There are different types of histories to film, not just one approach, all with different perspectives. Each progress through film history doesn’t just adopt one of these approaches but can relate to numeral.
These different histories can categorize into biographical history, technological history and social, aesthetic, economic, cultural and political history. There are many other histories you can look into more depth, which helps the progress of film here today, such as ownership, authorship theory and important dates.
‘Chronology is important, as understanding general film history plays a huge part in the construction of film itself. To find out what is exactly film history, what does film history claim to study and approaches historians take during their work.’
Film history means studying film from a particular perspective and with particular goals in mind, from this we can examine the development of film and how it has become the way it has today, being influenced by many different areas.
We look at significant dates that have encouraged each movement and development as well as the negatives, the pressures cinema has had from society by looking at film as a wider subject. Each history crosses each other’s path at some point and we will be looking at this closer later on, especially how the pressures affect the balance between the artistic approaches while still trying to achieve entertainment.
The reason we study the old history, is to understand the new history as well. David Broadwell also states this:
‘.. old films provide the same sorts of insights that we get from watching contemporary movies…some are documents of everyday existence or of extraordinary historical events that continue to reverberate in our times in our times’
The first type of history to mention would be the Aesthetic history, which in simple terms it the artistic overlook of the films, and looking into who influences what choices. Allen and Gomery support this:
‘until...