From evidence to re-enactment: history, television and documentary film

Abstract

There has been a significant increase in the number of history programmes and documentary films about history shown on television since the 1990s. This is due to technological and institutional changes in international television but also to the wider commodification of history. The new technological means and approaches have also provided new opportunities for filmmakers in the field of history documentaries. In this article, we are interested in the role of history in television and documentary filmmaking in general, and in how developments in television and documentary filmmaking have affected the nature of historical documents on television. We are particularly interested in the relationship between history documentaries and academic historical research. What do these changes mean from the point of view of both academics and filmmakers? We approach the question from the standpoints of media practice and the concepts of truth and history culture. As a case study, we focus on the documentary film A Man from the Congo River (2010), directed by one of the writers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Jouko Aaltonen is a documentary film director and producer; he works as a researcher in the Department of Film, Television and Scenography at Aalto University. His doctoral dissertation (2006) dealt with the process of documentary filmmaking. Additionally, he has published a study on Lasse Naukkarinen, a veteran Finnish documentary filmmaker, three textbooks and several articles.

Jukka Kortti has the title of docent (Associate Professor) in Economic and Social History at the University of Helsinki and in Television Studies at Aalto University. He is a media historian who has published two extensive studies on the history of Finnish television. He has just finished a textbook/overview on the history of media. At the moment, he is working as an acting university lecturer (assistant professor) in contemporary history at the University of Helsinki.

Notes

1. According to the popular culture researchers John Fiske and John Hartley (1996, 116–126), the tendency of the educated class to devalue television stems from tensions between oral and written cultures. Television essentially represents oral culture of a lower value, instead of educational written culture.

2. The first period, from the 1950s to the 1980s, was the ‘era of scarcity’. This was the phase during which public service broadcasting was developed. Television tended to present definitive programming to a mass audience. The second phase, the ‘era of availability’, lasted until the new millennium, and it witnessed an explosion in the number of channels and programmes through cable satellite television and videos (Ellis 2000, 163–178).

3. For more on the History Channel and its programming (see e.g. Taves 2001, 261–281).

4. Television’s role in shaping our sense of history is not a phenomenon limited to recent years, however. History has been present in television programming since the beginning. Besides old feature films, historical documentaries were also made for television already in the early 1950s. The most famous historical documentaries on television in the decades before the ‘history boom’ were about war. There are several reasons for the success of war documentaries, but one important, if crucial, factor is that they served a therapeutic function as conduits of personal, family and community memories.

5. Tamm adapted the idea of a truth pact from French literary scholar Philippe Lejeune’s idea of an ‘autobiographical pact’. But unlike autobiography, which represents the subjective voice of just one person, historical research is guaranteed by other professional historians.

6. Documentary traditions in the 1960s and the 1970s emphasised a direct relationship to reality (see Ellis and McLane 2005, 186, 208–215).

7. The Finnish Civil War between the revolutionary Red Guards and White Civil Guards started on 27–28 January and ended on 15 May 1918. The war can be seen both as a part of the Russian Revolution and the First World War. The Whites finally won the bloody and bitter war, but the traumatic and controversial shadows of the war have haunted the Finnish people from generation to generation.

8. A famous television theory concept first posited by the cultural theoretician Raymond Williams (1975).