History, Historians, and Visual Entertainment Media: Toward a Rapprochement

Author(s): Shelley Bookspan

Source: The Public Historian, Vol. 25, No. 3 (Summer 2003), pp. 9-13
Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the National Council on Public
History
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 History, Historians, and
Visual Entertainment Media:
Toward a Rapprochement
SHELLEY BOOKSPAN

Y EARS AGO, when the University of Nebraska Press sent out my book
manuscript for reviewers’ comments, the most pejorative remark I received
was: “I’m a bit puzzled about what to say about this manuscript. It’s short; it’s
easy reading; it flows. That’s the good side. The bad side, which isn’t really
bad, is that the manuscript does very little besides tell a story.”
I remember thinking that I’d just been praised with faint damnation. In
my defense, I wrote to the Press: “I am aware of a school of historians which
shuns narrative history as insubstantial, but I strongly believe that construct-
ing a readable, plausible narrative from a disparate array of data is the most
difficult interpretive task the historian has. If my narrative flows, if I have
interwoven local and national events in such a way as their telling seems
natural and not the product of intellectual strain, then I believe that I have
presented a successful interpretation of the facts and opinions at hand.”
Since that time, I have had the opportunity to work as a historian in many
settings, business, consulting, litigation, and academic. I have come to see
that my protest to the Press, while on to something important about the

At 54 years of age, SHELLEY BOOKSPAN still retains her youthful enthusiasm for a new
venture, so thus, along with three of her long-time associates, she has started a new produc-
tion company called LifeStory Productions, Inc. LifeStory’s mission is to develop an ongoing
series of films for broadcast about various recent history topics identified during the course
of oral history interviews.

The Public Historian, Vol. 25, No. 3, pp. 9–14 (Summer 2003). ISSN: 0272-3433
© 2003 by the Regents of the University of California and the
National Council on Public History. All rights reserved.
Send requests for permission to reprint to Rights and Permissions, University of
California Press, 2000 Center St., Ste. 303, Berkeley, CA 94704-1223.
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10 n
THE PUBLIC HISTORIAN

nature of narrative as interpretation, was nonetheless constrained in its

assumption that the output of historians’ work would at best be “readable,”
that words were the tools by which to convey our narratives, that the best
history would result from expert wordsmithing. Indeed, how and why we
make our choices in what we convey is central to what we do. But those
choices do not have to be ones solely of words. As a verbal person who did
not replace her television set for more than a decade after it broke down in
the early 1980s, it didn’t occur to me that an even more difficult interpretive
task for a historian than constructing a readable narrative is presenting a
viewable one through a cinematic medium. It didn’t occur to me, because it
simply wasn’t in my world view to consider these as media available to
historians for such interpretive purposes. I daresay blinders like mine fit a
lot of historians, public and otherwise.
Only recently, since completing my stint as editor of The Public Histo-
rian, have I paused to integrate much of what I’d learned about public
history during my tenure. In doing so, I think I’m beginning to see light
around the edges of those blinders. In my final Editor’s Corner, I summa-
rized what I’d learned into three axioms: public history is important; public
history is everywhere; public history is a lively intellectual endeavor. I
believe these statements have been proved and that they represent the basis
for a new level of confidence, for that is what we need in order to shatter our
reluctance to use unfamiliar cinematic media to communicate our stories.
In case we need evidence of what we instinctively know to be true, Thelen
and Rosenzweig in The Presence of the Past showed us that far more
members of the general public encounter historical themes through movies
or television programs about the past than they do through books or visits to
museums.1 Yet we historians have generally ceded the role of producing
movies and television programs to filmmakers or, in the case of documenta-
ries, to journalists, resulting often in works we do not respect, in exclusion
from our own fields of expertise, and, worse, in missed opportunities for us
to expand the tools of expression at our disposal and to reach the public.
For our profession to continue to grow, it seems imperative for us to be
able to use cinematic media as well and as often as we use books and
journals, which means changing much about the way we think about history
and our profession. In this special issue on “History, Historians, and Cin-
ematic Media,” we investigate what it would mean and what it would take for
historians to become integrally involved in the production of history in the
movies and in television broadcasts.
We start our exploration with four accounts from historians who have
participated in cinematic media productions. First, Simon Schama tells how
he and his collaborators defied predictions by achieving, in Britain, a large,

1. Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in
American Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 234.

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 HISTORY, HISTORIANS, VISUAL ENTERTAINMENT MEDIA n
11

prime-time market share for their fifteen-part documentary history series,

A History of Britain. He recounts many of the decisions along the way: the
choice to employ a chronological approach rather than a thematic one; the
use of a single narrative voice rather than a series of expert perspectives; the
telling of big stories, such as the War of the Roses, through metaphor, such
as through the eyes of a single family, rather than through a more compli-
cated and comprehensive narrative; the use of visual symbols rather than
words to represent changes and passages. The goal underlying these choices
was to attract an audience through coherence and an appeal to a universal
yearning for a connection with the past. Since the series’ success, Schama
notes, the demand for history programming in Britain has exploded.
Our other participants offer less sanguine stories, a result, it seems, of
being farther from ultimate control of production choices. Daniel Blake
Smith’s is a Hollywood story. For all of its technical innovations, for its being
so “now,” Hollywood may really be a closed and difficult place for newcom-
ers like historians. Smith, a faculty-based historian and an accomplished
writer of documentary films, received a grant for writing a script based on a
historical event, the 1960 Greensboro, North Carolina, lunch counter sit-in.
Smith, like Schama, made many decisions along the way when considering
how best to convey this moving civil rights story through cinema. Principal
among these were decisions about whose point-of-view to use and whether
and how to employ fictionalized scenes to add sense to the narrative without
creating a false past. Can such a thing be done? In spite of Smith’s efforts to
prepare a drama that would withstand the demands both of history and
television, in spite of a contract with a cable TV channel, it appears now that
the program may never be produced. Hollywood’s values seem to demand
that an established Hollywood writer re-write Smith’s script, no matter how
good it is. Surely we historians need our own production companies!
Next, Natalie Zemon Davis reflects on her experience in the production
of a feature film, The Return of Martin Guerre. Her collaboration in the film
was at once successful and disappointing: successful in that she had very
much wanted to see this story of sixteenth-century France dramatized and
available to the general public; disappointing in that she had initially hoped
to produce it herself. In serving instead as historical advisor, she found that
others had final say in the script, and they chose to distort the narrative in
ways that she felt prevented an honest depiction of village life and French
justice during those times. Even during the production, Davis decided she
would need to write a book about the Martin Guerre episode to stand not so
much as a corrective but as a counterpoint to the film. She suggests that this
is something historians working in film should expect to have to do, even
when they have greater say over the script, because the media are so
different.
Vivien Rose and Julie Corley next use Rose’s unsatisfactory experience as
a historian consulting on a television program about the women’s rights

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12 n
THE PUBLIC HISTORIAN

movement in America, produced by documentarian Ken Burns, to investi-

gate problems associated with filmmakers, rather than historians, shaping “a
historical vision.” Rather than making choices in order to tease out com-
plexities, hypocrisies, failures, and ambiguities, the very stuff we historians
believe makes the past both interesting and relevant, Rose and Corley
maintain that Burns uses history as a means of personal poetic expression.
They are concerned that production choices be made within the framework
of a historical consciousness. Visual metaphors, for example, should serve a
historical theme and not, or not merely, an individual’s artistic sensibility. In
the authors’ opinion, not only does the viewing public not know about the
content choices that Burns makes, but Burns is not really aware of them,
either. Is there a solution? Rose and Corley encourage historians to learn
and employ cinematic techniques themselves.
Our next four contributors start from the perspective that the audience
for historical films is well enough established and the study of film well
enough advanced that it is time for the disciplines of history and film to
cross-fertilize. Through examples that include The Return of Martin Guerre
and discussion that includes a look at Ken Burns, Robert Rosenstone lays
out the problems we historians, raised in the House of Accuracy, have in
embracing film as a valid mode for the presentation of historical findings.
He says that “there is our general notion that [historical] films . . . inevitably
oversimplify the complexities of the past. But I am tempted to argue the
reverse. Films seem simple because on a surface level they are so easy to
watch.” Here, as I read this provocative essay, I remember my manuscript
reviewer, criticizing me for writing a book that’s easy to read, and I say to
myself, “Aha! Rosenstone is right!” He concludes, much as Davis did
through her experience with Martin Guerre, that historical film is another
“realm…something adjacent to History,” and he calls on us to continue to
explore and define the realm’s boundaries.
Robert Brent Toplin next begins to do just that in his review of historical
feature films as a genre. He notes that there are “cinematic artists who are
becoming our most influential historians.” Lest professional historians be
left standing on the sidelines, confused about the rules of play, Toplin
encourages us to understand the language and needs of the cinematic arts
on their own terms, not on those of scholarship. After a century of growth,
the movie industry has developed traditions that suit the medium’s ability to
capture audiences, tell stories, sort through details, reveal complexities, and
satisfy curiosity. As Toplin states, “a cinematic historian’s work necessarily
involves creative license.” On the surface, creative license is exactly what
scholarly history discourages. We are at all costs supposed to be “truthful.”
Well, then, to be truthful, we have to admit that we actively choose what
goes into our works and what doesn’t. We use creative license, in other
words, in service to our expository goals. If we recognize this, perhaps we
can also see that we do not yet know the extent to which we can take creative
license while remaining true to history.
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 HISTORY, HISTORIANS, VISUAL ENTERTAINMENT MEDIA n
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Next, skip to our film/electronic media review section for a moment.

Here we present reviews of four history-based productions: two fiction-
alized dramatizations of historical events (The Rosa Parks Story and
Freedom Song), one documentary feature made for television (A Frag-
ile Freedom), and one reality TV series (Frontier House). Our review-
ers, Judy F. Richardson, Laura A. Miller, and David M. Wrobel, respec-
tively, each make a similar observation about their subjects: The success
of cinematic depiction of history does not so much depend on the type
of production, but rather on the producers’ sensitivity to historical
meaning, as represented by the creative choices they make. The field of
television and film documentaries is more like that of feature films than
may appear on the surface. The content of documentary films is subject
to the same kinds of directorial and editorial choices as the content of
feature fiction films is. Even reality TV programming, so-called because
it is unscripted, is subject to editing room control and many other
interventions. Content is omitted, just as it is included. Factors like
duration, cost, and viewpoint serve to determine the ultimate product
in each case. Given this situation, historians arguably belong in the
production of history-based feature films no less than they belong in
documentary history production.
So we learn in this issue that we have much to learn if we want to have
cinematic media at our disposal. Can we do it? In our final essay, Gerald
Herman proposes that we can. Herman takes us through the recent history
of improving relations between historians and filmmakers to conclude, as do
others of our contributors, that we have reached a stage beyond our initial
adversarial one where we can start building bridges. Among the ways to do
this, Herman suggests, is to develop a curriculum within departments of
history themselves through which to introduce students to cinematic media
as means of communicating the findings of their research. He offers us a
possible taxonomy of relevant coursework that would prepare new histori-
ans for effective work in cinematic productions.
Indeed, without such coursework, I believe, we risk the continuing loss of
influence over history. That in itself is a great professional loss. Even more,
however, we risk limiting our own means of expression to written and,
perhaps, spoken ones at a time when visual and aural ones are easily
available and in increasing use. Who knows what we’re apt to discover about
ourselves and our understanding of history if we accept the interpretive
power of cinematic media? We have always had stories to tell. Now, we can
also have stories to show.

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