This issue of Screening the Past is a particularly rich one, requiring two editorials.

Editorial (1)

In “Reruns”, we reproduce the English language sections of a booklet issued by the Pusan Film Festival in October 1997. This exciting festival is comparatively new (1997 was only its second year), but it is the major festival for Korea and is making its mark within Asia more generally. From the beginning, the festival has included retrospectives – in 1997 of early Asian cinema. That very early period, when cultures were adapting to the new medium of film and film was adapting to the cultures in which it found itself, is of special interest to this journal. We hope in 2000 to have an issue devoted to these matters: we will eventually put up a “Call for papers”, but in the meantime would be interested to receive proposals for contributions.

The short essays reproduced from the Pusan booklet discuss the first years of film production in Hong Kong (Stanley Kwan), India (P.K.Nair), Japan (Sato Tadao) and Korea (Lee Young-Il). The introductory section of the booklet provides the information about these writers which we would normally include as a link to our “Contributors” section. It was the concern of the festival and of the individual contributors to highlight the importance of the collection and preservation of this very early film material, much of which has been lost. This has been a continuing concern of Screening the Past. We published in issue 5 Professor Cho Hee-Moon’s article about the recovery of rare early films made in Korean, and in the present issue we republish (in “Short subjects”) a piece about the co-operation of film archives in Australia and Singapore in restoring an early musical made in Singapore – Giliw Ko.

In our “Classics and revivals” section this issue, we publish translations of two short pieces by Jean Deprun, introduced by Harriet Margolis. These pieces are representative of this journal’s interest in the history of film culture and film theory: they are a little-known part of that ferment of ideas about the cinema in post-World War 2 France which has had such an influence on film study worldwide.

Issue 7 of Screening the Past , due for upload in July 1999, will be a special issue entitled “After Grierson”. Several of the papers to be published there were first delivered at the Stirling Documentary Conference, which Keyan Tomaselli reports on in the “Short subjects” section.

The rest of this issue comprises a response to the “film and history” forum published in the American Historical Review in 1988. It has been guest-edited by Arthur Lindley and Anthony Guneratne, who provide the second editorial, below.

Ina Bertrand
March 1999

Editorial (2)

Out of the Past

This issue of Screening the Past begins with a reprint of two watershed articles that first appeared in a 1988 special issue of the American Historical review, an issue which departed from the long-held belief that films which treated historical themes were beneath the notice of professional historians. In so doing it introduced the serious study of film as historical medium to anglophone scholarship. Robert Rosenstone, already a well-known historical consultant for films and the architect of that issue, brought a theoretical perspective to his own work on films in different genres, and considered in some depth the question of representational adequacy, an issue that has remained central to much subsequent discourse on the subject. Another of Rosenstone’s concerns, the kinds of challenge that filmed history pose to historiography, is the central theme of Hayden White’s contribution to the AHR forum. Having identified this as perhaps the greater challenge, White is proved right by none other than Rosenstone himself, still firmly entrenched in the role of midwife and matchmaker (without him we could never have brought all the present contributors together). As Rosenstone seems to imply, if the first AHR issue marked a coming of age, then the present forum, which takes place in an entirely different medium, marks the transition from youth to maturity.

Part of that maturation comes with a recognition that filmed fictions also possess a certain historical validity, and that the history of cinema cannot be preserved as a separate endeavor from the medium’s production of “history.” In a forthcoming book, Cinehistory, bits of which have appeared as articles since 1990, Anthony Guneratne has argued that the history of the medium and the technologies of representation through which cinema narrates history are deeply interconnected, and one of the proofs of such a contention can be seen in Roberta Pearson’s innovative contribution to the present forum. It is, in a sense, the product of what can be termed “film historicism.”

To gain a clearer understanding of this film historicism it would perhaps serve us best to recount very briefly the various stages of “historical consciousness” within our discipline. The first stage can, we think, be conveniently thought of as the beginnings of film history proper, the period in which Robert Grau, Terry Ramsaye, Jewis Jacobs and Benjamin Hampton used journalistic and aesthetic approaches to describe films, the events and activities they recorded, and some of the ways in which they came into being. Although in the first half of this century other scholars like Louis Delluc, Jean Epstein, Hugo Munsterberg, Rudolf Arnheim, Béla Balasz, Siegfried Kracauer, Dziga Vertov, Sergei Eisenstein and André Bazin theorized film as a mode of representation, it was not until after the Second World War that the history of the medium (both as technology and as mode of representation) began to be thought of as a legitimate area of academic inquiry. What emerged with Georges Sadoul’s monumental Histoire generale du cinéma is a second and rapidly triumphant paradigm of film historiography in which a nascent methodological consciousness – at least in its consideration of different lines of historical evidence – can be discerned. The culmination of this trend is probably the revisionist historiography of the late seventies and eighties. Taking place at the same time that Annales School-inspired historians like Pierre Sorlin and Marc Ferro wrote the first accounts of film as a medium of historical representation, revisionist film historiography rejected the over-reliance of historians like Sadoul on secondary sources, asserting the validity and coherence of primary sources like prints of the films, newspaper reports, legal documents and trade papers.

It is only since the AHR forum, and especially in the 1990s, as cinema celebrated its various centenaries, that a full-fledged film historicism has emerged. The parallel we draw with New Historicism by this appellation is by no means coincidental because there are unmistakable points of contiguity between them, both being the result of the dissolution of disciplinary boundaries and the proliferation of new approaches to academic inquiry that have occurred during this period of time. The most striking contiguities are, perhaps, the following:

1. Just as Lyotard and de Certeau responded to the challenges of post-structuralism and post-modernism by questioning the monologizing grand récit of Western history, New Historicism and the new historians of cinema accept that plural and competing texts of history can and do co-exist.
2. Louis Montrose has characterized the post-structuralist (and specifically New Historicist) orientation to history as a reciprocal concern with the historicity of texts and the textuality of history. In cinema studies this translates to the study of the “cultural specificity” and “social embedment” both of films and the discourses about film, and equally to the cinema’s mechanisms for textualizing history particularly in light of the capacities of film and television as media to represent events.
3. Carlo Ginzburg and the microhistorians on the one hand, and Michel Foucault and discourse theorists on the other, have sought to explore discursive margins or to resurrect discursive terrains that have been effaced because of the asymmetry of power relations in societies. This has, in part, led to a reassessment of the validity of diverse sources of historical evidence, and a greater democratization of the terrain of textual analysis, so that New Historicists show a marked fondness for gossip and anecdotes, while microhistorians have turned to related disciplines like anthropology and folklore to extract a greater range of meanings from “dubious” or prejudiced textual sources. The history of cinema, and by extension conceptualizations of the way the cinema represents history, are still largely a celebration of top-end production – directors, producers, actors and their textual traces – and we have only just begun to reconstruct the other histories of cinema.
4. Rather than subscribing to grand theoretical models New Historicists have engaged in a theoretical bricolage of complementary elements of Bakhtin, Foucault, Geertz and Ginzburg, and they have synthesized them into a form of cultural studies or cultural poetics. Similarly, such convergences as Pasolini’s idea of semiotic “contamination” and Derrida’s “dissemination,” of Derrida’s formulation of “intertextuality” and Bakhtin’s “heteroglossia,” of Bakhtin’s “multi-accentuality” of signs and Eco’s sign-codes, can and are having an impact on how we examine the ways in which films represent and produce realities for a multiplicity of audiences with divergent “reading” habits.

The present forum is, in a sense, a mini-summation of all that has transpired in the course of the unfolding of this third stage of historical consciousness. For those who in an age of incessant and irreversible change are still engaged in millennial musings about the myriad issues raised by a century of moving pictures, the theoretical concerns seem only to augment with the passage of time. In surveying the concerns of recent scholarship, the areas of convergence (even when the convergence implies differences of opinion) are striking. For instance, both Leger Grindon and Vivian Sobchack have discussed historical films in terms of genre theory, and Sobchack (as in the present instance) has attempted to bring phenomenological theories of spectatorship to bear on cinema’s mechanisms of historical signification. So powerful is the grip of the cinematic image on the historical imagination that others have been alarmed (or in the case of such scholars as Jean Baudrillard, disarmed) by its powers of simulation. For many, the “insistent fringes” of which Sobchack speaks, should always raise eyebrows. More than half a century after the Holocaust, our most vivid recollections of the darkest moments of our species can only be glimpsed through our most highly evolved sense; we remember the Holocaust, Hiroshima, the killing fields of Cambodia and Rwanda, apartheid, through images. As long as such memories – however attenuated, however displaced – remain, the question of historical responsibility will always attach itself to the cinema.

We should note, however, that one of the progenitors of our discipline, Pierre Sorlin, has thrown down the gauntlet: to ponder the past on celluloid might have involved missing the proverbial bus, since television has long been the dominant form of mass communication. Film has taken on the aura of the classical; its very nature as a medium dignifies the history that it shows. Moreover, other scholars like Marcia Landy and, to an even greater extent Thomas Elsaesser, seize the present occasion to illustrate that questions of representational adequacy are just as central to television (and other media) as they are to cinema, even if the questions are not all the same. Moreover, as is appropriate to the age of film historicism, Rosenstone and Wyke also ponder the effect of such new media on the labors of the historian, Rosenstone’s own contribution being a dramatic example of a fragmentary, discordant, early Eisensteinian (and yet even post-modern) montage:history as fragment, shard, TV commercial, sound-bite.

If cinehistory has given way to telehistory, it might be worth pondering how telehistory is in the process of giving way to cyberhistory. Ten years after the AHR forum we are able to communicate with each other at a speed that only a Marshall McLuhan could have evisaged. The contributions to the present issue have come in the form of scanned articles, e-mail, e-mail attachments and faxes, and once written the articles have been assembled in a matter of weeks and edited on three different continents simultaneously. With advent of the age of cyberspace, not only has the entire process of mass communication changed, but the very conventions of representing reality and reading reality in all media have changed under the pressures and pleasures of computerization. If the first Titanic was sunk mostly by an iceberg, then we must remember that the Titanic that is now in everyone’s mind’s eye was sunk largely by computer graphics.

Thus, if the evolution of historical consciousness in the age of electronic media provides the initial context for our discussion, current anxieties about the falsification of personal and public history – a topic addressed in many of the essays, provides another, equally significant one. In one of those essays, Robert Burgoyne points us to Alison Landsberg’s concept of film as a source of “prosthetic memory”: “memories that circulate publicly, that are not organically based, but that are experienced with one’s own body – by means of a wide range of cultural technologies”. People not yet born in 1963, for example, may have a vivid sense of what the Kennedy assassination – or rather, watching and hearing of the assassination – might have been like. Vivian Sobchack and Maria Wyke, similarly, address the “memories” most of us have acquired of ancient Rome or 18th-century pirates. Most of us, however, will have experienced prosthetic memory before Burgoyne’s account or Landsberg’s thesis have made us aware of it: the “past” that is programmed into the replicants in Blade Runner (USA 1982), complete with documentation and photographs, is as prosthetic as memory gets. In one of that film’s most memorable scenes, Dekkard, a kind of surrogate film critic, pores over the family pictures that verify the history of the replicant Rachel (Sean Young), a kind of surrogate innocent audience, until he realizes what has been done to her. At the end of the “Director’s Cut” of the film, of course, Dekkard begins to suspect that he, too, is a replicant and that his memories are as prosthetic as hers. Is he the vicitim of an imaginary past encoded into him by media? But then what real does he – or she – have to replace it with? In what sense has memory been unreal to them before it was revealed as factitious?

If Blade Runner seems at times a hymn to Baudrillard’s notion of the precession of simulacra and the dominance of the hyperreal over the real in the age of mass communication, then other films suggest different reasons for the impossibility of locating “historical reality.” When the aptly named Truman Burbank in The Truman Show (USA 1998), another movie meditation on personal and public history under the aegis of the media, tries to leave his fictional world, he is reminded (by his “Creator”) that he is leaving a history kinder and more secure than any in the outside, ostensibly less mediated, world. And we know, as he does not, that he has only exchanged the world of the character for that of the audience, one side of the ubiquitous screen for the other. Everybody we have seen in that other world is either involved in producing “The Truman show” or watching it.

Likewise, when the teenage hero and heroine of the brilliant recent satire, Pleasantville (USA 1998), are transplanted to the 1950s, it is not to the historical period but to one of its television shows – a pastiche of Father Knows Best and Ozzie and Harriet – which, it is clearly implied, is a more significant reflection of the mentality of the period and its place in the dream-life of present-day America than the actual past could be (just as the fairy-tale mythic customarily takes place in films notionally set in the Middle Ages, as Arthur Lindley has pointed out in an earlier number of STP). In the process of bringing sex, curiosity, and colour into that dream world, they and the film perform from “within” the kind of fruitful inspection of the mediated world that Thomas Elsaesser recommends in his contribution to this issue. In his terms, the “train” hidden behind the sitcom facade of Pleasantville is the nightmare ’50s of the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers (USA, 1956). At the end of the film, when that black-and-white world has turned fully to colour (i.e., when it has become a contemporary movie), it melts seamlessly into historical time. Pleasantville‘s roads become linear and connect with the outside world. Jennifer (Reese Witherspoon), having discovered the joys of literacy, elects to stay behind so that she can go to university (where we last see her) and continue reading D. H. Lawrence. Enrolling in 1959, she will graduate just in time for the Kennedy assassination, either in academic history’s version or in Oliver Stone’s.

Clearly, the anxieties addressed by Burgoyne, Pierre Sorlin, Thomas Elsaesser, Robert Rosenstone, and other contributors to this special issue extend beyond explicitly historical film and its criticism. They are, perhaps, given special urgency by the coming end of the millenium. In the world of Blade Runner, as in the world of video recording and computer simulation addressed by Sorlin, Elsaesser and Rosenstone, linear time seems to cease, just as personal history becomes a programmed illusion. Los Angeles in Ridley Scott’s film, you will recall, is a jumble of architectural styles from ziggurats to skyscrapers. The individual buildings are palimpsests, layer having been added to layer, so that the building of 2019 contains interior (which are also mental) spaces from 1939, just as the detective of the future, Dekkard, speaks (in the original version) with the accents of Sam Spade. In the realm of historical film, similarly, the better we are able to simulate the past, the more our simulations displace the past. Our public history now floats in cyberspace, endlessly replicable, endlessly manipulable, liable to become whatever the manipulators choose to make it. When NATO began to bomb Serbia, the first reaction of Serbian television was to air Wag the Dog, perhaps intending to imply that their genocide was fictional but inadvertently raising the possibility that the bombing itself was too. On 8 April 1999 NATO responded by threatening to bomb Serbian broadcasting stations which failed to air unedited versions of “Western” news for a mandatory number of hours each day. We are fast approaching a stage where history, memory and the media which sustain them begin to have interchangeable properties to which we can no longer apply “reason” and “logic” as countervailing forces. With fewer and fewer memories that we can truly call our own, we are yet reminded often and insistently that we are not necessarily in control of the media “at our command”.

Arthur Lindley
Anthony Guneratne

The editors would like to thank:

— Ina Bertrand, the general editor of STP, for asking a couple of years ago if we had any ideas for special issues and for extending the space for the resulting forum;
— Peter Hughes and the STP staff for getting this online in the usual elegant form;
— Robert Rosenstone, for advice and mediation above and beyond the provision of an essay and a reprint;
— and all of our contributors, for excellent work under electronically compressed deadlines.