Dylan wrote: ↑Fri Feb 19, 2021 3:30 pm
The topic of whether or not certain Blu-ray/DVD commentators should be referred to as "film historians" has come up here a few times over the years, and I'm honestly a bit fuzzy on what traditionally qualifies a person to be called a film historian. Is a film historian, traditionally, only a person who works in academia and/or writes scholarly pieces?
I started describing myself as a film historian about fifteen years ago when I was employed full-time by the BFI and spent a lot of time doing properly primary research for the first time - interviewing filmmakers, poring through original archive documents, etc. etc.
I don't have any formal qualifications in film or indeed history (at least beyond an A-level in the latter; my degree is in Business Studies because I had ambitions as a producer back then and thought it would teach me more practical skills), but it seems to me that the term "historian" more accurately described what I was doing than alternatives like "critic", because the primary purpose of all this research was to participate in the construction of a portrait of aspects of British film history that either hadn't been attempted before at all or certainly not in the level of detail that we were delving into.
I'm particularly proud of my work on the BFI's great postwar documentary survey a dozen or so years ago, which was a particularly fascinating project to work on because so little of it had been formally charted besides things like Free Cinema and British Transport Films - I remember spending months of three-hour screening sessions every Tuesday morning watching stuff that none of us had seen before and whose production company catalogue entries were broadly useless (as they were purely factually descriptive whereas we were in quest of films of specifically cinematic interest) - in the process I sat through some of the most boring films I've ever seen in my life, but when we struck gold it justified all the effort.
And I'd also say that when I research a commentary I'm basically treating it the way a historian would - there's a ton of advance research into the specifics of the film itself and the wider cultural/political context that could just as easily fuel an academic essay as an audio commentary. In fact, I suspect it wouldn't take long for me to rework, say, my commentary for Arrow's
Blind Chance as a BFI-style 100-page monograph - the word count must be pretty close to that already.
Oh, and when it comes to commentaries, I don't ever take on anything that I don't want to do (the money's simply not worth it) - or anything that I don't feel capable of pulling off to my satisfaction. I was hugely flattered to be asked to record a commentary for Eureka's
Mr Vampire, a film I adore, but I can't read or speak Chinese and it seemed to me that it would be impossible to do the film justice without being able to delve into original-language material, so I said no. (And have no regrets, especially as they ultimately went with someone much better qualified - and they also kept their promise to offer me something more appropriate when
Viy came up a few months later, and I'm very pleased indeed with how that turned out.)