This book emerges out of our teaching and our dissatisfaction with the available books in film history. Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell's now classic volume, Film History: An Introduction, best represents the main tendency, and it provides students with an absolutely indispensable narrative history of film that focuses on the aesthetic development of the medium. However, while we recognise that students need to be familiar with this kind of history, if only so that they know the key points of reference in relation to which most existing scholarship is produced, we were also concerned that students should not be given the impression, from early in their studies, that film history is largely about the processes of aesthetic development. However, while Robert Allen and Douglas Gomery's equally classic volume, Film History: Theory and Practice, provides the main alternative, and focuses on the wide variety of objects, methods and practices involved in ‘doing’ film history, it presupposes a great deal of knowledge about the narrative of film history, the very knowledge provided by books such as Bordwell and Thompson's.

In one sense, then, we felt that a book was needed that combined both tendencies: that provided both a narrative history of the medium as it is usually presented, while also introducing students to a wide range of different objects and methods. We also felt that students could best understand what was involved in the practice of historical film research if, rather than simply describe objects and methods in the abstract, we presented them with specific exemplars of those types of research; if they saw examples of the actual practice of film history.