Uploaded 16 April 1999
Begin at the beginning. Which beginning? The 1988 AHR Forum. A historical mistake or an idea whose time had come. A breakthrough into a new field or the beginning of the end of history as we know it. Take your pick. Like all moments it was over determined. The coming together of too many lines of force, moments, ideas, impulses, desires ever to be charted clearly.
Instigator. The instrument of one of those lines of force. That is my role. A dragnet historian who has been trained that history is just the facts, m’am. A historian who after teaching with film for a decade is increasingly puzzled by the relationship between what we write on the page and what is on the screen. A historian who becomes even more puzzled after being involved in the process of turning his books into films. A historian whose puzzlement goes into notes he writes to himself.
The first essay [1] is not an essay. It is those notes. Thirty-three disconnected paragraphs full of questions, observations, reflections on the issues raised for him by film. So odd that he doesn’t trust them to speak for themselves. Their submission to the AHR is supported by phone calls to the editor that draw on the historian’s good dragnet reputation to insist it is high time the journal publish something on film. After many calls the editor agrees. With the subject matter but not with the form. The paragraphs must be connected. Discipline must be preserved.
[Let’s see if I can get away with disconnected paragraphs in this venue.]
The editor is also an instrument. Edging the oldest journal in the profession towards a post-dragnet world in which historical debates give way to debates about history. Its possibilities. Its truth claims. The editor is not there yet. Neither is the journal. Ten years later they are still not. But the walls have been breached.
We are all grounded in a discipline. In my case, the discipline of History. We have learned its norms. Internalized and practiced them. We have had to believe them, at some level of belief, or we would not have been taken seriously. Would not take ourselves seriously. However much we may want to stretch the boundaries of that discipline, we are always afterwards marked by that training.
The original AHR Forum is not, as the call to this current forum suggests, “interdisciplinary.” The essays are written by five historians. Or is it more accurate to say four historians and Hayden White? Historians are people who are trained to begin with the facts. White was trained the same way. But by now, sitting alone in a room, he may constitute an entire interdisciplinary department.
This current forum is slightly more interdisciplinary. Here the tilt is away from historians. The participants include half a dozen people in cinema studies and literature and two historians. This alone suggests something about what the organizers call “cinematic representations of history.” They have been less the systematic concern of scholars inside the historical profession than those outside it.
No surprise here. We are talking History. A discipline. The way we view the world. The rules of the game. Its not easy to change those rules. The dragnet historian has a particular stake in the past. A particular past that only s/he has the skill, expertise, research techniques to unearth and tell correctly. The way it should be told, on the page, in words. The way s/he was trained. Turn that world over to someone else, a filmmaker, and chaos is bound to result. Who can know the truth of what is on the screen? Where are the facts? How does one constitute facts on the screen?
This may seem like autobiography. But it is really an attempt to situate this subfield? tendency? thread? within the world of academia. Be honest. It is far easier to talk interdisciplinary than to be interdisciplinary. Scholarly discourses are hardly compatible. The stakes are different. For someone in cinema studies or literature to write an analysis of a historical film is to do what s/he is trained to do: unpack or explore or deconstruct meanings. For a historian it is to validate the competition which has already won the public contest over who gets to tell the past. The competition which now threatens to invade the scholarly game.
For historians all this underlay the issues ten years ago. It still underlies them. Along with a certain mind set about reality. The notion that History is based upon irreducible units of knowledge. The fetishism of the fact. One thing this means is that film, particularly dramatic film, cannot be History. Because it is clear that things have to be invented to make stories coherent, intense, fittable into a two hour timeslot. Little wonder most of the interesting work on history and film is done by people in literature and cinema studies.
In the decade since the AHR forum, the history profession has given considerable energy to film. Reviews, panels, essays, books. Most of this activity gives the lie to any notion of Progress. Let a single work stand for the profession. A collective work in which fifty-nine historians (okay, some are journalists or in other academic fields) each wrestle with a single film (occasionally more than one). The title says it all: Past Imperfect.[2] As if, somewhere on the page, one can locate a perfect and knowable past. One that cannot make it onto the screen. This theme is underscored by the format. Each page divided horizontally. On the top half, History. On the bottom half, Hollywood. Never the twain shall meet?
It’s easy to make fun of historians. It’s even fun if you are one of them. Yet the problems are real. For them. For us. Historians care about what actually happened. The events. The moments. What people said. What they did. They like such things. They want to describe them. Understand them. The most difficult thing for them (for me) to accept about film is that this most literal of media is not at all literal. That what we see on the screen is less a description than an invention of a past.
A past that relates to the History they write. But how? For historians that is the issue. The leading question. One which hovers over the essays in the original AHR Forum. Continues in the film reviews in historical journals, in panels at conferences and meetings. Becomes the focus of my own subsequent work. How does the historical film fit with regard to History on the page? How can an academic historian think about, evaluate these visual works which narrate the past? To what extent can a filmmaker be a Historian?
[I speak here of the dramatic film. The kind that draws big audiences. That frequently becomes the subject of public controversy. By contrast with their critique of dramatic works, historians have a weakness for the documentary. Its indexical relationship to reality seems more like what they do. More about the facts. Ignored is the fact that the documentary is structured much like the dramatic film, with a story arc, heroes and villains, and footage that often does not show what it purports to show.]
My own work subsequent to the Forum led directly to the realization that the label, Historian – surprise! – is largely a question of definition. That in fact filmmakers (some of them) are already Historians. Not Historians who adhere to the current rules of the game of History as played in academia. But Historians in an older, more traditional sense of the word: people who seriously endeavor to make meaning out of the traces of the past.
The lesson struck my consciousness after seeing Alex Cox’s film, Walker (1988), the “true story” of the leader of a band of Americans who invaded Nicaragua in 1954. For want of a better word, the film might be (and has been) called postmodern. Such a label is less important than the style: Walker is history as black humor, history as farce, history in which overt anachronisms (Mercedes automobiles, helicopters, Time magazines, Cokes in the 1850s) work to deny the literalness of the image and to suggest the continuities between past and present. By flouting the rules of both written History and traditional historical films, this film points towards new ways of representing and understanding the past.
Walker the film sent me back to read everything ever written since the eighteen fifties about Walker the historical figure. What resulted was a kind of revelation. The film’s humor, anachronisms, over the top bloodshed and violence, and jaunty musical score – all these intersected with and commented upon both the long tradition of portraying Walker and the conventions of the historical film, from Griffith to Sergio Leone. Like the best historical films, Walker is a cunning mixture of fact and invention. Gloriously false to the past at the level of fact, its truth claims work at the level of argument and metaphor. Giving us a compelling portrait of the democrat as imperialist – then, now, and in between.
In Walker, filmmaker Alex Cox does more than play Historian. He shows that the issue for the historical film is not the (literal) facts m’am, but the overall portrait. The argument. The organizing metaphor. The question of how the work engages the discourse of history. That vast body of data, arguments, debates, oral, written, and visual texts that comprise the field into which each new work of history must enter. Within which each work must find its way.
All this may sound abstract. But perhaps less so when you focus on a more familiar film and a better known period of history – the Bolshevik Revolution in Sergei Eisenstein’s October (1927). To study this film in connection with other explanations of the Russian revolution, to compare its account to works by historians of different schools and periods, from John Reed to Richard Pipes, is to see that Eisenstein provides a reasonable – dare we call it true? – interpretation of the events leading to the October days. As reasonable as that provided by anyone else.
With regard to major, specific moments, events, data nodules normally used to mark the stages of the revolution – the February downfall of the Czar, the July Days, the actions of Kornilov or Kerensky, the role of the Bolsheviks – October‘s interpretation always runs parallel to that of one or more historians. Certainly its overall image or governing metaphor falls well into the spectrum of the normal historical discourse. Eisenstein’s revolution is a spontaneous movement of masses discontented and angry over government corruption, a dwindling food supply, and a bungled war effort. Masses shaped and led by a small but determined party of Bolsheviks who, while the Soviets debate endlessly in the Smolny Institute, seize the power centers of Petrograd.
October is not meant to be literal. It invents incidents and moments, overtly alters or fictionalizes others. But such inventions are metaphors that allow what is on screen to resonate, to generalize into a larger sense of historical change. Take the raising of the bridges to cut off Central Petrograd (undertaken often by the Russian government but not in July), that wonderful series of images (the horse hanging from the bridge, the hair of the fallen woman erotically sliding into the crack) – all these point to the geographical and social class divisions in St. Petersburg, the proletariat north of the Neva River, the bourgeoisie and government south. Or take the exaggerated assault on the Winter Palace, which never happened – this screen violence looks ahead to the bloody Civil War to come, the true violence of the revolution that flows directly from the events of October but cannot fit into its timeframe. [Something both literally and figuratively true; originally Eisenstein planned to include the Civil War, but the need to finish the film for the tenth anniversary of the revolution made that plan impossible.]
The meaning of October or any historical film lies in a new realm. One that exists somewhere in the narrow land between history and poetry as defined by Aristotle. October tells us neither what happened nor what might have happened. It presents a mixture of the two, a commentary on the former by using the latter ( a mixture not so different from written history if one looks closely at our organizing tropes and metaphors).
Some historians will object. October is not the Bolshevik Revolution. Schindler’s List (1993) is not the Holocaust. Glory (1989) is not the Civil War. True. But – and here is the argument that must be turned back upon historians – the very same thing can be said about any of our books. There is no Bolshevik Revolution, no Holocaust, no Civil War except in a text (written, visual, oral) that evokes the events, comments upon them, and interprets them – all at the same time. Which is exactly what film does.
Except for the facts, m’am.
The difference between History on the page and on the screen is the difference between discourses. Part of the same problem historians can have with theorists of history, narratologists, cultural critics, and others who have never faced the practical issues of trying to tell the past. To arrange its traces into an account of something that happened. To deal with the facts. To face the question: just what do we do with these stubborn things? How do we use them in our accounts of what happened?
Sometimes it can seem as if those who critique traditional History and those who embrace film don’t actually care what happened in the past. Sometimes it can seem as if those who write so easily about History only care about metaphor, and damn the details. But the historian cannot do this. We need to connect the two. To find in those details, the events, the moments, the people of that vanished world the metaphors that lead to understanding.
This is an argument for why historians need to be in the mix. For a touch of empiricism. Fact must be part of any discussion of history and film. However we constitute them. However we use them as the basis of metaphors and symbols. They too are part of the discourse of history.
One major issue that nobody tackled in the original AHR Forum and that nobody has since taken on very directly or clearly is this: what does film add to our sense of the past that the word cannot? And how do we talk about this addition? For the normal dramatic film the answer usually stresses the emotional, the visceral, the experiential. The empathy the arises from seeing, hearing, feeling – kicked up by music, color, motion, sound, by Foley artists, cinematographers, and actors. We know something is going on here that doesn’t happen on the page. But what?
The issue of what the film image adds to history is something Roberto Rossellini explored. In a film such as The Age of the Medici (1973), there is no drama. Figures, clad in appropriate costumes, stand around in various Renaissance settings, giving lectures to each other and us about Florence, the Medici, the banking system, the manufacture of cloth, the relationship between people and rulers. So slow are the scenes, so long the shots that we have time to absorb costumes, settings, decorations, ambience, and to think about them (or to fall asleep). The Age of the Medici does not pretend to be a mirror. It doesn’t tell but, rather, it points at the past. To words it adds something about materiality (as it appears in immaterial light) of the past. History as colors, textures, spaces, costumes, gestures, faces unavailable to the written text.
Historical film as a parallel discourse to written History. One that comments upon standard historical discourse. One that (as I have written elsewhere), visions, contests, and revisions that discourse. But one that can and never should be divorced from it.
Film challenges historians as part of the more general rethinking of the past that has been going on in recent years. A rethinking taking place around the edges of the historical profession and – to read the recent works of defenders of a traditional History – has begun to shake the foundations of traditional practice. Film also challenges theorists, at least those who have proclaimed the death of History. While some wonder over the very possibility of a meaningful telling of the past, filmmakers – like the child who sees the emperor without his clothes – go ahead and do it. Create stories that engage the issues of the past about which people care. About which they make people care.
Filmmakers have something to teach us by not claiming their stories are the past but are based upon the past. Based upon True Stories. Such disclaimers that now appear at the outset of a historical films should be taken up by those who write History. We too should begin to say: This is based upon a True Story. Upon the traces of the past. But beware: I have constituted those traces as facts and incorporated them into an argument of my own.
Footnotes:
[1]Articles by Rosenstone and White in this forum are represented in this issue of Screening the Past .
[2]Mark C. Carnes ed., Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies (New York: Henry Holt, 1995).