Iluminace 2022, 34(2):29-43 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1731

Ordinary People, Ordinary Lives. The Prospects of New Cinema History

Agata Frymus
Monash University

This article outlines the most recent methodological developments in new cinema history and relates them to existing scholarship on girlhood and feminist history. In charting my personal relationship with the field and my specific subjects, it gestures towards broader applications of "critical confabulation,"; the term coined by Saidyia Hartman in relation to the history of Black slavery. In doing so, it articulates some of the opportunities and limitations of re-centring historiographies of moviegoers towards groups that have been marginalised because of the overlapping factors of class, race and gender.

Keywords: social history, film history, archive, girlhood, feminist history

Published: June 1, 2022  Show citation

ACS AIP APA ASA Harvard Chicago IEEE ISO690 MLA NLM Turabian Vancouver
Frymus, A. (2022). Ordinary People, Ordinary Lives. The Prospects of New Cinema History. Iluminace34(2), 29-43. doi: 10.58193/ilu.1731
Download citation

References

  1. Anselmo, Diana. "Screen-Struck: The Invention of the Movie Girl Fan," Cinema Journal 55, no. 1 (Fall 2015), 1-28. Go to original source...
  2. Anselmo, Diana. "Bound by Paper: Girl Fans, Movie Scrapbooks, and Hollywood Reception during World War I," Film History 31, no. 3 (2019), 141-172. Go to original source...
  3. Anselmo, Diana W. "Introduction, or The Things We Did Not Lose in the Fire," Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 60, no. 4 (2021), 160-167. Go to original source...
  4. Baptist, Vincent, Julia Noordegraaf, and Thunnis van Oort. "A Digital Toolkit to Detect Cinema Audiences of the Silent Era: Scalable Perspectives on Film Exhibition and Consumption in Amsterdam Neighbourhoods (1907-1928)," Studies in European Cinema 18, no. 3 (2021), 252-273. Go to original source...
  5. Biltereyst, Daniel, Richard Maltby, and Philippe Meers. "Introduction: The Scope of New Cinema History," in The Routledge Companion to New Cinema History, eds. Daniel Biltereyst, Richard Maltby, and Philippe Meers (London: Routledge, 2019), 1-12. Go to original source...
  6. Bolin, Paul E. "Imagination and Speculation as Historical Impulse: Engaging Uncertainties within Art Education History and Historiography," Studies in Art Education: A Journal of Issues and Research 50, no. 2 (2009), 110-123. Go to original source...
  7. Caddo, Cara. Envisioning Freedom: Cinema and the Building of Modern Black Life (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014). Go to original source...
  8. Chua, Ai Lin. "Singapore's 'Cinema-Age' of the 1930s: Hollywood and the Shaping of Singapore Modernity," Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 13, no. 4 (2012), 592-604. Go to original source...
  9. Ercole, Pierluigi, Daniela Treveri Gennari, and Catherine O'Rawe. "Mapping Cinema Memories: Emotional Geographies of Cinemagoing in Rome in the 1950s," Memory Studies 10, no. 1 (2017), 63-77. Go to original source...
  10. Fee, Annie. "'Les Midinettes Révolutionnaires': The Activist Cinema Girl in 1920s Montmartre," Feminist Media Histories 3, no. 4 (Fall 2017), 162-194. Go to original source...
  11. Field, Allyson Nadia. Uplift Cinema: The Emergence of African American Film and the Possibility of Black Modernity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015). Go to original source...
  12. Frymus, Agata. "Researching Black Women and Film History," Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media 20, Archival Opportunities and Absences in Women's Film and Television Histories Dossier (Winter 2020/2021), 228-236. Go to original source...
  13. Frymus, Agata. "Mapping Black Moviegoing in Harlem, New York City, 1909-14," in New Perspectives on Early Cinema History: Concepts, Approaches, Audiences, eds. Mario Slugan and Daniel Biltereyst (London: Bloomsbury, 2022), 193-212. Go to original source...
  14. Frymus, Agata. "Black Moviegoing in Harlem: The Case of Alhambra Theatre, 1905-1931," Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 62, no. 2 (Spring 2023), forthcoming. Go to original source...
  15. Gaines, Jane. "The Scar of Shame: Skin Color and Caste in Black Silent Melodrama," Cinema Journal 26, no. 4 (Summer 1987), 3-21. Go to original source...
  16. Garton, Stephen. "Putting Harlem on the Map," in Writing History in the Digital Age, eds. Jack Dougherty and Kristen Nawrotzki (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2013), 168-197.
  17. Hartman, Saidyia. "Venus in Two Acts," Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008), 1-14. Go to original source...
  18. Harman, Saidyia. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women and Queer Radicals (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019).
  19. Hicks, Cheryl D. Talk with You Like a Woman: African American Women, Justice, and Reform in New York, 1890-1930 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2012).
  20. Huber, Sam. "Saidyia Hartman Unravels the Archive," The Nation, May 1, 2019, accessed March 28, 2022, https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/saidiya-hartmans-astounding-history-of-the-forgotten-sexual-modernists-in-20th-century-black-life/.
  21. Inmate #2480, Statement of Girl, June 23, 1917, Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, 14610-77B Inmate Case Files, ca. 1915-30, 1955-65, Records of the Department of Correctional Services, New York State Archives, State Education Department, Albany, New York. Cited in Hicks, Talk with You Like a Woman, 216.
  22. Inmate #3711, History Blank, August 2, 1924; and letter from Amy M. Prevost to Superintendent Amos T. Baker, January 9, 1925, Bedford Hills Correctional Facility.
  23. Kisseloff, Jeff. You Must Remember This: An Oral History of Manhattan from the 1890s to World War II (Orlando: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Publishers, 1989).
  24. Levine, Elana. "Alternate Archives in US Daytime TV Soap Opera Historiography," Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 60, no. 4 (Summer 2021), 174-180. Go to original source...
  25. Mapping Movies, accessed May 11, 2022, https://www.mappingmovies.com/.
  26. Meyers, Erin A. "Only in Us! Celebrity Gossip as Ephemeral Media," Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 60, no. 4 (Summer 2021), 181-186. Go to original source...
  27. Midkiff DeBauche, Leslie. "Breaching Flowery Borders: Early Twentieth Century Girls Scrapbooking Their Lives," Girlhood Studies 14, no. 3 (2021), 124-139. Go to original source...
  28. Pryt, Karina. "Cinema and Cinema Audiences in Third Space in Warsaw, 1908-1939" in Researching Historical Screen Audiences, eds. Kate Egan, Martin Ian Smith, and Jamie Terill (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021), 65-85. Go to original source...
  29. Stamp, Shelley. Movie-Struck Girls: Women and Motion Picture Culture after the Nickelodeon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). Go to original source...
  30. Shipton, Alyn. Fats Waller: The Cheerful Little Earful (London and New York: Continuum, 2002).
  31. Stokes, Melvyn and Richard Maltby, eds. American Movie Audiences: From the Turn of the Century to the Early Sound Era (London: British Film Institute, 1999).
  32. Stokes, Melvyn, Matthew Jones, and Emma Pett. Cinema Memories: A People's History of Cinema-going in 1960s Britain (London: British Film Institute, 2022). Go to original source...
  33. Thissen, Judith. "Cinema History as Social History: Retrospect and Prospect," in Routledge Companion to New Cinema History, ed. Richard Maltby et al. (London: Routledge, 2020), 123-133. Go to original source...
  34. Tofighian, Nadi. "Mapping the 'Whirligig' of Amusements in Colonial Southeast Asia," Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 49, no. 2 (2018), 277-296. Go to original source...
  35. Treveri Gennari, Daniela, Catherine O'Rawe, Danielle Hipkins, Silvia Dibeltulo, and Sarah Culhane. Italian Cinema Audiences: Histories and Memories of Cinema-going in Post-war Italy (London: Bloomsbury, 2020). Go to original source...
  36. van der Velden, André and Judith Thissen. "Spectacles of Conspicuous Consumption: Picture Palaces, War Profiteers and the Social Dynamics of Moviegoing in the Netherlands," Film History 22, no. 4 (2010), 453-462. Go to original source...
  37. Verhoeven, Deb, Kate Bowles, and Colin Arrowsmith. "Mapping the Movies: Reflections on the Use of Geospatial Technologies for Historical Cinema Audience Research," in Digital Tools in Media Studies: Analysis and Research: An Overview, ed. Michael Ross et al. (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2009), 69-82. Go to original source...

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), which permits use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original publication is properly cited. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.