«..In this book, we introduce the history of film as it is presently conceived, written, and taught by its most accomplished scholars. Film History: An Introduction is not, however, a distillation of everything that is known about film history. Researchers are fond of saying that there is no film history, only film histories. This partly means that there can be no single survey that puts all known facts into piace. The history of avantgarde film does not match neatly up with the history of color technology or the development of the Western or the life of Alfred Hitchcock. For this reason, the enterprise we call "writing film history" is a big tent housing people who work from various perspectives and with different interests and purposes. So there is no Big Story of Film History that will list, describe, and explain everything that took place. We think that writing film history involves asking a series of questions and searching for evidence in order to answer them in the course of an argument. When historians focus on different questions, they select different evidence and formulate different explanations. For example, the historian who wants to know how European cinema developed in the Cold War will not pay much attention to why Marilyn Monroe had career problems near the end of her life. For this reason, historians create not a single, infinitely extended history but a diverse set of specific historical arguments...» (From Preface)