Cinema History

Spring 2019

Original HistoricalResearch Project

If you work alone, your final paper must be 6-8 pages.

2). Topics are due on March 12th. On this date you will turn in a one-page description of what you will attempt to discover…the subject and how you plan to go about your investigation. You must also turn in a one-page bibliography proving you have done research about your subject.

Cinema and television history encompasses more than just films. By studying how films were made and received, we discover how creators and audiences responded to their moment in history. By searching for social and cultural influences on films, we understand better the ways in which films bear the traces of the societies that made and consumed them. Film history opens up a range of important issues in politics, culture, and the arts.

And it involves more than just theatrical fiction films for entertainment or fictional television. We can include educational, industrial, scientific, and pornographic films. We should also consider documentary films, experimental or avant-garde filmmaking, and animation. Another fascinating area of study is audience effect – fashion trends, influence on other forms of popular culture (or “high” culture”), and the creation and/or function of fan culture.

In this class you are not going to just study American film and television history, you are going to write it - undertaking original research. Your assignment is to pick a topic relevant to film, from its inception in 1985 to 2000, that is open to study and can be accomplished through primary- sourcework.

A primary source is an original document or object created at the time you are studying. It is first- hand evidence about an event, object, person, or work of art. Primary sources for this class may include reviews, publicity articles, interviews or eye-witness accounts, photographs, theater reviews, production news items, production notes, screenplays, real estate records, court documents, patent records, autobiographies, memoirs, and of course – films.

Choose a topic that can be researched and written up by the end of the semester. Your subject must concern a very specific issue, one that has not been studied in full or in sufficient detail, although their might be references or short remarks about it here and there.

In order to discover both a reasonable topic and how much or little it has been studied, you must undertake, first, research throughsecondarysources.

Secondary sources describe, discuss, interpret, comment upon, analyze, evaluate, summarize, and process primary sources. Secondary source materials can be articles in newspapers or popular magazines, or articles found in scholarly journals that discuss or evaluate someone else's original research.

Having done that you then proceed to uncover the kind of resources that you want to study and which are available to you. Some places to find primary sources:

Considering Research in Film and Television Archives

https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/january-2001/ considering-research-in-film-and-television-archives

Media Studies Research Claremont Colleges list of Archives

http://libguides.libraries.claremont.edu/c.php?g=317177&p=2118898

Academy Film Archive – Be Sure to check out the Margret Herrick Library under Lean

http://www.oscars.org/collection-highlights

Animation Archive (Burbank)

http://www.asifa-hollywood.org/about-us/animation-archive/

Center for Visual Music

http://www.centerforvisualmusic.org/

DGA Visual History Program (interviews with members)

http://www.dga.org/Craft/VisualHistory/About.aspx

Hollywood Heritage Museum

http://www.seeing-stars.com/Museums/StudioMuseum.shtml

Hefner Moving Image Archive (USC) includes the Motion Picture Technology Archive

http://cinema.usc.edu/about/movingimagearchive.cfm

Louis B. Mayer Library

http://www.afi.com/about/library.aspx

Paley Center for Media

https://www.paleycenter.org/collection

Warner Bros. Archive

http://cinema.usc.edu/about/warnerbrosarchives.cfm