CONCLUSION

See Your Town Disappear—The Historicity of the Local Film

FOR THE FIRST THREE QUARTERS of the twentieth century, local films were everywhere. They were made by theater managers, hobbyists, and traveling filmmakers with varying amounts of experience and expertise. They were shot in big cities, suburban neighborhoods, small towns, and even in villages and hamlets that struggled to support regular film exhibition. Camera operators created moving image records of big events and notable townspeople, and turned the crank as amateur actors staged home talent performances. Others caught people unaware as they walked through town on what was, in every other way, an ordinary day, commemorated merely because a camera was there.

Local films were the products of a huckster’s hustle, the realizations of a narcissist’s wish, the results of a starry-eyed business club’s fanciful publicity campaign. If one were to unspool all of the local films ever made, with each frame covering a map of the places and people pictured, we would likely have a more comprehensive view of life in the United States in the twentieth century than if the same were done for any other mode of professional or amateur film production. For all their worldly ambitions, Hollywood producers were provincials when it came to selecting shooting locations, with most movies made in New York or Los Angeles studios. Industrial and educational picture companies occasionally ventured out of their smaller, geographically dispersed offices, but only to capture the people and places selected by their clients. Newsreel camera operators trained their eyes on events, not everyday life. Home movie makers, who were more numerous than itinerant producers of local films, were not active in large numbers until the 1940s, providing comparatively few views of the United States before then. Itinerant filmmakers, in contrast, traveled everywhere, from the beginnings of cinema, and continued making local movies in large numbers into the 1970s.

At the same time, local films were from the moment after the final reel wound its way through the projector especially vulnerable to loss. The business and civic associations who sponsored these films were, in many cases, given them for safekeeping, but those groups were usually unprepared to keep archives at all, let alone something as fragile as film. While some theaters retained local films, the projection booth was not seen as an obvious home for motion pictures. Local movies shot on 16mm were more likely to be saved, often by people who had access to a projector, but film damage and the loss of playback equipment made them functionally obsolete. A few filmmakers decided to retain their movies, knowing that the pictures shot today had historical value that could be commercialized in three, ten, or twenty years hence. But in most cases, local films were an ill fit for even informal systems of distribution, circulation, and preservation, making their survival all the more unlikely. Those that did survive constitute, collectively, a vast and unwieldy moving image archive of twentieth-century America.

In many ways, this book has been interested in making sense of this archive. Distributed in a variety of small institutions rather than centralized in a national one, the local film archive is both rare and nearby. Modest in its aims, this archive invites uses, and users, of all sorts. Most studies of local film and adjacent genres—travelogues, amateur film, home movies—have focused on their capacity to capture and reproduce scenes from everyday life. As I have shown, the itinerant producers of local films from the early teens forward had other ambitions. By integrating fictional plots, narrative storytelling techniques, and special effects into their local films, these producers adapted to fast-changing industry norms. Rather than mapping the small worlds created by these movies, this book has sought to describe the social, political, and cultural climates in which local films were produced. In my conclusion, I want to suggest, first, how this other archive of cinema might challenge how we conceptualize the work of film history, particularly our own “local views” of the discipline, and, second, how local films themselves might open up new horizons of inquiry in fields that continue to treat cinema in nationalist and generalist terms.

WHERE IS THE LOCAL IN FILM HISTORY?

In Siegfried Kracauer’s posthumously published book on historiography, he argued that historians should seek to find middle ground, or a “medium shot,” between histories that are too distant from or too close to the ground of historical experience.¹ Written in the 1960s, Kracauer’s work anticipated arguments about the research and writing of history, from microhistories that celebrate minutiae to work in the digital humanities that uses algorithms to mechanically read large volumes of historical data. Although Kracauer’s use of film concepts to describe his thoughts on historiography is not surprising given his interest in cinema, film history in particular is well-suited for “medium shot” analysis, in part because films themselves travel from the granular to the global. In fact, the local theater itself could be thought of as a middle ground between close analysis of individual films and investigations into the operations of the motion picture industry. Furthermore, I want to suggest that local films especially represent this “medium shot” of film history, as they capture the specificity of particular places using modes of production devised for almost any place whatsoever.

In this book, I have discussed the local film as a historical film practice that was recognized as such in its own time—contemporary newspapers often referred to the production of these movies as “local films”—and as a way to conceptualize an entire archive of moving images that confound the divisions film historians have long used to demarcate certain types of cinema. Local films were professional and amateur, fiction and documentary, narrative and non-narrative, commercial and noncommercial. In fact, as I have shown, such labels meant less than those that were commonplace at the time—home talent, booster, hometown—but have fallen into disuse.

By calling these movies “local films,” I bring attention to the similarities they share and the possibilities for analyses that cut across historical periods, genres, and functions. At the same time, I have tried to avoid reading them through a single interpretive framework, namely, films that gave people the pleasure of seeing themselves in the movies. Jane Gaines has suggested that film historians need to guard against over-determining their readings of the past. As an example, she observes that the transformative, if now universally accepted, notion of a “cinema of attractions” that predated narrative film can be used to produce a particular reading of early cinema texts, thus cutting against its very potential to provoke new understandings of moving image culture at the turn of the twentieth century. As she notes, a history of the cinema that is invested in fictional narrative will locate the origins of such works. Likewise, histories of the documentary will seek out early actualités. With digital archives, such readings are remarkably easy to reproduce, as long as one ignores the search results that confound one’s expectations.

Rather than tossing out old paradigms for new ones, Gaines proposes borrowing from the work of the anthropologist Michel-Rolf Trouillot, in which we look for an overlap, rather than a gap, in the “historicity of that which is said to have happened” and the “historicity of what happened.”² Instead of locating historical facts in the past, using evidence—newspapers, films, ephemera—that is, by necessity, widely accepted as valid and using them to fill in the gaps of history, Gaines suggests that we also account for the ways in which the interpretations of these facts are shaped by another, and more recent, set of historical facts about how the cinema came to be and is understood.

EXPANDING THE FRAME: THE SCALE OF LOCAL FILM

Rather than seeing the “local film” as yet another phenomenon of early cinema that persisted, in a subterranean way, until the 1970s, I want to suggest that we can see interest in the local film as something that is related to our investment in the “local” as a way to conceptualize an alternative to global culture. This way of looking at the local film opens up new approaches to adjacent fields, particularly those that ascribe social, economic, and geopolitical importance to the American small town and its surplus of representations. Because local films were not mere pictures of everyday life but rather structured, layered, and organized representations of certain people and places, looking at them through contemporary eyes provides insight into both the small-town imagination and those who, willingly or not, were cast as bit players in its realization. Instead of seeing such films as historical evidence, I suggest that we look at these movies as “special effects” that collapsed hierarchical and proportional scales of cultural production. Because cinema was from its inception understood to be a global medium, which was experienced in local and communal settings, local motion pictures glide effortlessly from the particular to the general. This is why these films can simultaneously be seen as detailed, even microscopic studies of place and as an epiphenomenon of the development of the movies as mass culture.

By claiming that local films were not really, or at least not only, “local,” I want to underscore other ways in which they may be analyzed and understood. Anna McCarthy has argued that the “politics of scale” was essential to the development of cultural studies as an academic discipline, with scholars studying the marginal, the ordinary, and the everyday in order to challenge “conventional assumptions about scale and value, generality and importance.”³ As Alan Liu has noted, many localized studies, whether of particular works of literature or specific communities, present themselves as a challenge to global and hegemonic studies. At the same time, by embracing “detailism” as a way of researching and writing history, such scholars produce what he terms “bubble universes” that are even more closed off and atomized than the larger views they are intended to supplement or replace. Furthermore, such universes are often depicted as if they were mediated using contemporary technologies, which, not surprisingly, are often seen as scalar instruments. As he argues, such histories are dispensed “through the ‘orifices’ of lenses, microphones, screens, and sundry other instructions of mediation that, via the act of mediation itself, register the paradox of immersive freedom from history constitutive of contingency.” Rather than accepting mediation on its own terms, Liu, echoing Kracauer, suggests scholars embrace “actual media innovation” that allows one to “see history as a compound relation of proximity and distance between past and present.”⁴ Here, I wish to propose that we look at local films as texts with “compound relations,” offering specificity while implicitly acknowledging their universality. By reading such films as being as much about a particular place as they are about ideas of how such places should be depicted in the cinema, it is possible to retain this “medium shot,” seeing the local as a middle ground between the particular and the abstract.

Even so, there remains the question of just what kind of “local” is present in the local film. I propose that we should see the local as a special effect. Although not all local films were narrative fictions, almost all itinerants shot scenes that can be read as special effects. Whether they were camera tricks, such as under-cranking or over-cranking the camera in order to produce the illusion of fast or slow motion, or staged effects that relied on stop-motion cinematography and the manipulation of the mise-en-scène, such as fake fires and automobile accidents, special effects were ubiquitous in local films. Furthermore, the production of the local was itself a kind of special effect, as it emerged from an ideology of place that was reinforced by sponsors and exhibitors who saw much to be gained in controlling who was granted a few minutes on screen. The presence of special effects in local films challenge our understanding of these moving images as representations of the everyday, the ordinary, or the real, and suggests that their capacity to transform the appearance of the local was as important as its mere depiction.

In other word, the towns that appeared in local films have disappeared, but not because of a special effect produced by a particularly clever director. Rather, these towns disappeared because they have been replaced, in our historical imagination, by the moving images, photographs, and other textual materials that survive, which are now the basis for both specific and general histories. And although local films in particular appear to bring them back to life with a vividness not found in other media, the presence of special effects, even ones that only become visible on close reading, remind us of our need to find an overlap between film as historical evidence and film as a means of manipulating reality.

We see this concern about the historicity of the local film in a somewhat unusual place, the editorial pages of the Moberly Weekly Monitor, a Missouri newspaper that had a striking reaction to a motion picture of a coon hunt that was produced by the Paragon Feature Film Company in the autumn of 1913. Like many early assessors of the cinema, the unidentified editorial writer from Moberly realized characteristics of the medium that would only become clear to film theorists decades later. In a section that reminds us of the cinema both as a special effect and, contradictorily, as a machine that produces historical evidence, the editorialist observed, “We will sit in the picture show hereafter and see ourselves living in the past, the resurrection of the past, and live again this day. And soon there will be some on the picture screen whom we once knew but know no more. The panorama of the world is passing. All creation is a moving picture.”⁵

Local films used special effects both as a way to exploit the capacities of cinema and as a way to remind us of the medium’s fallibility as historical evidence. As archivists, scholars, and community groups continue to discover, identify, and reclaim these moving images for our own time, it is critical that we are reminded of what they represent: images of particular people and their interest in appearing in a medium whose reach and influence seemed to be limitless.

NOTES

1. Kracauer, History. The suggestion that Kracauer’s preferred mode of historical analysis should be referred to as a “medium shot” comes from Gerd Gemünden and Johannes von Moltke’s introduction to Culture in the Anteroom, 4–5.

2. Gaines, “What Happened to the Philosophy of Film History,” 71.

3. McCarthy, “From the Ordinary to the Concrete,” 34.

4. Liu, Local Transcendence, 25.

5. “The Pictures of Today,” Moberly (Mo.) Weekly Monitor, November 7, 1913, 2.