4: Film History

Interview with Richard Koszarski, Editor-in-Chief, October 2006

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This installment of Periodical Radio is about Film History: An International Journal, a quarterly scholarly journal published jointly by Indiana University Press and John Libby Publishing. Film History publishes research on the historical development of motion pictures in the context of society, technology, and the economy. To quote from the journal’s statement of aims and scope, Film History’s content “ranges from the technical and entrepreneurial innovations of early and pre-cinema experiments, through all aspects of the production, distribution, exhibition and reception of commercial and non-commercial motion pictures.”

Most issues of Film History are devoted to a single theme. Recent themes include film museums, women and the silent screen, 1927, local film, and the intriguingly titled “Unfashionable, Overlooked or Under Estimated.” Each issue begins with an introduction, which I found myself drawn to in order to learn why 1927 was worthy as a theme, or what the term “local film” means. The provocative first line of the introduction to the 1927 theme is, “This issue is dedicated to saving 1927 from The Jazz Singer.” Apparently the first talkie was not the only significant accomplishment that year. And I learn that local films shot in a community and shown in only that community were often funded by local cinema owners to boost attendance.

Each issue of Film History runs approximately 130 pages. As is typical with scholarly journals, each volume begins with page one and pagination continues through the volume. So issue 2 may begin with page 130, issue 3 with page 260, and so on, so page numbers run through the full volume as they do in a book. Film History is printed in black & white on high quality glossy white paper. The sharply printed text is divided in two columns. Many articles include illustrations from films, old advertisements, or historical photographs. These are reproduced as crisply as the originals allow.

Film History is indexed in America: History & Life, and articles from the journal are available in several full text databases, including Project MUSE, EBSCOhost's Communications and Mass Media Complete, InfoTrac OneFile, and ProQuest 5000.

The subscription price for Film History is $175 for libraries, and $70 for individuals. Price differentials for libraries and individuals are typical for scholarly journals.

To learn more about Film History, I have as my guest Editor-in-Chief Richard Koszarski, associate professor in the Department of English at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

Steve: Richard, welcome to Periodical Radio.

Dr. Koszarski: Thank you, glad to be here.

Steve: In a nutshell, what is Film History about?

Dr. Koszarski: Anyone can turn to the back of the journal where we have our Aims and Scope. For many years we’ve published our scope as being the historical development of motion pictures within their social and technological and economic context, which means that it’s not a journal devoted to old films, or reusable films. It uses films themselves as entry points into the history of this medium. So we’ve never published reviews of Citizen Kane, or a review of a movie like Sunrise or The Battleship Potemkin. But often articles either bouncing off those films, or going through those films to discuss larger issues which affect the entire movie image industry in many different ways.

Steve: I'd like to ask a basic question about terminology. Why is the term "film" used, rather than "cinema" or "movies" or "motion pictures"?

Dr. Koszarski: That goes back to where the journal came from. In 1985 I was approached by some people who were working with Taylor & Francis, who were publishing History of Photography. They said we’d like you to edit a journal for us called “History of Film.” I said the title “History of film” doesn’t [sound right], so we flipped it around and called it Film History. The suggestion I guess was theirs. Of course it’s neater than “motion pictures.” I think it was simply shorter for them. “Motion pictures” already in the 1980’s seemed to be too limited to photochemical based media, as opposed to electronic media or what we now think of as nineteenth century pre-cinema media. “History of Cinema” would have sounded maybe a little too Continental. I think they wanted something that was going to seem a little punchier, and a little more American, actually. So we wound up with Film History, and film history is a term that pops up a lot in the literature, including in the titles of books. We were there early, I guess, with that.

Steve: Each issue of Film History addresses a theme. How do you choose the themes?

Dr. Koszarski: We have a group of associate editors, and these editors include people from all over the world. We have people like Steven Bottomore who’s an independent historian living in Thailand (he’d been living in London), John Fullerton from Stockholm, Janet Bergstrom from UCLA, and also John Belton and Daniel Leab who teach here in New Jersey, where I do. Each of these editors is sort of given the responsibility to locate a theme. What are you interested in, what do you want to work on? If you look over a year or two of the journal, sometimes there are issues that aren’t edited by these people, or somebody gets to do two issues. We are also amenable to being approached with suggestions from the outside for particular issues. We have an issue now that’s going to press that will be edited by Charles Musser, who’s an early cinema specialist. He wanted to do something on documentary film in the 1920’s and 1930’s. We’ve been working with him, and that’s coming along very well. It should be out by the end of the year. Then there’s another category. We accept papers submitted that are off topic. Somebody sends me a paper, and it’s a wonderful piece of work, I can’t say there’s really not anything coming up on this field, I’ll just have to toss it back. So we can do one of two things with that. We can add it on to an issue that maybe has a little space, because after all these are magazine issues, they’re not anthologies. So we have a little flexibility there. Or we can gather them together if we see we’re beginning to have a shape emerging from the submissions. This is not surprising, because people tend to be interested in writing about the same things. There are waves of interest over time. These can coalesce and form an issue. We did this recently. You mentioned to me earlier our issue on overlooked and unknown topics.

Steve: Yes, I believe the exact title was “Unfashionable, Overlooked or Under Estimated.” Tell us about what was in that issue.

Dr. Koszarski: That’s not in front of me, but the issue is one of these assortments of papers that have come in over a year. I’ll look at the papers and think this is really nice, can I hold on to this and see if we have some space? When more things come in I can either say, here are some nice things that came in over the transom, or from what’s available there which has not been solicited. This has only happened once or twice, but there may be something linking all this material, off the point of many of the obvious suspects in terms of film history research. What I have to do, then, is write an introduction which justifies it and explains it.

Steve: I read your introduction to that issue. There’s also an article in that issue you wrote about the 1918 flu pandemic. I found it very interesting. Could you tell our listeners a little about that flu outbreak and how it affected the motion picture industry?

Dr. Koszarski: At the end of the first World War, there is an epidemic or pandemic of what they called Spanish Influenza. This epidemic of Spanish Influenza begins apparently in the United States, moves to England with the troops we’re sending over there, then winds up sweeping around the world and comes back to the United States in 1918. I had been reading books about the flu epidemic that had been published in the last half dozen years. It’s not coincidental that these books are written under the shadow of the looming bird flu epidemic. Lots of people are writing about this. I’m thinking, didn’t this have some impact in motion pictures? There were one or two anecdotes you’d encounter in someone’s autobiography about how we had to wear flu masks when we made that film. So why don’t I hear more about this, especially if it was going to such an extent that entire towns were being closed down, or were closing down their businesses. I began researching it, possibly with the idea of doing a book. I may still do a book on this topic. I said let’s go and drill a sample hole in one journal. The journal we looked at was Moving Picture World, which is easy to access. The journal is basically devoted to the exhibitors, and talks more about theaters and what’s going on in towns across the country as opposed to what’s happening inside the studios. By going through the Moving Picture Worlds for this period and simply reprinting excerpts in chronological order of a selection of the hundreds of pieces that the World published over four or five months, I was able to chart the flow of this epidemic from the east coast from where it started in Boston through when it expired in winter 1918/1919 on the west coast. As this epidemic progressed, you could see that initially the theater owners felt very patriotic, as they had been during the war raising money for war bonds, said yes, we will close this week because the epidemic is here. Then the epidemic would last longer, go on two weeks, three, four weeks you have to have your theater closed. Some began to suffer financially, terribly. In the motion picture industry if you don’t get someone’s money that day, they’re not going to come back next month. If you need a pair of shoes, you can delay a week or two buying, but movies are an instantaneous purchase. So every week these theaters are closed, they basically lose that revenue. At first you find theater folks responding by making common cause with other institutions that have been closed, such as saloons, and in some places churches. Some municipalities ordered theaters, saloons, and churches closed. Department stores, usually not. Transportation lines, usually not. Sometimes in some towns saloons would be allowed to be open but churches would be closed. So you have reason for all sorts of people to be making common cause and complaining about irrational application. Eventually, by the end of 1918, some theater owners are going to court and they are about to bring what would have been precedent making legal actions against the ability of the government, even in time of war or emergency, to put them arbitrarily out of business. These cases were moot as the epidemic expired, and were never adjudicated. But what I thought was interesting here, is maybe bird flu will be coming, and what are we going to do about, well in our case in the movie industry business, are the movie theaters going to cooperate the way they initially did, or will we see a legal bloodbath as it looked was about to happen at the end of 1918?

Steve: Richard, I'd like to ask you a few questions about the job as editor-in-chief of Film History. How did you become editor-in-chief?

Dr. Koszarski: In 1985 I was approached by a publisher working with Taylor & Francis, a large journal publisher, to begin work on this magazine they wanted to be a brother of their History of Photography. We began developing this journal which became Film History. There were problems initially, because history of photography, if you look at the articles and the editorial board, is tied largely to museums, libraries, archives and collectors. Those are the main people who are supporting that historical work in the medium. In the movie business, the film scholarship doesn’t work that way. In fact there were no real film museums in 1985 in the way you have several around the world today. You had archives and libraries that had some material. Collectors of movies did not operate the way collectors of photographs did. There was no art market for motion picture prints, and what historical work was being done by 1980 was not coming from the academy. I graduated with my doctorate from NYU in cinema studies in 1977, and I wrote on a historical topic. Already by the late 1970’s and early 1980’s most of the energy at NYU’s cinema department was in critical theory. People there weren’t terribly interested in the historical context of different works that they were analyzing using various theoretical yardsticks. So a large part of that energy was going into theory and criticism. What work was being done on the history of film was coming from well trained amateurs, people like Kevin Brownlow, the filmmaker and film historian who was responsible to turning attention to silent films in a major way for the first time in many, many years. So I thought what I would do with this journal is link this type of bridge between the academy, using a “rigorous” academic context, rhetorical context on one hand and also looking at film as a medium with traditions and with cultural roots. This direction at that time was largely being done by independent historians. So we established a board which included people from all areas, from universities, independent historians, and curators at archives and museums, to bring them together and form an approach to the history of film, that wasn’t either the theoretical, analytical perspective you might have gotten from a university or one of these “here’s the guy who invented the first sprocket hole,” and letters wrangling about minutia of technological developments. I went to the Society for Cinema Studies conference and gave a little outline of the journal, and from the back of the room there was a woman who exclaimed, “At last! An empirical journal!” I thought, you’ve got it, you have it.

Steve: Richard, earlier in our interview you described a little bit about what the associate editors do, and you just mentioned the editorial advisory board that you established. Can you describe for our listeners, for a scholarly journal such as yours, just what does the editorial advisory board do?

Dr. Koszarski: It differed over time. When we were initially published by Taylor & Francis, for the first five years, the advisory board, which is rather large, were being barraged by me on a regular basis with solicitations for papers and ideas, please look at this. It proved to be somewhat unwieldy, which is why when the journal was taken over by John Libby publishing after five or six years, we extracted from that a smaller group of associate editors. The associate editors and myself each independently have the responsibility to create an issue. I know in other journals you have a group of five or six editors and they sort of thrash out among themselves the content of every issue, so that each of them is individually satisfied. I didn’t know that would lead to the most interesting journal in our field. So while there is an overall direction for whoever gets selected, once they are in charge of an issue it’s as if they’re running their own magazine within the context of Film History.

Steve: So they’re essentially guest editors for that issue?

Dr. Koszarski: They are the editors. They’re not guest editors, because a guest editor would have less authority or presence with the journal. These are people who keep coming back over and over again, so their personality and interests and perspectives will be engrained in the journal from that point on. Otherwise it would largely be my personality, which I guess would be okay for me, but this is a more interesting way of broadening out the appeal and range of areas of interest that the journal can cover.

Steve: How are the associate editors and advisory board members compensated for their time and energy on the journal?

Dr. Koszarski: Well, they get subscriptions. There is a small fee for the editing of an issue. But this is largely a labor of love for the editors, as it is for the subscribers.

Steve: Some critics of the peer review process for scholarly journals in general, I don’t mean Film History, this is in general, have claimed that the work of editing a journal and being on the board is not sufficiently compensated for the amount of time and energy that goes into it, specifically for rank and tenure in academic positions. Do you think that criticism valid?

Dr. Koszarski: What do you mean by compensated, you mean financially?

Steve: No, not financially, just as a return in the rank and tenure process at whatever institution they’re working at.

Dr. Koszarski: It really depends on the institution, I think. Obviously I think they should be rewarded tremendously, not only financially but in terms of respect and credit. Yes, is in your tenure packet having edited a 175-page journal issue given the same weight as having edited a 175-page book? Maybe not. But on the other hand, the packet will usually include a sample of the work you’ve been doing, so I would hope those who are reviewing your publication history would be able to take that into account.

Steve: Richard, before we close I’d like to give you an opportunity to address aspects of Film History I’ve not asked you about. Is there anything you would like to add?

Dr. Koszarski: In terms of the journal or in terms development of the medium itself?

Steve: Your choice.

Dr. Koszarski: Well maybe we can talk about the two of them simultaneously. As I mentioned, by 1980 there was very little historical work being done in graduate cinema departments, at least in this country. That has changed over time. Theory has--I don’t want to say theory has proven a dead end--but people who used to do only theoretical work are now writing for us. The change happened through the 1980’s and 1990’s largely because of an increase in library and university resources, specifically large corporate and private paper collections which were deposited in places like the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Hoblitzelle Theater collection in Texas, and UCLA. These collections, some of which had arrived a few years earlier, were finally processed and graduate students began to discover them. They began to understand that you can see inside the walls of those Hollywood studios in the 1920’s and 1930’s, what was going on behind the scenes in production companies. Discussing the beginnings of motion picture history did not have to be limited to looking at a movie projected on a screen and trying to write about that, or going through some old trade papers. Now there was the opportunity to look behind the public façade and see how this art industry actually operated. In the 1990’s there is a complete split, a complete change in the direction of the most creative energy in film studies towards new kinds of historical inquiry. It was a wonderful coincidence that we were here with this journal at the time that happened. I can see it in the submissions over the last twenty years.

Steve: Richard Koszarski, thank you very much for being my guest on Periodical Radio.

Dr. Koszarski: Oh, it was great to talk to you. Thank you for asking.

Steve: You’re very welcome. If you are interested in subscribing to Film History: An International Journal, go to Indiana University Press’s web site. The URL is http://iupjournals.org/filmhistory. Be aware that there is a web site titled “Film History” that is not affiliated with the journal. Thank you for listening to this installment of Periodical Radio. I'm your host, Steve Black.