How we think about historical films
says a great deal about how we think about the past. Indeed, the differences
in how historians and filmmakers choose to interpret history, and their
disagreements about how to construct stories about the past, can serve
as a measure of wider social concerns about the uses of history. Historical
films do count as history, and that they raise questions about the social
role of history. I will explore two independent films, Men With Guns and
Danton, and two Hollywood films, The Godfather, Part II and Glory. In each
of these examples, I will look at criticism that the films have received
within the historical and scholarly community, and then suggest a different
way of looking at history in film and history in general.
Historian Robert A. Rosenstone compares the form of historical films to “standard written history, which, in its conventions of realism, incorporates the aesthetic values of the nineteenth-century novel.” (Rosenstone, 11-12) Rosenstone’s assertion that history and historical film may share many of the same problematic narrative traditions confronts historian’s accusations about film’s native inability to tell a “true” story about the past. Filmmakers use history to heighten the impact of their message. We are a culture obsessed with facts, and, as many historical blockbusters have proved, “true stories” can appeal to audiences in ways that fiction cannot. Historians have praised film for its potential to evoke emotion and for its visceral immediacy, but many feel that most historical films misrepresent past experience and perpetuate misunderstanding about key historical events. For example, when historians focus attention on periods of violent conflict, their primary motive is to explain what happened and why. Filmmakers are more interested in the narrative uses of violence and the ideological power of war. Many historians have compared the work of the director to that of the novelist: rather than constructing a past reality, filmmakers reinvent the past to suit a narrative agenda that will have resonance with contemporary viewers.
Rarely have historians and filmmakers entered into dialogue on the uses of history in film or on the narrative reconstruction of the past. Directors have expressed little interest in historian’s opinions on their work. Historians have most often taken the role of film critics, highlighting historical inaccuracies in historical films. A few, less frequently, such as Robert Rosenstone, have styled themselves as defenders of film as a medium for historical memory – or perhaps, more correctly, as apologists for historical film. The tendency has been, as Rosenstone points out, to treat historical films as if they were primary textual sources. In ignoring film’s role as a secondary historical source that can reach a large audience with its interpretation of the past, historians are in fact turning a blind eye to their own subjectivity as makers of history while highlighting the subjectivity of directors as makers of film. Without apologizing for the very real deficiencies of many historical films as a vehicle of academic history, it seems useful to look at film as another kind of history – as another way of relating a historical narrative.
A distinction should be made between the uses of historical material in the major Hollywood blockbuster and in the independently produced film. Gavin Smith, in the collection of John Sayles interviews authored by Smith and Sayles, asks:
Why begin discussing Sayles’s career in terms of budgets and grosses? Because Sayles’s singular position between the commercial mainstream and the specialty margins is the result of economic necessity. In the tradition of John Cassavetes, who financed his independent films in the sixties and seventies by acting in mainly minor Hollywood pictures, Sayles works as a journeyman writer for hire, ploughing his earnings back into his own personal projects. In this way he continues to ensure his creative freedom and commercial survival. (Sayles and Smith, ix)Coppola and Zwick are both mainstream commercial directors, while Wajda and Sayles represent the independent film industry. Their different positions within the world of cinema give these directors different takes on history, audience, and indeed on filmmaking as a profession. The historians whose comments are considered below also come from a range of professional backgrounds. In constructing a historiographical dialogue around these four historical films, I hope to touch on the ways in which both directors and historians see cinematographic narrative as a vehicle for recreating past experience.
Director Francis Ford Coppola and his
wildly successful series occupy a crucial place in the development of the
contemporary genre of historical film and in the film industry itself.
Paramount funded Godfather II as an economic enterprise, banking on the
phenomenal success of The Godfather, the largest grossing movie
of its day. Previous sequel films had been cheap, low-quality productions
usually produced by a different company. The Godfather raised the
stakes in the movie industry by providing the possibility for huge returns
and the opportunity for Wall Street to invest in film enterprise. Ultimately,
Coppola reshaped Hollywood’s concept of filmmaking. Godfather II
is a different kind of sequel in part because The Godfather had
pioneered the idea of the blockbuster in film industry, and in part because
Coppola had recently received an Oscar for the screenplay for Paton.
Coppola was able to convince Paramount to finance a sequel that would improve
on his earlier film, and allow him to use the film as a vehicle to critique
the American political establishment as well as to explore his own past
through the Corleone family’s immigrant experience.
Until recently, few historians had dealt seriously with Godfather II. The film attracted a great deal of negative attention from Italian-American groups, who resented the portrayal of Italian-America as an underworld of crime. Godfather II was also used as an example of insensitivity bordering on racism toward Italian-Americans in many of the histories written in the late 1960s and early 1970s by historians exploring their own ethnic identity and the concept of white ethnicity in America.
Stephanie Hull and Maurizio Viano co-authored an article titled “The Images of Blacks in the Work of Coppola, De Palma, and Scorsese” in Beyond the Margin: Readings in Italian Americana, published in 1998, in which Hull in particular brings attention to the portrayal of race and racism in Coppola’s films. (Hull and Viano) The rivalry between white ethnics and black immigrants to Northern cities was a part of the backlash to the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s and 1970s. Many white ethnics wanted to keep their neighborhoods ethnically pure, and resented the incursions of black families into predominantly white neighborhoods, claiming that they wanted to keep property values constant. White ethnics also saw blacks as competition in terms of employment prospects. African Americans are conspicuous by their absence in Godfather II, as historians have noted. Coppola thus avoids the possibility of racist tension in his film.
In her article in Film Quarterly in 1985, Naomi Greene suggests that Francis Ford Coppola and Michael Cimino are working in a new genre of “cinematic melodrama” that has much in common with nineteenth century opera. Greene concludes:
the Godfather films allowed us to criticize contemporary America and yet to wax elegiac about a lost world of family values … This ambivalence also meant that while the overt message of the Godfather films or Heaven’s Gate might be leftist, the myths upon which they draw (power and patriarchy in the one case, romantic heroism in the other) could have a reactionary tone. Built into the powerful formal fabric of the film, it is this tone which emerges victorious. The result is that spectacle encourages us to lament the past, to forget history, and to luxuriate in spectacle for its own sake. (Green, 37)Hull, Viano, and Greene undertake serious criticism of Godfather II, yet at the same time give Coppola’s films credit as carriers of history. Part of the reason may be that all of these scholars are more primarily interested in film and cultural studies than in history and historical analysis.
Coppola still viewed the story [of the Godfather] as being quintessentially American – no different, he insisted in interviews, from the stories of such families as the Kennedys or the Rothschilds, each founded by powerful, influential patricians, each experiencing both subtle and dramatic changes as one generation succeeded its predecessors. (Schumacher, 156)Part of Coppola’s mission in co-authoring, producing, and directing Godfather II was to address the issue of Italian-American heritage and white ethnicity in America. Coppola, Schumacher asserts later, “had ideas for the small portion of [Mario Puzo’s] novel – the flashback scenes in Little Italy – that he planned on using. Godfather II, he decided, could be developed into a personal film in which he could address his own ancestry.” (Schumacher, 162) The scenes in Little Italy became an obsession with Coppola, who not only worked to bring the scenes to life in the screenplay, but also to painstakingly recreate the early-twentieth century Italian immigrant experience on film. Historical accuracy was important for Coppola in these scenes. He even included elements from his family’s history. Vito Corleone’s period of quarantine on Ellis Island |click here to view scene| reflected the experience of one of Coppola’s aunts, and Senza Mama, the musical that Vito goes to see in Little Italy, was in fact a contemporary production authored by Coppola’s maternal grandfather, Francesco Pennino. The scene in which Senator Geary insults Michael Corleone and tries to intimidate him into handing over hundreds of thousands of dollars for a casino license exemplifies Coppola’s understanding of the continuing discrimination toward Italian-Americans. |click here to view scene| Godfather II fights against any idea of Italian “dependency,” a common slur against Italian-Americans, demonstrating that Vito Corleone has pulled himself up by his bootstraps in the crime industry just as he would have in any industry.
Godfather II opens with the young Vito Corleone’s escape from Sicily, and his quarantine period within sight of the Statue of Liberty, |click here to view scene| a scene that questions the “American dream” interpretation of immigrant history, and then the “melting pot” theory of immigrant assimilation into American culture. The use of language in the film points to one of Cuppola’s points about “changing times” and the decline of Michael’s family as well as his crime empire. Hardly a word of English is spoken in the flashbacks, although we see the scene in which Vito tells Michael to wave goodbye in English as they leave Sicily, his vengeance taken, twice. In Michael’s world, the “family” is no longer just Sicilian. Sicilian is spoken only when members of the Corleone crime family want to particularly emphasize a point, or to prove a bond of loyalty. Godfather II suggests that the rise of Italian-American crime families was directly connected to the continuation of isolated Italian and Sicilian communities in America, and thus the result of the failure of the American Dream.
Coppola’s interpretation of the Italian-American immigrant experience is not necessarily at odds with the interpretations of scholars of Italian-American immigrant history. Humbert S. Nelli, in the chapter “Early Ventures in Syndicate Crime” from his 1976 book The Business of Crime: Italians and Syndicate Crime in the United States, approaches an ethnically segregated underworld in a manner similar to Coppola’s. Nelli’s description of a “crumb,” a law-abiding man who works for below-subsistence wage pushing a broom, in particular resonates with Coppola’s assertion that it was impossible to rise above the segregated community of Little Italy or even to become successful within that community without resorting to illegal activity.
Some historians are beginning to reevaluate their criticism of The Godfather, Part II, which was seen in 1974 as being too difficult and novelistic. Godfather II is now generally acknowledged to be a better film than The Godfather, and is seen as a film that deals seriously with history in the context of a turbulent political period in American history. The focus on the power of ethnicity and of the family marks the 1970s as a moment of renewed interest in ethnic history. Coppola was responding, and was himself a part of, a social interest in “repressed” histories that had personal resonance for whites exploring their own ethnic identity. In the context of the Roe versus Wade Supreme Court decision of 1973, Watergate and televised hearings on governmental corruption, the Kefauver hearings of 1950 and 1951 on the Mafia, the Cuban revolution and the war in Vietnam, and particularly the context of the Civil Rights movement, Coppola negotiated a narrative that did indeed take history seriously, and that reflected a new American trend in accessing the past through ethnic or racial identity.
Danton infuriated many French
historians. Historian Robert Darnton argues that Wajda “trimmed the historical
record to cut his text.” (Darnton, 39) Darnton finds many anachronisms
in the film that undermine its historical accuracy, and many historians
objected to imposing contemporary Polish politics on the revolution. |click
here to view scene| François Furet called it a “long film ...
without society and without people.” (www.wajda.pl) Louis Mermaz, French
historian and socialist president of the Assemblé Nationale, said
that the film was “misleading” and made him “want to make a plea for the
revival of the teaching of history, something essential for a nation, for
a civilization.” (Darnton, 38) In an interview in La Croix in January
1983, Mermaz replied that as a historian, he was “impressed with the dramatic
intensity of the film,” but that Danton “takes too many liberties
with historical reality. The logic of the revolution is very weakly presented,
and there is no trace of the social forces which have driven those two
sons of the revolution, Danton and Robespierre.” Mermaz called the play
“very Shakespearean,” and said that he felt that Danton was really
more of a psychological study of two historical figures than an attempt
to recreate the revolution. (Wajda, www.wajda.pl) Mitterand himself disapproved
of the film when he attended a private screening in January 1983, proving
that French history is anything but past where the French are concerned.
(Carne, 104)
|Smashing Desmoulin's printing press|
Wajda’s interest in Solidarity and his inclusion of Stalinist Soviet-style political tactics in Revolutionary France was not a hidden propagandistic agenda, but rather an intentional directorial decision. Writing of Depardieu’s visit to Poland shortly before filming began, he explains that understanding the contemporary Polish struggle was crucial to his own artistic interpretation in the film:
I wanted Depardieu to see the face of the Revolution – inhumanly tired, with eyes wide open, suddenly falling asleep and never fully sleeping. Depardieu … stood for a long moment in the hall of the Mazowsze Region headquarters with its endlessly milling grounds, where the history of those days was being created … No words and no director could have made a better job of introducing Gérard to the subject of my new film Danton than the scene which he saw with his own eyes. (Wajda, www.wadja.pl)
Mermaz’s suggestion that Danton is like a Shakespearean play is an intriguing one, particularly as Wajda also makes a comparison to historical film and to Shakespeare’s wildly inaccurate yet intensely relevant and political history plays. The cause of historical accuracy, Wajda argues in his 1986 autobiography Double Vision: My Life in Film, can be a form of censorship imposed on the artist by authorities eager to propagandize their own version of the past. Using the example of Shakespeare’s Richard III, Wajda explains that authorities fear "that the artist will portray the world according to his own vision without taking into account historical necessity, the dilemmas of power, the “extremely complex” political circumstances. In order to avoid this kind of “problem,” the Socialist state finances every kind of artistic production – from literature to film.” (Wajda, 121) But, Wajda maintains, historical inaccuracies and anachronisms can help the contemporary viewer understand the director’s interpretation and allow the viewer to connect with another historical period. Wajda offers Danton as an example: “Danton … makes use of an apparently anachronistic modern music composed by Jean Prodromides, which succeeds in capturing the essence of the picture: the sense of things tearing apart.” (Wajda, 114)
|Learning the Declaration of the Rights
of Man|
Wajda writes that his films Kanal and Ashes and Diamonds offered “the truth of an eyewitness account,” a Polish version of Polish history available to audiences in the same way that American and British interpretations of history and contemporary politics were available to global audiences. Wajda continues “I sense that today in a number of countries there is a desire for an indigenous cinema that would depict and accurately portray the life-style of that country, with all its joys, conflicts, and concerns.” (Wajda, 3) His book is in part a cinematographic “how-to” manual for young filmmakers in less-represented countries. Anecdote and history, Wajda believes, make generalities specific, “the abstract concrete, and the idea incarnate as human drama.” (Wajda, 9)
As an independent director, Wadja feels that filmmakers can provide “the truth of different countries that too few are familiar with through their vision and their films.” When director Roman Polanski explained that he went to Hollywood to work among professionals, Wajda responded that he “would much prefer to rob a bank with a gang of rank amateurs than be a part of a group of professional gangsters.” (Wajda, 59) Wajda believes that films can use history to represent less influential perspectives and that films can fill a social need. A Hollywood scriptwriter at the 1957 Cannes Film Festival congratulated Wajda’s scriptwriter for Kanal, Jerzy Stawinski, on his excellent imagination. Kanal is, however, based on the true story of an individual who took part in the 1944 Warsaw uprising. (Wajda, 9) Wajda’s response to the Hollywood writer’s ignorance is to make more movies, just as a historian's response might be to pen an article to set the record straight. His opinion of film as a kind of “true” social history is similar to that of French historian Marc Ferro, who argues that film offers a challenge to traditional history to be more inclusive and accessible.
Wajda actually has a lot in common with the historians who were horrified by his movie. Wajda is interpreting the past in the same way that historians do, and his statements on film show that he shares many of the same concerns as social historians. “Good history,” by academic standards, is not an encyclopedic list. Historians have to trim the historical record, too, and they do so in a way that highlights their own argument or their own interest. Furet spent his career trying to overthrow the Marxist interpretation of the French Revolution. One could argue that his interpretation of the Terror as a key aspect of revolutionary ideology from the very first is close to Wajda’s construction of a revolution that destroys its founders and betrays the people it was supposed to help. His interpretation of French history through contemporary Polish history is provocative and resonates with those trying to come to terms with the legacy of Soviet occupation. It sparked debate and drew people into the issue, and what historian could hope to do more?
Glory is history twice removed:
history through the filter of novelistic and cinematographic interpretation.
Inspired by a work of historical fiction and drawing on the genre of war
films that came out of the Vietnam period, Glory, historians have
argued, is pure romance. Civil War historians Ira Berlin and Jim Cullen
both acknowledge that Glory is an important reformist film: a film
history that tries to write a group of people back into public memory.
However, many historians point out the inaccuracy of portraying the 54th
as a regionally and socially diverse regiment. By making the 54th into
what Ira Berlin calls “a Frank Capra-like view of black America: one Southern
rebel and one Northern intellectual, one naïve fieldhand and one wise
old head,” (Berlin, 145) Glory allows a modern viewer to understand
Civil War society in cross section, but sacrifices historical accuracy.
In actuality, the 54th was composed of politically aware, educated, free,
Northern African-Americans whose experience in the regiment allowed them
to become leaders in the black community after the Civil War. Because pay
riots and equal rights protests were actually carefully planned political
statements by African-American activists, historians point to the film’s
pay riot scene as another inaccuracy. |click
here to view scene| Trip’s (Denzel Washington) protest could be read
as an individual grudge, not part of a larger movement. Jim Cullen argues
that Glory glosses over sticky historical issues in order to show
the Civil War as a “just war.”
|Denzel Washington as Trip during the
pay riot|
Glory is full of historical inaccuracies.
Historian Robert Burgoyne states that Glory fails to mention that
the first African-American medal of honor recipient served in the 54th,
while James McPherson notes that many of the “principal characters in the
film are fictional,” and that Frederick Douglass’s two sons, who were members
of the real 54th, are not mentioned in the film. (Carnes, 130) Douglass
himself is portrayed as an elderly statesman when he was in fact a young
man. (Berlin, 142) As we saw in the written debate between Ira Berlin and
James McPherson on whether or not Lincoln freed the slaves, however, American
historians are also conflicted about key points of Civil War history. Zwick
did draw attention to a number of historical events that had been virtually
unknown to the public. Here we see an important difference between the
audience for academic history and the audience for mainstream Hollywood
movies: despite the numerous scholarly articles and books written on the
subject of African-American involvement in the Civil War, Glory
surprised most people who saw it, and told them something new about American
history.
|The monument in Boston to the 54th| |
|Trip comforts Thomas (Andre Braugher) before Ft. Wagner| |
The film also started a debate on African-American
and Civil War history. The issues for debate were various and sparked new
discussion of key issues in the Civil War. Is Glory a "buddy film,"
or a romance between a white officer and his black regiment, a boys-into-men
narrative that has racist implications? Does Glory focus too closely
on the experiences of white officer Colonel Robert Gould Shaw (played by
Matthew Broderick, who received top billing)? Does it matter that Glory
is based largely on non-historical sources, if it calls attention to a
larger historical truth? It could be said that the debate on Glory,
if not the film itself, brought the Civil War to life.
|Lifting the flag at the final assault on Ft. Wagner| |
|Trip and Col. Shaw in the mass grave| |
Glory, Burgoyne argues, does more
than call for historical revision. Quoting historian Peter Dimock, he suggests
that Glory is calling for a new kind of narrative history that “is
explicitly a collective narrative of social loss,” and that only a narrative
history that recognizes this will be able to speak to contemporary crises
of historical memory. In beginning to confront the wider implications of
the legacy of slavery and the Civil War in terms of our conception of history,
Glory
addresses the construction of race for whites as well as for blacks in
America. Zwick’s position as a major Hollywood director highlights another
connection between historians and filmmakers. Just as historians impose
a narrative form on the past, they also use drama to make the story interesting.
Just as there are many films about wars, violence, exceptional individuals
or famous love affairs, there are many historians who focus on wars, violence,
exceptional individuals and famous love affairs. Historians are not immune
from a "romantic" bias. And romance, as we have seen in
Glory, is
an effective way of making people take notice of the past.
Historians tend to appreciate Sayles’s
more subtle approach to historical film to the Hollywood-based entertainment
industry’s take on the past. In a conversation-style interview between
historian Eric Foner and John Sayles, Sayles touches on the idea of history
as a part of the construction of identity and the different roles of history
in text and film: "I've often had the experience of seeing a historical
movie and then reading some history -- and thinking that the history is
the better story, a more interesting story, and certainly a more complex
story. I feel that history, especially the stories we like to believe or
to know about ourselves, is part of the ammunition we take with us in the
everday battle of how we define ourselves and how we act toward other people.
History is something useful to us and that people feel we need." (Carnes,
11) Sayles also remarked that most directors have "fear and resistance"
toward hiring historians in part because historians have their own primary
concerns that conflict with the artistic vision of the director and the
coherence of the narrative. (Carnes 19)
|One of Dr. Fuentes's students: his "legacy"|
“Men With Guns presents the inadvertent, systemic complicity of progressive humanism with right-wing genocidal militarism as a horrific, bitter, historical irony.” (Sayles and Smith, xvi-xvii) Historian Steve J. Stern’s chapter on Toledo’s mita policies in early modern Peru from his book on the Spanish conquest in the late 16th and early 17th centuries provides a textual-historical counterpart to the market that drives life and death in Men With Guns. (Stern) This market has much in common with the system of forced labor and the exploitative economy of the Spanish conquest. The Salt, Sugar, Banana and Gum People encountered in Men With Guns are named for the product they have to offer the market. The world of the capital that Dr. Fuentes (actor Frederico Luppi) leaves to search for his “legacy” is in fact supported by these people – people who have been forced, by men with guns, to sacrifice their lives and their cultures to the production of a commodity.
|An Indian girl playing against the backdrop
of the city skyscrapers: two worlds|
Dr. Fuente’s son-in-law claims to know about “the Indians” because he comes from a ranch-owning family. The son-in-law’s character is important, as he reminds the viewer that the wealth of many city-dwellers is directly tied to the countryside. This message is reinforced by the scenes that take place in the market stalls of the capital and more prosperous towns, introducing us to a society in which only those who have something to sell have the chance to escape from the nightmarish countryside. When Dr. Fuentes first acquires Conejo as a traveling companion, he tells the boy that he should have given food to the woman and her malnourished daughter from Conjeo’s village, not to Conejo himself. Conejo, shrugging, responds that the woman didn’t have anything to sell, the implication being that the boy’s services as a guide are worthy of remuneration, whereas the obvious implication of failure in the market economy is starvation. Altruism does not enter into the equation. Conejo’s understanding of the market system is contrasted with the more romantic notions of Dr. Fuentes, who regardless of his white hair seems willfully innocent of reality.
|Leaving the city and the known, following
a map of nowhere|
Despite the fact that the producers working in the countryside are the foundation of life in the city, the city has nothing to give in return, and supports military atrocities in the countryside through ignorance. Indeed, it is implied in Dr. Fuente’s first meeting with a former student (Bravo) that the liberalism of the academic institutions in the city does not even stretch to include the impoverished inner city itself. The difference between Dr. Fuente’s bright white memories of his own school and the neglected torture chamber in which he and Conejo spend the night establishes the enormous distance between their ideas of “education.” Spanish dominance required coercion to extract the resources that would allow a wealthy European community to establish itself in Peru. Stern also explains that the network of indigenous administrators was crucial to the success of the colonial endeavor – the creation of a class of Indians who through their service to the colonial state gained status and avoided the mita. The army holds a similar status in Men with Guns, ensuring the continuance of the unstable market system supporting Fuente’s city through violence.
|The American tourists meet Dr. Fuentes|
The American tourists in Men With Guns confront Dr. Fuentes with a textbook version of the history of his own country, one that he refuses to believe is true. As the general remarks at the beginning of the film, "the common people love drama," and drama informs even the history of this unnamed country, which could be the viewer's own. Sayles nests interpretations and realities to create a multilayered narrative that questions American -- North, South and Central -- society on one level while it questions history itself on another.
Sayles creates characters and situations that are three-dimensional, complex, and play on the viewer's preconceptions. Sayles remarked that this “complexity of human behavior makes storytelling much more difficult. That’s one of the reasons why my secondary characters tend to be three-dimensional and come close to the foreground. If there’s just good guys, you can make genre pictures. The minute that the good guys are a little more complicated, your stuff starts to fall in between genres.” (Sayles and Smith, 9) By leaving time and place unspecified, Sayles forces his viewer to discard any facts that they may know about specific situations, confronting the viewer with historical processes stripped bare in an archetypal, allegorical setting.
|Fuentes as a city doctor|
Of course, the audience for a John Sayles film is arguably closer to the audience for academic history than it is to the audience for Hollywood blockbusters. Sayles himself, as a novelist and director, is closer to the historical establishment than most directors, despite his declared distaste for academics. When producers of Glory asked Sayles to attend a screening and to write a statement on the film, they were unhappy with his response, which was to state that "the film revealed a little-known feature of the American past ..." The producers contacted Sayles demanding another statement, as his was "of no use." What Glory's producers wanted was "a statement that says the film is accurate from a historian's point of view." Sayles replied: "I couldn't do that because what I mean by accurate is not exactly the same thing as what they mean by accurate. I thought the film was accurate in a general way, but there were many historical inaccuracies in it." (Carnes, 17)
|The Indian storyteller at Cerca del Cielo:
questioning history and narrative|
Men with Guns draws attention
to how economies can systematize social inequality. The two worlds of the
colonial society in turn mirror the two worlds of the capitalist system:
white versus Indian and rich versus poor. On this level, Men with Guns
is about far more than either American liberalism or South American society.
The men with guns themselves represent both the real and ever-present threat
of violence and the historical systems of inequality and oppression that
allow a few to dominate many. John Sayles brings historical analysis and
processes to life in his movie, which not only challenged the American
liberal tradition but also calls into question the role of history itself
in shaping people’s everyday perceptions and assumptions.
The definitions of history and historian’s
definitions of acceptable carriers of historical memory are changeable,
and as such conclusions, in historiography, are closer to comments for
continuing debate and discussion. I would like to conclude by presenting
two quotes by historians who have dealt with historiography and different
vehicles of historical transmission in their work. I will begin with Simon
Schama, who writes:
In its original Greek sense the word “histona” meant an inquiry ... But to have an inquiry, whether into the construction of a legend or the execution of a crime, is surely to require the telling of stories. And so the asking of questions and the relating of narratives need not, I think, be mutually exclusive forms of historical representation. And if in the end we must be satisfied with nothing more than broken lines of communication to the past ... that perhaps is well enough to be going on with.” (Schama, 325-326)Schama’s suggestion that all historical inquiry provides no more than “broken lines of communication to the past” ties in with the argument that film and history, and thus filmmakers and historians, may be closer than we thought. Narrative, as we have seen, can be an effective means of enabling a modern audience to understand a past that no longer seems immediately accessible to the present. But there is a significant difference between narrative in written history and narrative in film, which Rosenstone addresses when he asks:
Surely I am not the only one to wonder if those we teach or the population at large really know or care about history, the kind of history that we do. Or to wonder if our history – scholarly, scientific, measured – fulfills the need for that larger History, that web of connections to the past that holds a culture together, that tells us not only where we have been but also suggests where we are going. Or to worry of our history really relates us to our own cultural sources, tells us what we need to know about other traditions, and provides enough understanding of what it is to be human. (Rosenstone, Visions of the Past, 23)Rosenstone is wondering whether traditional history – as in history books written by historians – satisfies people’s need to have a more accessible, personal history. The success of historical film suggests that academic history doesn’t fill a social need for stories about the past, and that film may address history in a more individual way.
Historian Robert Burgoyne opens Film Nation: Hollywood Looks at U.S. History with the explanation that “the American past has become a contested domain in which narratives of people excluded from traditional accounts have begun to be articulated in a complex dialogue with the dominant tradition. One of the most visible manifestations of this changing narrative of nation … can be found in the resurgence of films that take the American past as their subject.” (Burgoyne, 1) Historical film highlights a growing emphasis on oral and visual culture. Films can provide a version of the past that bypasses academic history, and places emphasis on connecting with a modern audience. Drama and the creation of a believable world are their first priority, not historical accuracy. However, films like Godfather II, Danton, Glory and Men With Guns have to be considered as vehicles of history as well as objects of historical inquiry. The debates that historical films raise are as important as the work that academic historians do in researching the past.
Historians have recently looked at historical
fiction as well as historical film as another way to do history. Rosenstone
suggests that historical film has been gaining credence as a legitimate
field of study within academic history, particularly since major journals
such as the American Historical Review and the Journal of American
History now include sections on historical film. Both of these genres
are stepping on what historians consider “their” turf. But no genre can
claim to do more than provide a subjective window into the past. Historical
film reminds us that all history is at best an interpretation. Written
history and historical film both look to the past to convey an interpretation,
to make a point, and to tell a story that will be relevant to the present.
Berlin, Ira, "Glory Be," [review] Radical
History Review 53 (Spring 1992): 141-148.
Burgoyne, Robert. Film Nation: Hollywood Looks at U.S. History. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.
Carnes, Mark C., ed. Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1996.
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