Historians and Historical Film

Filmed histories - movies, TV dramas, documentaries - have become for many the prime source of knowledge about the past. As such, historians can’t afford to dismiss them. Even if film can’t offer the critical apparatus and analysis insisted on in the scholarly text, even if it subordinates the messiness of the past to the demands of the linear plot and story-telling conventions, even when finer details of historical accuracy are less than rigorously insisted on, film can stimulate the imagination and foster curiosity about the lives of past generations. It can kindle an interest that later leads to the choice of history as a subject of academic study (or, less dramatically, of a specific topic for research). And even if we aren’t all postmodernists yet, we have become as historians increasingly aware of the importance of understanding practices of representation. We cannot simply believe that we are straightforward recorders of fact; historians, too, select, interpret and marshal their materials into narratives designed to persuade, according to certain established conventions.

Sometimes film conventions do simply submerge the history, most of all in the big-budget ‘Hollywood’ movie: The Patriot (surely yet another Mel Gibson revenge movie, with its own history going all the way back to Mad Max?) recently had historians raging (This summer (2001), it’s Pearl Harbour). English/British history certainly seems to be a particular victim of this tendency, in various ways. Braveheart: brave Celts versus nasty English (and Mad Max gets his revenge again…).[1] Elizabeth: a sentimentalized portrayal of a particularly canny political survivor as a romantic innocent.[2] The Madness of King George is one of the more successful from the historians’ point of view, but even so, in its translation from stage play to Hollywood movie, has become as much ‘Heritage’ as history.[3] This doesn’t mean, I think, that they are of no use in teaching history. Besides, they are not the only history films out there. The first challenge, perhaps, is to consider the difference between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ history on film, which may involve some reference to written history, but should not simply be a matter of measuring visual history against written versions.

Film history and written history, undoubtedly, have different strengths; they are experienced in very different ways. ‘The most serious problems the historian has with the past on the screen arise out of the nature and demands of the visual medium itself.’[4] Enthusiasts and critics of historical films alike, tellingly, focus on the same aspects of the medium: the way in which it creates the illusion of an immediate experience of the past. It’s deeply personal and moreover personalised, reflecting the strengths of film in the representation of individuals’ lives. That this illusion is so powerful, so overwhelming to the senses, is at once strength and weakness - depending to a considerable extent on the viewer’s idea of what ‘history’ is, what it’s for.[5]

There are, of course, ways in which a filmmaker can foster audience awareness that this is story-telling, an illusion, without sacrificing audience appeal. For example, Citizen Kane’s mesmerising, dramatic photography draws attention to the medium itself; the ambiguities and unresolved questions allow viewers to draw from it their own meanings; not least, its flashback structure ensures that we cannot forget for long that it is made up of stories told by people with differing perspectives. Citizen Kane encourages multiple, endlessly thought-provoking readings and is a wonderful feast of film entertainment, proving conclusively that these qualities don’t have to be in conflict. Indeed, I feel that commercial filmmakers frequently underestimate their audiences, and in shackling themselves to conventions, frustratingly miss opportunities to tell much richer stories; but, that, after all, is not confined simply to historical film.

The ‘languages’ of ‘historiography’ and ‘historiophoty’ (to use Hayden White’s term) [6] may differ, but the principles behind learning to ‘read’ them are in many ways the same. From the historian and teacher’s point of view, it is crucial to stimulate critical viewing practices: most of all, perhaps, with those films that make the most explicit claims to offer the truth. Such claims, whether made in documentaries or feature films, certainly need to be seen ‘as an invitation for further exploration’; [7] but the same principles should apply to all films. Teaching history, in my view, is only in part learning about ‘the past’; it should also equip students with the mental resources they need to live in the present, teaching them a wider understanding of the familiar and the unfamiliar around us, to watch and listen and question the taken-for-granted. And a vital part of that is the practice of learning to examine and question accounts of the past, whatever form they take.

Critics complain of the poor information load of historical film. Well, that rather depends on what is meant by ‘information’. Are visual and written information even comparable? Robert Rosenstone has consistently argued against this point of view: ‘The historical film must be seen not in terms of how it compares to written history but as a way of recounting the past with its own rules of representation.’[8] David Herlihy, a more sceptical historian, comments: ‘Film, a visual medium, can effectively present the visual aspects of history but not the whole of history.’[9] That is, in essence, simply a more negative version of what Rosenstone is saying. The question that Herlihy does not ask, and Rosenstone does, is: what is missing from written history? There simply is no medium that can present ‘the whole of history’; judged by that standard, all accounts of the past fail.

The sceptics point to the lack of critical apparatus in film and to the related accusation that it demands ’suspension of disbelief’. What they apparently mean, basically, is that a film has no footnotes. Apart from the risk of fetishising a convention that is acknowledged to be imperfect, it is once again attempting to judge historical film by inappropriate standards. It’s also a rather inadequate analysis of how we watch films: does ’suspension of disbelief’ really entail the abandonment of all complex thought? Historians may not like the answers that audiences provide for themselves, but they should certainly beware of thinking of them as passively absorbing what the filmmaker puts on the screen. Insofar as a film does require suspension of disbelief, it is a temporary state. It lasts only as long as the film; the responses that follow - as anyone who has been to the cinema with friends and then spent the rest of the night arguing about the film could testify - can last much longer and may be hotly contested (and if this were not the case, film studies would not exist). Filmed history does not provide a neat set of tags for explanation and reference; rather, what it can do is to incite the viewer to explore further by leaving loose ends, question-marks, pointing beyond the boundaries of the film itself.[10] Why did that happen (did it really happen)? What happened next (what came before)? (One of my personal dislikes is those thundering black-and-white end-titles that attempt to dictate the outcomes of the events portrayed in the film.) And, most of all, how do we know? Too few films attempt to do these things: but it is simply not true that they are incapable of it.

Undoubtedly, the student of history could never rely on films alone; the library is not about to be superseded by the video or cinema in historical study. Only in twentieth-century history can film ever be a primary source for the past. The more important question is: what can we potentially learn from film, as a secondary source, that books cannot tell us? Shouldn’t we be making the most of every resource available to us for learning and teaching? Teaching with historical film and written history in combination is a highly stimulating way of teaching how any historical account is selective: how to recognise the tricks of the narrative trade, how to become more critical of all sources of information. And since we inhabit a world bombarded by visual images, many of which are intended to persuade us to do something or think in a certain way, the critical faculties being fostered are particularly important ones. (Which is why we should not confine ourselves only to ‘good’ historical films.) It doesn’t matter whether the students will become professional historians or not (and, after all, few of them will): they’re learning skills that will stand them in good stead throughout their lives. They might even enjoy it, if that isn’t too heretical a notion.

There are historical films that truly bring history to life, even as they speak to present understandings. As Natalie Davis argues, ‘historical authenticity comes first and foremost from the film’s credible connection with “the spirit of a period” - in its large forms and sometimes in its small details’.[11] If historians can learn what - beyond getting the visual detail, clothing, props, etc - goes into a good historical film, how to create that connection, they will be in a better position to influence future practice on individual films and amongst film-makers, gaining access to far larger and more diverse audiences than they could ever do through textbooks. They can develop new skills in decoding visual images’ propagandic and persuasive dimensions. And they can gain novel, dynamic perspectives onto their subject: historical people as living, moving figures in their social settings and physical environments.

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Notes

[1] Arthur Lindley, ‘The ahistoricism of medieval film’, Screening the Past, 3 (1998) at http://www.latrobe.edu.au/www/screeningthepast/firstrelease/fir598/ALfr3a.htm, makes some perceptive comments about Braveheart as ‘nationalist fairy-tale’. It’s hardly difficult to find denunciations of The Patriot, but try Jill Lepore, ‘Talk of the past: playing dress-up’, Common-place: the Interactive Journal of Early American Life 1 (September 2000), at http://www.common-place.org/vol-01/no-01/talk/ for an interesting angle

[2] Carole Levin, ‘Elizabeth: romantic film heroine or sixteenth-century queen?’ Perspectives Online, April 1999, at http://www.historians.org/perspectives/issues/1999/9904/9904FIL5.CFM (I know that this film is partly British-made (involving Channel 4), British cast, etc, etc: it’s still essentially ‘Hollywood history’).

[3] See Jonathan Coe, ‘Power mad’, Sight and Sound, April 1995, 30-33

[4] Robert A Rosenstone, ‘History in images/history in words: reflections on the possibility of really putting history onto film’, American Historical Review 93 (1988), 1173

[5] See Rosenstone, ‘History in images’, 1176-77<

[6] Hayden White, ‘Historiography and historiophoty’, American Historical Review 93 (1988), 1193-99

[7] Mark C Carnes, ‘Introduction’ to Ted Mico, John Miller-Monzon and David Rubel (eds), Past imperfect: history according to the movies (London, 1996), 10

[8] Robert A Rosenstone, ‘Introduction’ to idem (ed), Revisioning history: film and the construction of a new past (Princeton, 1995), 3

[9] David Herlihy, ‘Am I a camera?’, 1191

[10] See Natalie Z Davis, ‘”Any resemblance to persons living or dead”: film and the challenge of authenticity’, The Yale Review 76 (1986-87), 476-82, on how films have done (and could do) this

[11] Davis, ‘”Any resemblance to persons living or dead”‘, 471