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Hi, I'm Wheeler Winston Dixon, James Ryan Professor Film Studies of University of Nebraska-Lincoln
and this Frame by Frame and I just want to speak for a moment about the importance of
film history.
If you don't know history you're condemned to repeat it, and if you don't know history also
you can't really judge a film because you really don't know what came before it.
The film history of the of the last century because film is really a twentieth-century
medium which began in the eighteen eighties and of course is now shifting the digital,
is so incomparably rich you know basically encompassing not only films that are made in
the United States but films globally around the world. So we're talking
literally millions of titles with more being at every day.
If you know your film history you know that women for example were pioneers in film.
You know that racism basically infected American film making for a long period of time.
You can also follow the the depression, you can follow the events of World War I and World War II.
You can follow the events in other countries so that you can basically
learned the cultures of Sweden and Denmark and Germany and Spain and all the different
filmmakers who came from these various different countries.
Knowing film history gives you a perspective.
And once you have that perspective you can better judge the films you see so the next
time that you're looking for a film
basically you might want to take a look at the foreign section or in the more historical
classics and look past the present look into the past
and see what film has to offer you because there is a great deal of human history there.
In fact it's all of our recorded history as world culture.
I'm Wheeler Winston Dixon and this is Frame by Frame.