Introduction to a (False) History
of the Cinema*

This is the 1st lecture in the reconstructed course Introduction to Film Studies (1982-1985).

The history of cinema is not a true history. It’s a parody.
– Raúl Ruiz

All histories of cinema are bad, false – as Henri Langlois (1914-1977), former director of the Cinémathèque française, never ceased asserting. They are all grounded, first, on empirical deficiencies: missing, lost, unknown, forgotten films – thousands of them. And, second, on hasty generalisations. We think we know something about cinema history, but we really know nothing – or, at any rate, very little.

Even more importantly for our purposes here, every history of cinema is theoretical, in the sense that it presupposes a certain logic, a specific viewpoint on what it gathers and contains. It uses the logic of the archive, of curation – or more simply, from a personal perspective, nesting.

So, at one level, what we are interested in studying is the cinema as it has been told to us, described, presented and represented, promoted … its image, its value, its attraction and its fascination.

I am going to outline for you today ten different histories – or rather, ten different types or versions of history. Each of these histories implies an opposition or struggle between two sides, with cinema as the stake of the battle. It’s impossible to even utter or merely allude to any of these histories without implicating oneself on one side or other of the ‘debate’ (even if it’s never been openly recognised as such); I won’t try to pretend that I’m beyond bias on any of the questions that will be raised.

This course [as listed in the preliminary Guide] is a history of cinema – predominantly American cinema, but with some notable diversions/deviations – between 1945 and 1965.

Some background information on this historical period. It’s the time of the so-called studio system, which ran on something resembling an assembly line of constant production, locked with an imperialist mode of global market distribution (at least, as much of the world as the USA could penetrate).

Many of the films we’ll watch were very successful in terms of box-office popularity. Those are facts; yet those facts don’t ‘speak for themselves’, they can’t tell us very much at all just as they are. The films don’t necessarily tell us much, either – despite the fact that they never stop speaking and we never stop listening to them, receiving and responding to them, across time. The films alone cannot announce their own context, or their own system of reference. That’s what we need to figure out.

These ten histories (or models of history) overlap, necessarily so. This course is a case study in thinking cinema history – how to constitute it and question it.

History 1. Popular culture versus ‘Art’ – strictly as these categories are culturally defined, not as natural, self-evident designations.

History 2. The Dominant and the Excluded. I have mentioned America’s imperialist monopoly over the economy of cinema – but also over general regimes of taste. The power to establish a norm: what we’ll refer to, loosely, as classical cinema. Many of us have ambivalent feelings about the USA – the nation’s cinema is often great, and its politics is often not – and this ambivalence will be a necessary, inescapable part of our dealings with the films.

History 3. Aesthetics – a history of forms. The possibilities, developments, stagnations and renewals across that history. The massive transition from silent to sound cinema. A history of what is genuinely (and usefully) filmic or cinematic, as distinct from a particular, overvalued heritage from traditional theatre and conventional literature (another legacy of the pop culture/Art divide).

History 4. Norms in filmmaking – standards, codes, rules, laws, conventions, exclusions. The myth-cloud of “professionalism”. Is there a zero-degree cinema comparable to Roland Barthes’ idea of a zero-degree writing? Pushing against this, we explore cinema as its own kind of writing or figuration. The homogenous versus the heterogeneous.

History 5. Fiction. The role of narrative and storytelling in diverse cultures. Against the vaunted ideas of realism and naturalism (enshrined in movements including neo-realism and ‘slice of life’ storytelling), we oppose surrealism, reflexivity, artificiality, complexity.

History 6. The Author. As film auteur. As artist. What is the ‘death of the author’ idea all about, is it at all useful to us? When does an auteur compromise or sell out in their career? What is a career, exactly, in the industry of filmmaking? Modernism, and incoming postmodernism, give us new versions of the author-function. Is personal expression through film still possible, and what is the value we could or should give it? What about collective expression?

History 7. Politics, Culture, Ideology. Values, depictions (‘images of …’), representations. Do we go to the movies for mirror-recognition of ourselves, for reassurance of our identities? Or do we go because of the appeal (and necessity) of a more fraught type of negotiation with contradiction, ambiguity, complexity? Popular culture with its ‘safety valves’. But also the problems and doubts, across all cultural forms, that are not so easily managed or contained.

History 8. Taste. Value judgements. We contend with innumerable canonical lists of the classics, the greats (films and filmmakers), the must-sees. These can be a good starting-point, but are never a good ending-point. The attractions of an indifference to official judgement; or a delirious promiscuity of film experience. The suspension of values – Beyond Good and Evil.

History 9. Desire and Pleasure. Release and repression. The drives in culture, the drives in us. Exaltation and degradation of our innermost selves. The dispersal, or the perverse elaborations and manifestations of desire (eg., the irony in camp culture, in ‘second degree’ art, in 1980s New Wave graphics).

History 10. Finally, a personal, autobiographical history belonging to each of us – a chronology with its own unique influences and inflections. When did we see and discover certain films, in what order, in which times, places, contexts? Alone or in a peer group? What are the films we long to see but have not yet had the opportunity; what are the ones we have only read about, or imagined? And what about the movies that have (literally) entered our dreams, our unconscious, that helped shape our values and personality?

That last history (as Samuel Fuller would say) can only be written by you! And such a history is one form of film criticism, or one way of defining the activity of film criticism – whether or not we follow the trail of that logic consciously. Ultimately, we can’t help but do so.

* 2025 note: I assume, today, that the title of this kick-off lecture was probably an allusion to the 1980 book of transcribed Canadian talks by Jean-Luc Godard that I would have known little about at the time, beyond its French name: Introduction à une véritable histoire du cinéma – which was eventually translated as Introduction to a True History of Cinema and Television in 2014. back

© Adrian Martin June 1982