Filmmakers as Public Historians

Can a movie be accurate enough to please historians? This seems to be the thematic question asked by the majority of this week's readings regarding the interaction of history and Hollywood. That is simplifying the issue surely but certainly no more than how some historians accuse producers, directors, and screenwriters of downsizing historical events and people.

The articles from this week were motivated by the inclusion of filmmakers as public historians. Including the creators of movies into the realm as public historian is both exciting and frustrating. Some, like Toplin, find the medium of film as incredibly revealing about both and present and past cultures. Others find plenty to criticize.

The first to consider are documentaries. Frisch examines the oral histories in a PBS special on the Vietnam War experience. Rose and Corley research the documentaries made for PBS by Ken Burns. Both articles find documentaries lacking and for similar reasons: both Burns and the documentary on the War selectively choose what to present to the public which results in a less than honest depiction of history. Burns claims that he is compensating for poorly trained history teachers and he blurs the line between director and educator. Sometimes he seems to purposely be both and using either to support his goals of the moment. In this way the authors find him particularly dangerous to the public because he plays both sides of the coin and the authors seem to want him to fit neatly into either one category or the other.

Hollywood movies result in different analysis. In the article on Le Retour de Martine Guerre, the author Natalie Davis laments how her research on a 16th century French story resulted in a less than realistic understanding of peasant life. Her frustration of the style of trial shown in the movie did not lend itself to sympathetic ears. Without the filmmakers ability to account for their actions the debate is one sided. The directors expressed sincerity at including Davis and used her counsel regularly throughout the film process. Perhaps the choice in a public trial had to do with other things, like making the judges less of the villian that private trials would certainly have implied. Davis critiques the directors anachronistic choices without accounting for the development of plot and narrative functions (symbolism, simile, metaphor, etc).

Toplin's conclusions are different. He understands artistic license and expects less historical accuracy because he sees the movies as products of the present rather than exploration of the past. Toplin's article is the most interesting because he evaluates movies much as other texts from the class have evaluated museum exhibits. By allowing movies to speak about the present instead of criticizing every mistake, the films could become more valuable to historians. Contextualizing the time that the movies were made could yield much to to cultural and social historians.

When it comes to film, be they blockbusters or PBS specials, the public and historians should take what they can and discard the rest. It is plausible that more should be expected from documentaries but when profit is the motive than is is understandable that people would make something that would sell to investors and an audience. Burns is backed by General Motors. If he failed to make things that did well than he might lose funding. The reality of having millions of dollars pulled from projects is something that few professors will ever have to face, until then maybe we should cut them some slack.

Winston Churchill once said "the farther back you look, the further forward you will see."