New Cinema History and the Classical Hollywood Cinema

In a number of previous essays, I have proposed a distinction between film history and cinema history: that is, between an aesthetic history of textual relations among individuals and individual objects and the social history of a cultural institution. Film history, the history of textual relations and stylistic influence, borrows its methods and rationale from the practices of art and literary history. It is predominantly a history of production and producers, concerned with issues of intention and agency underpinning the process of cultural production, often at the level of the individual, less frequently at the level of the institution, and it is relatively little interested in anything, other than aesthetic influence, that happens beyond the point of production.

By contrast, writing the social history of cinema is a project engaging, on the one hand, with elements of economic, industrial, and institutional history in accounts of how the commercial institution of cinema operated and, on the other with the sociocultural history of its audiences...