Mapping Movie Magazines: Digitization, Periodicals and Cinema History and Circulating American Magazines

Magazines—which of course take many and varied forms, from trade publications to fanzines to women's magazines, newsmagazines and beyond—are critically important sources for film-study scholars and media historians. Magazines provide a day-to-day, contemporaneous account of an industry and its various bosses, workers, and audiences, the reception of creative products, the influence of government forces and corporations, and the fears, hopes, and peccadillos of generations past.Many publications are or have been digitally scanned by national libraries, archives, and nonprofit groups, such as the Internet Archive, but many have not been so fortunate, and are harder to locate. Many exist in physical locations that are hard to get to, and not just during a pandemic or the long recovery that follows.In this joint review, I will point to two sources recently published that can assist researchers in their work on magazines, especially if that work is historical and comparative in nature. I am a media historian who examines journalism trade publications, and so some of my perspective is informed by that experience. That means that I appreciate—or so I would hope!—how connected these magazines are to their industries. In other words, I know how they were (and in some cases still are) deeply embedded in the practices of those industries, but also their personalities and players—and thus the ways they are historical objects or artifacts worthy of their own study.Both the first subject of this review (Mapping Movie Magazines), an essay collection focused on the communities of production surrounding movies, and the second, the Circulating American Magazines project, function as tools for scholars in a number of disciplines, ranging from journalism history to film studies. Their formats invite participation, too, whether by being the product of multiple authors, some from different fields, in the case of the essays, or in the Magazines project, which has an active blog (its “Forum” space) where scholars can post updates on what they have learned. The latter, I believe, is also still being updated, so it has a certain pragmatic dynamism. Both endeavors are not passive—they invite engagement with research material in innovative ways.In Mapping Movie Magazines, one finds a wide-ranging and authoritative entry in the Palgrave's “Global Cinema” series, edited by Katarzyna Marciniak, Anikó Imre and Áine O'Healy. The authors thoughtfully push far beyond well-trod research paths to challenge and expand thinking about the use of magazines, especially fan magazines—an exceptionally broad genre—in understanding films in their holistic settings. While some such expansive collections can tend toward disharmony or just a general lack of cohesion, that is certainly not the case here—in fact, the opposite rings true, and the end result is particularly well done.Indeed, the authors in Mapping Movie Magazines take fan culture seriously and studiously, with an emphasis on readership that is challenging, as it involves creatively recreating the power of long-vanished audiences. This ties into the idea of circulation, which is explored in the project below, too, but again is not easy to track down or even imagine, in many cases. The people who read these magazines and engaged with their creators are in many cases no longer with us, but now we can better understand how that engagement occurred, and why it mattered, thanks to this collection.As the books' editors, Daniel Biltereyst and Lies Van de Vijver, describe it in their helpful introductory chapter, their writers have taken a “broad new cinema history perspective,” which involves thinking of “cinema [as] conceived as a multifaceted concept, encompassing not only the films and their stars, stories and the movies' diegetic worlds” (2). While this may be familiar to many readers of this journal, it is good to keep in mind the overarching mission of the volume—to serve as a resource for new cinema historians. As such, the collection in many ways represents the “best of” current thinking in this arena.To be a bit more specific, Biltereyst and Van de Vijver's collection is helpful in thinking of the “socio-cultural and economic realities within which films are produced, distributed, circulated, exhibited and received.” This means that many of their authors take a “bottom-up perspective, examining audiences' experiences of the movies and their encounter with the places and spaces in which motion pictures were shown and consumed” (2).A number of these scholars are also interested in how ideas of power—cultural, political, and economic—have shaped the discourse around films around the planet, including outside the U.S. And many of the scholarly essays in the collection are handsomely illustrated with photos, rich in their own contribution to visual analysis—as well as sometimes a copyright challenge, considering their subjects are often film celebrities, even of yesteryear, or of the magazines themselves.The first section engages with the broad issues associated with magazines, digitization and the historiography of cinema, with an imaginative case study by Eric Hoyt, Derek Long, Tony Tran, and Kit Hughes focused on the preservation of what is perhaps the most canonical American film-trade publication—Variety. Other notable articles in this first section include, “Who Knew? Using Digital Trade Papers to Explore Ethnic Programming in American Picture Palaces,” by Judith Thissen and Paula Eisenstein Baker (which looks at Jewish-American encounters with early film culture), and “Periodical Studies, Intermediality, and Cinema: Film in The Listener,” by Birgit Van Puymbroeck, the latter of which uses the Media History Digital Library (MHDL, as does the Hoyt, et al. project).The second section focuses on how magazines were embedded in the film industry and thus in the cultural economy of the first half of the twentieth century, with an opening chapter by Mary Desjardins. This article examines how Hollywood studios responded to the Production Code Administration (PCA) and its mandates (among other moralizing efforts to “clean up” the so-called “cheesecake” depictions of women in the nascent cinema-entertainment world), but also how fan magazines engaged in a kind of gatekeeping with stars and their personal and professional lives, especially female stars such as Mae West and Jean Harlow. Both women defied convention, but Desjardins shows how their employers attempted to manage their images, and how these women fought for their own independence. Other chapters of note include Kathleen A. Feeley's “‘The Great and Important Thing in Her Life’: Depicting Female Labor and Ambition in 1920s and 1930s U.S. Movie Magazines,” which is followed by Jessica L. Whitehead, Louis Pelletier, and Paul S. Moore's “‘The Girl Friend in Canada’: Ray Lewis and Canadian Moving Picture Digest (1915–1957),” and, lastly, “Drumming up Readers: Zonk! African People's Pictorial and Films for African Audiences in South Africa in 1949 and the Early 1950s,” by Jacqueline Maingard. This project looks at how a pioneering South African magazine emphasized African audiences and their interests. A final chapter in this section, “Mapping the Dutch Film Magazine Market, 1920–1960,” by Thunnis van Oort, shows how one national market struggled to assert itself in the global economy. In all cases, these essays—particularly through gender analysis—manage to hang together thematically and speak to each other's strengths.The third and final section of the book looks at “how audiences, stars and film directors featured in the movie magazine and how magazines developed strategies to create a participatory readership,” an intersection that serves as particularly rich research terrain (8). While some media-studies scholars consider such “prosumer” phenomena as a fairly recent happening, this section shows that this is definitely not the case, and how fans have long engaged in their own kinds of creative efforts that, in turn, shape the work of “professionals.” Among the notable essays in this section are Myriam Juan's “Looking at Movie Fans: On Pictures Published in French Film Magazines of the Interwar Years,” André van der Velden's “Between Hollywood and Babelsberg: Popular Cinephilia in a Dutch Movie Magazine of the 1920s,” María Paz Peirano's “Hollywood Imaginaries at the End of the World: Ecran and the Construction of the International Industry from the Periphery,” which looks at the Chilean film industry, and “How's Your Sense of Direction?: Using Movie Magazines to Study Audiences' Perception of Classical Hollywood Directors, 1934–1943,” by Dominic Topp. In these contributions, audiences receive attention—not as passive, receptive bodies, but as engaged groups that shaped perception and creation, in their own right.A final essay, “‘Coming Attractions’: Tijuana Bibles and the Pornographic Reimagining of Hollywood,” by Ellen Wright and Phyll Smith, pushes the boundaries of what has been known (and appreciated) about transgressive publications at the margins of the Hollywood's “Golden Age.” Wright and Smith circle back to Desjardins's point that the movie industry's shifting moral codes carried political ramifications, which reinforces the sense that the chapters, in spite of their disparate subject matter, are in conversation with one another.Collectively, the above authors demonstrate a thorough awareness of the need to mix up methods, approaches, and sources, resulting in a much-needed addition to the literature on the wider world of film studies. Those looking for non-U.S. case studies will particularly appreciate the projects that look at examples from other countries' film cultures and industries, and even those authors who look at the U.S. take a holistic perspective that puts their topic in conversation with other locations, where and when possible. Other scholars may find inspiration from their use of magazines and other publications that are often challenging to get at, with the notes on sources extensive, clear, and helpful.In the Circulating American Magazines project, the researcher finds an invaluable research database, created by Brooks Hefner and Edward E. Timke and their teams at James Madison University and Duke, which is ambitious in scope and should be on every scholar's bookmarked tab of resources. It is focused on the problem of circulation, a tough issue for a number of scholars who study magazines. Especially for publications that folded years ago, such data has been scarce, if not impossible, to come by. Hefner and Timke's curatory efforts are based on carefully extracted data from hundreds of periodicals from the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC), long the authoritative voice on the matter. The ABC sent representatives to check the records of publications and then performed their own detailed bookkeeping, independent of these outlets.Hefner and Timke's work was not an easy task, as it involves tracking down the physical copies of these records at a handful of institutions, and then transcribing data from row upon row of paper volumes into spreadsheets, organizing that data, and then presenting it in a useable format online. That latter effort is no mean feat in and of itself. Their goal is to “enable advanced studies of literary modernism and popular literary genres, the history of American publishing, the history and sociology of popular reading and print media in the United States, among many other topics.”i As a media-history scholar who has long grappled with the slippery, even evasive ways that circulation data elides easy study, I can attest to the utility of this project. It is hard to know where, exactly, a publication could have been found, prior to their efforts, but now scholars can know much more about the provenance and possibly the market penetration of magazines.With data on well over 200 publications, ranging from the well-known (TV Guide) to the more niche (Photoplay) to the truly niche (Submarine Stories), circulation data can be downloaded and used in a variety of formats, from .csv to JSON, or even as plaintext. That means that they can be used to generate incredibly useful visualizations, too, which also feature prominently on the site. For example, you can compare circulation data for two publications, including such disparate titles as Family Circle and Amazing Stories, or publications closer in mission and scope, such as Glamour and Cosmopolitan—if one were to be working on a project about, say, how “legacy” women's magazines competed with later generations of such publications, this can add a critical level of detail, especially as new technologies were introduced. Or, say if one was looking at a major publisher such as Condé Nast (or even, in turn, its owner, Advance Publications, Inc.), this kind of detail can show the changing fortunes of media empires across the twentieth century as mergers and chains developed.But these ideas just begin to get at the capability of “data sets” like the Circulating American Magazines project. Many scholars, including myself, look at a select handful of publications. This tool lets us look at the big picture, examining state-level or regional data in imaginative ways that can expand our research in fruitful directions. In addition, they provide quantitative and geographic information difficult to come by before Hefner and Timke collated and digitized it.Both Mapping Movie Magazines and Circulating American Magazines will be of great interest to scholars of film studies, magazine history, the economics of periodical publication and literary history more broadly. Both resources can enhance existing or new projects, or aid collaboration across subfields or help scholars working in different national contexts to find linkages. On the teaching side, the latter would be helpful as a tool to be unpacked in a graduate course on magazines, and an essay or two could be taken from the former and assigned to an advanced undergraduate course in film, or an introductory or advanced graduate course. Perhaps most compellingly, both could be used together to look at the circulation of fan magazines at a certain moment. There is also some interesting crossover work that could be done with the site and Mapping Movie Magazines, since, for example, Motion Picture (i.e., Motion Picture Magazine) is mentioned in the latter, as is Movie Mirror. In that sense, the book and the site go together as resources.Previous generations of scholars did not have easy access to these kinds of collaborations or tools—it would be wise for ours to take full advantage of them in the hard work of internationalizing our research and engaging—respectfully—across and through cultural, linguistic, and disciplinary boundaries.

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