The increased availability of primary sources made possible by sites such as Media History Digital Library is not only useful for scholars of early cinema but also opens up the possibility for incorporating new types of resources into research projects in undergraduate classes. This entry focuses on how we can integrate the vast resources of digital archives into our undergraduate teaching in meaningful ways. In other words, it requires careful consideration to construct assessments that teach students how to navigate the multitude of sources available to them and, hopefully, excite them about the material. Listed here are two assignments that combine digital research with creative simulations to facilitate engagement with a multitude of sources while also incorporating areas of research that extend beyond close film analysis. In addition to introducing students to digital archives, these assignments move past textual analysis to focus on the multifaceted elements of film as a business and film production and exhibition as labor.

The Theater Entrepreneur

This assignment asks students to imagine themselves as owners of a North American theater in one year selected from the period between 1905 through to 1919.[1] After consulting primary sources at the Media History Digital Library, and carefully selected secondary sources, students make rational decisions concerning the location, design, programming, and marketing of their theater. The students’ tasks are twofold: (1) undertake research of primary resources, mainly trade papers and exhibitor manuals housed by the Media History Digital Library, and (2) write a rationale explaining their decisions concerning theater location, architectural features, film program, and marketing strategies.[2] I expect students to justify each of their decisions with reference to the materials that they find in primary resources (e.g., advertisements, editorials, feature articles, letters from exhibitors, and film reviews), and to include a handful of illustrations gleaned from these sources. In this way, students are exposed to the variety of elements that constituted the content of trade papers and manuals, and they are required to make selections from this array of material. Creativity emerges as a key element of the assignment, but driven by research and designed to encourage browsing through the trade press magazines and other available materials on Media History Digital Library. A scaffolded approach to this project might ask students to first submit notes of their findings while browsing designated issues of Moving Picture World, Film Index, or Motion Picture News.

Writing the Photoplay 

While the first case study emphasizes the history of exhibition, the second case study focuses on the production of film, but offers a low-tech entry point for students. In short, the assignment requires students to read the available screenwriting manuals of the 1910s and 1920s, as well as secondary sources about screenwriting history, in order to write a historically accurate scenario (or portion of a scenario, depending on length limits).[3] To produce a script that reflects the era, students need to have an understanding of silent film conventions, but they must also research the specific format of a scenario or treatment during the period. Providing students access to a variety of research materials—the scenario-writing handbooks, memoirs, screenwriting histories, and vocational guides from the period, plus other available resources—allows them to understand the job and the breakdown of labor in the film studios before they undertake the creative task.  

In addition to thinking about cinema as art and entertainment, the study of scenario writing during the silent period asks students to consider and seek information about the structure of scenario departments. In this assignment, three options are typically given to students: 1) create an original story; 2) adapt a story for screen but justify its adaptation for 1910s/1920s audiences; 3) take a pre-existing silent film and re-edit it to radically change the story.[4] In addition, one could add a fourth option, pertaining to titling, in order to illuminate the important role of writing intertitles. As with the exhibition assignment, students submit both a creative component and a written rationale that explains the research conducted and how it informed their creative decisions.[5]

Conclusion

The field has witnessed a number of shifts in film history research: the archival turn, the industry turn, the digital turn, and more. The study of exhibition, nickelodeons, and local movie-going has a rich history in film scholarship.[6] Screenwriting studies[7]—the history and analysis of screenwriting as creative work and as labor—owes much to the industry turn or interdisciplinary work in media studies: the study of creative industries,[8] cultural industries,[9] media industries,[10] and production studies,[11] to name a few. These assignments attempt to find new ways of assessing students in line with changing frameworks of film history.

A common misconception holds that these shifts in research—and the assignments created to reflect them—constitute film studies without film. This could not be further from the truth. When attempting to write a silent film scenario, students will excel by having seen more films from the period. To simulate running an early film theater, students must know what films were available and what might have been popular. These assignments seek to innovate the ways we think about assessing and teaching an approach to film history that foregrounds industry, production, and exhibition over the “great men of history” approach. Students engage in focused research that has a number of possible emphases, depending on the instructor’s framing of material through lectures and the syllabus as a whole. This allows instructors to open the terrain to questions of race, gender, class, and sexuality in both the industry and the consumption of early film. In other words, who had access to different jobs within the film industry? Who were the imagined audience members? We must remind students that our understanding of “what it was like back then” needs to be rooted in evidence and that they are historians first, rather than role-players. Through simulating the experience of writing in or for Hollywood studios or other industries, we allow students to demonstrate their understanding of various aspects of film history.

1. This assignment can work with a number of different date ranges. Katherine Spring, at Wilfrid Laurier University, narrows the dates to cover only the nickelodeon period. I have experimented with dates from the period during which film was shown in vaudeville or other locations. I suggest erring on the earlier side rather than later. When expanded to include the 1920s, the assignment can inadvertently invite a common misconception from students: once features and the star system are entrenched, students embrace the notion that they are advertising a particular film, not the venue. ↑

2. One can find an extended explanation of this assignment at https://mediahistoryproject.org/teaching/educators.html. ↑

3. Screenwriting manuals from the 1910s and 1920s are readily available on the Internet Archive and provide students with the foundation of their knowledge of how to write a historical scenario. Examples include: Donald MacCargo’s Writing a Photo Play (1917) (https://archive.org/details/writingphotoplay00macc/page/n3/mode/2up); Howard Dimick’s Modern Photoplay Writing and its Craftmanship (1922) (https://archive.org/details/modernphotoplay00dimigoog/page/n7/mode/2up); Grace Lytton’s Scenario Writing Today (1921) (https://archive.org/details/scenariowritingt00lyttrich/page/n3/mode/2up); the Palmer Photoplay Corporation’s Handbook (1922) (https://archive.org/details/elementarytreati00palm/page/n3/mode/2up); Florence Radinoff’s The Photoplaywrights’ Handy Text-Book (1913) (https://archive.org/details/photoplaywrights00radi/page/n3/mode/2up); Embrie Zuver’s How to Write Photoplays (1915) (https://archive.org/details/howtowritephotop00zuve/page/n5/mode/2up); and many more.  A few key texts can help students understand the primary sources. Both Steven Price’s The Screenplay: Authorship, Theory, and Criticism (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010) and A History of the Screenplay (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013) offer useful and succinct introductions to screenwriting studies, with a focus on the changing form of screenplays throughout history. ↑

4. An extended explanation of this assignment is found at https://mediahistoryproject.org/teaching/educators.html. ↑

5. When using assignments that combine some creativity with a research rationale, I tend to weight the rationale grade much higher, so that students have a freer time with creativity. The learning outcomes are addressed in the research and in demonstrating what they learned about the film industry through their research. ↑

6. Edited collections such as Kathryn Fuller-Seeley's Hollywood in the Neighborhood: Historical Case Studies of Local Moviegoing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), Melvyn Stokes’ and Richard Maltby’s American Movie Audiences: From the Turn of the Century to the Early Sound Era (London: British Film Institute, 1999), and Ina Rae Hark’s Exhibition: The Film Reader (New York: Routledge, 2002) offer students concrete examples of how to think about historical film exhibition. Charles Musser’s Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994) and Eileen Bowser’s Transformation of Cinema: 1907-1915 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994) provide in-depth histories of early American film that offer a combined focus on films, industry, and moviegoing/exhibition practices. Rick Altman’s Silent Film Sound (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004) and Gregory Waller’s Moviegoing in America: A Sourcebook in the History of Film Exhibition (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2001) also provide insights into the experience of early cinemagoing. Both Jacqueline Stewart’s Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005) and Cara Caddoo’s Envisioning Freedom: Cinema and the Building of Modern Black Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014) also provide necessary discussions of cinemagoing and Black audiences. Coverage of women in film exhibition can be found in Kathryn Fuller-Seeley and Karen Ward Mahar’s “Exhibiting Women: Gender, Showmanship, and the Professionalization of Film Exhibition in the United States, 1900-1930” in the Women Film Pioneers Project https://wfpp.columbia.edu/essay/exhibiting-women-gender-showmanship-and-the-professionalization-of-film-exhibition-in-the-united-states-1900-ndash-1930/. ↑

7. The subfield includes useful texts from Steven Price, noted above; Miranda J. Banks, The Writers: A History of American Screenwriters and Their Guild (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015); Bridget Conor, Screenwriting: Creative Labor and Professional Practice (London: Routledge, 2014); Anne Morey, “Fashioning the Self to Fashion the Film: The Case of the Palmer Photoplay Corporation,” in Hollywood Outsiders: Adaptation of the Film Industry, 1913-1934 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 70-111; and Marsha McCreadie, The Women Who Write the Movies: From Frances Marion to Nora Ephron (New York: Birch Lane Press, 1994).  ↑

8. John Hartley, ed.. Creative Industries (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005); Rosamund Davies and Gauti Sigthorsson, Introducing the Creative Industries: From Theory to Practice (London: Sage, 2013).  ↑

9. David Hesmondhalgh, The Cultural Industries, 4th ed. (London: Sage, 2019). ↑

10. Jennifer Holt and Alisa Perren, eds. Media Industries: History, Theory, and Method (Malden, MA: John Wiley & Sons, 2009); Thomas Schatz, "Film Studies, Cultural Studies, and Media Industries Studies." Media Industries Journal 1, no. 1 (2014): 39-43; Michelle Hilmes, "Nailing Mercury: The Problem of Media Industry Historiography," in Media Industries: History, Theory, and Method (2009), 21-33.  ↑

11. Miranda Banks, “Production Studies,” Feminist Media Histories 4, no. 2 (2018): 157–161; Vicki Mayer, Miranda J. Banks, and John T. Caldwell, eds., Production Studies: Cultural Studies of Media Industries (New York: Routledge, 2009); Miranda Banks, Bridget Conor, and Vicki Mayer, eds., Production Studies, the Sequel!: Cultural Studies of Global Media Industries (New York: Routledge, 2015).  ↑