INTRODUCTION

Defining the Local Film

IN THE BEGINNING, ALL MOVING images were local. In Eadweard Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion plates, taken at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1880s, we often see an old man with a long, white beard who was none other than Muybridge himself. In West Orange, New Jersey, Thomas Edison’s technicians cast themselves in their early film experiments. Fred Ott saw his own sneeze.

And soon after Auguste and Louis Lumière first directed their cinematograph toward their employees leaving their factory in Lyon, they projected the results so their subjects could see themselves. The cinema was conceived as a solipsistic enterprise. To make a movie was also to see one, and those who saw movies often saw themselves in them.

But even after these early moving image experiments birthed a new industry, local films remained a central appeal of a movie show. Traveling exhibitors carried movie cameras with them as they went from fairground to amusement hall to tent show, confident that a local film made just hours before that night’s show would be a surer draw than a reel purchased three years ago.

For the first fifteen years of the cinema, 1895 to 1910, local films were a regular feature of the picture show. In this period, the local film was a genre, often identified in newspapers, theater programs, and billboards as “local views,” “topicals,” or “actualities.” Like other early cinema genres, the definition of local film was as much prescriptive as descriptive. Audiences and exhibitors alike recognized local views as motion pictures that were made near the site of their intended exhibition in order to give people the opportunity to see themselves on screen. One could “get in” a local film in much the same manner that one made the decision to go see a picture show—just by showing up. Even if many audiences saw local films in this early period, they were ephemeral experiences, much like the cinema itself.

This begins to change around 1910, when what André Gaudreault calls the “institutionalization” of the cinema commenced.¹ Distributors started to circulate film programs on a regular, and predictable, basis. Film production itself became more organized, and within a few years, the building blocks of the industry—genres and stars—were in place. In most cities and towns, the movies themselves went from an occasional spectacle to a permanent, settled fixture in local life. In many ways, the cinema’s arrival as an institution occurred precisely at the moment that there was something called a “moving picture theater” in town.

These new purpose-built movie theaters were both appendages of the communities in which they were located and conduits for national, and occasionally global, content.² Unlike other manufactured goods, which became domesticated as they were integrated into the routines of everyday life, motion pictures themselves never stayed in town long enough to become familiar. Movies were a commodity—sold by the foot, produced by the reel, and exchanged between exhibitors and distributors. There appeared to be little room left for an artisanal moving image practice like making local films for the satisfaction of those who preferred to see their own images on screen. In fact, until recently film historians assumed that local movies lost favor toward the end of the first decade of the 1900s, one of many early cinema practices that did not survive the transition to classical narrative cinema.

And yet, local films continued to be made by traveling and, on occasion, local filmmakers. While a few exhibitor-filmmakers active in the early cinema period stuck to their old habits, new camera operators and directors adjusted their practices for the times. Instead of paying for production costs upfront, filmmakers asked business organizations and other local groups to sponsor their work. Rather than exhibiting their movies in a temporary location, they contracted with theater managers to show their films at the new movie house in town. Instead of leaving the subjects of their films to chance, filmmakers planned scenes of particular people and places, and, within a few years, began shooting narrative fiction pictures.

The consequences of this shift in the production of the local film were more substantial than has been previously understood. While some local movies were still received as images of the quotidian and contingent, an accidental record of both pastness and locality, many more local films were altered by the same stresses narrative and fictional conventions placed on film form in the early 1910s. Instead of deploying what Tom Gunning has called a “view aesthetic,” in which the cinema apparatus produces the local out of an encounter between a camera operator and a future exhibition site, filmmakers captured a filmic local that had already been constituted in cooperation by theater owners and sponsors.³

We could choose to ignore this shift, reading the raw “footage” of local film as a remnant of forgotten people and distant places, a method that turns local films, like home movies, into an ahistorical film genre in a medium otherwise marked by change. Alternately, we could identify these films as the genres they mimicked—amateur comedies, newsreels, sponsored film—with their locality being a feature only of passing interest. In this book, I propose that we focus on how these films presented, and challenged, the local they claimed to represent.

This book attempts to answer two questions: did local film production continue in the United States after 1910, and, if so, how did local films change in response to the development of the motion picture industry that was, in many ways, the leading edge of a globalized, mass culture?⁴ The answer to the first question is easy, even if it challenges longstanding assumptions about the narrowing path American film history is assumed to have taken starting in the mid-1910s. As I show, local films continued to be made, in large numbers, throughout the United States well into the 1950s, with the last itinerant producers making their rounds in the early 1970s. Seeing yourself in the movies was not an experience specific to early cinema, or something reserved for movie extras, but rather an ordinary part of going to the movies.

The answer to the second question is the occupation of this book. Following James M. Moran, I use the term “mode,” rather than the more restrictive “genre,” to describe the types of local films identified. As Moran notes, defining a moving image practice as a mode allows for “variations in social function, material resources, cultural competence, and phenomenology of spectatorship.”⁵ While locally produced and exhibited motion pictures shared modal traits, most notably the expectation that audience members would be able to recognize people and places in the film, difference began to emerge between modes of production in the early 1910s, and, over time, came to represent competing ideas about the form and function of the cinema.

I identify six significant modes of local film production—municipal booster films, home talent pictures, local Hollywood films, amateur fiction films, movies of mutual recognition, and civic films. Using case studies to analyze each mode, I consider the larger commercial, technological, and cultural shifts within and outside of the cinema that shaped the context in which these pictures were produced and exhibited. Rather than assuming the local film was a simple genre with an obvious and timeless appeal, I argue that the emergence of distinct modes of production and exhibition suggests that the definitions of the local and its filmic representation fluctuated over the course of the twentieth century. The local film, then, came to represent and document how the cinema, one of the leading propagators of mass culture, was experienced in the United States.

FROM LOCAL VIEWS TO LOCAL FILMS

The origin of the local film is coterminous with cinema itself. Traveling exhibitor-producers were shooting local views as early as 1896, and most, if not all, of the companies and cinematographers active in the early years of the cinema made them as a stock-in-trade. And yet, even early histories of the movies downplayed the importance of local views, preferring to focus on technical and aesthetic developments of film form and the rise of the motion picture industry. The first scholarly histories of the medium retained this industry focus, in part because the sources they used, particularly trade publications for movie producers, were consumed with achieving efficiencies of scale. For this reason, the absence of local film from canonical cinema histories is not due to the lack of evidence but rather a consequence of methodologies that favor national- and industry-focused narratives.

Even so, there is a rich scholarship on local films made in the early cinema period, and this work informs my own reading of such films made after 1910. Even the first histories of the cinema, mostly written by former industry employees, were aware of the local film’s appeal. In A Million and One Nights, Terry Ramsaye noted that the Lumière brothers made “local scenes” for their programs but did not mention American exhibitors who did the same.⁶ Other early histories of the American cinema also skip over local motion pictures, or mention them in passing.⁷ In the 1980s, the first generation of academically trained cinema historians, including Gunning, Charles Musser, Robert C. Allen, and Miriam Hansen, began revisiting the myths of early cinema, many of which were spun by Ramsaye and other industry veterans.

In these revisionist histories, local films, which were often identified as “local views” or “actualities,” were seen primarily as a phenomenon of the first decade and a half of the cinema.⁸ Allen notes the popularity of local films throughout the early cinema period, particularly those produced by American Mutoscope and Biograph between 1897 and 1901.⁹ Musser and Carol Nelson concur in their book on the traveling exhibitor Lyman Howe, noting that “by the turn of the century, local views were a well-tested method of boosting the popularity of a motion picture show.”¹⁰ Some of these researchers have suggested that the production of local motion pictures ceased by the end of the decade. Allen argues narrative fiction genres became dominant around 1905 because exhibitors found that such films were more profitable than local views.¹¹ Musser claims that the Film Service Association, a consortium formed in late 1907 to protect Edison patent interests by regulating distribution and exhibition practices, forced most producers and exhibitors to sharply curtail local films.¹² Even though Allen, in particular, emphasizes the continuing popularity of local scenes into the early 1910s, few scholars have engaged deeply with his claim for the popularity of local actualities. The absence of extant films has likely served to limit scholarly interest in locally produced motion pictures.¹³

A less historically nuanced but more provocative analysis of the possibility of local motion pictures occurs in Miriam Hansen’s 1991 book Babel and Babylon. Citing Allen’s research on the use of local actualities in vaudeville houses, Hansen attributes their appeal to the “primitive fascination” early cinema audiences had with the medium’s capacity to capture everyday life. At the same time, Hansen argues, the promise of self-recognition in the local film was potentially political, as it suggested the possibility for a democratic screen in which anyone could appear. For her, local motion pictures were similar to other alternative and minority practices in early cinema that were shut out by classical film narrative. As she argues, “The viewer’s investment in the screen as mirror differs from later, narratively mediated forms of identification—with characters, star images, and the look of the narrating camera—which effectively displaced interest in local and personal representation from the institution of cinema, relegating it to the private province of ‘home’ movies.”¹⁴ While this argument could be read as a restatement of her broader claims for the transformation of spectatorial practices between the early and classical cinema eras, Hansen’s opposition between recognition and identification is particularly useful for a consideration of the local film.

Although the label “local film” was occasionally used in trade publications and newspapers starting in the early 1910s, the term does not appear in the scholarly discourse until the early 2000s, after a significant discovery of local views encouraged new research on the subject.¹⁵ In 1994, three metal drums containing much of the output of the Mitchell and Kenyon Company (1899–1913) were found in the basement of an unoccupied building in Blackburn, England.¹⁶ The discovery of 830 of the company’s films, which consisted almost entirely of local views, changed cinema history in Britain by calling attention to the prevalence of such films in the first decade of the cinema. In 1997, several of the films were screened at the Pordenone Film Festival in Italy, and in 1998, the first article on the collection was published in Film History.¹⁷ Vanessa Toulmin, the research director of the National Fairgrounds Archive in England, led the rediscovery of the Mitchell and Kenyon films, which were donated to the British Film Institute in 2000. In journal articles, books, and a BBC documentary, Toulmin demonstrates the potential of local films as artifacts of social and cultural history. Today, the Mitchell and Kenyon collection is the third largest from a single company in the early cinema period, after Lumière and Edison.¹⁸

The popularity of the Mitchell and Kenyon collection has had two consequences for scholarship on local motion pictures. First, archivists and scholars identified extant motion pictures as local films, often confusingly treating them as part of the same transnational genre. For example, when Film History published a special issue on the “local film” in 2005, collections from Sweden, Germany, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands, as well as the Mitchell and Kenyon films, were highlighted. Other collections, from H. Lee Waters’s movies of the American South (1936–1942) to Rudall Hayward’s “community comedies” produced in New Zealand in the late 1920s, were now identified as local films.¹⁹ In a survey of what he called “amateur-commercial hybrid film[s],” Dan Streible describes a local version of an Our Gang comedy produced in Anderson, South Carolina, in 1926.²⁰ However, with a few exceptions—most notably, Gregory A. Waller’s list of local films produced in Lexington, Kentucky, between 1907 and 1930, published in his 1995 exhibition history of the city—researchers have not had any way to measure the significance of any one title.²¹ The absence of historical studies has encouraged scholars to speculate on potential ties between, for example, New Zealand’s Hayward and Vermont’s Margaret Showalter Cram, one of the itinerant directors of the Movie Queen, a local comedy filmed repeatedly throughout the United States in the 1930s.²² While what could be called the “unified theory” of the local film may bring attention to little-known works, attempts to analyze discrete practices as part of a single phenomenon downplay historical exigencies.

The second consequence of the Mitchell and Kenyon collection was a reconsideration of the social and cultural significance of the local film. By the early 2000s, local films were well-known to scholars and archivists, and the latter group began making them a priority for preservation. In the United States, local films by H. Lee Waters and Melton Barker were named to the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry, which recognizes motion pictures of great national and cultural significance, in 2004 and 2012, respectively. While these films were always of interest to local historical societies, it is only in recent years that they have been considered of national importance.

While the discovery of local films has encouraged archivists to look for other extant films and contextual material that describe their production and exhibition, many scholars continue to define the local film in relationship to theories of spectatorship. Tom Gunning characterizes the early cinema period as the “era of local cinema,” with local and global views intermingled in an evening’s show. As he notes, “The lure of virtual world tours and glimpses of distant, exotic places marked the global aspect of early cinema, while the gasp of recognition and the naming of familiar faces or places characterized its local identity.”²³ For Gunning, the local film is not a genre, with formal traits embedded within the film itself, but rather dependent on audience recognition to accrue meaning.

While Toulmin demonstrates that one could recover much of the meaning of a film through contextual research, many scholars have argued that the film’s principal pleasure, and meaning, comes when the audience performs what Gunning calls the “gasp of recognition.”²⁴ He suggests such a response could be read out of the film themselves: “We can no longer hear the cries that welcomed these images at the turn of the century; one side of the dialogue has been silenced. But, as historians, we have a responsibility to recall and channel those departed voices, or at least to search for their echo in the images that, thankfully, have survived.”²⁵

Gunning’s advice to recover an “echo” of the exhibition experience in the image itself leaves scholars to make connections between these idiosyncratic practices and the broader experience of cinema without sufficient supporting evidence. Such speculations are reminiscent of much of the scholarship on early cinema, in which the naming of the “first” motion picture of any genre or form turns into a debate on the properties and functions of the cinema itself.²⁶ By tasking themselves with the near impossible work of recreating the “lost world” in which local motion pictures were made and received, scholars risk burrowing into minutiae, what Carolyn Steedman has called the “dust” of history, and never accounting for the relationship of such films to the larger domain of the cinema, or to political, economic, and cultural life.²⁷ This book argues that local films are more than the sum of the individuals who recognized themselves in the movies, and thus seeks to position local film practices in the United States within broader contexts.

NOTES ON METHODOLOGY

This book provides a national perspective on local film production in the United States after 1910. Rather than limit my focus to a sampling of filmmakers or a geographic region, I used keyword searches of digitized materials, including newspapers, trade journals, and films, to identify and analyze distinct modes of local film production. Employing trade and local newspapers, extant films, and archival collections, I explicate these modes through case studies of filmmakers and film companies. This hybrid research method allows me to maintain the depth of a microhistory without losing the breadth of a survey of print discourse about the many variants of the local film. My methodological approach is strongly influenced by what Richard Maltby has termed the “new cinema history,” which focuses on discrete events of cinema-going rather than audience experiences of the movies in a given period. Borrowing concepts from cultural geography, historians such as Jeffrey Klenotic, Deb Verhoeven, and Paul S. Moore suggest that we think of the cinema as an organic, ongoing process of place creation, with the moviegoing experience created anew with each screening, rather than one in which the early possibilities for moviegoing were abandoned in favor of a classical mode of spectatorship.²⁸ The cultural geographer Doreen B. Massey writes of what she calls the “event of place,” the moment in which space and time intersect, involving “the coming together of previously unrelated, a constellation of processes rather than a thing.”²⁹ The local film is the distillation of particular places, and for audiences, place recognition was as an important quality of the local film as self-recognition. By emphasizing the production of place, I analyze the potential meanings of the local film by considering the processes of production and exhibition as well as the film itself.

I began this project by looking closely at a source familiar to film historians, the pages of the Moving Picture World. In the late 1900s and early 1910s, the World was one of several new publications that emerged to serve the needs of the motion picture industry. Along with The Nickelodeon, Motography, Motion Picture News, and, later, Exhibitors Herald, these publications were particularly sensitive to the interests of small-town and rural exhibitors, who made up a substantial percentage of their readership. Several pages of each issue were devoted to exhibitor news, and their regional correspondents often noted the production of local films.

If national trade publications provide an overview of local motion pictures from the exhibitor perspective, articles and advertisements printed in small-town newspapers give insight into how these movies were presented to local audiences. In almost all cases, local newspapers covered the production of these films from start to finish, at times even signing on as sponsors. Itinerant filmmakers used newspapers to orchestrate elaborate publicity campaigns for their productions, placing articles and staging events with front-page headlines in mind. Using large, digitized newspaper collections, which together represent several thousand newspapers from towns and cities throughout the United States, I map the paths of the itinerants featured in my case studies and, through close analysis, examine how they adjusted their own publicity and business practices over time.³⁰

In my research, I have located hundreds of extant local motion pictures held by film archives, historical societies, and public libraries throughout the United States. Rather than assessing these films as visual evidence of specific people and places, I pay close attention to their aesthetics and to the social and political circumstances of their production. My comparative analysis of Don Newland, for example, was only possible after acquiring access copies of five versions of the same film from libraries and historical societies in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. Although I realize that this study just captures a sliver of the local films made in the United States in the twentieth century, by focusing on the modal qualities of extant films, I aim to provide a guide for how local films may be interpreted.

Finally, my research draws on archival collections that were donated by the filmmakers themselves, as well as brochures, pamphlets, photographs, and films that were found in other collections. Two of the filmmakers in the study donated their materials to archives, resulting in the H. Lee Waters Collection at Duke University and the Shad. E. Graham Collection at the University of Texas at Austin. A third director, Marion Angeline Howlett, one of several dozen directors for the Amateur Theatre Guild, donated materials to the Harvard Theatre Archive. I have also benefited from the use of digitized collections and research materials at the Alabama Department of Archives and History, Ball State University, Bancroft Library at the University of California, Black Film Center/Archive at Indiana University, Chicago History Museum, George Eastman House, Margaret Herrick Library at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, New York Public Library, Northeast Historic Film, Walter J. Brown Media Archives at the University of Georgia, and Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research.

CHAPTER SUMMARY

In this book, I argue that exhibitors and producers used local films to interrogate, negotiate, and assuage concerns about the spread of mass culture into everyday life. In eight chapters, arranged chronologically, I use case studies to show different aspects of local film practices. The first four chapters establish critical developments in local films in the transitional and classical period (1909–1932), including the use of local films in town advertising campaigns, the introduction of narrative techniques and fictional stories into local films, and the association of local films with stardom and Hollywood. The next three chapters explore how ideas of gender and amateurism, race and recognition, and nation and commerce inflect the construction of the local between 1936 and 1975. The final chapter focuses on the rediscovery and preservation of these films, which began in the 1980s and continues to this day.

In the first chapter, I consider the municipal advertising, or booster, motion picture. Sponsored by well-financed business clubs and chambers of commerce and produced by companies who specialized in industrial motion pictures, booster films were intended to promote a city to its own residents, as well as to nonresidents who might see the film at an exposition or even at a theater in their own city. While early producers distinguished their films from local views by shooting longer and more elaborately staged motion pictures, by 1913 producers began to integrate fictional and narrative sequences into what had previously been a nonfiction form. In a case study of the Paragon Feature Film Company, which claimed to have produced one hundred motion pictures between 1914 and 1917, I argue that the imperative for making a film that resembled the melodramas audiences were used to seeing overtook the sponsor’s interest in portraying their city as a distinct and desirable place to live or invest. While early Paragon motion pictures used historical reenactments and narratives set in local factories, by their last film the company was using a melodramatic plot in which a spurned lover commits suicide at the end of the two-reel picture. By 1917, booster film production declined, most likely because the United States’ entry into World War I disrupted the domestically oriented booster movement. Even though the municipal booster motion picture phenomenon was short lived, sizeable production budgets and experiments with narrative and fiction scenes make booster films important indicators of alternate uses for the cinema in the transitional era.

In the second chapter, I discuss the production of local fictional narratives featuring local actors, which I call “home talent” films, in the 1910s. Although the term “home talent” was in common usage in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, by the time a reduced-width film gauge was introduced in 1923, the term “amateur” was more widely used to describe nonprofessionals. By reclaiming the term “home talent” for the amateur motion pictures of the 1910s, I reassert the importance of the geography of cultural production and dissemination. I focus on one exceptionally prolific filmmaker, Charles Tinsley of Corning, Iowa, who produced at least twenty photoplays in his hometown of two thousand people between 1914 and 1916, using box office receipts to help fund his practice. Initially, Tinsley wrote a new scenario for each picture, often tying them to local events, such as house fires, reunions, and, most prominently, the activation of Corning’s National Guard unit to the US-Mexico border. In 1915, Tinsley began working as an itinerant filmmaker, using the same scenario for each home talent picture he produced. By 1918, Tinsley had abandoned his local work and instead joined the growing ranks of independents who traveled throughout the country shooting the same story again and again. Although these films were still labeled home talent pictures, they rarely featured original scenarios particular to a local community.

In chapter 3, I turn to the impact of the vertically integrated studio system on the local film. While the late 1910s is often thought of as a period in which producers, distributors, and theater chains began standardizing the experience of cinema, exhibitors used their community ties to demand more studio and distributor support in localizing motion pictures for particular audiences. By 1918, several studios had established publicity or exploitation departments, with dozens of regional managers tasked with helping exhibitors promote individual motion pictures. One technique used was the production of a local film, often a screen test, to attract audience attention. For the 1922 Mack Sennett feature The Crossroads of New York, an exploitation manager in Louisville, Kentucky, decided to make a more ambitious local picture, a two-reel comedy that would “mimic Sennett.” After the success of the Louisville film, exhibitors across the country tried their own local Crossroads movies, with varying results. In some cities, inexperienced theater managers proved unable to pull off the local comedy, resulting in negative press coverage and, likely, disappointed moviegoers. The mixed results of the Crossroads experiment, accompanied by broader concerns about movie fans flocking to Hollywood after a local screen test, likely tempered studio enthusiasm for local pictures.

However, around 1923, itinerant filmmakers began claiming experience in the motion picture industry. In chapter 4, I consider their so-called Hollywood local motion pictures, in which they replicated the experience of Hollywood filmmaking at all levels, from the casting process to the public filming of special effects, like car crashes and rescues from burning buildings. I focus here on the career of Don Newland, who made difficult-to-verify claims of working with movie pioneers such as Mary Pickford, Flora Finch, and John Bunny, in order to secure work. Regardless of his actual experience, he was one of the most prolific itinerants of the 1920s, making dozens of pictures throughout the United States. Newland’s filmmaking and business acumen was such that he even made the transition to sound filmmaking in the early 1930s, long before other itinerants.

In chapter 5, I consider the role small-gauge film technology played in democratizing the production of local films in the 1930s. Despite the introduction of the 16mm amateur film gauge in 1923, local films continued to be shot and exhibited using 35mm equipment for the remainder of the decade. But with the introduction of brighter 16mm film projectors in the early 1930s, filmmakers began to produce local movies with the smaller gauge equipment, transporting not just the camera but also the projector, a phonograph for sound accompaniment, and publicity material from location to location. Hollywood culture also changed the stakes for the people who appeared in local films. Seeing themselves in the movies was not enough. They expected to see themselves as potential stars, and their towns as movie sets. While early Hollywood-themed itinerant films, such as those discussed in chapter 4, were presented with a showman’s sincerity, by the 1930s, appearing in a local film was often treated as a lark, often one with implicit gender assumptions. For example, working under the auspices of the Amateur Theatre Guild, young college-age women made a lighthearted comedy film series titled Movie Queen, which parodied Hollywood film culture, particularly its fascination with ingenues, vamps, and virgins. In contrast to earlier films, the Movie Queen films, which were preceded by a three-act play with the same title and a fashion show, satirized Hollywood and its small-town fans. The local film, then, served in the 1930s and later as a way for rural residents to participate in and mock Hollywood culture.

Other 16mm itinerants rediscovered the local view, producing nonnarrative and nonfiction pictures with titles such as See Yourself and Your Town in the Movies. In chapter 6, I consider the films of H. Lee Waters, a studio photographer from North Carolina who visited 118 small towns and cities in the mid-Atlantic South between 1936 and 1942, shooting 252 films. In this chapter, I consider the role “mutual recognition,” or, in the terms of many itinerants, “seeing yourself as others see you,” played in documenting and reproducing social difference. Waters, for example, filmed segregated communities, in some cases producing films specifically for white or African American audiences, and in others reproducing the segregation of the town in his films. In this chapter, I build on the philosopher Paul Ricouer’s work on recognition to develop a theoretical underpinning for the pleasures and politics of recognition in local films.

Even after the long decline of the single-screen movie theater commenced in the late 1940s, local films continued to be made in many communities. In some cases, filmmakers who began their careers in the 1920s and 1930s continued to work, revisiting old territory and finding smaller towns where a local film could still draw interest. In chapter 7, I focus on a mode of production that became more significant in the postwar period, the civic film. Unlike the booster films of the 1910s, civic films were not advertising vehicles. Instead, these films, in most cases sponsored by local merchants, were intended to celebrate, and often commemorate, the small town, its institutions, and the business interests that sustained them. For example, in the 1940s, a number of filmmakers, including the Texas-based Shad E. Graham, begin making a series titled Our Home Town. Directors used a prerecorded soundtrack narrated by national radio announcers to assure local business communities their town was just like any other. In this chapter, I consider the “banal localism” of the postwar hometown movies and suggest that this shift in the function of local films was due to the increasing difficulty small towns had in establishing themselves as distinct, culturally and economically significant places.

If local films were made as frequently as this book documents, why were they missing, not just from film histories but also from social and local histories? In chapter 8 I consider narratives of discovery, preservation, and exhibition of local films in the past three decades. Beginning in the late 1980s, historians and archivists began finding local films in barns, basements, and attics. As archival moving images became an increasingly popular way of memorializing the past, communities used their own movies as a way to understand their history, as local films documented certain places and people while eliding others. In this chapter, I consider the recovery, reclamation, and reuse of local films as processes that change how we assess these moving images. Although much of this work takes place in the communities where the films were made, I also consider how these films are transformed when they circulate online, in scholarly and archival settings, and, in some cases, as raw material transformed by artists.

MAPPING THE LOCAL FILM

While previous studies of the local film have emphasized the basic appeal of “seeing yourself in the movies,” I focus on the other pleasures a local film might offer. For many audiences, seeing oneself in the movies was not a timeless pleasure, as the “movies” were constantly changing. One year, audiences and sponsors may have wanted to see an advertisement for their town, while the next they instead preferred to see their home as the setting for a fictional drama. These types of seeing could still be called recognition, but the recognition was not just about seeing oneself reproduced in the cinema but also about seeing oneself embedded in larger national processes. Local films inculcated in movie audiences a sense of mutual recognition, which, as I explain in chapter 6, requires not only seeing yourself but seeing yourself with the awareness that others are watching. The enduring popularity of the local film can only partially be attributed to a fascination with the medium of cinema itself. Local films reflect and refract experiences of people as they saw themselves in booster films, home talent movies, local Hollywood films, movie industry parodies, civic pictures, and, now, archival footage. In order to fully understand this practice, it is necessary to place the local film in its social and cultural contexts.

NOTES

1. Gaudreault, Film and Attraction, 69.

2. As Ross Melnick has shown in his recent study of the pioneer exhibitor Samuel “Roxy” Rothafel, theater managers elevated the status of the cinema in the teens by encouraging business groups, service clubs, and other organizations to see their local theater as a public space. See Melnick, American Showman, 80.

3. Gunning, “Before Documentary.”

4. While I focus on local film production in the United States, where a shared and vibrant film culture created the conditions for the diversity of film practices I describe, local filmmaking was a global phenomenon.

5. Moran, There’s No Place Like Home Video, 73.

6. Ramsaye, A Million and One Nights, 238.

7. In addition to Ramsaye’s work, histories by Robert Grau, Benjamin Hampton, Lewis Jacobs, Garth Jowett, Kenneth MacGowan, and Robert Sklar downplay the importance of local views in early cinema. For example, MacGowan noted that Lumière cinematographers made local pictures wherever they went. As he wrote, “When the local pictures flashed on the screen, even the most cynical peasant was convinced that here was no trickery.” MacGowan, Behind the Screen, 92.

8. The term “local topical” was mostly used in Britain. See Gomes, “Working People, Topical Films, and Home Movies.”

9. Allen, Vaudeville and Film, 128–131.

10. Musser and Nelson, High-Class Moving Pictures, 109.

11. Allen, Vaudeville and Film, 142–143.

12. Musser reiterates this claim in a more recent encyclopedia entry on itinerant exhibitors, suggesting that “Edison’s patent claims made filmmaking far riskier, and there was less small-time production” than in the United Kingdom. See Musser, “Itinerant Exhibitors,” 341.

13. Allen, Vaudeville and Film, 216–219.

14. Hansen, Babel and Babylon, 31.

15. For example of the uses of the term “local film” in the 1910s, see an advertisement suggesting exhibitors “Make Your Own Local Films” that appeared in MPW, December 14, 1912, 1110, and the article “Expect Many to See Local Films,” La Crosse (Wis.) Tribune, July 11, 1914, 6. The first scholarly use of the term appears to be in Toulmin, “‘Local Films for Local People.’”

16. Vanessa Toulmin, Patrick Russell, and Simon Popple, “Introduction to the Mitchell and Kenyon Collection,” in Toulmin et al., eds., The Lost World of Mitchell and Kenyon, 3–5.

17. Whalley and Worden, “Forgotten Firm,” 51.

18. Toulmin, Electric Edwardians, 3.

19. See Hoorn and Smith. “Rudall Hayward’s Democratic Cinema.”

20. Streible, “Itinerant Filmmakers and Amateur Casts,” 177.

21. Waller, Main Street Amusements. Other accounts of local film production after 1909 have appeared in Michael Aronson’s study of moviegoing in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Paul S. Moore’s account of film exhibition in Toronto; and George Potamianos’s dissertation on exhibition in Sacramento and Placerville, California. See Aronson, Nickelodeon City, 208–247; Moore, Now Playing, 207; and Potamianos, “Hollywood in the Hinter-lands,” 168.

22. Hoorn and Smith, “Rudall Hayward’s Democratic Cinema,” 79.

23. Tom Gunning, “Pictures of Crowd Splendour: The Mitchell and Kenyon Factory Gate Film,” in Toulmin et al., eds., The Lost World of Mitchell and Kenyon, 52.

24. Stephen Bottomore, for example, defines the local film as a motion picture in which there is “significant overlap” between the people in the audience and the people in the film. See Bottomore, “From the Factory Gate to the ‘Home Talent’ Drama,” 33.

25. Gunning, “Pictures of Crowd Splendour,” 53.

26. For more on the historical and theoretical difficulties of establishing cinematic firsts, see Gaines “First Fictions.” As Jane Gaines argues, in cinema history “‘firstness’ and its concomitant, ‘origin,’ are almost automatically challenged by the very possibilities of mechanical reproduction where reproducing is indistinguishable from producing” (1314).

27. Steedman, Dust.

28. Richard Maltby, “New Cinema Histories,” in Maltby et al., eds., Exploration in New Cinema History, 3–40. In the same volume, see Klenotic’s “Putting Cinema History on the Map.” Deb Verhoeven has written on these issues in the essay “New Cinema History and the Computational Turn,” in Beyond Art, Beyond Humanities, Beyond Technology: A New Creativity, World Congress of Communication and the Arts Conference Proceedings, COPEC–Science and Education Research Council, Guimarães, Portugal, http://hdl.handle.net/10536/DRO/DU:30044939.

29. Massey, For Space, 141.

30. These databases include ProQuest Historical Newspapers, America’s Historical Newspapers, Old Fulton NY Post Cards, Newspaper Archive, Newspapers.com, and Genealogy Bank. The first two databases are academic, while the latter four are private and/or commercial. In some cases, this research was supplemented by looking through microfilm of newspapers that have not yet been digitized.