The future of history as film: apropos the publication of A Companion to Historical Film

Abstract

In the past three decades, due to the work of some distinguished historians, the discussion of film is being slowly integrated into Western historiography. However, while relatively few academic historians would deny today film's ability to instigate awareness to and enrich the understanding of historical experiences, many fewer are willing – and able – to incorporate film analysis in their own research and teaching. This impasse is particularly apparent in the case of “historical films,” in which past events and experiences are reconstructed, invented and framed in varying degrees of sophistication. The convincing arguments that established film as a “legitimate” narrator of historical reality often fell short of explicating how film should be integrated into academic history discourse. This article reads Rosenstone and Parvulescu's recent collection of essays A Companion to Historical Film as a demonstration of different approaches taken by contemporary historians in an attempt to meet this challenge. Within this context, it identifies four paradigms, each involves different premises about the nature of film's realism, its role as an agent of social change, and its dialog with “conventional” (national, institutional, etc.) narration of the past. The analysis of these paradigms – and the ways they have been implemented by the contributors to A Companion to Historical Film – shows their potential contribution to the study of historical realities, as well as their weaknesses and limitations. Insightfully presenting and discussing these approaches, I argue, Rosenstone and Parvulescu's volume is an important step forward in the ongoing endeavor to methodologically incorporate film analysis in the academic research of history.

Notes

^1. World War I, in particular, instigated heated discussions on the role of film in shaping the perception of historical experiences (Montgomery, 1992; Münzenberg, 1925; Kester, 2003).

^2. Robert Rosenstone (2006, 165–71) contains a helpful guide to the essential studies in the field, including the initial attempts to conceptualize the relations between film and history in the 1970s.

^3. Path-breaking essays have been published by the abovementioned scholars and others in special issues of American Historical Review 93 (1988); Perspectives 37:4 (1999) and, more recently, Rethinking History 11:4 (2007). See also Rosenstone (1995a, 1995b); Rollins (1998); Landy (2001).

^4. For instance, McCrisken (2005); Eldridge (2006); Toplin (1996); O'Brien (2012); Murray and Wickham (1992); Talmon and Peleg (2011).

^5. Winkler (2008, 2012); Kelly (1997); Cooke and Silberman (2010).

^6. Some of them thematic, such as ‘War and Revolution’, ‘Pre-Modern Times’ and ‘Cinema and the Nation’; others are generic (‘Biopic’); and still others indicate a more reflective approach (‘Filmmakers as Historians’). This organization of the articles is somewhat arbitrary, since many of the essays could have appeared under more than one heading (Marcia Landy's article on Italian films about the Roman Empire, for instance, is located under ‘Filmmakers as Historians’, and could also be classified under ‘Pre-Modern Times’, ‘Cinema and the Nation’ and even ‘Slavery and the Post-Colonial World’).

^7. Natalie Davis calls it ‘a thought experiment about the past’ or, more accurately, ‘experiment in thought, sight, and sound’ extended to ‘very large audiences’ (Davis 2011, 14).

^8. Thus, through a clever use of invented facts, filmmakers assume the historians' task, namely, to produce a noteworthy ‘historical consciousness’. See Keith Jenkins (1997).

^9. Cesarani and Longerich's (The Guardian, April 7, 2005) discussion of Hirschbiegel's Der Untergang is a good example for such approach.

^10. In justifying its attitude to torture, Kathryn Bigelow describes her film as a ‘first rough cut’ of history, thus dismissing historians' accusations of inadequate research (Blake, Los Angeles Times, January 23, 2013).

^11. See Stone, Kuznick, and Wilentz, New York Review of Books, March 21, 2013.

^12. Alison Landsberg set a seemingly similar criterion in her contribution to this volume, with a moral twist: ‘legitimate’ historical films ‘take seriously their obligation or responsibility to the past’ (p. 12). The problem, of course, is the fluid definition of ‘seriousness’ and its boundaries: Ip Man (Dir. Wilson Yip, 2008) is a fact-based film about a defiant Chinese man under the 1937 Japanese invasion; a biopic, a Chinese nationalist propaganda film, and a generic Kung-Fu movie, does it take its responsibility to the fact seriously?

^13. Historians can also learn from such films to be critical towards institutional and political authorities, which constitute hegemonic historical narratives. But this lesson is not new to mainstream historiography.

^14. In 1964, some of Israel's leading young authors, actors (and pop-singers) produced Hole in the Moon (Dir. Uri Zohar), a cinematic deconstruction of the history of Zionism, styled after the European New Wave cinema. The film is often cited as a turning point in the history of Israeli culture; it is nonetheless impossible to indicate any impact of this film on Israelis' willingness to embrace the institutionalized national narrative. There are arguably many more films that resembled the influence of Hole in the Moon than ones that resembled the far reaching impact of, say, Night and Fog (Dir. Alain Resnais, 1955).

^15. Studies in this paradigm should arguably also include a broader inquiry about the social role of cinema, the institutional environment and the actual experience of the movie-goers when viewing particular films. See, for instance, Fehrenbach (1995).

^16. Debra Ramsay's insightful essay on the effect of the DVD bonus feature on the ‘message’ of the viewed war film is an interesting exception to the book's focus. While she is interested in the feature film, the points she makes about the presence of the film as ‘objec[t] in domestic space’ (p. 53) are seemingly relevant to the reception of television productions as well.

^17. This is exactly the reasoning behind Catherine Portuges' interesting discussion of La Haine (Dir. Mathieu Kassovitz, 1995), which refers to its role as a historical film after the eruption of social unrest in 2005 (p. 491).