Jargon and the Crisis of Readability: Methodology, Language,

and the Future of Film History

Steven Joseph Ross

Cinema Journal, 44, Number 1, Fall 2004, pp. 130-133 (Article)

Published by Michigan Publishing

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/cj.2004.0052

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/176104

[ Access provided at 13 Jul 2021 16:13 GMT from Ryerson University Library ]
Jargon and the Crisis of Readability:
Methodology, Language, and the Future of
Film History
Steven J. Ross

There is no one best way to write film history. Different questions require different
methodologies. My own scholarship and teaching focus on problems concerning
film, ideology, and power in America. Consequently, I see film as simultaneously
reflecting and shaping people’s understanding of the world around them. I am con-
cerned not simply with what is seen on the screen but with what is not seen. Why are
certain images and ideologies included or excluded from films? What are the every-
day material forces that shape the ideology of American films? What techniques do
filmmakers use to convey their messages? How are cinematic images received by
audiences? How should we communicate our findings to readers?
I would not pretend to be able to speak to all scholars in the field. Instead, I
offer a methodological road map for those concerned with a materialist-driven
approach to film studies: one that sees movies as an art form that stands on its own
but also, like the chair in Marx’s Das Capital, as an object whose creation reflects
a wide range of human practices.
Cinema scholars can certainly learn a great deal from historians, but histori-
ans can also learn from cinema scholars. Years ago, Tony Judt wrote a blistering
critique of the fools and angels writing social history.1 Unfortunately, readers tended
to focus more on the names he named than on the ideas and critiques he raised.
Thus, rather than cite specific works, I prefer to speak about general approaches
to doing a particular kind of film history, while also calling on cinema studies scholars
to change the way they write.
To my way of thinking, cutting-edge work in film history needs to deal with
four key elements: text, context, reception, and language.2 Deconstructing and
analyzing films as texts is something cinema scholars do far better than historians.
Historians have tended to focus on plot lines and to downplay or ignore the signifi-
cance of the images and the ways in which they are structured and used to convey
ideas. We still do not know how to read the inner workings of film itself. The
cinematic text, as film scholars have shown us, is composed of images that become
imprinted on the imagination far more effectively than do plot lines.
Reading in the field showed me how filmmakers use editing, lighting, costum-
ing, casting, choreography, makeup, and other techniques to convey ideological
messages without the need for words. In silent film, for example, radical agitators
are almost always eastern, central, or southern European looking; strikers are usu-
ally choreographed as unruly mobs rather than as orderly groups of protestors.
Today, drug dealers are “naturally” African Americans. No words are needed to
convey these messages to audiences.

130 Cinema Journal 44, No. 1, Fall 2004

 A thorough analysis of films also requires a thorough analysis of the context in
which they were made. Understanding context is a difficult task for it means under-
standing both the general climate of a society and the specific pressures within its
film industry at a particular moment in time. We need to know why filmmakers make
the films they do when they do. Movies are made by real men and women who face
myriad pressures every day. Will their decision about whether to make or not make a
particular film enable them to move up in the company structure, or will it earn them
a place on the unemployment line? Locating a film within its context helps us under-
stand what we see, why we are seeing certain images at that particular moment in
time, and why we are or are not seeing alternative images. Put another way, context
enables us to understand not simply what we see but what we do not see.
Context requires historical research. New knowledge demands new thinking,
and new thoughts are often facilitated by new sources. The act of historicizing
means more than just reading books by historians or quoting other academics. It
also means spending less time in cyberspace and more time in archival space. For
those interested in American film, looking at studio records, Production Code
Administration files, and censorship records are especially useful in helping us
understand why movies take the ideological forms they do and why some projects
never reach the screen.3 Yet, despite the calls for “historicizing” that have been
voiced repeatedly over the last decade, my examination of the twenty-three ar-
ticles in volume 43 (2003) of Cinema Journal reveals very little emphasis on archi-
val research. Of the 1,100 notes, 17 (1.5 percent) were drawn from Internet sources,
and 86 (7.7 percent) referenced magazines, newspapers, oral histories, or archival
collections. The rest of the notes were drawn from secondary sources—in short,
the profession was speaking to itself. The historicizing limitations of Cinema Jour-
nal do not mark the entire field. Film History and the Historical Journal of Film,
Radio and Television have done an excellent job of integrating new sources into
old debates and of generating new research problems.
Understanding audiences and reception is another area of concern to histori-
ans and film scholars alike. On the one hand, it is not enough for scholars simply to
deconstruct a film and its meaning and then to assume that audiences at the time
of the film’s release saw the film in the same way. Hindsight enables us to analyze
a film and offer interpretations that might not have been offered at the time. Yet
movies were made for paying customers at a specific time in history. How did they
interpret the film? Did they see it in the same way as the scholar who analyzes it
several years or decades later?
On the other hand, as someone who has tried to write about reception, I know
how hard it is to find information on audience response. How many respondents
are enough? One? Two? A dozen? A hundred? Given the immense difficulties of
tracing reception, we might consider broadening our idea of who constitutes “the
audience” and the arenas in which “reception” occurs. Audiences can be seen to
include more than the immediate paying customers. Reception occurred well be-
yond the four walls of the movie theater.
My current research on movies, movie stars, and politics in America sug-
gests that in looking at the impact of audience response on the overtly ideological

Cinema Journal 44, No. 1, Fall 2004 131

character of movies made between the 1930s and 1960s, we need to consider the
importance of such varied and politically engaged “audiences” as gossip colum-
nists, government agencies, civic groups, censorship boards, and voluntary asso-
ciations such as the American Legion and the Catholic Legion of Decency.
Examining studio records, Production Code Administration files, FBI files, gossip
columns (especially those of Hedda Hopper, Louella Parsons, and Walter
Winchell), oral histories of movie industry personnel, and the archival collec-
tions of star activists and industry leaders reveals that studio personnel paid a
great deal of attention to audience threats and frequently moved to silence
personnel or tone down films that jeopardized the studio’s and the industry’s
financial well-being.
While particular questions can dictate different research strategies, the one
common denominator that should guide all scholars is to write in clear, jargon-free
language. Jargon pervades all academic disciplines, including history, but it is es-
pecially pervasive in cinema studies. Film studies scholars, as a group, tend toward
the left side of the political spectrum. Yet their writings are among the most inac-
cessible, antidemocratic prose in the academic world. This is a shame because film
studies is positioned to have a far greater public readership than most other disci-
plines. I know this from firsthand experience. I spent the first ten years of my
academic career writing about industrialization and class formation in nineteenth-
century America. When I would talk to nonacademic friends about my work—or
even to historians outside the field—their eyes would glaze over. But talk to the
same people about movies and they perk up. After all, everyone has an opinion
about the movies; every viewer is also a critic.
People inside and outside the academy want to read what we have to say, but
only if we say it in a manner they understand. Current writings in film journals are
all too often filled with impenetrable jargon. When I complain about this to friends
who teach in cultural studies and cinema studies programs, I am usually told that
I do not understand the difficult nature of the theory involved. The language they
use is complex because the ideas they are dealing with are complex. They accuse
me of being antitheory. This is not true. I have studied theory since my under-
graduate days (I majored in history/political theory) and continue to read widely in
Marxist and cultural theory (I realize there are other theories one can use and
have no problem with anyone choosing different theoretical approaches). I firmly
believe that theory can help shape our questions and approaches to research; it
can help us know what materials we should be looking for, thereby guiding us
more fruitfully through the archives.
But theory should not be used to flaunt our knowledge and show how clever
we are. It is our obligation—indeed, our job—to translate complex ideas into
comprehensible prose. We are not, like Marx and Engels, creating a new lan-
guage out of the old in order to subvert the very foundations of the then-mod-
ern industrializing world. Yes, ideas can be complex, but if you cannot explain
them in clear, comprehensible prose, then do not submit your article or book
until you can.

132 Cinema Journal 44, No. 1, Fall 2004

 It is not enough to write for a handful of scholars hip to the jargon that
passes as analysis. We are paid to think and communicate ideas to others: to our
students, our colleagues, and our potential public audience. One does not have
to write for the public. Some of us can focus on writing for scholarly journals,
others for university presses, still others for trade publishers. But there is no
excuse for obfuscation, for hiding incomplete thoughts and poorly developed
ideas behind a jargon so impenetrable that only a few will dare point out that the
emperor has no clothes.
The challenge that confronts cinema scholars and film historians alike is to
help readers understand why movies matter and why these readers should take
the time to read our writings. Doing this requires hard work. Each one of us has
to decide if we are up to the task. Do we wish to be significant, to be intellectual
leaders in the world, or do we wish to be practitioners of a dying—or at best a
marginal—discipline? I say this not to offend or sound smug but to alert us all to
a crisis of relevance. Few contemporary institutions have had a greater effect on
molding popular understanding of the world than film and television. Yet most
citizens lack the critical tools to contextualize, analyze, and critique the images
and ideologies of a film. Why not aspire to reach beyond the academic commu-
nity to the general public? That history books regularly make the best-seller lists
testifies to the public’s thirst for knowledge that is presented in an intelligent but
comprehensible manner. There is no reason cinema scholars cannot provide the
public with similar books. Let us try to engage the public, and each other, in a
common dialogue that could reach masses of people throughout the world. It is a
challenge worth taking.

Notes
I want to thank Leo Braudy, Phil Ethington, Richard Fox, Sumiko Higashi, and Vanessa
Schwartz for their thoughtful comments on earlier drafts of this piece.
1. Tony Judt, “A Clown in Regal Purple: Social History and the Historians,” History
Workshop 7 (1969): 66–94.
2. For more extended discussions of methodology and of materialist approaches to film
history, see Steven J. Ross, Working-Class Hollywood: Silent Film and the Shaping of
Class in America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 263–76, and Ross,
“American Workers, American Movies: Historiography and Methodology,” Interna-
tional Labor and Working-Class History 59 (spring 2001): 81–105.
3. For cinema scholars who have not spent much time doing archival research, I strongly
recommend that they explore the wealth of information housed in archival collections at
the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; the Film Studies Center, Museum of
Modern Art, New York; the Performing Arts Library, New York Public Library; the Ameri-
can Museum of the Moving Image, Astoria, New York; the George Eastman House,
Rochester, New York; the Oral History Collection, Columbia University, New York; the
Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills,
California; and the Cinema-Television Archives, Special Collections Departments,
University of Southern California and University of California, Los Angeles.

Cinema Journal 44, No. 1, Fall 2004 133