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History on Film
Film on History
History: Concepts, Theories and Practice
Imperialism
Barbara Bush
Class Struggles
Dennis Dworkin
ROBERT A. ROSENSTONE
First published 2006 by Pearson Education Limited
Second edition published 2012
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or
by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission
in writing from the publishers.
Notices
Knowledge and best practice in this field are constantly changing. As new research and experience
broaden our understanding, changes in research methods, professional practices, or medical
treatment may become necessary.
Practitioners and researchers must always rely on their own experience and knowledge in
evaluating and using any information, methods, compounds, or experiments described herein. In
using such information or methods they should be mindful of their own safety and the safety of
others, including parties for whom they have a professional responsibility.
To the fullest extent of the law, neither the Publisher nor the authors, contributors, or editors,
assume any liability for any injury and/or damage to persons or property as a matter of products
liability, negligence or otherwise, or from any use or operation of any methods, products,
instructions, or ideas contained in the material herein.
H istory: Concepts, Theories and Practice is a series that offers a coherent and
detailed examination of the nature and effects of recent theoretical,
methodological and historiographical developments within key fields
of contemporary historical practice. Each volume is open to the idea of
history as a historicist cultural discourse constituted by historians as
much as it is reconstructed from the sources available about the past.
The series examines the discipline of history as it is conceived today
in an intellectual climate that has increasingly questioned the status of
historical knowledge.
As is well known, questioning of the status of history, indeed of its very
existence as an academic subject, has been seen in several recent scholarly
developments that have directly influenced our study of the past. These
include the emergence of new conceptualisations of ‘pastness’, the
emergence of fresh forms of social theorising, the rise of concerns with
narrative, representation and the linguistic turn, and a self-conscious
engagement with the issues of relativism, objectivity and truth. All these
are reflected in the appearance of new historical themes and frameworks
of historical activity.
In acknowledging that history is not necessarily nor automatically
authorised by one foundational epistemology or methodology and that
history cannot stand outside its own genre or form, all volumes in the
series reflect a multiplicity of metanarrative positions. Nevertheless, each
volume (regardless of its own perspective and position on the nature of
history) explains the most up-to-date interpretational and historiographic
developments that fall within its own historical field. However, this
review of the ‘latest interpretation and methodology’ does not diminish
x P re f a c e t o t h e s e r ie s
to the development of his theories. (As justification, I call upon the great
historian E. H. Carr, who in his famed Cambridge lecture series, published
under the title What Is History?, insisted that to understand any work of
history it was important to first study the historian who wrote it.) In the
two chapters which frame the book I sketched my own trajectory from
traditional academic, to renegade (label from one reviewer), to post-
modern historian (label from another) in an effort to chart the path that
took me from writing third-person narrative to experimental multi-voiced
narrative and then on to thinking about dramatic films as history. In this
new introduction, I will again occasionally invoke the personal as way of
elaborating on the larger cultural moment and the academic context in
which this book was created and in which it continues to be read. One
major aim here is to locate History on Film/Film on History within the
fields of both historical and film studies, and more specifically to set it
within the growing subfield of History and Film both as it was at the
time I was writing the book and as it has continued to develop in the
years since then.
Not until the last decade of the twentieth century did the history film
as an object of study reach the critical mass which caused it to explode
into a field. The few earlier books on the topic published in Europe or
the United States between the sixties and the eighties, or the odd essay
that turned up in an academic journal – all the works which those of
us in the field should now honour as Ur texts – seemed at their time
of publication like anomalous undertakings located on the far edges of
professional discourse. Perhaps the first sign the topic was edging into
the mainstream was the December 1988 forum devoted to history on
film in the American Historical Review, the meta journal of the field.
Placed at the front and taking up a considerable part of that issue, the
section included a leading essay by yours truly and four responses from
senior historians, including David Herlihy, a former president of the
American Historical Association, and the eminent theorist Hayden
White. In October of the following year, with a certain amount of
fanfare, the AHR inaugurated an annual section (I was its first editor)
devoted exclusively to history films. By the early nineties, many other
history journals were beginning to accept essays on and reviews of films,
as were publications in a variety of nearby fields – language studies,
anthropology, popular culture, media and film.
With many disciplines focusing on the history film, scholarship has from
the outset covered a wide variety of approaches and methodologies, and
has included both studies of individual films and groups of films on a
xiv In t ro d u c t i o n to th e s e c o n d ed itio n
single topic (e.g. World War II, the Holocaust, Revolution, the Ancient
World, the Medieval World, Latin America, Joan of Arc). To oversimplify
a diverse movement, and solely for the purpose of giving some sense of
the developing field, these may be placed on a broad spectrum: at one
end are those who care about how such films relate to written history; at
the other, those who don’t. Put another way, the field runs from scholars
who are interested in whether there can be what one of its founders, the
French historian Marc Ferro, called ‘a cinematic writing of the past’,
to those for whom the writing of the past is less of an issue than what
history films say about the development of a genre; or how they reflect
and comment upon the times in which they were produced; or embody
national or cultural myths, beliefs, and ideologies; or inflect a particular
field of study.
There is a temptation to distinguish the different approaches as rooted
in particular fields, but I will try to resist because in some cases cultural
historians are closer to scholars in film studies than to narrative historians.
The latter are likely to ask simple questions about the past: what happened,
and why, and where, and how, and to whom, and finally, what did it
mean? At the other end of the spectrum the history film is taken as a
more self-contained and less referential object. What happened and why
is less important than the meaning created by the story on the screen.
In this kind of analysis, the data of the past count for less; the themes
embodied in the characters, stories, and genres, as well as cinematography,
production design, editing, colour, music, and acting count for more. Essays
or even books can cover topics such as Petroleum History, or Slavery,
or Legacies of Colonialism, or Revolution, or the history of a particular
nation without ever making reference to the scholarship of historians.
Even when unpacking the meaning of a single film, there is a tendency
to explore what the work shows about the consciousness or ideologies of
a nation or a culture during the period in which the film was produced.
In my younger days this approach would have been called intellectual
history – the attempt to read cultural artifacts as indicators of some
larger historical mood, or what in German is called the Zeitgeist.
Such essays can be extremely illuminating about the cultural con-
dition of the time and place in which they are produced. I can think of
no better examples than those written by the superb film scholar Robert
Burgoyne, whose books Film Nation and The Hollywood Historical Film
are models of erudition, full of brilliant and deep readings of a variety of
films dealing with American history. But they are quite different from the
kind of readings a historian, and particularly this historian, would do on
I n tr o d u ction to the s e c ond e dition xv
the same works. His chapter on Saving Private Ryan is rich in its analysis
of the multiple meaning(s) of that work, yet Burgoyne is less concerned
about the ‘history’ which is conveyed in the film than about what the
work says about America’s changing relationship to its own past and
national identity. Burgoyne reads Saving Private Ryan as part of a larger
cultural project which he calls the ‘reillusioning of America’ after the
coming apart of the country, the disillusionment of the Vietnam era.
The film, he says, is ‘a call to corrective action, a call to the community
to return to its foundational principles’. Ultimately he sees Saving Private
Ryan as serving a dual function: ‘It both acknowledges the crisis brought
on by Vietnam and the dissolution of the covenant between a state and
its people, while offering audiences a “way home” to mythic America,
reaffirming American national identity after the crisis of Vietnam.’
As insightful and important as I find this essay to be, it does not ask
the questions of Saving Private Ryan that I would ask, questions more
likely to come from an historian – such as what the film tells us about
American participation in the invasion of Europe by the Allies in June
1944, about the experience of war, the attitudes and morale of soldiers
under fire, their histories and hopes, and how this telling not only allows
us to experience the chaos, confusion, and bloodiness of battle, but to
what extent this depiction intersects with and comments upon what we
call the discourse of history, the already existing body of data and debates
over the Normandy landings and the experiences of common soldiers.
As in Burgoyne’s superb writings on history films, a great number of
scholars from many disciplines write as if history films are not really
about the past, but about the present, implying or overtly asserting that
what such works do is to reconfigure the past in terms of current conflicts
and questions about war, social movements, individuals, ideologies.
Thus one might interpret Reds, which I discuss at length in Chapter 6, as
not a film about the American writer and leftist John Reed, his wife
Louise Bryant, and the radical bohemian culture of the pre-World War I
Greenwich Village in which they lived, but rather no more than a belated
picture of the radicalism of the sixties, flavoured by director Warren Beatty’s
stormy relationships with both Julie Christie, the actress who was ori-
ginally to play the role of Louise, and Diane Keaton, the one who finally
did. (The film came out in 1982 but planning for it began a decade
earlier.) The liberated behaviour of Louise might be seen as an example
of women talking charge of their own lives, as early seventies feminism
urged. The overt eroticism, the mixture of politics and playfulness in
Greenwich Village are no more than a portrait of the sixties counter-culture
xvi In t ro d u c t i o n to th e s e c o n d ed itio n
of sex, drugs, rock and roll, while Jack getting arrested more than once
parallels the way young people were busted at sit-ins and anti-war
demonstrations.
Such a reading is not my own, but I can certainly see the truths it con-
tains – partial truths. For what that approach to the history film would
seem to imply is that there is no inflection of the present on written his-
tory, but in fact, as every historian knows, or should know, all historical
writing, even the most scholarly is, as historian Natalie Davis has written,
always ‘Janus faced’, inevitably looking towards both past and present.
History after all is written or filmed in the present, and the mark of the
contemporary is on every work we produce, in the questions we ask of
the past and the answers we give. As Peter Novick says in his magisterial
volume That Noble Dream: ‘all historical writing . . . is the product of
a particular moment in time, which shapes historians’ decisions about
what needs to be explained . . .’ Or as the Finnish historian Hannu Salmi
puts it: ‘The present day cannot be denied or eliminated: while describ-
ing the past the author is simultaneously writing about his own world,
consciously or unconsciously, implicitly or explicitly.’ I would submit
that the reasons this may seem more evident in films than in books
is that from a young age we are taught to read works of history solely
for their content, not for the context of their production. In fact we
should read all works of history, whatever the medium, for what they say
about both past and present.
For me, this lesson came when I was a teaching assistant more than
four decades ago. The professor had assigned the then most popular
history survey textbook in the United States, The Growth of the American
Republic by Samuel Eliot Morison and Henry Steele Commager, a work
originally published in 1930 which had been revised in several sub-
sequent editions. During my first year of teaching, 1965, the fourth
edition of the book informed us that Southern slavery was a ‘sin’, but
one that might well be overlooked because slaves suffered less than any
other class in the South from its peculiar institution. ‘Sambo’ (yes, the word
was used), was happily full of rhythm and humour, very well ‘attached’
to his new country, and better off than a lot of Northern and British
workers. Besides, ‘there was much to be said for slavery as a transition
from a primitive to a more mature culture’, for the ‘the Negro learned his
master’s language, received his religion and accepted his moral standards’.
The next year saw a new edition of the textbook. Gone from this one
was Sambo, his humour, rhythm, attachment to the United States, and
his apparent joy in transitioning from African to American culture.
I n tr o d u ction to the s e c ond e dition xvii
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