Thomas Doherty, "How Film Became History: The Rise of the Archival Documentary in 1930s America" (Columbia UP, 2026)

About this episode

Dr. Thomas Doherty discusses the rise of the archival documentary in 1930s America and its impact on preserving history through film.

By the 1930s, filmmakers had access to a backlog of footage from nearly forty years of motion pictures, allowing them to create a new kind of film stitched together from the raw material of older films. At around the same time, the transition to synchronous sound added a transformative new element to the grammar of cinema: the voiceover narration. Together, the film inventory and offscreen commentary gave rise to the archival documentary, the motion picture genre that preserves and rewinds history. In How Film Became History: The Rise of the Archival Documentary in 1930s America (Columbia University Press, 2026), Dr. Thomas Doherty tells the story of the archival documentary, spotlighting the first films that set out deliberately to preserve history on screen. He shows how newsreels and documentaries challenged the era’s restrictive censorship and how film began to engage with the great political issues of the day. Doherty considers a range of films—some well-known, others obscure—including J. Stuart Blackton’s The Film Parade (1933), Laurence Stallings and Truman Talley’s The First World War (1934), Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr.’s Hitler’s Reign of Terror (1934), Max Eastman and…

People in this episode

Host: Dr. Miranda Melcher

Guest: Thomas Doherty

Topics covered

• archival documentary
• film history
• 1930s cinema
• censorship
• political issues
• voiceover narration

Keywords

• archival documentary
• film history
• 1930s
• censorship
• voiceover narration
• political issues
• documentaries

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Columbia University Press

Books & works: How Film Became History: The Rise of the Archival Documentary in 1930s America, The Film Parade, The First World War, Hitler’s Reign of Terror, Tsar to Lenin, March of Time

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