Uploaded 16 April 1999

History decomposes into images, not into narratives.
– Walter Benjamin

[W]hat proliferates in historical discourse are elements “below which nothing more can be done except display,” and through which saying reaches its limit, as near as possible to showing.
– Michel de Certeau

In Medias Res

In his 1954 essay on “The Romans in films”, Roland Barthes points to the “insistent fringes” that repetitively mark the foreheads of all the Roman men in Mankiewicz’s Julius Caesar (1953). What does he make of this hirsute cinematic generalization? “Quite simply the label of Roman-ness. We therefore see here the mainspring of the Spectacle – the sign operating in the open. The frontal lock overwhelms one with evidence, no one can doubt that he is in Ancient Rome. And this certainty is permanent: the actors speak, act, torment themselves, debate “questions of universal import”, without losing, thanks to this little flag displayed on their foreheads, any of their historical plausibility. Their general representativeness can even expand in complete safety, cross the ocean and the centuries, and merge into the Yankee mugs of Hollywood extras: no matter, everyone is reassured, installed in the quiet certainty of a universe without duplicity, where Romans are Romans thanks to the most legible of signs: hair on the forehead”. [1]

In our experience of visual media, it is the image of “things” that first occupies the center of our consciousness, that mediates between the world and our understanding of it. Borrowed, to be turned with purpose against his condemnation of it, the “insistent fringe” of my title thus refers not only to the reduction of complex historical temporalization Barthes locates at the supposed “naturalized” site – and sight – of a Roman hairstyle in an American film. Here, I mean it also to trouble and critique this view: a view that far too quickly judges the iconic and synchronic signification of moving, yet “fixed”, images in popular films (and popular consciousness) as “mythological”, “ahistorical” and “bourgeois”, and the spectators who watch them as downright dumb, historically befuddled, and ideologically suspect. This seems to me too easy, dismissive, and elitist a perspective – particularly if we want to understand how historical consciousness emerges in a culture in which we are all completely immersed in images (if also surrounded by print), and what this might mean not only to the historical future, but also to the relevance and function of what is legitimated as “proper” (that is, academic) historiography.

In the context of the culture in which both filmgoers and historians currently live, the historian’s traditional iconomachy seems feeble in its injunctions, its hostility to images irrelevant to the life-world of both filmgoers and historians alike. Indeed, filmgoers and historians have become one and the same. Immersed in a culture in which the proliferation of visual representations has accelerated and understanding of “textuality” has become pervasive, perpetually confronted with contestation between competing representational claims and forms, filmgoers have become unprecedentedly savvy about (mis)representation and have learned the lessons of Hayden White’s Meta-History even if they’ve never read it. That is, filmgoers know that histories are rhetorically constructed narratives, that “events” and “facts” are open to various uses and multiple interpretations. And, as filmgoers have not been able to escape the lessons of historiography, so, on their side (and try as they might), historians have not been able to escape the lessons of the movies and television. Also caught up in the acceleration of visual representation and perpetually confronted with and “overwhelmed” by screen “evidence”, even historians have succumbed – often against both their injunction and will – to the seemingly immediate power of the moving image to, at least in the moment, “naturally” persuade one of its cause. Which is to say, historians are often moved by movies – even historically “inaccurate” ones. Today, then, in our culture, the binary oppositions commonly posited between the transparency of the image and the opacity of the word, between “mythology” and “history”, between “filmgoers” and “historians” no longer hold.

Establishing shot

The mise-en-scene is a screen, in this instance the site of a scholarly electronic discussion group called H-Film, [2]  one of a large number of such groups subsumed under H-Net based at the University of Chicago (and endorsed by the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, and the Southern Historical Association) . No images here: just written text – even if its subject matter is the cinema. What follows is a true historical account – perhaps, more appositely, an authentic historical account. That is, even though I shall elide the specific dates, names, and places that might identify the participants, it is an account that, I daresay, will “ring true” and resonate in many of my readers as it did for me. The event at its center not only provoked this present meditation, but also demonstrated that, although they may be differentiated to some degree, there is no future in opposing mythology to history, filmgoer to historian.

Not so very long ago, someone (it could have been a professor, an independent scholar, a student) posted a short inquiry to H-Film asking for recommendations of films that “realistically” depicted the Middle Ages. Edited for brevity, these were some of the responses (also from professors, independent posters, and students): “I’m afraid that period is a little before my time, so I can’t speak to it personally. I’ll ask one of my friends if he can recall what it was like. But seriously, three films stand out in my mind that are generally regarded as successfully conveying the atmosphere of the Middle Ages:  The Return of Martin Guerre, Beatrice, and Andrei Rublev.” Another: “Maybe The Lion in Winter – at least what reading I’ve done about the main characters suggests they got them right as people (although not as historical events – there was no Christmas Court in Chinon that year). There seems enough muck and dirt and rushes on the floors to suggest something of the twelfth century.” Another: “Orson Welles’ Chimes at Midnight has the most realistic medieval battle that I’ve ever seen (not that I’ve seen very many [diacritical marks of a winking face]). I’d also suggest Robin and Marian, The Advocate, The Name of the Rose, Flowers of St.Francis and Monty Python and the Holy Grail, The Seventh Seal and The Virgin Spring – if you equate realism with graphic depictions of squalor.” Yet another: “I think Jabberwocky and The Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey both contain quite realistic depictions of medieval life.” Then: “See the essay on this topic by Attreed and Powers in the January 1997 issue of the American Historical Association’s Perspectives. Many suggestions.” And back to the films again: “A quick comparison should be made between Braveheart and First Knight. Braveheart for the most part had the feel in terms of language, behavior, attitudes. In close ups, you could see dirt on their hands, since they didn’t wash their hands as often. Food was often a soupy mixture in a bowl, eaten without utensils but by dipping bread in it. Lots of mud, dirt, rain. They had poorer shelters then unless they were wealthy. First Knight, by comparison, seems glossed-over and shiny modern day. Everyone was sparkling clean, the set was elaborate, and hardly anyone got dirty. Even the torture scene in  Braveheart seemed accurate; the torture implements look dull and dirty, which would have been more painful, and the dwarfs came out ‘to entertain’ the crowd before the events began. This all seems historically accurate.” Countered by this: “I am not an expert on Scottish history, but a pile of distortions occurred in Braveheart to make Wallace appear like a typical hero of an action film. Correspondingly, Robert the Bruce was made to look like a petty crook who implausibly defeats the English army at Bannockburn thus gaining recognition for Scotland’s independence without any merit of his own. Some degree of surface authenticity apart, the film made little attempt to render a genuine account of the historical events. I would suggest that this kind of adventure film, historical or otherwise, has no such ambitions nor does it seriously pretend to. In this sense, they are not lies. They are just entertainment.” Yet another from someone who must be a “real” historian: “I would add  Sorceress. What distinguishes that film and Martin Guerre from the others thus cited, which have few redeeming values as ‘realistic depictions of medieval life’ (unless you define medieval life in terms of ‘squalor, knights in armor,’ and the like) is the active participation of historians in their making. Films such as Flowers of St. Francis and The Passion of Joan of Arc also are reasonably faithful to the history and lives they depict. Other films (biopics) like Becket, The Lion in Winter, or the Bergman Joan of Arc and Seberg Saint Joan are a melange of cinematic (or in these cases playwright) invention and intermittent historical fidelity.” And then: “I want to second Tavernier’s Beatrice and add Herzog’s Heart of Glass for which he purportedly hypnotized his actors to get them thinking outside twentieth century culture, progress, etc. Both films concentrate on the idea of difference, making strange, in order to put forth the idea that another, disconnected time is being framed. By doing so, they make the representation of a past we cannot possibly know (except through its documents) as much the focus as is the ‘realistic’ depiction of that past.” And finally: “I suggest a television source: the Brother Cadfael series on the PBS show Mystery – a little less dirt than reality, but artifacts and terms are in correct context.”

After this, the postings on “realistic depictions of medieval life” petered out as such a round of postings usually do, and the issues of historical realism, historical accuracy, and historical authenticity were displaced onto yet another set of screenings of the past.

Flashback

Raising the challenge that the cinema poses to traditional historiography, historian Robert Rosenstone writes: “Surely I am not the only one to wonder if those we teach or the population at large really know or care about history. . . 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. . . Or to worry if our history really relates us to our own cultural sources. . . “[3] These are significant concerns, indeed.

As a child born into American culture a decade before the last half of the twentieth century, I have a great investment in the palimpsestic relation – at times, the contradictions and, at times, the conflation – of mythological and historical consciousness. At an early age, I was overtaken by moving images – by their ability to tellme things by showing them to me, by their spectacular narratives of display. Indeed, I admit to not having really known or cared much about “academic” and expository history until rather late in my life.

In grade school, we had to memorize dates and remember who had fought what battles and signed which treaties; uninterested in what seemed to me hollow and timeless historical acts and figures, I was more curious about “real” people “back then” and wondered whether they laughed and what they ate and wore and if they used forks. So, forgetting the substance or import of some such historical activity as “colonization” or moral imperative as “Manifest Destiny,” I went off to the movies to watch a past unfold in which people drank wine from jeweled goblets, ripped apart roasted meats with their hands or swords, and sopped huge rounds of bread in the ambiguous contents of rough wooden bowls. (This particular visual marking of material interest is hardly uncommon or merely generational for a culture in medias res: hence, the student – more than forty years later on H-Film -noting  Braveheart’s historical accuracy because it showed that, in the Middle Ages, “food was often a soupy mixture in a bowl eaten without utensils but by dipping bread in it.”) At any rate, Benjamin, while dead right about the age of mechanical reproduction, was dead wrong when, stirred by an antique spoon in a shop window, he wrote: “One thing is reserved to the greatest epic writers: the capacity to feed their heroes.” [4] The movies do it all the time.

I also watched those Romans with insistent fringes, the ones who wore togas and gave speeches in the Forum. I encountered people who once lived in castles, who were encased in armor and chain mail, who killed and conquered natives (not yet described as “indigenous peoples”), who opened the Northwest Passage, who had their heads put on the block, who sailed and/or pirated trade and war ships (often hard to tell apart) in the Indies and Caribbean (also hard to tell apart), and who lived history in extravagant clothes and – particularly if they were women – spent a good deal of history changing them. In those formative years, the history that fired my imagination (as distinct from the history that dulled it) came in concrete and spatialized images – images that moved and moved me. I confronted the colonization of the “New World” through The Captain from Castille and Plymouth Adventure, medieval Italy through The Flame and the Arrow, and came to really care about Henry VIII’s England by identifying with the political (as well as romantic) education of head-strong and adolescent Young Bess.

In college, I was an English major and, through the imperatives of scheduling, continued my historical education according to no principled chronology. I took a course in Shakespeare before I took one in Chaucer, took Chaucer before I took Milton; I had no inclination nor charge to put them in temporal order (let alone temporal relation). My lack of historical consciousness in the classroom, however, was again offset by my historical experience at the movies. This was the time of, among other great foreign directors, Ingmar Bergman; the strangeness and power of his The Seventh Seal and The Virgin Spring allowed me (paradoxically, of course) to feel and comprehend the “otherness” of medieval existence in a world of flagellants, plague, dark and dank interiors, dancing bears, real superstition, real religious belief – and, yes, rounds of bread dipped in bowls of ambiguous stew.

Did I believe all these images? Did I think these narratives were the most accurate accounts of past events? Did they ruin me? Now that I read history and teach historiography, am I cured? Has “real” history replaced the “false” history of my formative years? Not really. As a child in medias res (that is, cinematically competent), I don’t think I ever believed the image as a historical record. How could one, with stars like Garbo or Flynn or Charlton Heston figured on the screen, with pirate ships and palaces that were spic and span (no insistent squalor here), with gold lamé push-up bras? Indeed, I find it rather funny that Hollywood historical film is so often castigated not merely for its historical “errors,” its melodrama, and its “bourgeois ideology,” but also for the seductive “transparency” of its supposed “seamless” construction. One could be perverse and make a counter argument, enumerating all the “distancing” and reflexive devices that point to such films as highly stylized, opaque, and meta-historical productions — not least among them the presence of stars who represent not “real” historical personages, but, rather, their historical “magnitude.” [5]

As a child, then, I believed the image as image, a real image of real things: hence my intense material interest in it. I also didn’t believe in the narratives as accurate accounts of past lives and times – or, for that matter, as the only accounts. They were, however, the most compelling accounts. In moving and showing human bodies disposed and active in space, they moved me in time. Indeed, so much so that they eventually led me elsewhere: first to art histories and film histories, and then to what is legitimated as academic, “non-fictional” history. This movement, however, was not “progressive.” Earlier images and narratives have not been erased from my adult historical consciousness, nor would my sense of history be somehow purified by their disappearance. Indeed, all those “insistent fringes,” all that medieval squalor, all those Christians dying and buffalo stampeding, all that clanking armor and swordplay, do not merely haunt the sophistication of my present sense of history; they also, dare I say, quicken it, flesh it out, nourish it (even if with ambiguous stew). If they do not quite constitute (and they just might) Benjamin’s “dialectical image,” then, they at least, through their material means and the concrete purchase they give us on an absent past, make us care.

Amidst competing narratives, contradictions, fragments, and discontinuities, the massive authority of institutions and the small compass of personal experience, sometimes the representation of phenomenal “things” like dirt and hair are, in medias res, all we have to hold on to – are where our purchase on temporality and its phenomenological possibilities as “history” are solidly grasped and allow us a place, a general premise, a ground (however base) from which to transcend our present and imagine the past as once having “real” existential presence and value. And, acknowledging that the past once was existentially valuable to real people who moved – like movie images – in space and time, creates a present in which we might care enough “to educate the image-creating medium within us to see dimensionally, stereoscopically, into the depths of the historical shade.” [6]

Footnotes:
[1] Roland Barthes, “The Romans in films”, in Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York, 1972), 26.
[2] The “H” standing for History: URL < H-film@h-net.msu.edu >
[3] Robert Rosenstone,  Visions of the Past: The Challenge of Film to our Idea of History (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1995), 23
[4] Walter Benjamin, “One way street”, trans. Edmund Jephcott, in Walter Benjamin,  Selected Writings, volume 1 (1913-1926), eds Marcus Bullock & Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, 1996), 466
[5] Vivian Sobchack, “Surge and splendor: a phenomenology of the Hollywood historical epic” , Representations 29 (Winter 1990), 36
[6] Susan Buck-Morss,  The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, Mass : MIT Press, 1991), 29