The Newsreels in the Morgue 2 Four Years of Visible Hell in Seventy-Seven Minutes: Laurence Stallings and Truman Talley's The First World War 3 The Search for Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr.'s Hitler's Reign of Terror (1934) 4 Max Eastman and Herman Axelbank's Tsar to Lenin (1937): A Visible History of the Russian Revolution 5 The Movies Turn Introspective 6 A Good Deal of Newsreel Content Belongs on the Marquee Notes Index

Notes:

Includes index

Description based on CIP data; resource not viewed

Other Format:

Print version:

ISBN:

9780231564267

0231564260

9780231565981

0231565984

OCLC:

1579846773

Publisher Number:

CIPO000352507

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license