Introduction: Local Film

T his issue of Film History focuses on three concerns: local film, the local context of reception and local exhibition. The first three essays variously address what has been, until recently, a blind spot in film historiography: the production and exhibition of films which were shot in a given community and shown to local people who constituted the first (and perhaps only) audience for the film. Such films, often commissioned by cinema owners as a way of attracting larger audiences, have frequently been overlooked since little or no advertising was used to promote the exhibition of local films. In the last few years, however, initiatives such as the ‘Symposia on Local Film’ funded by The British Academy and involving the universities of Sheffield, Stockholm and Trier, or the Dutch project, ‘Cinema, modern life and cultural identity in the Netherlands, 1896–1940’, funded by the Netherlands Foundation for Scientific Research and involving the University of Utrecht and the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, are helping film historians develop an historiography which addresses the exhibition of film in local or regional contexts. In ‘Is it You? Recognition, Representation and Response in Relation to the Local Film’, Vanessa Toulmin and Martin Loiperdinger examine what Tom Gunning has characterised as the ‘cry of recognition which baptizes this cinema of locality’ in their consideration of the output of the British company, Mitchell and Kenyon from whom more than 830 local actuality films survive. As with some of the Lumière films which were marketed, potentially, worldwide but also in some cases shown to local audiences, such films struck a chord with local audiences, conferring a degree of exclusivity for exhibitors who programmed local films alongside the customary mix of comedies, scenics, féeries, trick films and the like. For this reason, the production of local films was a compelling incentive for early exhibitors, an important marketing ploy by which an exhibitor could beat local competition. Exclusivity, however, was not the only element such films conferred: a delight in selfrecognition and the pleasures that arose from showing local films to local audiences are examined by Toulmin and Loiperdinger. The inclusion of sound accompaniment and regional dialect in the commentaries showmen provided made the magic of living pictures even more credible, a strategy which Brigitte Braun and Uli Jung examine in their consideration of local films shot in southwest Germany. Drawing on local newspapers and local archives, the authors trace the pattern of production and exhibition of local films shot by the Marzen family who not only exhibited local films as they travelled the southwest region of Germany but also at the permanent-site theatres which they later ran in Trier. The visual style of Marzen’s local films is considered, as too the production of films shot of state occasions such as the visit of Wilhelm II to Metz in 1903 or the visit of the Kaiser to Trier in 1913 where films of the head of state under the sole control of an exhibitor meant good business. With approximately forty films verified to date shot between 1902 and 1929, Marzen’s output is the best-documented achievement of a local filmmaker during the ‘pre-sound’ era in Germany, changing the production-oriented supplies of the commercial industry to the reception-oriented demands of largeand small-town exhibitors and audiences. The relation between the local and the global, a concern that surfaces in the first two essays, is developed further in Marina Dahlquist’s examination of the operation of the Pathé Frères subsidiary company in Stockholm, where Pathé opened a branch in 1910 to gain a foothold in the Swedish market. The production of local films was a genre which moving picture theatre Film History, Volume 17, pp. 3–6, 2005. Copyright © John Libbey Publishing ISSN: 0892-2160. Printed in United States of America