Toward the Question of Writing a History of Cinema in the Context of Time

Abstract

The article is devoted to the updated methods of writing on film history. The author’s conception is based on his personal experience of writing the text-book “The Recent History of Russian Cinema” as well as on the debate in the “Film Art” (Iskusstvo kino) magazine in the early 1970s, which revealed a number of issues that are still relevant nowadays: methods of cinema studies, the principles of writing both scholarly papers and teaching aids for students, certain expectations from a historic research, the approach to the subject matter, etc.
The author reflects on the advantages and disadvantages of two approaches: individual, subjective, striving for the polemical sharpness of the personal historical assessments, on the one hand, and collective, claiming certain impartialness, on the other.
All these reflections led him to a model that he still sees as a multiauthored monograph, as long as it takes on the task of a detailed fundamental presentation of extensive material that requires profound knowledge in various areas. However, he does not think it appropriate to ignore the subjective component. An individual viewpoint makes it possible to create a specific semantic high field that initiates various theoretical views on filmmaking.
Therefore, the functions of the team of authors can be distributed as follows: each contributor writes a fragment of the description of the historical process, perhaps even in its synchronous understanding, and together they create something that cannot be done by one researcher: an initial empirical picture. After that, one researcher, the supervisor, combines the isolated fragments into a coherent whole, something that is completely beyond the power of a team of authors. This supervisor eventually writes an integral history in his own way (but in a dialogue with the other experts) thus supplementing the original empirical picture with a single essentially diachronic view.