ACADEMIA Letters
Constructing Film Histories: a bottom-up approach
John Sedgwick
National and international films histories are normally told from a high-level viewpoint, drawing upon contemporary governmental enquiries and reports, trade journal reporting, memoirs
and biographies. These sources of evidence are vital of course and often arm us with pertinent
statistics and personal experience to frame accounts of the emergence and development of film
industries. It is an approach based upon authority – the right for a particular institution, group
or individual to be heard – and entails the selective presentation of information. However, it
is one that misses the rich texture of individual lived experience.
Here, an alternative focus is presented, based upon the countless millions of transactions
that took place at the box-office between film exhibitors and consumers. Consider a single
transaction in which Film X1 is screened at Cinema Y1 for a specified period of time t, of which
there are two parts: first, the corpus of investment and coordination decisions that underpin
the supply of Film X1 , entailing business organisations, capital and labour markets and the
means for them to interconnect - markets, prices and command. Film is a commodity. As
Karl Marx wrote in the first paragraph of Capital: ‘The commodity is, first of all, an external
object, a thing which through its qualities satisfies human needs of whatever kind,…whether
they arise, for example, from the stomach, or the imagination, makes no difference.’1
The second part entails a consumer making a choice to watch Film X1 in preference to
other films being screened simultaneously in period t in Cinemas Y2 . . . Yn .2 This decision
might be the consequence of habit. It might also be the consequence of the consumer drawing
upon a personal bank of accumulated filmgoing experience to make a judgement such as Film
1
Marx, K, (1976) Capital: Volume 1, (Penguin Books, Harmondsworth), p. 125. See also Lysandrou, P
(2019), Commodity, Routledge, London. For an account of commodity characteristics of films see Sedgwick, J,
(2000) Filmgoing in 1930s Britain: A Choice of Pleasures, Exeter, Exeter University Press
2
Where n represents either the number of films in the consumer’s choice set, and/or cinemas within the locality.
Academia Letters, December 2020
©2020 by Academia Inc. — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0
Corresponding Author: John Sedgwick, sedgwicj52@gmail.com
Citation: Sedgwick, J. (2020). Constructing Film Histories: a bottom-up approach. Academia Letters, Article
86. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL86.
1
X1 > X2 > Xn . For discriminating filmgoers, films matter - evidenced by the fact that
different films screened at the same cinema attract different size audiences.3
From the point of the single transaction, it is possible to develop the analysis. Unless
Film X1 was at the beginning or end of its life cycle, it was on a journey that took it to other
audiences in other cinemas in other places. The same is true of all other films. At most cinemas
films stopped for only a short time. For instance, in Rome in 1954, of the 114 cinemas that
consistently listed film programmes daily in the L’Unità newspaper, 75 of them screened three
or more films every week.4 As films made their journey outwards in time and space, those
films that were more popular with audiences were circulated more widely and intensively, with
the object of making higher revenues for their exhibitors, distributors and producers to share.
Thus, in response to audience preferences, films that were most popular were made less scarce
than films that were least popular. This seems to be true everywhere and at all times. Indeed, a
fundamental difference between cinema and earlier forms of entertainment was that the most
popular films (and their stars) could appear simultaneously to audiences in many locations.
In this way Gerben Bakker explains how the industrialisation of entertainment overcame the
bottleneck problem that had previously limited the capacity of the most popular stars to reach
mass audiences.5
To capture the journey made by films, details of each stay are required – cinema name,
seating capacity, admission prices and dates. The investigation can range in scale from small
towns in a province to national territories. The most obvious source of information is the advertisement/listing columns of local/regional newspapers. History emerges as films circulate
out in time and place from the centre to the periphery – in general from box-office rich to
box-office poor cinemas. Films that are popular appear time and again, allowing them to be
ranked by the number of screening days they accumulate. Patterns of distribution and exhibition appear.
The POPSTAT Index of Film Popularity was created not only to capture the flow of films
among a stock of cinemas, but to give weights to the cinemas where they were screened on
the basis of the revenue they might generate.6 In this capacity, POPSTAT serves as a proxy
3
Jurca, C and Sedgwick, J, (2014) ‘The Film’s the Thing: Moviegoing in Philadelphia, 1935–36’, Film History,
26: 58-83. Sedgwick, J, (2006) ‘Cinemagoing in Portsmouth during the 1930s’, Cinema Journal 46: 52-85. For
the distinction between discriminating and non-discriminating audiences see Handel, L, (1950) Hollywood Looks
at its Audience, Urbana, Ill., University of Illinois Press and Sedgwick, J and Pokorny, M, (2010) ‘Consumers as
risk takers: evidence from the film industry during the 1930s’ Business History 52: 74–99.
4
Treveri Gennari, D., and Sedgwick, J. ‘Memories in context: the social and economic function of cinema in
1950s Rome’, Film History, 27, (2015), pp.76-104
5
Bakker, G (2008) Entertainment industrialised: the emergence of the international Film Industry, 1890-1940,
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
6
For a recent presentation see Sedgwick, J (2020). ‘From POPSTAT to Relpop: a methodological JourAcademia Letters, December 2020
©2020 by Academia Inc. — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0
Corresponding Author: John Sedgwick, sedgwicj52@gmail.com
Citation: Sedgwick, J. (2020). Constructing Film Histories: a bottom-up approach. Academia Letters, Article
86. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL86.
2
for relative box-office. What POPSTAT cannot capture is the difference in the popularity of
films appearing at the same cinema.7 Clearly, actual attendance numbers and/or box office
records are preferable, but such records are indeed rare. In the absence of such information,
POPSTAT is a substitute tool that opens up a portal into past societies, in that it provides a
strong indication of the choices made and tastes revealed by very large numbers of people in
societies in which cinema dominated paid-for-leisure activities. Furthermore, the comparison
of POSTAT Index scores of films in different localities, allows for the possibility analytically
that differences in tastes and preferences exist. Specifically, the RelPOP Index has been developed to do this and works by expressing the POPSTAT Index score of each ith film with
the median score of the population from which it was derived.8
Resting on microfoundations the POPSTAT method contrasts with conventional approaches
taken to national film histories.9 At its centre is the transaction through which a consumer becomes a member of an audience. By recording this action by proxy of a film being screened for
a period of time in a particular cinema and aggregating this across a population of cinemas, we
learn about the affinities that societies had with particular films and the stars that appeared in
them. We learn for instance, that the 1930s Swedish films and stars dominated a fast-growing
domestic market: in keeping with Peter Miskell’s International Orientation Index, the Hollywood films that made the greatest impact in Sweden were those featuring Greta Garbo.10
Joseph Garncatz uses an astonishing array of sources to quantify how European audiences
during the 1930s favoured domestic films when given the opportunity to watch them.11 Clara
Pafort Overduin has shown a similar result in her extensive study of filmgoing in the Netherlands during the mid-1930s.12 Knowing that ordinary people in very large numbers not only
chose filmgoing as a form of recreation but also favoured particular films and stars contributes
ney in Investigating comparative film popularity’, TMG Journal for Media History 23 (1-2): 1–9. DOI:
http://doi.org/10.18146/tmg.776.
7
Joseph Garncatz has adapted POPSTAT to take account of the day of the week and month of the year.
8
See Sedgwick, J, Miskell, P, & Nicoli, M, (2019) The market for films in post-war Italy: evidence for both
national and regional patterns of taste, Enterprise & Society, 20: 199-228; Also see Sedgwick (2020) ibid.
9
Felin, T., Foss, N., Heimeriks, K., & Madsen, T. (2012). Microfoundations of routines and capabilities:
Individuals, processes, and structure. Journal of Management Studies, 49, 1351–1374.
10
Miskell, P, (2016) International films and international markets: the globalisation of Hollywood entertainment, C.1921–1951, Media History, 22, 2: 174-200. The Swedish observations were quantified in a 1990 report
by Leif Furhammar, kindly translated for me by Åsa Jernudd.
11
Garncarz, J., Wechselnde Vorlieben: Über die Filmpräferenzen der Europäer, 1896-1939, Frankfurt am Main,
Stoemfeld, (2015)
12
Pafort-Overduin, C, (2012) Hollandse films met een Hollands hart. Nationale identiteit en de Jordaanfilms,
1934-1936, Utrecht, University of Utrecht. See also Sedgwick, J, Pafort-Overduin, C and Boter, J, (2012) Explanations for the restrained development of the Dutch cinema market in the 1930s, Enterprise and Society, 13:
634-671.
Academia Letters, December 2020
©2020 by Academia Inc. — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0
Corresponding Author: John Sedgwick, sedgwicj52@gmail.com
Citation: Sedgwick, J. (2020). Constructing Film Histories: a bottom-up approach. Academia Letters, Article
86. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL86.
3
to an understanding of the quotidian of everyday life and the part that prevailing culture, for
better, or worse, played in this. The methodology proposed in this letter, allows the audience
to speak for itself - surely an important voice in any history of popular cinema.
Academia Letters, December 2020
©2020 by Academia Inc. — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0
Corresponding Author: John Sedgwick, sedgwicj52@gmail.com
Citation: Sedgwick, J. (2020). Constructing Film Histories: a bottom-up approach. Academia Letters, Article
86. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL86.
4
John Sedgwick