"Tells the origin story of the motion picture genre that most vividly preserves and passes on our history--the archival documentary. The film historian Jay Leyda famously declared that "films beget films," but only in the 1930s would they become fruitful and multiply. Doherty argues that the proliferation was due to two parallel developments, one archival, one technological. By 1930, a sufficient backlog of motion pictures--roughly four decades worth of filmed life--had accrued to provide the raw material to spawn a second generation stitched together exclusively from the first. That same year, Hollywood completed the task begun in 1927, the re-tooling of the studio assembly lines for the recording of synchronous dialogue. Together, the accumulation of a film inventory and the sound of the human voice gave rise to a new motion picture genre. "Archival documentary" became the term for the branch of next-generation cinema, though the name would not stick until the end of the twentieth century. In the 1930s, the decade in which it came of age, critics and practitioners struggled for the right label: compilation films, library films, historical films, celluloid anthologies, super newsreel, and stock footage collections.

Whatever the name, it referred to a parasitical genre that drew its life from pre-existing footage. Doherty examines the films that pioneered the genre--actually created it out of whole cloth--and the cultural historical forces that produced them. Some are little known, but all are of landmark importance: The Film Parade (1933), The First World War (1934), Hitlers Reign of Terror (1934), Tsar to Lenin (1937), and the March of Time screen magazine. How Films Became History offers a fascinating in-depth look at the creation of the first generation of history making cinema."-- Provided by publisher.