Paraphrasing Richard Abel, who in his Menus for Movieland calls the local newspaper a relatively unexamined treasure trove for writing film history,1 this volume turns the spotlight on another horn of plenty, the cornucopia of movie magazines. Whereas a handful of film magazines and trade journals like Variety are now widely used sources in the film and cinema scholarâs tool kit,2 many other cinema-related periodicals largely remain untouched. Besides drawing attention to the vast amount and the diversity of film periodicals, this edited collection aims at illustrating the considerable research opportunities offered by film trade journals, popular movie magazines and other periodicals with content about the medium that became one of the twentieth centuryâs most distinguished art and popular leisure forms.
Arguing that film magazines are more than just additional sources for understanding movies, stars and the wider cultural-economic institution of cinema, this book is part of the recently intensifying interest for periodicals within the humanities and the social sciences. One of the key insights gained from periodical studies as a discipline is that film magazines are best considered as significant sites of intermediality and remediation, or as crossing points between different media, formats and story types.3 In this volume we maintain that in the case of movie magazines, intermediality not only resides in how these periodicals transgress the borders between film and print media, but that there are also clear links with other media and art forms like literature, photography, radio, television and fashion. Hence, film periodicalsâ intermediality is also an internal feature, more precisely in how movie magazines cover the realm of cinema with a plethora of formats and story types such as reviews, interviews, poetry, short stories, fashion reports and contests, readerâs letters, photos, comics and many other kinds of narrative and graphic materials. Collectively, this volume argues that through these strategies, movie magazines play an important role in re- or intermediating between the realm of cinema and the audienceâs everyday life, practices and imagination.
The idea that movie magazines are not just by-products or paratexts (around the main text which is the movie) is also central to another inspiration for many of the contributions to this volume, that is, new cinema history.4 This recent trend in film and cinema historiography refers to a process of defocusing or decentralizing the movie as the core research object of the discipline. While film analysis, close reading and other perspectives related to understanding the aesthetic, ideological or rhetorical complexities of movies remain a vibrant strand within the discipline, new cinema history has increasingly explored other facets of what constitutes cinema over the last 15 years or so. Within the new cinema history perspective, cinema is conceived as a multifaceted concept, encompassing not only the films and their stars, stories and the moviesâ diegetic worlds. New cinema historians promote the study of what has often been conceived as marginal or peripheral to cinema, namely issues of the socio-cultural and- economic realities within which films are produced, distributed, circulated, exhibited and received. Much of this work looks at cinema from a bottom-up perspective, examining audienceâs experiences of the movies and their encounter with the places and spaces in which motion pictures were shown and consumed. New cinema historians study the socio-cultural practices of going to the movies and they are interested in the wider imaginative scope and meanings of cinema for audiences. Arguing that films are only one part of what constitutes cinema, the perspective provocatively brings forward the argument that movies might not have been that important at all in the strategies, tactics, practices and pleasures linked to cinema and cinemagoing as a social practice.
This comprehensive approach to cinema, obviously, requires the usage of a wide, eclectic array of sources and traces. In order to understand more fully the subtleties linked to the experience of films, cinema and the practices of cinemagoing, cinema historians now use methodologies like oral history,5 and the analysis of film popularity figures and film programming schedules.6 They closely examine fan letters and diaries,7 photographs showing audiences as well as film trade statistics and all other materials concerning cinema attendance and audience behavior.8 Scrutinizing movie magazines is an important part of todayâs film and cinema historianâs research strategies. While there is already some literature on movie magazines, both as research objects9 and as sources for examining issues like the discursive construction of stars10 and fans,11 we believe that much more work could be done about and with movie magazines.
In terms of movie magazines as research objects, we need to acknowledge that the existing scholarship often focuses on the film trade press and on a handful of popular movie magazines, mostly from the USA, the UK and a few other major film production countries. It is impossible to estimate the number of film periodicals, partly because defining them is difficult (see Chap. 4 on film criticism in the British Broadcasting Corporationâs [BBCâs ] cultural magazine The Listener and Chap. 5 on fan magazines and newspaper entertainment pages).12 Looking at what is available only in libraries linked to film archives and other film heritage institutions, it is clear that movie magazines constitute a vast and multiscopic area with many thousands of titles.13 Hence, only the tip of the iceberg is now used, and much work needs to be done in mapping this extensive field, both within and beyond the scope of the Anglo-Saxon world. In addition to chapters on the movie magazine markets in Britain (e.g. Chap. 4), France (Chap. 10) and the USA (e.g. Chaps. 2, 3, 5 and 6), this volume looks at the political economies, editing strategies and representational practices in small or âperipheralâ markets such as Canada (Chap. 7), South Africa (Chap. 8), the Netherlands (Chaps. 9 and 11) and Chile (Chap. 12). This international perspective offers the opportunity not only to gain new insights into, or to compare film magazinesâ editorial systems in different countries and continents, but also to enhance our understanding of the transcultural entanglement between periodicals. In this volume, several chapters address the intercultural influence, circulation and exchange between major cinematic centers and âperipheralâ receiving cultures, such as those between the Netherlands and Germany (Chap. 11), and the realm of Hollywood for Chilean movie magazines (Chap. 12).
A research agenda on the movie magazines as an object ...