Cinema's Doppelgängers

Front matter

DOUG

CINEMA’S DOPPELGANGERS DObbErCYUCEBe CIMEWV.2

DIBBEBU

PART ONE. Revising the Canon

Outline for an Alternative History of the Cinema 33 Andromeda (d. Cesar Vallejo, France, 1935) 42 Autumn Overture (d. Mordecai Rothenberg, Germany, 1959) 45 LAvventura (d. Michelangelo Antonioni, Italy, 1960) 49 Bike Repair (d. Simon Balimwezo, Uganda, 2001) 56 Butcher (d. Guillermo Pilar, Mexico, 1972) 61 Cab Driver (d. Mikhail Iossenovich, Russia, 1948) 64 California (d. Henry Dawes, USA, 1947) 70 Charlie Chan in Los Angeles (d. Robert Florey, USA, 1943) 74 Christiane (d. Marie Lebrun, France, 1981) 81 Chronicle of the Years of Embers (d. Mohammed

Lakhdar-Hamina, Algeria, 1975) 85 Comancheria (d. John Ford, USA, 1956) 92

The Dawn Light Is Harsh But Bright (d. Praew Tanitwanantrith, Thailand, 1978) 99

Decline and Fall (d. Arsenii Belyakov, Russia, 1935) Disco Giraffe (d. Khadija Chishuli, Tanzania/usa, 1989) Distant Star (d. Obonye Mosweu, Botswana, 1933)

The Elevator (d. Rimachi Alvarado, Peru, 1993)

Father's Diary (d. Park Gon-woo, Korea, 1966)

Faust (d. F.W. Murnau, Germany, 1926)

Fear on the Street (d. Derrick Hampton, USA, 1955) Gangster Film (d. Jean-Luc Godard, Switzerland, 1998) Grand Prix (d. Louis Belfont, France, 1934)

Gunned Down (d. Lloyd Collins, usa, 1941)

Harakiri (d. Kobayashi Masaki, Japan, 1966)

Heimat (d. Otto Preminger, Germany, 1960)

Helene Jaussner (d. Renata Gombrowicz, Germany, 1977) In the Courtyard (d. Alfred Hitchcock, UK, 1954)

In the Shadows (d. Im Chang-yul, Korea, 1965)

LAPD (d. Robert Altman, USA, 1973)

Late Spring (d. Ozu Yasujiro, Japan, 1949)

The Maltese Falcon (d. Raoul Walsh, usa, 1942)

Manila Neon (d. Lino Brocka, Philippines, 1977)

The Michael Douglas Show; Or, the Performance of the Self in the Messianic and Wounded Eyes of Orson Welles (d. Shirley Jacobs, usa, 1975) Mountain Retreat (d. Dao Han-lin, China, 1956) Only Angels Have Wings (d. Howard Hawks, usa, 1940) Paper Flowers (d. Guru Dutt, India, 1959) Paris in the Evening (d. Marcel LEnfant, France, 1932) Phoenix (d. Li Bo, China, 1998) Prize Fight (d. Randall Jennings, usa, 1912) Reeds at the Water’s Edge (d. Jules Dassin, usa, 1962) Retards (d. Kimberly Zaichek, usa, 1986)

The Rise and Fall of the City Mahagonny (d. Ritwik Ghatak,

India, 1970) Sally the Sewing Machine Operator (d. The Omega Collective, USA, 2008) Spider Web (d. Koda Yukichi, Japan, 1935) The Three Musketeers (d. Allan Dwan, USA, 1913) Under the Docks (d. William Chesterton, USA, 1935)

259 266 272 277

The United Nations (d. Orson Welles, 1974, USA)

Vaci Street (d. Mihaly Kertész, Hungary, 1952)

War Photographer (d. Chondrak Sridripranandra, Thailand, 1963)

Wet Pavement (d. Fritz Lang, Germany, 1946)

PART TWO. Networks of Origins: Outline for an Alternative History of the Cinema

1936: The Voice of Industrial Collapse — The Talkies, the Publix Theaters Decision, and the Dawn of Television

1970: Invasion of the Intellectuals — The Academic Study of Film

1923: Zukor’s Controlling Vision — The Vertically Integrated, Collusive Oligopoly

1913: Experimental Cinema — Allan Dwan, Randall Jennings, and the Language of Film

1965: Re-Mapping Aesthetics — Democratic Revolutions in the German and Japanese Spheres

2021: The Past as the Product of the Future — Virtual Reality and the Death of the Art Form

1895: Against Ontology

282 287

350 354

Tlén may well be a labyrinth, but it is a labyrinth forged by men, a labyrinth destined to be deciphered by men.

Prolegomenon on the Aesthetics of Non-linearity

Ozu Yasujiro found himself pacing through the dark. It was December 12, 1936 and it seemed that the world was shifting. The director hardly ever worried, his lead actor Ryu Chishu recalled, but that morning he looked as he if were “drifting, like a fragment of a cloud, along an ever-widening spiral,” first circling around the camera, then around the dining room table where hed arranged the shoot for that day, and finally along the perimeter of the soundstage itself, his hands clasped behind his back, head down in contemplation, no longer aware of the set hed so painstakingly designed the night before with teacups, flowers, and sake bottles arranged methodically across the table and floor to provide a sense of depth to the image and to display his authorial style to the intellectual critics in Tokyo whod already heralded him as the leading filmmaker of his generation.

Ozu wasn't troubled by the scene, Ryu said; hed always planned every shot in a day’s work long in advance, after all. Acting on an Ozu set was like “being a salaryman— perhaps more like working at a flower shop than a bank, but a simple job

1 Ryu Chishu, I Know Nothing, trans. Kyoko Hirano (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Center for Japanese Studies, 2001), 101.

like any other”? No, the director’s perambulations were unusually anxious that morning because of the meeting hed just had with Shochiku president Kido Shiro, whod finally confirmed what everyone at the studio had quietly expected but also quietly feared for several months. Soon after Gerhard Mannheim’s The Rhineland premiered as the world’s first all-talking picture, earning windfall profits in Germany earlier that year, Hollywood'’s three major studios had announced that they'd follow suit with a slate of movies recorded entirely with spoken dialogue. And that morning, Kido had finally told his favorite director the inevitable: that the company would soon be joining the American and German film industries in making the transition to a production schedule consisting entirely of recorded, synchronized sound, and that the movie that Ozu was then directing — Tokyo Winter, to be released in 1937 — would therefore be his final silent film.

Perhaps because the sensational crowds that thronged to the first talkies had made Ozu nervous about the future of his career, he and his screenwriting collaborator Noda Kogo had written an especially somber script that spring, obsessed with the conjoined themes of birth and death and with what Hara Tatsuki has called “Ozu’s fatalistic analysis of diachronic osmosis” — that is, his concern with the past’s tendency to permeate the present and the present’s tendency to continually re-imagine the past.’ And in this sense, Ozu’s film can function as the quintessential emblem of the juncture between the silent and the sound eras and thus the quintessential emblem, too, of film history itself, which scholars have similarly defined by the conceptions of intertwining deaths and births, by the folding over and permeability of time.

Tokyo Winter opens in unexpectedly dramatic fashion for Ozu, with a husband leaning in to listen to his wife as she rises

3 Hara Tatsuki, “Ozu’s Anti-Chronology: Tokyo Winter and Time’s Permeability; in Ozu: Formalism, Ideology, Interpretation, ed. David Desser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 117.

painfully from her deathbed. He cuts from an intense close-up of the woman’s whispering lips to a series of intertitles in which she admits to her husband that shed been married once before she met him, that her first husband had died in the 1923 earthquake, that shed been pregnant at the time, and that shed given her baby daughter away to a childless couple because she had been too ravaged by grief to take care of her on her own. And then, when Ozu cuts back to a two-shot, revealing Ryu Chishu’s blank expression, the wife lies back in bed with a heave of relief, closes her eyes, and passes away.

The movie hinges on a moment near the end when Ryu catches sight of a ragged thirteen-year-old girl wandering alone in the street, and in an extended close-up, his emotionless visage evokes a surging sense of anguish. And then, in what David Bordwell pointed out was the only flashback in his career,* Ozu cuts to what is demonstrably that same city street in the aftermath of the Great Kanto Earthquake thirteen years earlier, as Ryu, now a young man, stands in front of the ruins of what we understand immediately to be his family home, flames licking up against the charred timbers from pockets amid the rubble. From here, in what was certainly the most elaborate set the director ever created—with hundreds of soot-faced extras streaming through billowing smoke past heaps of bricks and twisted metal beams — Ryu wanders in a daze through a series of atypically surrealistic images for Ozu, past prostitutes smoking in the back seats of burned-out cars, dogs urinating into flowerpots, and abandoned children wearing inverted toilet bowls to ward off the rain. Finally, he comes across a lone woman cowering beneath a tarp, and as he bends down to drape her in his coat to fend off the cold, she looks up to meet his gaze, and we realize as we recognize her face that this is the moment when he first met his wife — the woman whose death thirteen years later had opened the film — huddling now in the street because her home, like his, has been destroyed. But because of the flashback struc-

4 David Bordwell, Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 53-54.

ture, we understand — in a way that Ryu wont for another thirteen years — that her husband is dead and that she is pregnant with a child whose very existence she knows instantly she'll have to hide from this man who may represent her only chance for survival.

The sequence is harrowing precisely because its oneiric character lies in such uncomfortable juxtaposition with the quotidian realism of the rest of the picture. When Ryu comes back to the present, he approaches the girl whod caught his attention on the street, who must now be the same age as his wife's first child, and gently offers to buy her a meal. But she makes an ugly face and runs away. Ryu turns home, initially in quiet contemplation, but eventually accompanied by the visual signifiers of a silent audio barrage — close-ups of car horns whose honking were prompted to imagine, store owners haggling with customers, women in window perches hectoring their husbands across the street — as if the environment, like memory itself, has begun to assault him. Finally, he returns to the small rooms above the noodle shop that hed shared with his wife for the last thirteen years and kneels stiffly in the dim light in front of his single table to eat dinner. Then, his daughter, now about twelve years old herself, emerges from a back room, cradling a baby doll in the crook of her elbow, and gazes for a while at her father’s back, as if trying to make sense of him by coming to terms with his bent shape, while the image slowly fades and the movie comes to an end.

Interpolation: Unmasking the Fictive

It’s at this point where I, the author, feel an obligation, unusual for an academic historian, to step out from behind the curtain in order to acknowledge what many readers have already picked up on or begun to suspect: the fact that what you've just read in this book’s opening section is not what most people would consider a work of history at all. That’s because most of what I've written never actually took place. At least not in this world. For those readers unfamiliar with the finer points of film history, let me be clear about some of the factual issues that you've encountered so far: Ozu Yasujiro, for example, was an actual Japanese filmmaker — indeed, one of the greatest who ever lived — but he never directed a film called Tokyo Winter, though cinephiles intimate with his oeuvre might have chuckled knowingly since the title sounds very much like a movie he might have made. Ozu’s favorite lead actor was, in fact, aman named Ryu Chishu, but Ryu never published a memoir in which he wrote the words that I’ve attributed to him. Nor does any film scholar named Hara Tatsuki exist, nor does his essay “Ozu’s Anti-Chronology,’ as much as Id like to read it. And though the scholar David Bordwell actually has written a book titled Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema, he points out there that the director, in fact, never once included a flashback in any of his films, which makes my reading of the fictive Tokyo Winter somewhat antithetical to Ozu’s existing aesthetic and intellectual program.’ Finally — and most ostentatiously — there is no film director named Gerhard Mannheim, nor was The Rhineland the first talking picture, since the first talkies weren't released in Germany in 1936, but in the United States in 1927 and 1928.

This being the case, I have to acknowledge that I, Doug Dibbern, am not really the author of the book that you will be reading. No, the real author of what you have read so far in the Overture and of what you will continue to read beginning with the next section and throughout the rest of the book is not me but my doppelganger —let’s call him “Doug Dibbern,” for simplicitys sake —a film historian and critic very much like his twin but who writes from some alternative unfolding of historical time. The world from which he writes is much like our own, but with some notable differences. In that other dimension, for instance, neither the Bolsheviks nor the Nazis came to power, so

5 Ibid. Hint: Bordwell’s book on Ozu, like many of the authors and books in the footnotes, is an actual author and an actual book, whereas many of the other authors and books in these footnotes do not exist — at least not in this existing unfolding of historical time.

there was, therefore, no World War II and no Holocaust. That world suffered, nevertheless, through its own catastrophes. Germany and Japan lived under the yoke of authoritarian regimes throughout most of the century, and anti-Semitic pogroms swept across Eastern Europe throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Film industries, too, evolved differently in that alternative existence. Hollywood was dominated by three major companies, for instance, rather than five, which limited the freedom of directors who worked in the studio system. It is also a world in which, because of these differences, the intelligentsia considers Kobayashi Masaki—not Ozu nor Kurosawa nor Mizoguchi—to be the greatest Japanese filmmaker, in which Alfred Hitchcock never came to Hollywood, in which Orson Welles’s first film was his adaptation of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, whose financial failure prevented him from ever making Citizen Kane, and a world whose cinematic aesthetics and critical literature all evolved slightly differently because an obscure director named D.W. Griffith was killed by a speeding train in 1913, just as hed begun preparing the script for an epic film based on Thomas Dixon's novel The Clansmen.

So, what’s going on here, exactly? This book lays out a counterfactual history of the movies — in fact, two alternative histories of the same counterfactual world, as you're about to find out — not just to engage in a playful exercise, but because an approach like this can serve a legitimate historiographic purpose. Embracing speculative fiction as a historical methodology will necessarily highlight the arbitrary nature of the past. It can underline how the trajectory of film — more than any other art form —has been determined by political, economic, technological, and bureaucratic forces. And it can call attention to the inherently aesthetic nature of all historical writing and thus of the inherent hermeneutic nature of the reader’s task. And I hope that by acknowledging the contingent nature of the pasts chronological unfolding, other historians might be inspired to deploy some more adventurously intellectual strategies of their own. To address these issues, let's let my fictive alter ego speak once again. It’s at this point that I, Doug Dibbern, will retreat into off-screen space and let my doppelganger “Doug Dibbern” take up the reins once again, beginning with the very next sentence and continuing for the remainder of the book.

Causal Explanation and Counterfactual Speculation: Materialist Historiography’s Aesthetic Demands

In his book Plausible Worlds: Possibility and Understanding in History and the Social Sciences, Geoffrey Hawthorn suggests that we should reclaim counterfactual speculation from the realm of the parlor game so that it can play an explicit and central role in the historian’s project. Though most historians tend to gloss over this aspect of their mission, their explanations of why any historical event took place are intimately bound up with — and dependent upon—the plausibility of those explanations’ implicit counterfactual suppositions. That is, a historian might maintain that some historical event A occurred because of preceding historical events X, Y, and Z. But, this explanation is only valid if one can argue convincingly that A would not have happened if something other than the combination of X, Y, and Z had actually taken place — and, crucially, that Not X, Not Y, and Not Z are all believable scenarios.

Take, for example, one historian’s explanation of why the first talking pictures arrived in Germany in 1936 rather than in Hollywood in 1924. In his book The Talkies: The Global Transition to Sound, Donald Crafton argues that sound cinema didn't appear initially in the American film industry, as one might expect due to its economic clout, partly because the three major studios — Paramount, MGM, and Fox — had colluded to corner the market by buying out all their smaller competitors back in 1923. So, in 1924, when RCA first approached the Hollywood studios with its new audio technology, the Big Three saw no economic need to experiment with their product since they no longer had any viable competition. But if the majors had failed to consolidate the industry in 1923 or had done so only in 1925, Crafton suggests, one of their minor rivals that they had not yet eliminated — Universal, maybe, or Pinnacle, or Warner Bros. — most certainly would have taken the risk of trying out Rca’s sound-on-film system.® But Crafton’s reasoning is credible only to the extent that the reader accepts that these alternative scenarios are realistic. That is, Crafton’s explanation about why the talkies emerged in Germany in 1936 depends in part on convincing his reader of the plausibility of a fictional course of events, in which Warner Bros. might have adopted sound technology in 1924 and thus produced the first all-talking features in, say, 1926 or 1927. As Hawthorn puts it, “the plausibility of this [historical] reasoning will turn on the counterfactuals it suggests. And if the counterfactuals themselves are not plausible, we should not give the explanation the credence we otherwise might”; or, as he writes elsewhere, “the force of an explanation turns on the counterfactuals it implies.”*

Hawthorn’s insight thus reveals a counterintuitive enigma in regard to historical understanding. For historians to make a compelling case as to why some event or phenomenon took place, they must delineate a series of plausible causes, but the more detailed their list becomes, the more alternative scenarios they generate. That is, because they imply that the opposite of each of the causal events they’ve laid out might also have taken place, when they propose an interconnected series of circumstances as the crucial factor in bringing about the current state of affairs, they are simultaneously positing that multiple combinations of interconnected actual and fictional events might also have occurred, all of which, presumably, would have led to outcomes other than what actually happened in the real world. For instance, ifa historian argues that event A took place because of three causes X, Y, and Z, he is postulating eight possible combinations of preceding events, only one of which could possibly

6 Donald Crafton, The Talkies: The Global Transition to Sound (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1998), 293.

7 Geoffrey Hawthorn, Plausible Worlds: Possibility and Understanding in History and the Social Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 16-17.

have resulted in phenomenon A.° Thus, in his “first paradox of explanation,” Hawthorn writes that “in explaining history we increase alternatives as we also reduce them.’ Thus, the supreme irony of historians’ enterprise is that the more intelligent and complex they make their case, the more deeply reliant on fictional suppositions their work becomes and thus the more like a novelist they appear. So even though Hawthorn himself doesn’t quite say so explicitly, to a certain extent we judge the validity of any historical explanation by the same standards that we use in judging any novelist’s imaginary creations.

Counterfactuals are especially important in understanding the history of film because its particular mode of production creates specific types of historical causes and effects. Fernand Braudel, the most articulate advocate of studying the past from a great remove, argued that historians too often focused on what he called the “history of events,” investigating microscopic decisions that individuals — the so-called “great men” — had made that produced instantaneous, observable effects at a specific place and time. He became interested, instead, in macroscopic causes and effects that would have remained largely invisible as they were transpiring — especially demographic shifts whose significance we could see only centuries after the fact when we studied what he called the longue durée."

But Lydia Bivington has argued that certain subjects, disciplines, cultures, or eras require historians to adopt what she calls a “materialist historiography” that focuses on the kind of microscopic effects that institutional forces tend to produce. Drawing on the recently renascent works of the German economic philosopher Karl Marx, she suggests that a culture’s ideology is to a

9 In this example, there are eight possible combinations of historical events: (a) X-Y-Z; (b) X-Y-!Z; (c) X-!Y-Z; (d) X-!Y-!Z; (e) !X-Y-Z; (f) !X-Y-!Z; (g) !X-!Y-Z; and (h) !X-!Y-!Z. In the real world, of course, most historians don't conceive of causal factors in such rigidly binary terms, but this example is intended merely to serve a theoretical purpose.

10 Hawthorn, Plausible Worlds, 37.

11 Fernand Braudel, On History, trans. Alexander Friebertson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 28, 27, 34.

large extent determined by its economic organization. So anyone studying the aesthetics of an industrial medium, therefore, needs to examine the bureaucracies that created those artistic standards for financial gain. “Historians of fields like the motion pictures,” she writes, “thus must study microscopic causes and effects in which individual figures, or more often corporations, make sudden decisions — often regarding the adoption or deployment of new technologies—that can have immediate and decisive effects on the look and feel and on the uses of their commercial products.” But though she doesn't explicitly say so herself, it becomes clear that because the pivotal actions that Bivington urges materialist historians to investigate always create such conspicuous counterfactuals, it logically follows that materialist historians will necessarily produce — more than other types of historians — a proliferation of alternative histories. In other words, the very volatility of the economic-aesthetic link that undergirds the qualities of screen entertainment demands that film historians, especially, propose and analyze fictional scenarios.

Film historians interested in explaining a smaller time frame — for example, why filmmakers produced the first narrative motion pictures in America in 1904 rather than in 1905 —will focus on people and institutions that made substantive decisions rather than on large-scale cultural shifts over which individual agents had little control. When Charles Musser suggests, for instance, that the Edison Manufacturing Company decided in 1903 to produce both fictional films like The Great Train Robbery and feature-length sports actualities like Tour de France in order to counteract the sudden downturn in film rentals in 1901 and 1902, he implies that the company would not have turned to fictional storytelling or to multi-reel movies if the popular genre of the boxing film had not been banned in

12 Lydia Bivington, “Materialist Historiography and the Artistic Industrial Complex, in Art, Economics, and Culture: New Approaches, eds. Lydia Bivington and Micaela Lorenzo (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 27. See also Lydia Bivington and Niranjan Menon, eds., The Karl Marx Reader (London: Routledge, 1999).

many states at the turn of the century.” These types of microscopic institutional decisions that a materialist historian would tend to explain are much more likely to engender plausible alternative scenarios than are the long-term demographic shifts that historians like Braudel are interested in.

Thus, some disciplines are inherently more amenable to counterfactual speculation than others because they are more beholden to specific types of real-world factors. Military historians, for instance, treat counterfactuals with more respect than social historians because the decisions that generals made in the heat of battle had more far-reaching consequences than did, for instance, the consumer choices that women in a particular nation made over the course of a decade. Civil War historians, for instance, are not embarrassed to speculate about whether the Confederacy might have won the war if the South had prevailed at Antietam or Gettysburg; if anything, they think that analyzing such what-if scenarios is one of their central intellectual functions. Film historians, to my mind, have much more in common with military historians who focus on immediate structural changes than they do with historians of poetry or painting whose aesthetic shifts may have causes much more related to the longue durée. Because the cinema has a corporate, institutional, and economic structure linked to mass culture, it is especially contingent upon any sudden changes in society’s material composition. If some company invents a new technology, such as three-strip color or stereoscopic imaging, and the film studios that dominate the existing industrial organization decide to take it up — and if audiences flock to see the new novelty — the entire course of film history can change overnight.

If materialist historians trying to explain why the art of film has taken the shape that it has have an obligation to value counterfactual speculation, they also have an obligation—and for

13 Charles Musser, “Rethinking Early Cinema: Cinema of Attractions and Narrativity, The Yale Journal of Criticism 7, no. 2 (1994): 203-32.

14 See James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).

the very same reasons — to embrace non-linear modes of writing. That is, if a historian’s ultimate goal is to explicate how the dominant cinematic aesthetics came into being, he should not necessarily write a narrative that commences with the moment when Edison or the Lumieres first projected film on screen, but should instead organize his analysis around those economic, political, and institutional factors that were the most important causes of the medium’s prototypical formal and narrative features. The very order in which the historian chooses to arrange his explanations would thus constitute an argument in and of itself, suggesting which actors and events were the most important in shaping the art of the screen. Historians who begin their chronological accounts in 1895 when people first projected motion pictures to an audience are thus making an implicit — and perhaps unthinking — teleological argument about the essential relationship between film’s origins and its later aesthetic evolution. A historian, on the other hand, who opened his account with the invention of the talkies and concluded with Edison and the Lumières in 1895 would be making the case for the aesthetic significance of the human voice in contrast to the image itself, and he would thus also be staging a critique of those scholars who treat the spectacular visual qualities of those early singletake movies as the ontological foundation of the art form.” Adopting Hawthorn’s theoretical position on counterfactuality to its furthest extent could inspire a historian to delve into more unambiguously fictional modes of writing and more radically non-chronological approaches, both of which would highlight — in an intellectually productive manner — the intrinsically aesthetic nature of historical writing as a genre. The possibility of treating one’s counterfactual suppositions as fact is intriguing for a number of reasons. It has the potential to liberate history from the formulaic chronologies and teleological assumptions that many readers have accepted as a given, transforming it into a vehicle that they might attend to with the same aspirations

15 See Wanda Strauven, ed., The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006).

they bring to other art forms. Hayden White, for instance, argues that historians are not like scientists who observe the world in order to uncover the truth; rather, they are practitioners of language, and thus, “the historian performs an essentially poetic act The historical work is not a window onto a phenomenal world, but a “verbal structure in the form of a narrative prose discourse,” and as such we shouldn't judge it by how accurately it represents the past. Historians organize written texts to make arguments about their characters and their interactions with the world just as novelists or playwrights do. So when we do judge historians, we should employ the same methods we use to analyze the artistic and rhetorical components of a story in any genre. In other words, White argues, “the best grounds for choosing one perspective on history rather than another are ultimately aesthetic and moral rather than epistemological?"

Drawing upon history’s innately artistic character to write a work of fiction might also enable historians to develop more nuanced modes of intellectual argument. That is, by presenting explanations about why certain events and phenomena took place in an alternative development of time, writers would simultaneously be formulating other implicit arguments about why certain events and phenomena took place in the actual world: by positing plausible alternative scenarios, they would highlight which causes and effects in our actual world they thought were inevitable and which had been arbitrary. Thus, by inventing an alternative history, authors would prompt readers to engage in a hermeneutic process in order to understand their historical vision in the same way that artists inspire audiences to interpret their work. Returning to a previous example, an adventurous historian could write a fictional account of film history in which Hollywood’s three major studios failed to take control of the American film industry in 1923 so that one of their smaller

16 Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth- Century Europe (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), x.

18 Ibid., xii.

American competitors, unlike them, was willing to experiment with Rca’s sound-on-film technology in 1925 as a way to compete with them. By presenting a fictive history in which Warner Bros., for instance, invented the talking cinema in Hollywood in 1927, a historian would be making a tacit argument about how the organizational structure of the film industry had more to do with the introduction of sound than did the technological inventions that comprise most accounts of the talkie revolution.