Leen Engelen and Roel Vande Winkel,
Perspectives on European Film and History.
Academia Press, Gent, 2007
ISBN: 97 890 3821082 7
Eur 30.00 (pb)
281pp
(Review copy supplied by Gent, Academia Press)

Perspectives on European Film and History brings together a number of essays by Dutch, Belgian, British and American scholars interested in the relationship between film and history, and notably in the historical value of films representing famous people and events. Individual essays deal with films representing Joan of Arc, Rembrandt, Cromwell, Andrei Rublev, Napoleon and Hitler. Most are by well-known directors – Tarkovsky, Luc Besson, Kevin Brownlow, Mike Leigh – but some essays rescue largely forgotten historical films which the writers consider deserving of wider recognition for the way they situate their characters and action within the relevant historical context – one, for instance, on Edith Cavell and World War I, another on Stalinism and the Terror.

There is of course no coherence to this series of historical topics and moments, but more seriously there is no coherence to the positions adopted by the authors on the relationship between film and history. All agree (1) that it is not enough for the historian simply to point out historical inaccuracies, and that some more global evaluation is necessary of the validity of the film’s representation of a historical figure or event; and (2) that given the need to re-enact the past visually within the tenets of contemporary narrative realism, some flexibility in the fictionalisation process is permissible. But beyond that there is little agreement, and the degree of sophistication with which the various authors approach their topic varies widely from essay to essay. In particular, attempts by several of the essayists to relate the representation of the past to the twentieth century context within which the films were produced and released (relating Joan of Arc to contemporary French internationalism, Cavaliers and Roundheads to New Labor) are somewhat naïve and/or strained. In general, claims to theoretical positions concerning realism, representation and reception are over-stated and a bit self-important. Where a few show an awareness of the terms within which these debates have been conducted, the essays themselves do not contribute to the debates. Most are ‘useful’ – factual and pedestrian, with a good deal of unenlightening information as to what critic said what about what film.

The introduction attempts to overcome these inadequacies by endowing the essays with a spurious unity, but the historical overview of work on ‘Film and History’ provided in a post-face by Robert Rosendale, to whom the collection is implicitly dedicated, would have served as a far more effective introduction. The first essay itself also aims to provide a theoretical overview of the field, but unfortunately it is so poorly translated into English as to be almost unreadable. The book’s acknowledgements include thanks to an English-language editor, and most of the translated material is free from gross errors (though see ‘make-belief,’ heroin for heroine, and prisoners ‘defiling’ before Napoleon), but his attention must have been elsewhere at this time. Otherwise sensible proposals in the essay concerning a need to move away from historiography as the prime inter-textual reference point by which to judge a historical film, are overly verbose for the rather straightforward points they make, and are undermined by clumsy and ungrammatical expression. Moreover in the context of a book on a film genre (or rather a cluster of film-historical genres) the explicit refusal of this introductory theoretical essay to deal with genre theory seems more than a little perverse. Much of genre theory was, after all, conceptualised around film-historical genres such as the Western and film noir. This theoretical blind spot on the part of the author is no doubt responsible for the claim that this book was necessary to make good a gap in film-critical literature – a gap which in fact doesn’t exist – namely ‘that academic literature on historical movies focuses upon a rather limited sample of pictures, often Hollywood and some rare European art movies.’

Any questioning of the argument, structure or expression of the book cannot however detract from the virtues of certain of the contributions – notably those by William Hessling on Korda’s Rembrandt (UK 1936), which outlines very confidently the long history of the myth of the creative artist, and Roel Winkel’s account of the way in which films such as Oliver Hirschbiegel’s Der Untergang (Germany/Italy/Austria 2004), on Hitler’s last days, rework accounts of key moments in a nation’s history with a view to reviving public debate.

Nevertheless, overall the collection of essays is disappointing, falling a long way short of Marc Ferro’s writings, which more adequately identify and exemplify the subtlety and complexity of the relationship between the terms ‘Cinema’ and ‘History,’ and also of other French historians and sociologists (Lucien and Annie Goldmann, Pierre Sorlin, etc). It is significant that the book’s title should include the distinctly vague catch-all term ‘Perspectives on’ European Film and History, and noteworthy also that Rosenstone himself in his post-face should hint at the book’s incoherence. As in most fields, the importance of theory and its systematic working out in practice seems in the field of Film and History to have been taken more seriously by the French than by other nations.

Colin Crisp,
Australia.

Created on: Thursday, 17 July 2008