In its technology, production, marketing and reception, film has been both modern and global from its very beginnings in the late nineteenth century. So there are strong empirical and epistemological claims for a transnational approach to its history. But, paradoxically, most film histories have been decidedly focused on the notion of national culture and industry. In this chapter, while I will make a case for film history to broaden out and at least establish the transnational context for their national stories, I will also explain my pessimism that this approach will not be widely adopted.

My account begins with the story of a neglected film pioneer – the story of both the pioneer and the neglect. James Dixon (‘Jaydee’) Williams was a ‘pushful American’,^[1] whose adventures in the film trade across three continents in the early decades of the twentieth century make him a prime subject for transnational treatment, as much for the historiographic complexities of his story as for the bravura of his performance.

Not much is known of Williams’ early years. Variously calling him James or John or J. D., American histories assert he was born in West Virginia in the late 1870s.^[2] On leaving school, he worked first in live theatre, selling tickets and later playing house-organ. He then set himself up as a travelling picture showman and from around 1897 until 1908 he took his show back and forth across the continent, ending up in the north-west, where he established a number of storefront picture houses in Spokane, Seattle, and in Vancouver. Exhibition history is very much the poor cousin of production history, so Williams’ early career is barely mentioned in either American or Canadian historiographies.^[3]

As the shape of the fledgling film business changed, J. D. sought new territory. He looked out across the Pacific and determined to try his luck in Sydney. At this point, his story is taken up within Australian film historiography where he is variously identified as Canadian or American.^[4] In 1909 he arrived in Australia alone; or with Leon Phillips;^[5] or with ‘a small party of Americans’.^[6] He came with a nickelodeon collection of ‘old films and junk pictures’,^[7] a few hundred pounds capital,^[8] and ‘Yankee ideas of expansion’.^[9] His new career began in Sydney sideshows, selling kewpie dolls on canes. It was a surprisingly successful venture that soon had him employing a retinue of sales boys both in Sydney and in Brisbane where he also hawked films of Jack Johnson’s heavyweight championship fights. Within a year he had moved from outdoor to indoor amusements. In 1910, he acquired a theatre at the busy downmarket end of Sydney’s George Street that he transformed in the American style – luxury for the masses. Most importantly, he introduced modern scientific management to the theatre’s operations, developing the continuous picture show. At the Colonial Theatre No. 1, then across the road at the Colonial No. 2 (later the Empress), he sold cheap seats for a film show that lasted about an hour and a half, and was screened continuously from 11am to 11pm. Here, in the words of his publicist, ‘people of all classes could find regular and frequent enjoyment at prices that would not make their pleasure a drain on their resources’.^[10] Until then, ‘[t]he great mass of people had not been catered for, and [J. D.] propose[d] to make money by catering for them’.^[11] By early 1912, J. D. claimed his picture theatres were patronised by 60 000 people weekly.^[12]

J. D. had a passionate commitment to the possibilities of the new medium. It ‘heralded the dawn of a new era in the social life of the people – the inauguration of a new and as yet untried system of relaxation, and rest, and instruction, and entertainment.’^[13] The picture business would enter ‘into more intimate relation with daily life’ and ‘to a large extent supplant the evening newspaper’. But it was ‘in the education department that cinematography is bound to make its next greatest and most important movement’, teaching youngsters about their country and leaving an historical record ‘of the great events of our time for the benefit of those who come after us’.^[14] After a whirlwind tour of the United States, England and Europe, he returned to Sydney in late 1911 with a scheme to realise this vision.

Williams’ commercial strategies set the standard for corporate empire building for the next two decades in Australia and his feats were the stuff of tall tales among film-men in New York and Hollywood.^[16] In December 1910, he consolidated his holdings into the Greater J. D. Williams Amusement Co. Ltd, with a capital of £200 000.^[17] Besides his Sydney theatres,^[18] this company controlled a circuit of fifteen picture theatres in Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth and New Zealand. It ran five film exchanges, had agents in London and America and a distribution outlet in China.^[19] While the general opinion of film historians is that J. D. ‘contributed very little to the creative side of local activity’,^[20] in 1912 he set up his own camera crews to cover dramatic events across eastern Australia for the first Australian newsreel, Williams’ Weekly News. Later, in 1916, he formed an independent syndicate with Stanley Crick and John C. Jones to finance the wartime feature, The Martyrdom of Nurse Cavell (1916), and the historical saga, The Mutiny on the Bounty (1916).^[21]

In this early period at least, moving pictures were not insulated from the rest of the amusement business, as implied by most film historians.^[22] A jump into another historiography reveals J. D. as the champion of a wide sweep of popular entertainment. His earliest sideshow enterprise is mentioned only in passing, but in 1911 and 1912, when the film historians have him building and opening the Melba and Britannia Theatres in Melbourne, popular amusement and local historians identify him as the great impresario of Luna Park at St Kilda.^[23] Directly emulating its namesake on Coney Island, Luna Park was built by a largely American team of amusement park designers and technicians.^[24] J. D.’s partner, Leon Phillips, with his two brothers, took over the enterprise after its spectacular opening in December 1912. J. D.’s fascination with Coney Island as the pinnacle of integrated entertainment had already been given form in Sydney. At the June 1912 opening of the second largest^[25] and most lavish of the Williams’ theatres, the Crystal Palace Theatre and amusement complex,^[26] a Sydney Morning Herald reporter described it as ‘a kind of miniature Coney Island transferred, as if by the Slaves of the Lamp, to Sydney, and fitted with all sorts of means of amusement’.^[27] Beyond the world of cinema and amusement parks, J. D. also had interests in motorbike and motorcar racing and sales, and revived track-bicycle racing, introducing both Sydney and Melbourne to the American sport of six-day racing in 1912.^[28] As his publicist recorded: ‘The object of the democratic-minded J. D. W. is to revolutionise the motor and motor-bike trade, just as he has revolutionised the photo-play business, and make motors popular and cheap.’^[29]

J. D. Williams’ empire was built in a world of cutthroat competition, of constant manoeuvring to undermine rivals and to advance one’s own position. J. D. understood that the future belonged to the efficient and the consolidated: the whole film business should be in the hands of only a few well-conducted enterprises. But a well-conducted enterprise was not easy to create or sustain. Throughout the period, 1910 to 1913, he faced disunion in the control and management of his own company and sharp competition in the field. Emerging on top after an intricate play of mergers, takeovers and court cases, in 1913 he engineered an amalgamation with his chief competitors and became the dominant partner in what was called ‘the Combine’.^[30] This was a distribution and exhibition company known as Union Theatres/Australasian Films, which stood as a colossus astride the Sydney moving picture field with a capital of well over £1 000 000. As with all his enterprises, J. D. did not manage the new company, but left it to others. His publicist explained the system 1912:

This machine worked well and Union Theatres dominated the national field for decades, and still exists in a hybrid form today.

In 1912, following the opening of the spectacular Crystal Palace, the leading theatrical magazine Footlights had proclaimed J. D., ‘the greatest showman that Australia has ever seen’, and anointed him the ‘Napoleon of Amusements’.^[32] It declared that, ‘The present generation sound his praise, and by posterity, he cannot be forgotten.’^[33] Its prediction was, however, vain. Within a year, the fabulous J. D. Williams disappeared from the pages of Australian film history. The contemporary papers and later historians simply abandon this hero and turn to others. There is some mention of more travels in America; there are hints of a ‘very spectacular crash’.^[34] Then silence.

But Williams was irrepressible. Australian historiography might forget him, but he did not abandon his dreams to be and make the biggest and best. So we need to turn our attention from Australian to American film historiography, which picks up the story from 1916. What happened before that date is left rather vague. Benjamin Hampton, for example, off-handedly introduces Williams as ‘a West Virginian who had been selling and exhibiting American films in various parts of the world for a number of years’.^[35] In these American works, the story of J. D. begins anew. Terry Ramsaye, presents the rebirth boldly:

He found plenty. First he set up a national distribution company based in New York. From there he locked horns with Adolph Zukor’s Paramount company, which had become a commanding force in the film business through its control of the most popular stars and the most profitable pictures. With Thomas L. Tally, J. D. co-founded First National Exhibitors’ Circuit in 1917 and became its general manager.^[37] The American histories make much of the industry politics and machinations of First National in combat with the other industry giants: ‘The moves were intricate, rapid and continuous.’^[38] But they make no mention of J. D.’s earlier and similar battles to create the Combine in Sydney.

First National was ‘essentially a national organization of states rights franchisees’,^[39] but J. D. soon developed it into a production/exhibition Combine and one of the most powerful film companies in the country for many years.^[40] The first contract he signed was with Charlie Chaplin, paying over a million dollars for eight two-reel pictures a year. The second was with Mary Pickford. Always cosmopolitan, he ‘created a motion picture sensation in the United States’^[41] when he introduced the first postwar German picture on to the First National circuit, Ernst Lubitsch’s Madame Dubarry (retitled for commercial reasons as Passion).^[42]

There is a photograph from 1922 showing J. D. as a foundation member of the most important regulatory agency for the film industry for the next half century, the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America.^[43] He is sitting next to the soon-to-become Movie Czar, Will Hays. In that same year, Motion Picture News listed him as one of the twelve greatest people of the motion picture industry.^[44] Twelve years later, his Variety obituary noted the innovation that First National originally represented: ‘Had Williams been more of an executive and less the promoter he might have revolutionized the industry’s set-up.’^[45]

In late 1922, J. D. was pushed to resign as general manager of First National over policy differences. At this point he drops out of American film history. His demotion also affected his standing within that history, which is largely an account of the winners and their success stories. So Williams is treated as somehow present, but unimportant, simply one wheeling dealer among many. The industry histories give no explanation for his innovative projects, no indication of his vision of moving pictures as anything other than commodities. There is no discussion of his ideals or motivation.

From 1922, the trail again goes cold, except for the minor mention that in 1925 he set up Ritz-Carlton Pictures. That company made only one picture, Cobra^[46] with Rudolph Valentino. But when J. D. disappears from the American historiography, he resurfaces in yet another. From 1925, he is remade as a British film producer. As if born anew, his American past is only vaguely recognised by British film historians, encapsulated in the brief statements that he ‘was known for his grandiose schemes on both sides of the Atlantic’ – but not of the Pacific – and that ‘he had already been beaten in the battle of the American film giants before coming to this country’.^[47] Such language implies the inflated ambition of a mere ‘pushful American’, rather than the persistence of the democratic vision that was first expressed in his Australian days: to provide the broad public with ‘absolutely the pick of the world’s very best things in the moving-picture line’ at ‘the minimum rates’.^[48]

Rachel Low in her magisterial The History of British Film, mentions in passing that J. D. Williams was a director in the British public company Stoll Picture Productions, registered in 1920,^[49] but she gives no explanation nor mentions him again until 1925, when he established and became managing director of British National Pictures. He initially signed up leading American star Dorothy Gish and British director Herbert Wilcox for three British pictures, followed by contracts with German director E. A. Dupont and the up-and-coming Alfred Hitchcock. To fund his films he made ‘remarkable’ deals for financial backing from the United States giants Paramount and Famous Players-Lasky. In 1926, he bought a forty-acre site and began to develop a film city, or huge super-studio – a British Hollywood – at Elstree.^[50]

His aim in these projects seems to have been the same as it had been fourteen years earlier in Australia: to foster the possibilities of film as the pre-eminent modern medium of ‘relaxation, and rest, and instruction, and entertainment’.^[51] Now, in England, his project was not to exhibit, but to make quality films that would compete with the best that Hollywood could offer in technical polish, but that also reflected ‘the very Soul of England’.^[52] That Soul, he asserted, lay in English drama, not in its landscapes. His long-term plan was to rationalise the highly fragmented British film industry and develop the size of the available market in order to finance quality production.^[53] Again, this plan was already present in his Australian days: ‘the ambitious mind of Mr. Williams cannot see why, if we can produce good films in Australia, we should not send them all over the world.’ ^[54] For a third time, he put the strategy of the Combine into play, but British historians have not recognised his accumulated experience.

In part, this was because his experience was not enough to win the game. In 1927, he fell out with the other backers of British National Pictures, who took over the company and the studio, creating an even bigger company, British International Pictures.^[55] J. D. faded away, again. In 1928, he popped back up, in America, floating World Wide Pictures Corporation, an international distribution organisation which attempted to break into the parochialism of the American market, handling thirty or forty European pictures a year.^[56] In his own words, what he proposed was ‘a film conversation between nations instead of the present Hollywood monologue’.^[57] Almost the last reference I have found to J. D. places him in Canada in 1931, where he picked up a film abandoned by Paramount because it didn’t fit its formula. He distributed The Viking internationally, establishing it as one of the keystones of Canadian cinema.^[58]

Between 1926 and 1929, J. D. elaborated on his vision of a transnational film industry in a series of speeches and articles, proposing schemes, ‘either to establish British cinema as a force to be reckoned with on the world stage, or to develop a pan-European film industry’.^[59] He developed a scheme for multi-language film production.^[60] He proposed the formation of an Academy of Motion Pictures with a teaching staff, preferably attached to Oxford or Cambridge University.^[61] Behind all these schemes was not just the desire for profit, although that certainly mattered. He was committed to the making, distribution and exhibition of quality pictures rather than genre films because he still nurtured the ambition for films that he had propounded in Sydney in 1910. Sixteen years later, in England, J. D. wrote the preface to one of the first books to address film seriously and theoretically, Gerard Fort Buckle’s, The Mind and the Film: A Treatise on the Psychological Factors in Film.^[62] In it, he reflected on the power of the cinema:

Making quality pictures took huge amounts of money, which could only be provided by a world market. But, in turn, quality pictures would realise their full power and destiny within such world market.

In 1934 James Dixon Williams died in New York. After a number of years in Canada, seven years in Australia, and five years in England, his eleven paragraph obituary in Variety devoted a mere half paragraph to his activities in Australia, and another half paragraph to his time in England. In the later film histories of each of the four countries in which he played a significant part, his moment there is acknowledged. But what happened before or after, where he came from and where he went, and what experience and influence he carried from one country to the others, all is ignored or dealt with through anecdote and supposition.

My title for this chapter hails J. D. Williams as a nomad. I do not use this term to invoke Deleuze and Guattari’s appropriation of it as a certain mode of critical inquiry.^[64] Rather, I am impressed by John Brinkerhoff Jackson’s discussion of the verb ‘To dwell [which] like the verb to abide simply means to pause, to stay put for a length of time; it implies that we will eventually move on.’^[65] Film historians, like most others, have been seduced into thinking that staying still is the normal condition, rather than being a mere moment’s pause. They have defined their subjects in terms of an identity, especially a national identity, which is the quality of a stationary people in a bounded space, rather than understanding them as mobile and multi-dimensional, as nomadic. Just as the physiological phenomenon of persistence of vision makes possible the movement of moving pictures, so too does the social phenomenon of persistence of memory make possible the fiction of the unity of personality and group identity, and the stability of place. In memory, the people we have met do not change, but stay as they were and belong where they were.

It is these fictions that are at the heart of national historiographies, most particularly for my purpose, national film histories. These histories inevitably constitute their subjects through an appeal to national identity and pride. So, how is transnational history to engage with the tyranny of the national? How is it to constitute its subject so that it is coherent, has epistemological legitimacy, and will gain acceptance from publishers and the reading public?

One answer is to adopt the mode of biography. In biography, the fiction of the continuous self, if not the unitary self, provides the coherence of the subject. Biography allows the transnational historian to prise their subject out of the death grip of the national. There are plenty of deracinated officials and entrepreneurs and proselytisers roaming across the empires of the world. The chief problem, apart from the fiction of coherent identity, is whether one’s person is already or can be made interesting enough to attract a readership. Celebrity or notoriety helps. In the case of film history, this is provided by stardom. Directors are sometimes granted celebrity status (for example, Cecil B. deMille and Alfred Hitchcock), but never producers, distributors or exhibitors.

A second answer is a model of analysis based in economic history, dealing with the global movement of goods, services, and people. Immigration history also fits this model, as does the history of disease. It is the preferred approach of World History and is much employed in the history of globalisation. The subject here is already constituted, or can be shown empirically to be constituted, by its inter- or multinational connections. The connections between J. D. Williams’ organisational projects in each of his four nations have not been noticed before, but I doubt there will be much resistance to the idea. But nor will there be much interest.

The international dominance of the American film industry since the Great War has meant historical focus is chiefly on American expansion, a sort of imperial history, whether viewed from Hollywood as metropolis or from a specific colonised province. Often conceptualised as the threat of Americanisation to national culture, movement is followed one-way along a single track, from the centre to the provinces.^[66] Very rarely do historians look at the continuous and multi-directional flow of people, technology and ideas around the whole circuit, treating America as simply another province, or perhaps as several provinces. The ‘Hollywood monologue’, in Williams’ phrase, is film history orthodoxy. Nonetheless, there is here a recognisable field for transnational history, which has been developed by writers such as Kristin Thompson, Ruth Vasey, Richard Maltby and Andrew Higson.^[67]

In terms of readership, unfortunately, the place of economic and more particularly business history in the hierarchy of historical genres is pretty low. Its status is linked to that of its subjects – the middlemen, the profit-takers who are neither producers nor creators nor end-users, and who suffer the curious prejudice against trade. Historians have typically shared this prejudice. In addition, many present-day historians as well as their readers see globalisation as the enemy of the producers and workers of the national culture and they turn their backs on business history.

A third model for a transnational approach to film history derives from the dual nature of moving pictures, as both commodities and cultural products. Certainly, film culture and its audience can easily be shown to have been transnational from the beginning. But there is very limited enthusiasm for a transnational approach to culture, and I cannot see that changing soon. Cultural nationalism was dominant throughout the entire twentieth century and remains so in the twenty-first. It has been fuelled by reaction to global modernity and to American economic monopoly of popular culture. Cultural nationalists everywhere have championed local culture, particularly locally made pictures that represent an idealised, often pre-modern, essential, unitary, national character. As J. D. Williams wrote in 1926:

The history of such cultural nationalism and its imagery is complex and much studied. For my purposes here, I want only to stress its longevity in Australia, as elsewhere. It took on new life in the 1960s and 1970s, when the film renaissance changed the content of the imagery but not its significance. Like the term Little Englander, its equivalent, White Australian, no longer has currency, but similarly exclusive and protective concepts of national identity still prevail and are democratically spread throughout the broad reading public. That readership, and its close relation the movie-going audience, is acknowledged to be cosmopolitan and to have great curiosity and catholic taste. International books and films are eagerly consumed. But when the subject matter is Australia, different standards and values seem to come into play. There is something sacrosanct about certain aspects of culture, as with sport and foreign policy, that triggers the protective, exclusive, mutual embrace; that constitutes a settled ‘us’ against the nomadic hordes of ‘them’. And film history as a genre has been seduced, or recruited, to tell that story. Most film historians continue to hold a strong allegiance to cultural nationalism, and hold the transnational elements in their accounts to be alien intrusions. The central purpose of their histories is to write into existence an authentically and uniquely national film culture. Foreign influences on that history, like foreign films from the archive, must be repatriated.

So, regrettably, I must conclude that, although there are strong empirical and epistemological arguments for a transnational film history, there are even stronger political investments in keeping film history national – even nationalist. Both the economic and the cultural sub-genres share these investments, although the history of film as culture is most thoroughly in thrall. National film history is an account of moving pictures with the pause button stuck, and histories of film culture’s transnational nomads find little welcome. This inhospitable outlook will not change until the larger political discourse changes.