J. E. Smyth,
Reconstructing American Historical Cinema: From Cimarron to Citizen Kane.
Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006.
ISBN: 0 81312406 9
US$50.00 (hb)
447pp
(Review copy supplied by the University Press of Kentucky)

J. E. Smyth’s Reconstructing American Historical Cinema is intended, in the author’s own words, “to question the canons of film studies and American history” (24). This is a bold claim. In attempting to reinterpret some of classical Hollywood’s best-known (and most written about) films, the author provides an engaging account of how American filmmakers critically examined their country’s past in the years between 1931 and 1941. In doing so, she certainly does challenge these canons, but not in an entirely unproblematic way.

It is in her introduction that Smyth makes her most controversial statements. Entitled ‘Toward a Filmic Writing of History in Classical Hollywood’, the chapter engages in an extended discussion of the film and historiographical theory surrounding the author’s subject matter. This section, at least in part, is what makes Smyth’s study stand out. She reviews the relevant literature, but then suggests that rather than “force fitting” the era’s films into an “industrial-artistic formula or deconstructing their mythic discourses”, she aims to “reconstruct a critical understanding of classical Hollywood’s American historical cycle and its engagement with professional and popular history” (19). This is a unique stance because Smyth refuses to accept the framework instituted by ‘film and history’ theorists such as Robert Rosenstone and Hayden White that written and filmic historical discourses should be treated as “separate but equal” (19).

However, there is a paradox at the heart of this theoretical approach, and it lies in the author’s presiding methodology. In seeking to absolve the divisions between written and filmic history, Smyth still argues for classical Hollywood’s “writing” of the American past. This is highlighted by the book’s focus on the script as the “most fundamental manifestation of film historiography”, the consequent concentration on textual inserts, the reification of scriptwriters as key to certain film’s historical visions, and the attention paid to novelists such as Margaret Mitchell and Helen Hunt Jackson as revisionist “historians” (19-21). Whilst these approaches prove analytically fruitful, they retain the age-old division between “written” histories of various kinds, and other, apparently inferior, forms of historical representation. Surely the only way to move beyond the theoretical stranglehold of Rosenstone and White is to reject such a focus on ‘writing’ altogether? To do this, it would be necessary to understand historians and filmmakers as engaged in history as a broad cultural narrative, one constructed not just in the ‘written’ form, but also by strong visual and oral traditions. Historical agency would then lie not only in the hands of those elites with access to the instruments of professional historical and filmic ‘writing’, but in the hands of all who can avail themselves of these other, more democratic historical forms.

Still, this specific theoretical niggle does little to limit the overall power of Smyth’s argument. The book, based on a 2005 Yale doctoral dissertation, is divided into five sections. Each one contains two chapters, and analyses the historical approach of a group of classical Hollywood films and filmmakers towards certain key issues in American history. The first deals with filmmaker’s approaches to the divisions between traditional and modern historical analysis exemplified in Cimarron and the 1930s gangster cycle. The second looks at differing filmic approaches to the history of westward expansion. The third considers representations of the Civil War and Reconstruction. The fourth reflects on filmic representations of the historical experiences of war veterans. Finally, the fifth section examines Hollywood’s approach to its own history.

Smyth’s approach is clear in her reading of John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939). The author opens by suggesting that the film “is one of the most lionized of Westerns largely because film theorists…and cultural historians universally consider the film to be the epitome of the western myth” (116). She challenges this received wisdom by reconstructing the film’s production history, and closely reading certain key scenes, to suggest that Ford and the film’s script writer, Dudley Nichols, designed the film not as a myth, but as a “powerful form of self-conscious film historiography” (117). The text forward from the final shooting script (which was eventually dropped from the film) is brought to bear on the film’s historiographical perspective; the fact that it refers to the white “invasion” of Apache land at a “specific date and time” is used to show that Nichols was resisting an ahistorical racist and mythic account of frontier history, and suggesting a more complicated alternative (120-121).

Ford’s editing is also cited as an example of resistance to established historical understandings of Western history. His use of a sympathetic close-up of Geronimo, along with his editing of the key chase scene to present the events “from the Apache point of view” show his subtle sympathy to the Indian cause; the kind of balanced historical perspective that did not exist in contemporaneous scholarship (123). Overall, we are presented with a convincing historical and textual account of how this classical Hollywood film consciously engaged with written history, and rejected prevailing historiographic tendencies. This is an approach which is consistently and effectively applied throughout the book, to a wide variety of films.

However, in suggesting a link between Ford’s presentation of history and that of the New Western historians of the 1980s and 1990s (120), Smyth exposes a problem in her work. By reading the more refined, politically correct views of historians such as Patricia Nelson Limerick onto Stagecoach, Smyth is in her own way lionising the film as a shining example of historical analysis from a time when historiography explicitly tended towards more racist and imperialist understandings of American history. To rescue certain texts from their simplistic Marxist and Poststructuralist detractors by asserting their historical consciousness is one thing, but to assert them as beacons of historiographical subtlety that were ahead of their time is perhaps going too far.

Overall though, this is an excellent book. It serves as an important challenge to traditional readings of classical Hollywood, to traditional understandings of American historiography, and to those theories of ‘film and history’ that are rapidly becoming traditionalised. Smyth uses the reconstructive tactics of film and cultural history in combination with close readings of filmic texts (regularly exemplified through the use of frame grabs) to provide a fundamentally original understanding of classical Hollywood’s historical cycle. Some of her conclusions may be controversial and unsettling to many scholarly readers, but I imagine this to be the point, and the book is admirable because of this.

Nicholas Witham,
University of Nottingham, U.K.