Assigning the year to which a film belongs affects how we think of it – but should we choose production or release date?
Time team ... For some critics, the date of The Maltese Falcon is 1946 not 1941. Photograph: John Springer Collection/Corbis
Let's try to push past the wordplay: how we date movies is serious business. Literary critics seem to rub along without having to write Twelfth Night (1602), but open any film book and you will find great thickets of brackets – Date Movie (2006) – mucking up otherwise perfectly respectable sentences. Moreover, the specificity these dates purport to offer is quite illusory.
Twasn't ever thus. Early film histories, such as Paul Rotha's The Film Till Now, first published in 1930, were largely unencumbered. Within a few decades, alas, parentheses had become de rigueur – but what to fill them with? Opinions varied. In later, much-expanded editions of Rotha's book, the most influential of its kind, films were dated "by their year of production, and not, as is misleading in some film books, by the date of their release which can vary widely from country to country. The year in which a film is made is its historical importance."
And yet the book itself, which by its fourth and final edition in 1967 contained material written over the course of nearly 40 years, the early parts almost untouched, provides a knotty test case. It isn't easy to define "production", and conception and completion will both have their bearing on a film's historical importance. Released in different countries between 2009 and 2010, the Renée Zellweger/Bradley Cooper chiller Case 39 may well have been "made" in 2006; to which year it truly belongs will have to be left to historians.
The release-daters won, and applied formulae such as the Oxford Companion to Film's "date of release in the country of origin". But merely by murmuring the phrase "release date" we have crossed a veritable Styx of loose terminology into a Hades of potential misunderstanding. To simplify and generalise, it used to mean the date on which a film was rolled out nationally, after a "pre-release" run in the big cities, so that – without getting into days and months – it is not uncommon to see The Birth of a Nation (1916) though it had its first public engagements the year before.
Apart from that, we are gazing into a fiery vortex of ambiguous language use just by entertaining the notion of "country of origin". Playing along for a second, Godard's Film Socialisme is a (2010) film because it opened in France (and Switzerland) in 2010; but Submarine, Archipelago and The King's Speech are also (2010), and they didn't arrive in their nominal birthplace until earlier this year. And what, casting off all restraint, is the country of origin of Where Eagle's Dare (1968 in the UK, 1969 in the US) or The African Queen (1951 in the US, 1952 in the UK)? You don't want to go there.
Perhaps because of the ubiquity of IMDb, we seem to have adopted the alternative to "release dates" offered by Denis Gifford's British Film Catalogue, in which films are listed "chronologically in order of their initial exhibition". As Gifford admitted, this allows any number of possibilities: festival galas, media previews, red-carpet premieres, illicit uploads, etc. He and many other sources give Hitchcock's The Lodger as (1926), based on its industry and press show; no punter saw it till 1927. By approaching "date of completion" in this way, the production-daters may have their time again.
None of this ought to matter too much, except that dating movies affects how we think of them. While appearing to put them in context, the date really abstracts them from the times and places in which they were shown, and makes them seem to have been available at all times, in all places. It helps us forget that films are (still) material objects, susceptible to the vagaries and ravages of history. Yet the specificity of a film's exhibition gives it part of its meaning.
War, politics and economics all have their roles. For French critics who defined film noir, the date of The Maltese Falcon was not 1941, but 1946. Decade-long channel crossings are not unknown. Jean Vigo's L'Atalante (1934) was not shown to the British public before 1946, Jean-Pierre Melville's Army of Shadows (1969) not till 1978. Much of the canon of "festival cinema" has never been "released" at all: the participants in the slow cinema debate are often talking about events as much as films.
So, dating movies. Do it – it's a handy aide-memoire. Or not. Just don't overthink it.
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