The Hollywood Research Library: Visual Knowledge in the Republic of Images

In the nineteenth century the circulation of printed images expanded through photography and the illustrated press, which offered a tremendous amount of new visual knowledge to the wide audience that consumed such media. This diffusion of visual media created a “Republic of Images” in which modern viewers encountered a broad array of pictures depicting the world of the past and present and built a common understanding of people and places that helped to build the modern audience. As American film production companies developed in the early-twentieth century, they assembled picture-based research libraries that collected, organized and distributed such illustrated materials to filmmakers who reproduced or alluded to such images in their movies. In so doing, cinema became a powerful vehicle of information dissemination via the image, by allowing a global audience to encounter and learn from pictures of events they might not have seen in person. As a result of the visual averages created in Hollywood films and the way they recirculated iconic images from the mass media, American cinema looked familiar, believable, and trustworthy to viewers. The screen worlds that studio research libraries helped filmmakers create, which were tied to earlier knowledge traditions, allowed Hollywood to shore up the sense of truthfulness in their cinematic representations, so much so that their own creations eventually stood as the source of visual knowledge itself.