Mapping the Scholarship of Charles Wolfe and its Historiographic Influence

Emily Carman

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There are a handful of scholars in Film and Media Studies whose work spans the period from the 1970s, when it was in its nascent phase, to the present moment, in which the discipline is now an established, vibrant subject of the humanities. In doing so, their work illuminates the dominant trends in the field as it has evolved, and in exceptional cases, encapsulates the paradigm shifts as well as pedagogical and philosophical concerns. Charles Wolfe is an exemplar in this regard, whose impact on film history and media historiography elucidates what has been coined the “historical turn” in Film and Media Studies that galvanized over the course of the 1980s.[1] In particular, Wolfe’s scholarship has mobilized primary materials to inform his historically grounded studies of a range of topics in film history: American cinema, silent slapstick comedy, documentary, authorship—in particular the authorship of Frank Capra, spatial studies, film shorts, and more. Furthermore, his co-editorship with Edward Branigan of the AFI Film Reader Series has published over thirty-nine anthologies that chronicle pertinent topics of interests in Film and Media Studies alongside his scholarly work and his teaching. This essay highlights Wolfe’s legacy in the field through a key sampling of his work while simultaneously underscoring how archival research became a key historiographic methodology for film and media histories. To attest to his impact, I have chosen four seminal essays on American cinema by Wolfe that not only illuminate these key shifts in the field but also my diverse engagements with them with as a film historian, archival researcher, and teacher.

I begin with “The Return of Jimmy Stewart: The Publicity Photography as Text,” first published in 1985 in Wide Angle and reprinted in 1991 in Christine Gledhill’s important anthology Stardom: Industry of Desire. This piece illuminates his strong synthesis of historical and theoretical inclinations, underscoring the “historical” direction in media historiography research that emerged in the 1980s towards considering the extra-textual dimensions of film beyond the screen. Wolfe’s methodology in this article analyzes not the onscreen return of Jimmy Stewart in his first postwar film, It’s a Wonderful Life directed by Frank Capra from 1946, but rather the Newsweek cover image and the accompanying article written about “The Return of” actor Jimmy Stewart that publicized the film’s release. The cover itself is a cropped production photo from the final scene when a formerly suicidal George Bailey is reunited with his family. As Wolfe contends, publicity images like this one are a “fertile field” for research and offer “historiographic value”; in this case study of Stewart’s image, it not only plays with the context of the actual film It’s a Wonderful Life, but also shapes a larger extra-textual metanarrative (apparent even across other Newsweek magazine covers he analyzes) of World War II and the returning home of U.S. soldiers.[2] Thus, Newsweek effectively collapses a difference between a journalistic and a fictional image—the image of Stewart here fits into a network of other real “war” images, another significant event alongside his cinematic return. Wolfe applies the close textual analysis that was commonly applied to film texts, to these wartime Newsweek articles and cover photos over time; he thus places them in historical context and foreshadows new directions of primary research that encompassed popular journalism that in turn shaped larger social-cultural narratives and converged with film. I first encountered this essay as I developed my bibliography on stardom and reception studies as a doctoral student in UCLA’s Cinema and Media Studies program in order to advance to candidacy. Wolfe’s approach offered a model for how to historicize and analyze the extra-textual images that transcend the film text themselves but are still very much part of Hollywood stardom—and he published this work at a time when primary source materials related to media history were only just becoming available in archives and special collections libraries in the 1980s.

Next, I profile “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington: Democratic Forums and Representational Forms,” published first in 1990 and then reprinted in the 1998 edited anthology Frank Capra: Authorship and the Studio System.[3] This essay blends historiographic research with textual film analysis by highlighting the social-industrial context that surrounded the film Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939): the tensions in the Hollywood studio system of 1939, Capra and the studio Columbia’s clashes with Joseph Breen and the Production Code Administration (PCA), its politically controversial release, and subsequent critical appraisal. To compliment his primary source evidence, Wolfe also employs textual analysis of the film, especially to the lead character of Jefferson Smith played by James Stewart (especially his famous filibuster) who raises tensions between dramatization and representation of the “real” Washington (as in his previous work, his interest lies in filmic mediations of discourses and events). While identifying other forms of communication and corruption inherent in new technologies such as print journalism, the film elevates itself beyond this judgment. To quote Wolfe directly, Mr. Smith represents “The cinema of Hollywood” and “emerges as an ideal medium for the revivification, authentication, and dissemination of political and cultural ideals; it is a guarantor of a compelling experience—a Capra film—yet itself is not subject to the critique of machination and mediation the fiction otherwise provides.”[4] His methodology includes a broad spectrum of primary sources that increasingly came to inform film historiographical studies, including magazines, newspapers and advertisements, as well as industry discourses such as the PCA memos, and other historical books on Capra and Studio-era Hollywood.

Wolfe merged his interests in Hollywood authorship, documentary, and the intersections of film and politics in his 2012 essay “Mapping Why We Fight: Frank Capra and the US Army Orientation Film in World War II” published in The Wiley-Blackwell History of American Film. Paralleling his scholarship in the 1980s-1990s in terms of subject matter, here Wolfe charts the development of the film series made for the U.S. Army by Capra, the tensions and support that the director faced during production (from Office of War and Information (OWI)), and the legacy and use of these documentaries in the postwar years. At the same time, Wolfe’s spatial textual analysis illuminates how the maps in the films, coupled with Roosevelt’s radio address, help homogenize and summarize disparate U.S. national histories into a larger narrative that distinguished the free nations from the fascist regimes of the Axis powers. By presenting a “a world of nation-states in flux…” his investigation shows us how the Why We Fight series “projected…an Allied imaginary, with the United States at its center” to visually map “the consciousness required to fight” this global war.[5] His expansive sources in this piece include interviews, film reviews, Roosevelt’s radio addresses, the George C. Marshall Papers, and a wealth of secondary scholarship on wartime propaganda. This essay elucidates how Wolfe’s writing lends itself as a demonstrative pedagogical model for other scholars in terms of how to mine primary materials as a historiographic methodology that illuminates the relationship between Hollywood media and the U.S. government during World War II.

I close with one of the more recent directions of Wolfe’s work through his examination of historiographic and spatial aspects of the comic entanglements in silent film comedian Buster Keaton’s slapstick films from the 1920s, nearly all of them shot in Southern California. In “Buster Keaton: Comic Invention and the Art of Moving Pictures” published in the 2010 volume Idols of Modernity: Movie Stars of the 1920s edited by Patrice Petro, Wolfe considers the formation of Keaton’s iconic image as his stardom grew in popularity to his eventual decline from the public eye and to his critical reassessment in the 1960s-70s. In doing so, he illustrates how Keaton, as both an image and a creator, straddled debates about American art and technology in the 1920s—including the Taylorist assembly line, disregard of tradition in favor of efficiency and utility, urbanization and massive system integration etc.—and a more pastoral, traditionalist nineteenth-century vision of labor. Wolfe argues that Keaton’s interest in tinkering and mechanics opposed Fordist Americanization insofar that his slapstick scenarios were interested in complex function, but often without purpose. Again, his research practice illustrates the shift to utilizing archival research to carry out historiographic analysis. Wolfe provides ample primary evidence from exhibitors who noted Keaton’s synthesis of low-brow slapstick and high-brow drama into his films, and similarly how critics associated this mastery with his iconic “stone face.” Thus, Keaton’s lack of facial expressions “contributed to a general impression among the trades press and reviewers that his physical comedy was innovative and clever, admirably lacking in ‘hokum’—overused gags associated with cruder, older forms of slapstick.”[6] For example, he cites the Exhibitors Herald in their review of Keaton’s 1922 short The Pale Face that ‘Keaton as a rule is an original’ and that “his solemn face mien gets laughs where no amount of comedy hokum would.”[7]

It has been the aim of this essay from my modest sampling from Wolfe’s distinguished career spanning four decades to underscore how his prolific scholarship elucidates key debates, intellectual concerns, and methodological shifts in Film and Media Studies, in particular for media historiography and the study of the extra-textual elements of moving images in what Eric Smoodin and Jon Lewis coined as “looking past the screen.”[8] I conclude by recounting how I had the gratification to personally observe Wolfe teach

Figures 1 & 2. Wolfe in conversation about Buster Keaton with Chapman University students attending the Il Cinema Ritrovato Film Festival in Bologna Italy during 2017.

his scholarly approach in practice with my own students at the Il Cinema Ritrovato film festival in Bologna, Italy in summer 2017 [See Figures. 1 & 2], after the screening of some recently restored Keaton films. I not only witnessed his vast repositories of film historical knowledge and see his pedagogy in practice, but more importantly, I observed how his generous mentorship inspired innovative connections among a new generation of students and scholars and saw the expansive intellectual impact of his work in practice, beyond the pages of the scholarship surveyed here.

Notes

[1]Also known as “the new film history,” see Jane Gaines, Pink Slipped: What Happened to Women in the Silent Film Industries? (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2018), 4. See also, “In Focus: Film History, or a Baedker Guide to the Historical Turn,” edited by Sumiko Higashi, in Cinema Journal Vol. 44, no. 1 (Fall 2004): 144-154.

[2]Charles Wolfe, “The Return of Jimmy Stewart,” in Stardom: Industry of Desire edited by Christine Gledhill (London: Routledge, 1991), 92.

[3]First published in Close Viewings: An Anthology of New Film Criticism, edited by Peter Lehman (Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1990), 300-332.

[4]Charles Wolfe, “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington: Democratic Forums and Representational Forms,” in Frank Capra: Authorship and the Studio System, edited by Robert Sklar and Vito Zagarrio (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998), 212.

[5]Charles Wolfe, “Mapping Why We Fight: Frank Capra and the U.S. Army Orientation Film in World War II,” in The Wiley-Blackwell History of American Film, Vol II, 1929-1945, edited by Cynthia Lucia, Roy Grundmann, and Art Simon (Boston: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 414.

[6]Charles Wolfe, “Buster Keaton: Comic Invention and the Art of Moving Pictures,” in Idols of Modernity: Movie Stars of the Twenties, edited by Patrice Petro (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2010), 53.

[7]Original article published 25 February 1922, 61, cited by Wolfe, “Buster Keaton,” 53.

[8]Jon Lewis and Eric Smoodin, Looking Past the Screen: Case Studies in American Film History and Method (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007).

Emily Carman is an Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at Chapman University. She is author of Independent Stardom: Freelance Women in the Hollywood Studio System and co-editor of the anthology Hollywood and the Law. Her forthcoming book, A Misfit Cinema, considers how John Huston’s 1961 Western The Misfits is a transitional film through which to understand the important cultural and industry shifts from Classical to New Hollywood.