Thomas Doherty's "How Film Became History"

Thomas Doherty is professor of American studies at Brandeis University. His books include Hollywood and Hitler, 1933–1939 (2013); Show Trial: Hollywood, HUAC, and the Birth of the Blacklist (2018); and Little Lindy Is Kidnapped: How the Media Covered the Crime of the Century (2020).

Doherty applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, How Film Became History: The Rise of the Archival Documentary in 1930s America, with the following results:

Page 99 of How Film Became History discusses the censorship gauntlet run by Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr.’s Hitler’s Reign of Terror (1934). The film’s producer, an independent hustler named Samuel L. Cummins, had to negotiate with the New York State Censor Board to obtain a certificate of approval to exhibit the film in New York, a make-or-break market for a commercial release.

Serendipitously enough, page 99 is a good indicator of the rest of the book: a cultural-historical inquiry into a select inventory of foundational archival documentaries made in the 1930s. Like most of the films discussed in the other 266 pages, Hitler’s Reign of Terror is something of an obscurity, but an important one: it is the first feature-length anti-Nazi film in American history, and a well ahead of the curve provocation. (Not until 1939 would mainstream Hollywood attack Nazism in Warner Bros.’s Confessions of a Nazi Spy, the first major studio release to indict the Third Reich by name.) Vanderbilt Jr., scion of the robber barons, visited Nazi Germany soon after Hitler came to power on January 30, 1933. An amateur shutterbug, he took his home movie camera with him and captured some astonishing footage of the transformation of Germany into a gangster state—incessant military parades, menacing brownshirts, and naked antisemitism. He supplemented his own footage with material from the newsreels, notably of Hitler’s harangue at the Sports Palace on February 10, 1933 and the book burnings staged on May 10, 1933—both of which Vanderbilt claimed to have attended.

Vanderbilt’s film is among a select inventory of pioneering documentaries that established the template for the archival documentary, the motion picture genre that came to shape our memory of the past. Only in the 1930s had a sufficient backlog of motion pictures accumulated on studio shelves and newsreel libraries for filmmakers to be able to stitch together an entirely new film from the raw material of old films. At around the same time, sound was seamlessly integrated into the grammar of cinema and with it the arrival of the narrative voiceover, the omniscient lecturer who guides the viewer (and now listener) through the images from the past.

The other documentaries under the critical microscope are Truman Talley and Laurence Stallings’s The First World War (1934), J. Stuart Blackton’s The Film Parade (1933), Herman Axelbank and Max Eastman’s Tsar to Lenin (1937), and a sampling from the March of Time screen magazine (1935-1951). Overall, the films may seem to have been chosen out of a willful penchant for the obscure (“I’ve never even heard of Vanderbilt’s film and I’ve taught American film history for decades,” groused a colleague who read the manuscript), but they are all (I think) of singular importance in motion picture history.

Learn more about How Film Became History at the Columbia University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Hollywood and Hitler, 1933-1939.

The Page 99 Test: Show Trial.

--Marshal Zeringue