Bad Film Histories: Ethnography and the Early Archive

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Description

A daring, deep investigation into ethnographic cinema that challenges standard ways of writing film history and breaks important new ground in understanding archives.

Bad Film Histories is a vital work that unsettles the authority of the archive, examining the imprecisions and absences that define film history and its archives. Taking ethnographic cinema as a crucial case study, Katherine Groo challenges standard ways of thinking and writing about film history and questions widespread assumptions about what film artifacts are and what makes them meaningful

Reviews

"Stimulating and necessary . . . Bad Film Histories makes an important theoretical intervention into early cinema history. Katherine Groo prompts us to question our assumptionsto throw away the film-historical mapand to keep moving along multiple trajectories."Alice Maurice, author of The Cinema and Its Shadow: Race and Technology in Early Cinema

"With this book, Katherine Groo establishes the necessary and productive incoherence of film historical inquiry by insisting on certain structuring non-relations between artifact and historical knowledge, between ethnographic subject and scientific investigator, between film and its content, and between the world and its index. Bad Film Histories devastatingly reveals how our current film historical knowledge is entirely without basis, leaving us to wonder what today might constitute an adequate account of the cinema; the solutionas Groo brilliantly arguesis that this is precisely the wrong question to ask."Mark Lynn Anderson, author of Twilight of the Idols: Hollywood and the Human Sciences in 1920s America

Author Bio

Katherine Groo is assistant professor of film and media studies at Lafayette College.