calderwood

Not long after editing Wikipedia’s article on film noir, I realized that the bibliography still had a glaring omission: Borde and Chaumeton’s A Panorama of American Film Noir was not on the list.  A Panorama of American Film Noir was the first book-length work on film noir, and contemporary writers continue to refer to it when they discuss film noir.  For these reasons, I added it.

To be honest, when I returned to the Wikipedia article today, I half expected that my previous edits would be gone.  When I contribute to Wikipedia, it’s hard to shake the feeling that I am writing in the sand, and that another contributor will erase my efforts.  Contributing to Wikipedia seems to require a certain sense of trust, one that I hope to develop.

I enjoyed reading Roy Rosenzweig’s article on Wikipedia and its implications for professional historians.  I agree with him that Wikipedia is an important model for historians to study. We historians could learn a thing or two about the benefits of voluntary, collaborative work.  As someone who is also a practicing poet, I have in recent years discovered the benefits of collaborative writing.  Writing with another writer, and with that other writer’s habits in mind, not only liberates me from my own idiosyncrasies but also gives me more impetus to write.  I imagine voluntary, collaborative effort would have a similar effect on the historical process.

Whether professional historians like it or not, Wikipedia is an incredibly effective tool for providing historical information to a general audience.  Even though some of the practices of Wikipedians run counter to those of professional historians, I agree with Rosenzweig that we as historians ought to contribute to Wikipedia in the hope of improving it, rather than denounce it for its flaws.

As an alternative to contributing to Wikipedia, many historians are keeping blogs.  I really liked The History Carnival, which mimics the form of a journal; however, instead of including peer-reviewed articles, it contains peer-reviewed blog.  One of the most interesting blogs I found on this site was Rob Macdougall’s Superman I: Secret Origins.  Although not exactly in a journal form, The History Blogosphere also contains links to several peer-reviewed blogs.  One of the most interesting blogs, not only in terms of content but also presentational style, that I found on this site was 1947project.

I was surprised by how many supposedly academic blogs reflect, at leat in part, the same sort of “geek priorties” that Rosenzweig ascribes to Wikipedia.  For example, at Easily Distracted, Timothy Burke’s thought-provoking story about his experience as a discussant in an academic seminar is preceded by a discussion of the computer game Oblivion.  At Break of Day in the Trenches, Esther McCallum-Stewart devotes as much attention to science fiction and computer games as to her primary academic interest, the impact of World War I on popular culture.

I believe scholars like Burke and McCallum-Stewart have every right to a forum in which they can communicate all their personal interests, academic or otherwise.  At the same time, I am left wondering whether the kind of writing they are doing on their blogs is, by purely academic standards, any better than the kind of writing that appears on Wikipedia.  Am I betraying my profession by saying that I sometimes prefer the collaborative writing produced by Wikipedia to the geeky blogs of science fiction-reading, computer game-playing historians? 

I had only heard of Wikipedia a few months ago.  The first and only time I consulted it happened a couple weeks ago, when I was searching for a website that provided a good overview of film noir.  Overall, I would say that Wikipedia’s article on film noir was the best thing I found.

When I reread the article today, I was quite impressed with how nuanced its discussion of film noir is.  It acknowledges the fact that the term, invented by French critics, ”was unknown to the filmmakers and actors [in Hollywood] while they were creating the classic films noirs.”  By desribing what “some critics” vs. “other critics” argue, it also implicity acknowledges the problem of defining film noir.  In addition, the article carefully mentions the European influences on film noir, lists dozens of film noir’s common characteristics, and names a few of the movies whose status as film noir is debatable.

(Interestingly enough, the discussion page demonstrates how nuance can easily devolve into–or emererge from?–hair-splitting.  The majority of the page contain a snarky debate over the plural form of film noir: is it films noirs, films noir, or noir films?)

Encarta’s article on film noir suffers by comparison.  Besides being mucher shorter, it generally fails to acknowledge the problematic nature of the term “film noir.”  In its own flatly-stated way, the Encarta article seems to sidestep the debate, to describe a consensus that doesn’t really exist.  Wikipedia, however, represents a collaborative effort and thus seems to reflect a genuine consensus regarding the term.

Another advantage Wikipedia’s article on film noir has over Encarta’s is that it contains a bibliography.  Of course, as someone who has read much on film noir, I thought the bibliography needed improvement–and so I provided it.  Some of my edits were minor–I corrected mechanical errors in a few places, and I provided the publisher’s name and (where appropriate) the copyright date for Hirsch’s The Dark Side of the Screen and for all the books by Alain Silver.

(My information regarding the publisher and date of Kaplan’s Women in Film Noir differed from what was on Wikipedia, so I “corrected” that as well.  I realize, though, that my information may be for an older edition.  Perhaps, in the process of correcting, I am also introducing a new mistake.)

The biggest change I made was in adding four more books: Keaney’s Film Noir Guide, Lyons’s Death on the Cheap, Selby’s Dark City, Spicer’s Film Noir, and Telotte’s Voices in the Dark.  The first three books are essentially film catalogs that deserve to be read and compared to Silver and Ward’s Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference.  The fourth book, in my mind, provides the best, most concise overview of film noir and the scholarship surrounding it.  The fifth book is a classic scholarly work on film noir; whether the contributors to this article realize it or not, their discussion of film noir makes use of Telotte’s thesis.

I could have added even more titles to the bibliography, but then I would have started to include critical works that are not necessarily appropriate for a beginning reader.  By this logic, I was inclined to attempt to remove a very scholarly cultural analysis that is currently on the list–Rabinowitz’s Black & White & Noir.  Not wanting to offend the person who put it there, or to seem like I was discouraging anyone from reading it, I did not bother to remove it.

In any case, I think my edits represent an improvement.  I added a classic work and very recent books to the bibliography.  The publisher names and copyright dates that I provided might help potential readers locate these works more easily.  If these readers manage to look at any of the three film catalogs I added, they will find an alternative to the list of films in Silver and Ward’s Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference.  Hopefully, these additions will lead at least a few people to a greater understanding of film noir.