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Thomas Doherty, "How Film Became History: The Rise of the Archival Documentary in 1930s America" (Columbia UP, 2026)
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- [00:01]
A
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- [01:06]
B
Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher. And I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Professor Tom Thomas Doherty about his book titled How Film Became the Rise of the archival documentary in 1930s America, which is a really interesting book published by Columbia University press in, in 2026. That takes something that I think we kind of take for granted now, the idea that we have films that are dramas and fiction and all sorts of things. And of course, we have documentaries, too. Like, that's a massive deal these days. And yet those had to start somewhere and in many senses kind of couldn't start immediately because otherwise, what archival film would you have to draw on? Right. As soon as you start thinking about it, all sorts of questions come up. And those are some of the questions this book helps us understand. So, Tom, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [02:01]
A
It's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for inviting me.
- [02:04]
B
Well, I'm very glad you said yes. Could you start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book?
- [02:11]
A
Sure. I'm a professor of American Studies at Brandeis University, which is located right outside of Boston, Massachusetts. And I think you could say I have a special interest in Hollywood history and especially the way the motion picture medium both reflects and gives us a window into the past. So that's sort of my main scholarly bellowick. And in terms of the book itself, I've always been interested in documentaries, which is, you know, such a wonderful way to learn about history. And when I started exploring the 1930s, I started coming across references to documentaries I had never heard of, but that turned out to be really formulative and foundational to this motion picture genre that we get so much of our history from the archival Documentary. And I think most of us know about archival documentaries from the Second World War. And of course, Britain has been a real pioneer in this art form. And maybe some of your listeners know about the BBC documentary the Great War from 1964, or the Thames Television documentary the World at War, which are really kind of pioneering examples of this form. But it first came about in the 1930s, because in the 1930s, for the first time in motion picture history, you had a sufficient backlog of movies on the shelf. We've got about like 40 years of history that have been. That has been recorded by the motion picture medium. And so we finally have enough raw material where you can stitch together a new film from old films. And you don't really reach that stage until the 1930s. And then, of course, the other key development at around the same time is the emergence of sound, especially the voiceover narrator. So sound hits the motion picture industry in 27, and then in 1930, all the newsreels adopt a narrator, commentator, voiceover narrator. And between those two developments, the backlog of motion pictures on the shelf. And then the narrator, who becomes the kind of guide that takes you through this imagery, we have the development of this new form, the archival documentary.
- [04:38]
B
Okay, so that already lays out a whole bunch of things that we're going to talk about in more detail, because that is so dominant to what we have now. And, of course, it had to start somewhere. So what are the sorts of initial factors to understand in terms of technology, in terms of archives that start to make this idea of archival documentary possible?
- [05:00]
A
Well, one of the key things that happens is around 1933, 1934, a lot of people are looking at Germany, and already there's this ominous sense that this guy Adolf Hitler, might have something in mind for a repeat of the First World War. And the First World War was the first war that was chronicled by the motion picture medium and a group of filmmakers and documentarians, I think, most notably a guy named Truman Talley, who was the. The head of Fox Movietone News, and another guy named Lawrence Stallings, who was a World War I veteran and a. The author of the Big Parade and what Price Glory? They independently came to the notion that they should make a kind of a. An archival compilation of the war film that had been on the shelves, but that in World War I, hadn't really been shown because it was so gruesome and grisly. And so they make a pioneering film called the Great War in 1934, or actually it's called Tsarik. That's A big mistakement, because the film was actually called, significantly, the First World War. And this is a film that comes out in 1934. So already by the title, the filmmakers have the sense that we're going to have to start numbering our wars, because in the 1930s, of course, everyone called the Great War the Great War. It was the only one that ever happened. And the BBC documentary from 64, of course, is called the Great War. So there were this series of films I started coming across that I had never heard of, and a lot of film scholars and film buffs haven't heard of these films either. That turned out to my mind to be very influential, very interesting, but totally unknown. So I had sort of, Miranda, the. What you might say, the big theme that I was pretty confident about, which is that this form emerges in the 30s because we have enough material on the shelf and we have this narrative voiceover guide. But the films themselves were pretty obscure. And the ones I ended up talking about were the Great War, the 1934 film, a fascinating wacko film called Hitler's Reign of terror from 1934, a really true exemplar of the archival documentary called Tsar to Lenin from 1937, which is a documentary film about the Bolshevik Revolution. And then a film about our. One of our favorite topics for the archival documentary, which is the motion picture industry, Hollywood itself. You know, the great clipathons that we all watch on television to sort of relive our motion picture past. A film called the Film Parade by Stuart Blackton, who was one of the there at the creation motion picture pioneers who actually worked with Thomas Edison.
- [08:01]
B
Yeah, that definitely gives us a lot to talk about. But I think the thing I want to discuss first is that idea of kind of. There's a lot of archival material to pull off the shelf and use. And of course, as you mentioned earlier, there was. Right. There's decades of material at this point, but not everything is filmed right. So if, for example, newsreels are a big key source, it kind of matters then what was and what isn't in newsreels if you're going to use it later on. So what were some of the things that were present and what were some of the gaps in that archive?
- [08:33]
A
Well, film archives are always hit or miss. And if you're lucky, say the studio or the newsreel company kept, you know, fair collections. They preserved it, and you can go to the shelf and pull it out. But people were so haphazard back in the day with that stuff. There were no real libraries or motion Picture Archives, the Museum of Modern Art film archive isn't formed until 1935. You know, many of the other countries were hit or miss. Ironically, the Nazis were, you know, one of the great collectors of motion picture imagery. So a lot of the film that we have of the rise in Nazi Germany is because the Nazis collected it. So the newsreels which were shown before the feature film in theaters in the 20s, 30s, and on into the 50s, when television kind of kills the form, we. I always have to tell my students this, Miranda, that you didn't have a phone in your pocket. And so it was big 35 millimeter equipment that needed tripods and took a while to set up. So the newsreels usually only could film events that were pre planned. So you didn't have instantaneous news because it took some real time to set the newsreels up to record an event. So an image that maybe your audience would have in mind would be, say, that the Hindenburg disaster in 1937, where the airship Hindenburg explodes while it's coming into its moorings in Lakehurst, New Jersey. But the reason we have this dramatic footage of this spectacular event is because all the cameras were there waiting to take pictures of what they assumed was going to be a routine landing of the zeppelin. And when suddenly it explodes before the newsreel camera's eye, you have what is widely considered the most dramatic footage from the 1930s. So when you're watching the newsreels, you always have to keep that in mind that unlike today, where, you know, everything's photographed ubiquitously, people take pictures of their breakfast. Back in the day, only special events tended to take precedence with the newsreel cameras.
- [10:53]
B
Got it. And that, of course, influences the types of things that can then be used for archival documentaries later on. And you've mentioned a number of them that you look at in the book. But can we talk first about the first major studio archival documentary, like when are we talking and how and why did this one get made?
- [11:11]
A
Well, that would probably be in terms of the studio documentary, the, the 1934 film I mentioned called the Great War. And that film had the backing of the, the Fox Motion Picture Company, you know, the Fox film. And they had the backing of two very resourceful guys, Truman Talley, who, like I said, was the editor of Fox Movietone, who was one of these guys who had a real vision that he felt the newsreels were not just diversions and ephemera that, you know, recorded fun events so the audience would be amused before the feature film. But he really felt that it was screen journalism and one of the prime recorders of history. So Callie starts systematizing an archive and a catalog at Fox Film. And he had been interested in the First World War since he covered it, covered the Versailles treaty back in 1918. So. So he always sort of had his eye on the ball that he wanted to create a compilation film about the Great War. And then he connects with Lawrence Stallings, the great author of World War I fiction and film. And they put together this film, and one of the prime things they do. And the BBC documentary from 64 does this, too. If you're an American watching Great War footage during the Great War, first, it's going to be censored, and second, you're not going to get the film of the enemy, so you're not going to get films from the Germans or the Austrians. And so what Talley and Lawrence Stallings do is they go to Paris and Berlin and get footage that Americans hadn't seen. And that's always a thrill. You're looking at, say, war not from your point of view, but from the enemy's point of view. And that's sort of been one of the great tricks of the archival documentary ever since, that after the event is over, you can get all the different motion picture footage of the people engaged in the combat.
- [13:16]
B
And so it sounds like this was well received, I mean, both by the people making it and by audiences. Right?
- [13:21]
A
Yeah. And by critics who say that, you know, one of the things the motion picture medium can do now is can render history more vivid and put it before your eyes in a way that a book can't, and it brings it more to life. And so this film was actually pretty successful for a documentary. The word on documentaries in Hollywood always was, you know, audiences in. In the Great Depression especially want to come out to the movies to escape the Great Depression and to, you know, be with Scarlett o' Hara and Gone with the Wind or Dorothy down the yellow brick road that they don't want to get an education lesson. But the First World War was so immediate to the lives of people that. And it could travel because everybody had engaged in the First World War. So you can, you know, release it in Britain, Germany, Japan, China. So the film had a pretty big afterlife, and it really puts together all the. What you might think, the building blocks of the. Of the archival documentary. So if you look at the Great War even today, I think it holds up pretty well. And one of the other great advantages of the films of this era is that film stock was filmed on nitrate, which is a very perishable and combustible stock. So if you're making a film in the 30s, you're collecting perishable film from the teens and the 20s and so cut to 30 years later. If we want an image of the Battle of Verdun or some other Great War moment, we will tend to go to the. The Great war film from 34, because that's the only preservation of those images that we have. So these archival documentaries preserve the past from the teens and the twenties for future generations. And it's kind of a well that filmmakers can go to.
- [15:18]
B
And that in many ways sounds clear kind of why it would be of interest and importance pretty immediately. And of course, since I do want to talk about though, the documentary you mentioned as being maybe a little bit stranger, Hitler's Reign of Terror, that's pretty forgotten as a documentary, but you focus a whole chapter on it. So what's going on?
- [15:37]
A
It. Well, it's a, it's. To me, it's a fascinating film because it's the first feature length anti Nazi documentary that really explores what Nazism is. And especially something that was pretty unspoken in documentary film and the newsreels throughout the 1930s, the anti Semitism that was at the core of Nazi ideology. It's made by this fascinating guy named Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr. Who is the scion of, you know, the famous robber baron Vanderbilts. Vanderbilt, over his family's injections, enlists in the First World War. And when he comes back, like a lot of war veterans, he just can't go back to the Park Avenue life and sort of becomes a roving journalist filmmaker in the 1920s and early 1930s. And in 1933, right after Hitler takes power, in January 30, 1933, in February and March, Vanderbilt is in what is now Nazi Germany with a motion picture camera, which he has. And so he goes around Germany and Austria and takes kind of home movies and cobbles together the home movies into a documentary along with some other archival footage from the newsreels to sort of do an expose on what Germany has recently become. And it's an independent production, it wasn't backed by the studios, it experienced a lot of censorship problems and so it wasn't widely circulated. But to me it's like sort of one of these fascinating forgotten documents because it kind of cobbles together home movies, newsreel footage, voiceover narration, reenactment, many of the elements that most documentaries today have. And it's treating one of the epochal issues of the time, which is Nazi Germany. And it's a one of a kind film and like I say, a very bizarro film. It was lost for decades. And then the Belgian film archive in Brussels found a copy in the Customs House and they kind of restored it to the extent that can be restored. We have the 1939 version, which I think is even up on YouTube or around somewhere. But the original 34 version is, as far as I know, lost. So you can put out a call for anybody who has something in their attic. Because sometimes these films, seriously, Mary, sometimes they just turn up in these bizarre ways. And I and a couple other people have been obsessively looking for the original print of the 1934 Hitler's reign of terror. So far without success.
- [18:26]
B
Well, hopefully someday. But of course you also look at other documentaries in the book. So I wonder if we can maybe talk about Czar to Lenin, which seems to not be so forgotten. It's certainly the time. It seems to have been quite discussed,
- [18:41]
A
so why it really was. Czartha Lenin is really a landmark documentary and it's put together by two people. One is a. One of the great characters in archival film history is the obsessive, anal retentive film collector. And there is a guy named Herman Axel bank, who in 1917, when he hears the word of the Bolshevik revolution, he knows immediately that this is going to be recorded by motion pictures and that he should start collecting motion picture imagery of the Bolshevik revolution. And he spends the rest of his life doing just that. Like up until the 1970s, he's still collecting footage. So he has this collection of Bolshevik motion picture footage from 1917 to 1925. He knows he's not a filmmaker, however, and he also doesn't have access to funding. So he hooks up with this guy named Max Eastman, who is a literary critic, writer, kind of a well known guy in his time. And one of these guys who seems to have known everybody worth knowing. He was, you know, Leon Trotsky's literary agent in the 1920s and the 1930s, who was close friends with Charles Chaplin, you know, really a well connected guy. And he and Axel bank put together this documentary art film tracing the. The fall of the Romanovs and the rise of the Bolshevik Revolution from about like 1914 to the early 1920s. And it's actually the film that got me interested in this whole project, Miranda, because I came across this item in a gossip column from 1937. I forget what I was looking up about this woman. I had never heard of Angelica Balabanov. Who was a very well known socialist at the time. And she's in a motion Picture Theater in 1937 watching this film called Czar to Lenin, which I had never heard of. And the account in the gossip column is how as she was watching the film, she becomes so spooked by what she sees on screen that she screams and runs from the theater and leaves her purse behind. Then, you know, calls the manager, he has her purse, and she explains why she got so upset. And the reason was she was watching the film and she saw herself in the footage from the Bolshevik Revolution in a. In a scene with Lenin himself. She was one of the secretaries at the second Comintern meeting. And today, of course, everybody is familiar with their seeing themselves on screen. Everybody has an Instagram or TikTok account, it seems. But back in 1937, you can imagine the kind of shock that suddenly you're confronted by a big screen image of yourself from 20 years ago. And people weren't used to that. And when I saw that item, I got really interested in the film, which has a fascinating story because Max Eastman was a Trotskyite. And of course, Stalin is in control of the Soviet Union then, and the American Communists are protesting the film because they feel that it gave Stalin short shrift and celebrate celebrated Trotsky at the expense of Joseph Stalin. So the film was actively suppressed by the American Communist Party, who put pickets up in front of the theater showing it in New York. But. But it's really got some wonderful footage in it that it was quite striking at the time. And in fact, some of this footage is. Has been going around on the Internet, lady, lately because Eastman discovered this amazing home movie footage of the czar and his retinue bathing naked in a lake outside of the palace. And so you can actually see Tsar Nicholas, you know, running into the water naked. And that's home movie footage taken by the Romanovs. And Eastman, you know, comments rather bitterly that this is the first time that you've seen a king as he's meant to be seen in all his naked glory. And the film also has some very brutal and stark footage of some executions of some Bolshevik soldiers. So a really compelling film.
- [23:19]
B
Yeah, definitely has quite a lot of drama.
- [23:22]
A
It really does. And, and both backstory of, you know, how Axel bank got this footage and then the reception of the film, because it really got caught in the. The kind of intramural battles that the Communists had in the 1930s between the Trotskyites and the Stalinists. And Stalin himself was aware of the film, I'm certain, because at a meeting of the, the Comintern in 1937, Stalin actually condemns Max Eastman by name. Which must have been pretty bracing to have Stalin actually call you out as an enemy.
- [24:06]
B
Yeah, that definitely shows that some attention was being paid. So interesting to hear about that one. Of course, though you already mentioned that another big sort of area of archival documentary at this point is of course, documentaries about Hollywood, which you explained. Makes total sense. Right. Hollywood is always interested in Hollywood. But I want to make sure we don't take that like, so for granted because that had to start somewhere and somehow. So how does the back catalog of Hollywood come to be seen as a source for new content?
- [24:37]
A
Well, it was mostly the idea of a guy named J. Stewart Blackton, who was one of the real pioneers of the motion picture industry. He got a start in the business from none other than Thomas Edison. If he goes down, he was a, a cartoonist and a, a reporter for the New York papers. They send him down to talk to Edison and Edison is so impressed with him that he decides to kind of bring him into the business. And then Blackton gets into the business and founds a film company himself called Vitagraph, which is very successful in the first 20 years of the motion picture industry. And then he goes bust. And like a lot of, you know, former studio heads is kind of scrounging around for a new project. And it occurs to him in 1933 that he has a lot of motion picture footage that he's got personal experience with. He's usually credited as the first newsreel creator. He sort of creates some of the first fight films and advertising films. And so in 1933, who better to lead us through the motion picture past which he has lived through, than J. Stuart Blackton? So he makes this compilation film called the Film Parade. And it might be the first time that audiences could do something that we all do now, which is we remember our own youth through the motion pictures we went to. So it's become like a really a popular forum in both on both television and in feature films, where you'll have somebody like Martin Scorsese or some other director give you a first person account of the films that mean something to him. And then you look at them and go, oh, yeah, I remember seeing that film. This is, you know, the film that I took my now wife to on our first date. And we can all go through memory lane together. It's kind of like a public family photo album because we all know these characters because we've watched them and we feel like they're part of our, our background, our youth, our, our own personal history. And the Hollywood Clipathon, basically one of the, in the most popular form. But the thing I find interesting about Blackton's the Film Parade is he's actually there. So when he's talking about Thomas Edison, he actually knows the guy. Or when he's talking about the reaction of an audience in 1903, he was there at the creation.
- [27:09]
B
Very interesting to think about these sorts of origin stories. What about then the kind of process, I suppose, between coming up with the idea creating these documentaries but then making them like a mainstream thing that general audiences were sort of used to as an option. How did that happen to kind of go to the cinema and be like, let's go see a documentary?
- [27:31]
A
Yeah, well that happens during the Second World War, I think. And I talk about this in the last chapter because these films that happened in the 30s are pioneering and they're important, they're foundational, they, they really give you the kind of structure to make a documentary narrative voiceover, you know, stitching together exciting footage, telling a kind of a three act drama as they do in, in the First World War. But it really isn't until the Second World War that documentary cinema kind of comes into its own as a theatrical attraction. And you can understand why if you're on the home front in America in the 1940s, this is the big event in your life. You're going to watch a documentary on the Pacific theater or on the air war in Europe because that's where your husband is, that's where your brother is. And it's an event of such overriding importance that affects you, where you're, where you live. It's not just an educational experience, but it's something of intense personal interest. So the newsreels, documentary shorts and then feature length documentaries are really, they really come of age with the Second World War. You know, my argument is that didn't come out of nothing, that the techniques and skill set that the filmmakers of the Second World War are using were pioneered in the 1930s. But it isn't until wartime that you really have these films playing all over America. And audiences are quite interested in them, usually in the newsreels and in the short films that precede the feature attraction. So we still want to escape the war or when we watch meet me in St. Louis or Casablanca. Well, you don't really escape the war with Casablanca, but we are now intensely interested in the newsreel. Because when you think of it. The Second World War is the event that's most widely covered by the motion picture medium. And of course, it's an event which has these spectacular combat footage and larger than life feature creatures, you know, Hitler, Roosevelt, Churchill. And it's got to remain one of the earth sources of the archival documentary forever after that. We're always interested in the archival documentaries of World War II. It's never going to go away. And we were talking earlier about, you know, archival footage you might find in the attic once. One of the things that started happening in the 90s in Germany especially is nice. So a granddad would die and his, you know, grandchildren go into the attic and, you know, start putting his stuff in order and they discover, you know, canisters of 8 or 16 millimeter film that granddad took during Operation Barbarossa during the invasion of Russia. And a lot of this film is only recently become, you know, come to light in the, in the 90s and in the early part of the 20th, 21st century even.
- [30:44]
B
Do we think there might be links between kind of what is filmed and how that film is used during World War II? I mean, by then there is this idea of the archival documentary. By then there are decades of archival footage. So is maybe part of why we have so much. And it's so good for World War II because, like, they're not learning from scratch at this point. Like they're drawing on these experiments with archival documentary until then.
- [31:11]
A
Exactly. And, and then the other thing is, by World War II, everybody knows that film is an important transmission belt of information and education and propaganda. So all of the major combatants in World War II are, you know, incessantly documenting what they're doing. You know, they all had Signal Corps units in the military. They got newsreel photographers who basically joined the military as kind of adjuncts. So, you know, the Nazis, the Communists, during World War II, the Allies, they're all incessantly documenting what they're doing and then playing it to the home front for information and propagandistic purposes and, you know, flat out information as well. So in the American tradition, typically what would happen is that, you know, say the Marine motion picture units would photograph the Marines taking an island. That footage would be released in the newsreels. And then a month later, after Tarawa or Guadalcanal is. Is conquered, you'd get a 20 or 25 minute archival recapitulation tracing the battle from, you know, the beginning to the end. And those films are very popular during the Second World War because we want that information, and we want to know about, you know, our son who's fighting in the Pacific Theater.
- [32:37]
B
Yeah, that definitely makes sense. And of course, we have some of that still because things were preserved by, like, the big studios then, as you said, things have been found in the archives. But you also mentioned that kind of not, you know, we've lost a lot of newsreels, and that sort of archiving process of the archive is an issue too. So is there anything further we want to discuss in terms of what happened to the newsreels and how we might want to think about kind of film archiving and storage even now?
- [33:04]
A
Oh, well, one of the great things about the age of digital communication is all these archivists from around the planet can sort of communicate and establish kind of a global network of archival information. So if, you know, if Britain doesn't have a copy of a film that they think they should have, you know, the British archivist could put out an alert and it'll turn up in some, you know, counterintuitive place like Argentina will happen to have a copy of the film. So that's been really one of the great legacies of our modern age. Of course, the downside, or the thing that always disappoints points you is that there's stuff that you think should be out there and you read about and you think, oh, it's such a great historical document and it's just gone. Nobody seems to have, you know, taken the trouble to. To save the footage. And it took the Americans really a long time to kind of fund and make available a. Fund a proper motion picture archive and attend to this. And even Hollywood wasn't particularly interested in its history until quite recently.
- [34:16]
B
But I think documentaries are definitely here to stay. Now, thanks to your book in this discussion, we have a better sense of kind of how we got here, which is great. So thank you very much for telling us about this research. What, may I ask, are you working on now? Anything you want to give us a sneak preview of?
- [34:32]
A
Oh, nice of you to ask. It's actually, in some ways a tandem project about a medium that's even less available than the motion picture medium in the 1930s, which is radio. So I'm doing a project now on how Nazism came into the American imagination in the 1930s, not via film, but via radio. And radio is even less preserved than motion pictures because there was no audio tape in the 1930s.
- [35:04]
B
And.
- [35:05]
A
And so when things were reported, it. It just went into the air and disappeared. So it's a. It's kind of a frustrating project that I don't have the material to listen to. So you have to imaginatively recapture what it was like to say, listen to Adolf Hitler speaking from Nuremberg in 1938 for an American audience.
- [35:27]
B
Well, I can see why that's frustrating, but it certainly sounds intriguing too. So best of luck with the project. And while you're pursuing it, listeners can read the book we've been talking about titled How Film Became the Rise of the archival documentary in 1930s America, published by Columbia University Press in 2026. Tom, thank you so much for joining me.
- [35:47]
A
Oh, it's a pleasure. Thanks for the invitation.
- [35:49]
B
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