History in images/history in words: Reflections on the possibility of really putting history onto film

Uploaded 18 April 1999

First published American Historical Review 93, no.5 (December 1988): 1173-1185

For an academic historian to become involved in the world of motion pictures is at once an exhilarating and disturbing experience. Exhilarating for all the obvious reasons: the power of the visual media; the opportunity to emerge from the lonely depths of the library to join with other human beings in a common enterprise; the delicious thought of a potentially large audience for the fruits of one’s research, analysis, and writing. Disturbing for equally obvious reasons: no matter how serious or honest the filmmakers, and no matter how deeply committed they are to rendering the subject faithfully, the history that finally appears on the screen can never fully satisfy the historian as historian (although it may satisfy the historian as filmgoer). Inevitably, something happens on the way from the page to the screen that changes the meaning of the past as it is understood by those of us who work in words.

The disturbance caused by working on a film lingers long after the exhilaration has vanished. Like all such disturbances, this one can provoke a search for ideas to help restore one’s sense of intellectual equilibrium. In my case, the search may have been particularly intense because I had a double dose of the experience – two of my major written works have been put onto film, and both times I have been to some extent involved in the process.

The two films were about as different as films can be. One was a dramatic feature and the other a documentary; one was a fifty-million-dollar Hollywood project and the other a quarter-million-dollar work funded largely with public money; one was pitched at the largest of mass audiences and the other at the more elite audience of public television and art houses. Despite these differences, vast and similar changes happened to the history in each production, changes that have led me to a new appreciation of the problems of putting history onto film. After these experiences, I no longer find it possible to blame the shortcomings of historical films either on the evils of Hollywood or the woeful effects of low budgets, on the limits of the dramatic genre or those of the documentary format. The most serious problems the historian has with the past on the screen arise out of the nature and demands of the visual medium itself.

The two films are Reds  (1982), the story of the last five years in the life of American poet, journalist, and revolutionary, John Reed; and The Good Fight (1984), a chronicle of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, the American volunteers who took part in the Spanish Civil War. Each is a well-made, emotion-filled work that has exposed a vast number of people to an important but long-buried historical subject, one previously known largely to specialists or to old leftists. Each brings to the screen a wealth of authentic historical detail. Each humanizes the past, turning long-suspect radicals into admirable human beings. Each proposes – if a bit indirectly – an interpretation of its subject, seeing political commitment as both a personal and historical category. Each connects past to present by suggesting that the health of the body politic and, indeed, the world depends on such recurrent commitments.

Despite their very real virtues, their evocations of the past through powerful images, colorful characters, and moving words, neither of these motion pictures can fulfill many of the basic demands for truth and verifiability used by all historians. Reds indulges in overt fiction – to give just two examples – by putting John Reed in places where he never was or having him make an impossible train journey from France to Petrograd in 1917. [1]  The Good Fight – like many recent documentaries – equates memory with history; it allows veterans of the Spanish war to speak of events more than four decades in the past without calling their misremembrances, mistakes, or outright fabrications into question. [2] And yet neither fictionalization nor unchecked testimony is the major reason that these films violate my notion of history. Far more unsettling is the way each compresses the past to a closed world by telling a single, linear story with, essentially, a single interpretation. Such a narrative strategy obviously denies historical alternatives, does away with complexities of motivation or causation, and banishes all subtlety from the world of history.

This sort of criticism of history on film might be of no importance if we did not live in a world deluged with images, one in which people increasingly receive their ideas about the past from motion pictures and television, from feature films, docudramas, mini-series, and network documentaries. Today, the chief source of historical knowledge for the majority of the population – outside of the much-despised textbook – must surely be the visual media, a set of institutions that lie almost wholly outside the control of those of us who devote our lives to history. [3]  Any reasonable extrapolation suggests that trend will continue. Certainly, it is not farfetched to foresee a time (are we almost there?) when written history will be a kind of esoteric pursuit and when historians will be viewed as the priests of a mysterious religion, commentators on sacred texts and performers of rituals for a populace little interested in their meaning but indulgent enough (let us hope) to pay for them to continue.

To think of the ever-growing power of the visual media is to raise the disturbing thought that perhaps history is dead in the way God is dead. Or, at the most, alive only to believers – that is, to those of us who pursue it as a profession. Surely, I am not the only one to wonder if those we teach or the population at large truly 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 if our history actually 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.

Perhaps it seems odd to raise such questions at this time, after two decades of repeated methodological breakthroughs in history, innovations that have taught us to look at the past in so many new ways and have generated so much new information. The widespread influence of the Annales school, the new social history, quantification and social science history, women’s history, psychohistory, anthropological history, the first inroads of Continental theory into a reviving intellectual history – all these developments indicate that history as a discipline is flourishing. But – and it is a big BUT, a BUT that can be insisted on despite the much discussed “revival of narrative” – it is clear that at the same time there is a rapidly shrinking general audience for the information we have to deliver and the sort of stories we have to tell. Despite the success of our new methodologies, I fear that as a profession we know less and less how to tell stories that situate us meaningfully in a value-laden world. Stories that matter to people outside our profession. Stories that matter to people inside the profession. Stories that matter at all.

Enter film: the great temptation. Film, the contemporary medium still capable of both dealing with the past and holding a large audience. How can we not suspect that this is the medium to use to create narrative histories that will touch large numbers of people. Yet is this dream possible? Can one really put history onto film, history that will satisfy those of us who devote our lives to understanding, analyzing, and recreating the past in words? Or does the use of film necessitate a change in what we mean by history, and would we be willing to make such a change? The issue comes down to this: is it possible to tell historical stories on film and not lose our professional or intellectual souls?

***

Thirty years ago, Siegfried Kracauer, a theoretician of both film and history, dismissed the historical feature as stagey and theatrical, in part because modern actors looked unconvincing in period costumes, but in larger measure because everyone knew – he argued – that what was on the screen was not the past but only an imitation of it. [4] If he neglected to deal with the equally obvious shortcoming of written history, or to explain why we so easily accept the convention that words on a page are adequate to the task of showing us the past, Kracauer at least took a stab at the theoretical problems of history on film. This is more than one can say of recent scholars. Despite a great deal of professional activity concerning history and the visual media – the articles and monographs, the panels at major conventions, the symposiums sponsored by the American Historical Association, New York University, and the California Historical Society – I have encountered but two discussions of what seems a most basic question: whether our written discourse can be turned into a visual one. [5]

R. J. Raack, a historian who has been involved in the production of several documentaries, is a strong advocate of putting history onto film. Indeed, in his view, film is possibly a more appropriate medium for history than the written word. “Traditional written history,” he argued, is too linear and too narrow in focus to render the fullness of the complex, multi-dimensional world in which humans live. Only film, with its ability to juxtapose images and sounds, with its “quick cuts to new sequences, dissolves, fades, speed-ups, [and] slow motion,” can ever hope to approximate real life, the daily experience of “ideas, words, images, preoccupations, distractions, sensory deceptions, conscious and unconscious motives and emotions.” Only film can provide an adequate “empathetic reconstruction to convey how historical people witnessed, understood, and lived their lives.” Only film can “recover all the past’s liveliness.” [6]

Philosopher Ian Jarvie, the author of two books on motion pictures and society, took an entirely opposite view. The moving image carries such a “poor information load” and suffers from such “discursive weakness” that there is no way to do meaningful history on film. History, he explained, does not consist primarily of “a descriptive narrative of what actually happened.” It consists mostly of “debates between historians about just what exactly did happen, why it happened, and what would be an adequate account of its significance.” While it is true that a “historian could embody his view in a film, just as he could embody it in a play,” the real question is this: “How could he defend it, footnote it, rebut objections and criticize the opposition?” [7]

Clearly, history is a different creature for each of these two scholars. Raack saw history as a way of gaining personal knowledge. Through the experience of people’s lives in other times and places, one can achieve a kind of “psychological prophylaxis.” History lets us feel less peculiar and isolated; by showing that there are others like us, it helps to relieve our “loneliness and alienation.” [8] This is hardly the traditional academic view of the subject, but if one looks at history as a personal, experiential way of knowing, then Raack’s arguments seem to make sense. He is certainly right that, more easily than the written word, the motion picture seems to let us stare through a window directly at past events, to experience people and places as if we were there. The huge images on the screen and the wraparound sounds overwhelm us, swamp our senses, and destroy attempts to remain aloof, distanced, critical. In the movie theater, we are, for a time, prisoners of history.

That, for Jarvie, is just the problem: a world that moves at an unrelenting twenty-four frames a second provides no time or space for reflection, verification, or debate. One may be able to tell “interesting, enlightening, and plausible” historical stories on the screen, but it is not possible to provide the all-important critical elements of historical discourse: evaluation of sources, logical argument, or systematic weighing of evidence. With those elements missing, one has history that is “no more serious than Shakespeare’s Tudor-inspired travesties.” This means that virtually all filmed history has been “a joke,” and a dangerous one at that. A motion picture may provide a “vivid portrayal” of the past, but its inaccuracies and simplifications are practically impossible for the serious scholar “to correct.” [9]

If most academic historians are likely to feel closer to Jarvie than to Raack, it is still necessary to ask to what extent his arguments are true. Take the notion that the “information load” of film is impoverished. Surely, this depends on what one means by “information,” for in its own way film carries an enormously rich load of data. Some scholars claim not only that an image of a scene contains much more information than the written description of the same scene but also that this information has a much higher degree of detail and specificity. [10]  One does not need to be an expert to discover this – all one need do is attempt to render into words everything that might appear in a single shot from a movie like Reds. Such an assignment could easily fill many pages, and if this is the case with a single shot, how much more space would be needed to describe what goes on in a sequence of images? The question thus becomes not whether film can carry enough information but whether that information can be absorbed from quickly moving images, is worth knowing, and can add up to “history.”

What about Jarvie’s assertion that history is mainly “debates between historians”? Scholars do continually disagree over how to understand and interpret the data of the past, and their debates are important for the progress of the discipline – one might even say that debates help to set the agenda for research by raising new issues, defining fields, refining questions, and forcing historians to check each other’s accuracy and logic. And it is true that each and every work of history takes its place in a discourse that consists of preexisting debates, and the very meaning of any new work is in part created by those debates, even if they are not acknowledged within the work itself.

The question for history on film, however, is not whether historians always, or usually, or even sometimes, debate issues, or whether works take their place in a context of ongoing debates, the question is whether each individual work of history is, or must be, involved in such debates and involved so overtly that the debate becomes part of the substance of the historical work. To this, the answer is no. We can all think of works that represent the past without ever pointing to the field of debates in which they are situated; we all know many excellent narrative histories and biographies that mute (or even moot) debates by ignoring them, or relegating them to appendices, or burying them deep within the storyline. If written texts can do this and still be considered history, surely an inability to “debate” issues cannot rule out the possibilities of history on film.

***

When historians think of history on film, what probably comes to mind is what we might call the Hollywood historical drama like Reds, or its European counterpart, The Return of Martin Guerre (1983) – the big-budget production in which costumes, “authentic” sets and locations, and well-known actors take precedence over attempts at historical accuracy. Such works in truth fall into a genre that one might label “historical romance.” Like all genres, this one locks both filmmaker and audience into a series of conventions whose demands – for a love interest, physical action, personal confrontation, movement toward a climax and denouement – are almost guaranteed to leave the historian of the period crying foul.

Yet this need not be so. In principle, there is no reason why one cannot make a dramatic feature set in the past about all kinds of historical topics – individual lives, community conflicts, social movements, the rise of a king to power, revolutions, or warfare – that will stay within the bounds of historical accuracy, at least to the extent that one need not resort to invented characters or incidents. If, by its very nature, the dramatic film will include human conflict and will shape its material in accordance with some conventions of storytelling, this does not entirely differentiate it from much written history. One may argue that film tends to highlight individuals rather than movements or the impersonal processes that are often the subject of written history, yet we must not forget that it is possible to make films that avoid the glorification of the individual and present the group as protagonist. This was certainly one of the aims and accomplishments of Soviet filmmakers in the 1920s in their search for non-bourgeois modes of representation. If the best known of their works – Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin  (1925) and October  (1927) – are for political reasons skewed as history, they certainly provide useful models for ways to present collective historical moments.

To represent history in a dramatic feature rather than a written text does involve some important trade-offs. The amount of traditional data that can be presented on the screen in a two-hour film (or even an eight-hour mini-series) will always be so skimpy compared to a written version covering the same ground that a professional historian may feel intellectually starved. Yet the inevitable thinning of data on the screen does not of itself make for poor history. On many historical topics, one can find short and long and longer works, for the amount of detail used in a historical argument partakes of the arbitrary or is at least dependent on the aims of one’s project. Jean-Denis Bredin’s recent book, L’Affaire  (1983), although four times as long, is no more “historical” than Nicholas Halasz’s earlier Captain Dreyfus  (1955), and Leon Edel’s one-volume biography of Henry James (1985) no less “accurate” than his full five-volume version.

If short on traditional data, film does easily capture elements of life that we might wish to designate as another kind of data. Film lets us see landscapes, hear sounds, witness strong emotions as they are expressed with body and face, or view physical conflict between individuals and groups. Without denigrating the power of the written word, one can claim for each medium unique powers of representation. It seems, indeed, no exaggeration to insist that for a mass audience (and I suspect for an academic elite as well) film can most directly render the look and feel of all sorts of historical particulars and situations – farm workers dwarfed by immense western prairies and mountains, or miners struggling in the darkness of their pits, or millworkers moving to the rhythms of their machines, or civilians sitting hopelessly in the bombed-out streets of cities. [11] Film can plunge us into the drama of confrontations in courtroom or legislature, the simultaneous, overlapping realities of war and revolution, the intense confusion of men in battle. Yet, in doing all this, in favoring the visual and emotional data while simultaneously playing down the analytical, the motion picture is subtly – and in ways we do not yet know how to measure or describe – altering our very sense of the past.

***

The other major type of history on film comes under the label of documentary. Whether it is the film compiled of old footage and narrated by an omniscient voice (the voice of History) or a film that centers on “talking heads” (survivors remembering events, experts analyzing them, or some combination of the two), the historical documentary, just like the dramatic feature, tends to focus on heroic individuals and, more important, to make sense of its material in terms of a story that moves from a beginning through a conflict to a dramatic resolution. This point cannot be too strongly emphasized. All too often, historians who scorn dramatizations are willing to accept the documentary film as a more accurate way of representing the past, as if somehow the images appear on the screen unmediated. Yet the documentary is never a direct reflection of an outside reality but a work consciously shaped into a narrative that – whether dealing with past or present – creates the meaning of the material being conveyed.

That the “truths” of a documentary are not reflected but created is easy to demonstrate. Take, for example, John Huston’s famed Battle of San Pietro (1945), shot during the Italian campaign in 1944 with a single cameraman. In this film, as in any war documentary, when we see an image of an artillery piece firing followed by a shell exploding, we are viewing a reality created only by a film editor. This is not to say that the shell fired by the gun that we saw did not explode somewhere or that the explosion did not look like the one that we saw on the screen. But, since no camera could follow the trajectory of a shell from gun to explosion, what we have in fact seen are images of two different events spliced together by an editor to create a single historical moment. And if this happens with such a simple scene, how much more does it mark complicated events shown to us in footage  actualité.

As a form capable of conveying history, the documentary has other limits as well. Some of them are highlighted by my experience with The Good Fight. In writing narration for this film, I was frustrated by the directors in my attempt to include the issue of possible Stalinist “terrorism” in the ranks. Their objections were as follows: they could find no visual images to illustrate the issue and were adamant that the film not become static or talky; the topic was too complex to handle quickly, and the film – as all films – had so much good footage that it was already in danger of running too long. This decision to sacrifice complexity to action, one that virtually every documentarist would accept, underlines a convention of the genre: the documentary bows to a double tyranny – which is to say, an ideology – of the necessary image and perpetual movement. And woe to those aspects of history that can neither be illustrated nor quickly summarized.

The apparent glory of the documentary lies in its ability to open a direct window onto the past, allowing us to see the cities, factories, landscapes, battlefields, and leaders of an earlier time. But this ability also constitutes its chief danger. However often film uses actual footage (or still photos, or artifacts) from a particular time and place to create a “realistic” sense of the historical moment, we must remember that on the screen we see not the events themselves, and not the events as experienced or even as witnessed by participants, but selected images of those events carefully arranged into sequences to tell a story or to make an argument.

***

Historians can easily see how such film conventions of both the dramatic feature and the documentary shape or distort the past, in part because we have written work by which the piece of visual history can be judged. What we too easily ignore, however, is the extent to which written history, and especially narrative history, is also shaped by conventions of genre and language. This needs to be underscored. So many scholars have dealt with questions of narrative in recent years that “narratology” has become a separate field of study. Here I only wish to call to mind a few of their insights that seem relevant to history on film. First, neither people nor nations live historical “stories”; narratives, that is, coherent stories with beginnings, middles, and endings, are constructed by historians as part of their attempts to make sense of the past. Second, the narratives that historians write are in fact “verbal fictions”; written history is a representation of the past, not the past itself. Third, the nature of the historical world in a narrative is in part governed by the genre or mode (shared with forms of fiction) in which the historian has decided to cast the story – ironic, tragic, heroic, or romantic. And, fourth, language is not transparent and cannot mirror the past as it really was; rather than reflecting it, language creates and structures history and imbues it with meaning. [12]

If written history is shaped by the conventions of genre and language, the same will obviously be true of visual history, even though in this case the conventions will be those of visual genres and visual language. To the extent that written narratives are “verbal fictions,” then visual narratives will be “visual fictions” – that is, not mirrors of the past but representations of it. This is not to argue that history and fiction are the same thing or to excuse the kind of outright fabrication that marks Hollywood historical features. History on film must be held accountable to certain standards, but these standards must be consonant with the possibilities of the medium. It is impossible to judge history on film solely by the standards of written history, for each medium has its own kind of necessarily fictive elements.

Consider the following: in any dramatic feature, actors assume the roles of historical characters and provide them with gestures, movements, and voice sounds that create meaning. Sometimes, film must provide a face for the faceless, such as that South African railway conductor, undescribed in Gandhi’s autobiography, who pushed the young Indian out of a train compartment for whites and started him on the road to activism. In such cases, certain “facts” about individuals must be created. Clearly, this is an act of fictionalizing, yet surely no real violence is done to history by such an addition to the written record, at least not so long as the “meaning” that the “impersonators” create somehow carries forth the larger “meaning” of the historical character whom they represent.

To begin to think about history on film not simply in comparison with written history but in terms of its own is not an easy task. Current theories of cinema – structuralist, semiotic, feminist, or Marxist – all seem too self-contained and hermetic, too uninterested in the flesh-and-blood content of the past, the lives and struggles of individuals and groups, to be directly useful to the historian. Still, the insights of theoreticians do offer valuable lessons about the problems and potentialities of the medium; they also point toward some of the important differences between the way words on the page and images on the screen create versions of “reality,” differences that must be taken into account in any serious attempt to evaluate history on film. [13] At the very least, historians who wish to give the visual media a chance will have to realize that, because of the way the camera works and the kinds of data that it privileges, history on film will of necessity include all sorts of elements unknown to written history.

***

Although the big Hollywood feature and the standard documentary are currently the most common forms of history on film, it would be a mistake to regard them as the only possible forms. In recent years, directors from a variety of countries have begun to make movies that convey some of the intellectual density that we associate with the written word, films that propose imaginative new ways of dealing with historical material. Resisting traditional genres, these filmmakers have moved toward new forms of cinema capable of exploring serious social and political issues. The best of these films present the possibility of more than one interpretation of events; they render the world as multiple, complex, and indeterminate, rather than as a series of self-enclosed, neat, linear stories.

The names of these innovative filmmakers are not well known in the United States outside of specialized cinema circles, but some of their works are available here. For the historian interested in the possibility of complex ideas being delivered by film, the most interesting and provocative of such works may be the feature-length Sans Soleil (1982). This best-known work of Chris Marker, an American who lives in Paris, is a complex and personal visual and verbal essay on the meaning of contemporary history. The film juxtaposes images of Guinea-Bissau and the Cape Verde Islands with those of Japan in order to understand what the filmmaker calls “the poles of existence” in the late twentieth-century world. It can also be seen as an oblique investigation of Marker’s contention (made in the narrative) that the great question of the twentieth century has been “the coexistence of different concepts of time.” [14]

Far from Poland (1985), made by Jill Godmilow, is another good example of how film can render historical complexity. An American who had spent some time in Poland, Godmilow was unable to get a visa to go there to make a “standard” documentary on the Solidarity labor movement. Staying in New York, she made a film anyway, a self-reflexive, multi-level work, one that utilizes a variety of visual sources to create a highly unusual “history” of Solidarity – it includes actual footage smuggled out of Poland, images from American television newscasts, “acted” interviews from original texts that appeared in the Polish press, “real” interviews with Polish exiles in the United States, a domestic drama in which the filmmaker (read “historian”) raises the issue of what it means to make a film about events in a distant land, and voice-over dialogues of the filmmaker with a fictional Fidel Castro, who speaks for the possibility of contemporary revolution and the problems of the artist within the socialist state. Provocative visually, verbally, historically, and intellectually, Far from Poland tells us much about Solidarity and even more, perhaps, about how Americans reacted to and used the news from Poland for their own purposes. Not only does the film raise the issue of how to represent history on film, it also provides a variety of perspectives on the events it covers, thus both reflecting and entering the arena of debates surrounding the meaning of Solidarity.

The topics of both Marker and Godmilow may be contemporary, but the presentational modes of their films are applicable to subjects set more deeply in the past. Nor are documentarists the only filmmakers who have been seeking new ways of putting history onto the screen. All historians who feel a need to resist the empathic story told in Hollywood films, with its “romantic” approach and its satisfying sense of emotional closure, will find themselves at one with many Western radical and Third World filmmakers who have had to struggle against Hollywood codes of representation in order to depict their own social and historical realities. [15] In some recent Third World historical films, one can find parallels to Bertolt Brecht’s “epic” theater, with its distancing devices (such as direct speeches or chapter headings for each section of a work) that are supposed to make the audience think about rather than feel social problems and human relationships. Although the filmmakers are no doubt working from a native sense of history and aesthetics, this distancing is what seems to happen in such works as Ousmane Sembene’s Ceddo (1977) and Carlos Diegues’s Quilombo (1986), both of which present historical figures with whom it is almost impossible to identify emotionally. Made in Senegal, Ceddo portrays the political and religious struggle for dominance that occurred in various parts of Black Africa during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when a militant Islam attempted to oust both the original native religion and the political power structure. The Brazilian film, Quilombo, presents a history of Palmares, a remote, long-lived, seventeenth-century community created by runaway slaves that for many decades was able to hold off all attempts of the Portuguese to crush its independence. Each film delivers its history within a framework of interpretation – Ceddo upholds the pre-Islamic values of Black Africa, and Quilombo glorifies the rich tribal life of a culture freed of the burden of Christian civilization. [16]

For anyone interested in history on film, the chief importance of these works may lie less in their accuracy of detail (I have been unable to find commentaries on them by specialists in their fields) than in the way they choose to represent the past. Because both films are overtly theatrical in costuming and highly stylized in acting, they resist all the usual common-sense notions of “realism” that we expect in movies like Reds. Clearly, the camera in these films does not serve as a window onto a world that once existed; clearly, it represents something about the events of the past without pretending to “show” those events accurately. Just as clearly, each of these films is a work of history that tells us a great deal about specific periods and issues of the past.

In their unusual forms, Ceddo and Quilombo work to subvert a major convention of history on film – its “realism.” At the same time, they also highlight, and call into question, a parallel convention of written history – the “realism” of our narratives, a realism based, as Hayden White showed two decades ago, on the model of the nineteenth-century novel. It is possible, in fact, to see these works as examples (in a different medium) of what White was calling for when he wrote that, if history were to continue as an “art,” then to remain relevant to the issues of our time historians would have to move beyond the artistic models of the nineteenth century. Ceddo and Quilombo may be products of Third World nations, but they point the way toward the narrative forms of the twentieth century, toward the necessity for modernism (expressionism, surrealism) in its many varieties, or even post-modernism, as modes of representation for dramatizing the significance of historical data. [17]

***

Almost a century after the birth of the motion picture, film presents historians with a challenge still unseized, a challenge to begin to think of how to use the medium to its full capability for carrying information, juxtaposing images and words, providing startling and contrastive mixtures of sight and sound, and (perhaps) creating analytic structures that include visual elements. Because the conventions of the visual media are strong and, to the historian, initially startling, they also serve to highlight the conventions and limitations of written history. Film thus suggests new possibilities for representing the past, possibilities that could allow narrative history to recapture the power it once had when it was more deeply rooted in the literary imagination. [18]

The visual media present the same challenge to history that they have to anthropology, a field in which the ethnographic documentary, invented to illustrate the “scientific” findings of written texts, has in recent years cut loose from its verbal base to seek what one scholar calls “a new paradigm, a new way of seeing, not necessarily incompatible with written anthropology but at least governed by a distinct set of criteria.” [19] Now it seems time for such a “shift in perspective,” one occasioned by the opportunity to represent the world in images and words rather than in words alone, to touch history. Doing so will open us to new notions of the past, make us ask once more the questions about what history can or cannot be. About what history is for. About why we want to know about the past and what we will do with that knowledge. About possible new modes of historical representation, both filmed and written – about history as self-reflexive inquiry, as self-conscious theater, as a mixed form of drama and analysis.

The challenge of film to history, of the visual culture to the written culture, may be like the challenge of written history to the oral tradition, of Herodotus and Thucydides to the tellers of historical tales. Before Herodotus, there was myth, which was a perfectly adequate way of dealing with the past of a tribe, city, or people, adequate in terms of providing a meaningful world in which to live and relate to one’s past. In a post-literate world, it is possible that visual culture will once again change the nature of our relationship to the past. This does not mean giving up on attempts at truth but somehow recognizing that there may be more than one sort of historical truth, or that the truths conveyed in the visual media may be different from, but not necessarily in conflict with, truths conveyed in words.

History does not exist until it is created. And we create it in terms of our underlying values. Our kind of rigorous, “scientific” history is in fact a product of history, our special history that includes a particular relationship to the written word, a rationalized economy, notions of individual rights, and the nation-state. Many cultures have done quite well without this sort of history, which is only to say that there are – as we all know but rarely acknowledge – many ways to represent and relate to the past. Film, with its unique powers of representation now struggles for a place within a cultural tradition that has long privileged the written word. Its challenge is great, for it may be that to acknowledge the authenticity of the visual is to accept a new relationship to the word itself. We would do well to recall Plato’s assertion that, when the mode of the music changes, the walls of the city shake. It seems that to our time is given this vital question to ponder: if the mode of representation changes, what then may begin to shake?

Endnotes:
[1] A fuller discussion of the historical shortcomings of Reds can be found in my “Reds as History,” Reviews in American History, 10 (1982): 297-310.
[2] A fuller discussion of the historical shortcomings of The Good Fightis in my paper, “History, Memory, Documentary: ‘The Good Fight’ Fifty Years After,” delivered at a symposium entitled “The Abraham Lincoln Brigade and the Spanish Civil War: History, Memory and the Politics and Culture of the 1930s,” National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., December 5, 1986.
[3] A few historians such as Daniel Walkowitz, Robert Brent Toplin, and R. J. Raack have become deeply involved in filmmaking projects. For an interesting insight into some of the problems of the historian as filmmaker, see Daniel Walkowitz, “Visual History: The Craft of the Historian-Filmmaker ,” Public Historian, 7 ( 1985): 53-64.
[4] Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film (New York, 1960). 77-79.
[5] By now, any list of articles, books, and panels on film would be very long. Perhaps the most important symposiums were the ones at New York University on October 30, 1982, and in Washington, D.C., in April-May 1985, sponsored by the AHA. The former resulted in Barbara Abrash and Janet Sternberg, eds., Historians and Filmmakers: Toward Collaboration (New York 1983), and the latter in John O’Connor, ed., Image as Artifact: The Historical Analysis of Film and Television (forthcoming).
[6] R. J. Raack, “Historiography as Cinematography: A Prolegomenon to Film Work for Historians,” Journal of Contemporary History, 18 (July 1983): 416, 418.
[7] I. C. Jarvie, “Seeing through Movies,” Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 8 (1978): 378.
[8] Raack, “History as Cinematography,” 416.
[9] Jarvie, “Seeing through Movies,” 378.
[10] Seymour Chatman, “What Novels Can Do That Films Can’t (and Vice Versa),” Critical Inquiry, 7 (Winter 1980): 125-26.
[11] Pierre Sorlin argued the value of film in giving a feeling of certain kinds of settings in “Historical Films as Tools for Historians,” in O’Connor, Image as Artifact.
[12] Hayden White has made this point in a number of works, including Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore, Md., 1973); and in various articles in Tropics of Discourse Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore, 1978)
[13] A good survey of recent film theory is Dudley Andrew, Concepts in Film Theory (New York, 1984).
[14] Quotations are from the narration of Sans Soleil. A longer discussion of the film as a work of history is contained in my lecture on Sans Soleil, delivered at the Neighborhood Film Project, Philadelphia, April 3, 1987. An interesting article on it is Janine Marchessault, “Sans Soleil,” CineAction 5(May 1986): 2-6.
[15] See Teshome H. Gabriel, Third Cinema in the Third World: The Aesthetics of Liberation (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1982), and Roy Armes, Third World Filmmaking and the West  (Berkeley, Calif., 1987), especially 87-100.
[1] For a full discussion of Ceddo, see Gabriel, Third Cinema in the Third World, 86-89; and Armes, Third World Filmmaking, 290-91. For Quilombo, see Coco Fusco, “Choosing between Legend and History: An Interview with Carlos Diegues,” and Robert Stam, “Quilombo,” both in Cineaste, 15 (1986): 12-14, 42-44. For the history of Palmares, see R. K. Kent, “Palmares: An African State in Brazil, “Journal of African History, 6 (1965): 161-75; and Arthur Ramos, “The Negro Republic of Palmares,” in The Negro in Brazil (Washington. D.C.. 1939). 42-53.
[17] Hayden White, “The Burden of History,” History and Theory, 5 (1966): 110-34, especially 126-27, 131. This article is also reprinted in White, Tropics of Discourse, 27-50.
[18] Hayden White has made this argument in a number of articles. See, for example, “Historical Text as Literary Artifact,” and “Historicism, History, and the Figurative Imagination,” both in Tropics of Discourse, 81-120.
[19] Bill Nichols, Ideology and the Image (Bloomington, Ind., 1981), 243.

About the Author

Robert A. Rosenstone

About the Author


Robert A. Rosenstone

Robert A. Rosenstone, professor of history at the California Institute of Technology, is author of the multi-voiced, innovative narrative Mirror in the shrine: American encounters in Meiji Japan (1988) and the prize-winning Romantic revolutionary: a biography of John Reed (1975). The latter work was used as the basis for the film Reds, on which Rosenstone served as historical consultant, a role he has played on several other productions. Rosenstone created the film review section for the AHR in 1989 and served as its editor for six years. His own major essays on history and film have been gathered into one volume, Visions of the past: the challenge of film to our idea of history (1995).View all posts by Robert A. Rosenstone →