How Film Became History

The Rise of the Archival Documentary in 1930s America

Thomas Doherty (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

264 Seiten

2026
Columbia University Press (Verlag)
9780231222570 (ISBN)

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By the 1930s, filmmakers had access to a backlog of footage from around thirty 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.

Thomas Doherty is professor of American studies at Brandeis University. His previous Columbia University Press books include Hollywood and Hitler, 1933–1939 (2013); Show Trial: Hollywood, HUAC, and the Birth of the Blacklist (2018); and Little Lindy Is Kidnapped: How the Media Covered the Crime of the Century (2020).

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

Erscheint lt. Verlag	21.4.2026
Reihe/Serie	Film and Culture Series
Zusatzinfo	33 b&w images
Verlagsort	New York
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 229 mm
Themenwelt	Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Film / TV
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Kommunikation / Medien ► Medienwissenschaft
ISBN-13	9780231222570 / 9780231222570
Zustand	Neuware