Hollywood and the Culture Elite

How the Movies Became American

Peter Decherney

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9780231508513
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Film e video

As Americans flocked to the movies during the first part of the twentieth century, the guardians of culture grew worried about their diminishing influence on American art, education, and American identity itself. Meanwhile, Hollywood studio heads were eager to stabilize their industry, solidify their place in mainstream society, and expand their new but tenuous hold on American popular culture.

Peter Decherney explores how these needs coalesced and led to the development of a symbiotic relationship between the film industry and America's stewards of high culture. Formed during Hollywood's Golden Age (1915-1960), this unlikely partnership ultimately insured prominent places in American culture for both the movie industry and elite cultural institutions. It redefined Hollywood as an ideal American industry; it made movies an art form instead of simply entertainment for the masses; and it made moviegoing a vital civic institution. For their part, museums and universities used films to maintain their position as quintessential American institutions.

As the book delves into the ties between Hollywood bigwigs and various cultural leaders, an intriguing cast of characters emerges, including the poet Vachel Lindsay, film producers Adolph Zukor and Joseph Kennedy, Hollywood flak and censor extraordinaire Will Hays, and philanthropist turned politician Nelson Rockefeller. Decherney considers how Columbia University's film studies program helped integrate Jewish students into American culture while also professionalizing screenwriting. He examines MoMA's career-savvy film curator Iris Barry, a British feminist once dedicated to stemming the tide of U.S. cultural imperialism, who ultimately worked with Hollywood and the U.S. government to fight fascism and communism and promote American values abroad. Other chapters explore Vachel Lindsay's progressive vision of movies as reinvigorating the public sphere through film libraries and museums; the promotion of movie connoisseurship at Harvard and other universities; and how the heir of a railroad magnate bankrolled the American avant-garde film movement.

Amid ethnic diversity, the rise of mass entertainment, world war, and the global spread of American culture, Hollywood and cultural institutions worked together to insure their own survival and profitability and to provide a coherent, though shifting, American identity.

1

VACHEL LINDSAY AND THE UNIVERSAL FILM MUSEUM

We must realize that the halls and art objects are but the container, whose content is formed by the visitors. It is the content that distinguishes a museum from a private collection. A museum is like the lung of a great city; each Sunday the crowd flows like blood into the museum and exits purified and fresh.

—Georges Bataille, “The Museum” (1930)

But it will take a heap of reviewing [i.e., revising] to make [The Art of the Moving Picture] the same oracular Moses in the Mountain deliverance of two tablets of stone I want to make it.

—Vachel Lindsay to Harriet Moody (1915)

ONE OF THE first ways anyone imagined cultural institutions embracing film was in the form of a collection, often described as a film library or film museum. Indeed, all the collaborations discussed in this book entailed some form of film collection. The first theorists of film collecting responded to the suggestion that film was a new universal medium: a purveyor of universal truths and an envoy for universally intelligible images, or, more commonly, a new universal language. Advisers to presidents and monarchs viewed the universal dimension of film as a threat to state or institutionally authorized history. They quickly saw the need to contain the production and circulation of film documents, and calls for public film collections—either state-owned or open to the public—emerged out of a desire to control film’s power to present realistic and indisputable evidence of important events. The scattered discussions of public film collections before World War I were, almost without exception, tied to attempts to control visual documentation of national narratives.

Within this one-note doctrine of containment, the poet Vachel Lindsay stands out as the prescient de Tocqueville of film collecting. The consolidation of the American film industry in Hollywood in the mid-1910s stirred Lindsay to imagine the cinema as a singular national institution on an unprecedented scale. When speculating about an ideal film collection, Lindsay focused less on films themselves and more on the technologies of cataloging and display. Like other theorists, he began with the premise that film was a new universal language, but, more importantly, he thought film theaters could be made into all-inclusive venues for yielding universal consensus. Lindsay looked to nineteenth-century public libraries and museums to find models for a new film institution that would forge, for the first time, a truly democratic American national identity.

Lindsay’s vision was first published in The Art of the Moving Picture in 1915 and revised in 1922. As we will see in later chapters, Lindsay’s vision ignited early university and museum projects, which sought to take film out of the commercial sphere, and his book was read in Europe, by Iris Barry and others, as a harbinger of the Americanization of the world. This chapter recovers the context of Lindsay’s musings and clarifies what often reads like a conglomeration of personal interests marshaled in an attempt to claim film as art. His case for the art of film, however, served another goal: to claim cinema as a civic institution that might implement American democracy on a universal scale.

NATIONALISM AND FILM COLLECTING FROM EDISON TO LINDSAY

As early as 1895 Thomas Edison’s assistant, W. K. L. Dickson, envisioned a national film collection in a book cowritten with his sister Antonia. The authors concluded their self-serving commemoration of Edison’s innovations by speculating about the educational uses of cinema. They foresaw a film collection that preserved history free of the historian’s cant and with greater precision than written texts: “Instead of dry and misleading accounts, tinged with the exaggerations of the chroniclers’ minds our activities will be enriched by the vitalized pictures of great national scenes, instinct with all the glowing personalities that characterized them.”¹ All at once, this sentence presents film as inherently truthful; it demonstrates film’s usefulness as a national tool; and it represses the commercial system of film production that was increasingly controlled by Edison. The Dicksons’ image of an unbiased historical collection restricted to bringing into one place “great national scenes” is perhaps evidence of little more than a corporate attempt to place a patriotic face on its monopolization of the emerging film industry. It is apt, in this context, that W. K. L. Dickson’s other important contribution to the history of film collecting was also both incidental and commercially motivated; Dickson inaugurated the largest extant collection of pre-Hollywood film when in 1893 he started to deposit “paper prints” of Edison films at the Library of Congress for copyright purposes.² The Dicksons’ inclination to imagine a historical film collection of national importance, however, is emblematic of early visions of film collecting. As we will see, that vision gained momentum because it appealed, for different reasons, to civic reformers, government officials, and filmmakers who, like the Dicksons, were attempting to replace the impression that films and the film industry were harmful to society with an image of cinema as a civic institution. To be sure, some proponents of film collecting sincerely hoped to transform the cinema itself and not just its public image.

Just a few years after the publication of the Dicksons’ book, a Polish cinematographer in Paris, Boleslas Matuszewski, submitted an editorial to Le Figaro (March 25, 1898) in an attempt to create a new career for himself. Matuszewski’s editorial made the case for a French national film collection, and one can’t help notice how his powerful description of a film collection both resembled and amplified the nationalistic image of the Dicksons’ projected collection. Matuszewski repeated the familiar invocation of film as a historical recorder superior to the “useless torrents of ink” as well as celebrating film’s direct, evidential access to empirical facts:

Animated photography … will give a direct view of the past. … How many lines of vague description in books intended for young people will be rendered unnecessary, the day we unroll in front of a classroom in a precise, moving picture the more or less agitated aspect of a deliberative assembly; the meeting of Heads of State about to ratify an alliance; a departure of troops or squadrons; or even the changing, mobile physiognomy of the city!³

If this seems typical of the celebrations of what Annette Michelson has called film’s “epistemological implications,”⁴ its ability to yield knowledge of the world, it is important to remember that public film collections were born out of a desire to control rather than facilitate this power.

Matuszewski, for instance, did not limit himself to a positivist stance toward visual documentation. He qualified his vision of a film collection, suggesting that film prints contained momentary, skewed views of events rather than straightforward, objective historical records. For Matuszewski, a film was a “piece of history” as well as a “historic document.” As a result, he insisted on the use of partisan documentary filmmakers, “aiming [their] lens[es] the same way a soldier does his gun.” Moreover, he insisted on a “competent committee” to determine the veracity of film documents. In the end, Matuszewski, like the Dicksons, called for a film collection limited to national interests. Such a collection, he continued, would “of necessity be restricted in the beginning” until filmmakers turned, properly, to capturing “slices of public and national life.”⁵ This was the dilemma shared by many early theorists of the film collection: how to preserve film’s power to represent history while keeping its interpretation within a national—really a nationalist—framework.

Matuszewski, like many of his successors, argued that the national film collection necessitated two new jobs: a trained cinematographer like himself and a curator. The changing job description of the film curator, we will see, is the battleground on which the design of the national film collection was fought. Matuszewski, for his part, left the description of the curator to the reader’s imagination. He was much more interested in the job of cinematographer, for which he was preemptively applying. To highlight his qualifications for the job, Matuszewski carefully timed his appeal to the Parisian reading public to follow an incident in which one of his own short films helped France avoid international embarrassment. His article reminded readers that in his previous post as official cinematographer for Russia’s Tsar Nicholas II, Matuszewski made a film of French president François Faure’s visit to St. Petersburg. Simply recording a state visit, the film inadvertently absolved Faure of accusations that he had not tipped his hat at an appropriate official moment.⁶ In addition to boosting his candidacy, this story further corroborated Matuszewski’s picture of the film collection as a necessary tool of national security able to contain and control film’s potent ability to represent historic events.

In contrast to the national collections invoked by the Dicksons or Matuszewski, individual private collectors found a variety of uses for film collections, including experiments in visual historiography, scientific study, and personal enjoyment. A Swiss Jesuit priest, Abbé Joye, acquired a collection of over two thousand films by 1910, which he used, most likely, for teaching in the school he started in Basel. One of the largest early private collections belonged to a wealthy French intellectual, Albert Kahn. Kahn created a utopian documentary archive of everyday life that he hoped would be used to promote international peace and understanding, although it was viewed only by a small circle of friends. Of course, there is no telling how many other archives have been lost to history.⁷

In discussions of public film collections, however, state leaders and their advisers persistently echoed Matuszewski’s call for officially sanctioned film collections. Early examples include Franz Goerke lobbying Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1912 (and possibly as early as 1897) to begin a German national film collection; French undersecretary of education and the arts Léon Bérard’s 1913 call for a French national cinemathèque; and U.S. president Warren Harding’s 1923 plan to store film records of nationally significant events in the White House basement.⁸ Not surprisingly, discussions of national film collections have typically proliferated and intensified during periods of military conflict. The most significant film collection to appear during World War I, the collection of the British Imperial War Museum, was explicitly nationalist in purpose. The museum’s first film archivist, E. Foxon Cooper, had pretensions to universal representation that included gathering and preserving every scrap of footage from newsreels to reenactments (or “faked scenes”). But despite Cooper's ambitions, the museum’s staff selectively organized its film collection from the outset, and four years after the end of the war a committee of museum trustees and naval officers convened to reevaluate the collection and discard infelicitous material.⁹ Shortly after that, the Imperial War Museum’s selective collection was mined for a series of documentaries celebrating Britain’s triumphs during the war, including Ypres (1925), Mons (1926), and The Battles of the Coronel and Falkland Islands (1927).¹⁰ By the time of World War II, Germany, France, Italy, Great Britain, Belgium, Sweden, Russia, and the United States were all engaged in a struggle to design or redesign archives in the service of national ideologies (a period discussed in chapter 5).

All these plans and collections, despite the common rhetoric of objective or universal documentation that surrounded them, barely concealed their nationalistic ambitions. As repositories of facts, the calls for state collections generally emphasized preservation of evidence and elided questions of access and use. But not all collections with nationalistic objectives have sought to imbue their objects with the inert quality of historicity. In 1915, for example, we find two instances in which national film collections were imagined in liberal-democratic terms, and appeals to nationalist historiography were replaced by—or at least mixed with—the desire to provide universal access to collections, making their venues into civic training grounds. One example is D. W. Griffith’s brief but vivid account of a future public library and the other is Vachel Lindsay’s extended and more complex prognostications in The Art of the Moving Picture. In these models, built on the examples of public libraries and museums, the viewing space became more important than the objects themselves. Films were valued for their ability to represent history to a mass public rather than as uncanny historical documents. As a result, containment of evidence became less of a problem than the proper method of display and consumption. The new placement of the collection in the hands of the people rather than the state, however, couldn’t entirely conceal the still strong nationalist program of the film collection, now imagined as a library or museum.

Griffith began his sketch for a film library by reiterating the image of a historical collection superior to written histories in both accuracy and completeness:

Imagine a public library of the near future, for instance, there will be long rows of boxes or pillars, properly classified and indexed, of course. At each box a push button and before each box a seat. Suppose you wish to “read up” on a certain episode in Napoleon’s life. Instead of consulting all the authorities, wading laboriously through a host of books, and ending bewildered, without a clear idea of exactly what did happen and confused at every point by conflicting opinions about what did happen, you will merely seat yourself at a properly adjusted window, in a scientifically prepared room, press the button, and actually see what happened.

There will be no opinions expressed. You will merely be present at the making of history.

But then he took it all back:

All the work writing, revising, collating, and reproducing will have been carefully attended to by a corps of recognized experts, and you will have received a vivid and complete expression.¹¹

Griffith, like the other early advocates of film collecting, concluded that film’s exceptional ability to represent the past presented a problem of containment. He proposed a solution to the problem that entailed replacing one set of experts—the historians, who guarded information and confused the general reader—with another set of experts who would present history clearly to all.

Many calls for state film collections explained the need for containment as a necessity of national security and assumed that state-authorized experts would supervise collections. But the experts-curators in Griffith’s sketch were not state employees, and their role was not to eliminate unwanted footage. In Griffith’s account, the promise of unlimited access was to be expedited by generic experts who were there merely to sift through the overwhelming number of documents. Griffith’s experts provided the assurance that viewers’ access to the past wouldn’t be hampered by the burden of making choices themselves. Griffith’s film library, in short, appears to put the experts directly—if condescendingly—at the service of the people rather than the state.

But when put in context, Griffith’s vision appears to be another attempt to transform the film collection into a national technology. As a film producer-director, Griffith made claims for film’s educational potential that were clearly the result of a combination of commercial and nationalist motivations, as were Matuszewski’s and the Dicksons’ in different ways. Written in direct defense of Griffith’s controversial racist epic, The Birth of a Nation (1915), this palpable image of film’s historiographical usefulness was intended, as Miriam Hansen has shown, to bolster the claims of objectivity made by his revisionist account of the Civil War and Reconstruction.¹² Ironically, where Griffith’s claims for a...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: How Film Became Art
• 1. Vachel Lindsay and the Universal Film Museum
• 2. Overlapping Publics: Hollywood and Columbia University, 1915
• 3. Mandarins and Marxists: Harvard and the Rise of Film Experts
• 4. Iris Barry, Hollywood Imperialism, and the Gender of the Nation
• 5. The Museum of Modern Art and the Roots of the Cultural Cold War
• 6. The Politics of Patronage: How the NEA (Accidentally) Created American Avant-Garde Film
• Conclusion: The Transformation of the Studio System
• Notes
• Index