Historical Feature Film

1. Historical Feature Film

2. Feature Film > Some (confusing) criteria historians use in evaluation • accuracy of detail • use of original documents • consulting with a professional historian • type/nationality/looks of actors • appropriate music • “poetical and metaphorical” use of historical details (see Robert Rosenstone quoting Gerda Lerner)

3. Feature Film > Context for Article: Historical Film and Postmodernism • “Postmodernism”--contradictory term, used to denote post-Fordist economy, non-linear anti-modernist literature and art, and methods of historical research based on textual interpretation rather than fact-finding • Roland Barthes: there are no facts, just “reality effects” • Joan Scott: because language is important, we have no direct access to our experience - we should study instead how people narrate their experience • Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: “subaltern” (illiterate, subordinate, racially and socially oppressed) peoples cannot “speak” for themselves because their language is determined by the dominant (educated, elite) culture • Rosenstone’s conclusion: anachronisms and “displaced facts” are ok, as long as the film’s interpretation “rings true” as a result

4. Feature Film > Fictions “historically true” in a “filmic way” according to Rosenstone • Walker: conversation between Vanderbilt and Walker that never happened • Born on the Fourth of July: events depicted as part of Syracuse U. protest really happened at other protests at other universities • A Knight’s Tale: “The Wave” and other signs of contemporary fan behavior

5. Feature Film > Historical film that presents history more conventionally: The Return of Martin Guerre • A film about an impostor who takes place of a husband who goes to war. The film takes place in a 16th-century French village. • Natalie Zemon Davis, a professional historian of France, consulted on the film. Her book was the basis for the film. • But: Natalie Zemon Davis was criticized for her book anyway, because both the book and the movie speculated about the motives behind the wife’s acceptance of her fake husband--her critic argued that Davis produced an unverifiable “feminist” interpretation

6. Feature Film > Historical film that presents history without anachronism: The Return of Martin Guerre • A film about an impostor who takes place of a husband who goes to war. The film takes place in a 16th-century French village. • Natalie Zemon Davis, a professional historian of France, consulted on the film. Her book was the basis for the film. • But: Natalie Zemon Davis was criticized for her book anyway, because both the book and the movie speculated about the motives behind the wife’s acceptance of her fake husband--her critic argued that Davis produced an unverifiable “feminist” interpretation

7. Feature Film > Historical film that aroused protests of French historians despite its historical veracity: Danton (dir. Andrzei Wajda, 1983) • A film about the French Revolution, where Danton’s execution during the Terror is used as a metaphor for communist repressions in Eastern Europe • French historians attacked the film as a misinterpretation of the history of the French Revolution • But: Andrzei Wajda was more interested in communism in Poland than in revolutionary France

8. Feature Film > Historical film comedy that does not try to be factual yet was lauded for authenticity: The Front (dir. Woody Allen, 1976) • A film about blacklisted screenwriters in 1950s United States where Woody Allen plays a gambler who submits screenplays written by his blacklisted friends. • Nobody expected a comedy to be realistic • But: Woody Allen used many actors who were blacklisted during the 1950s so his film is often used by historians teaching McCarthyism

9. Film Review Assignment > Some questions • What is the film’s genre? (drama, documentary, etc.) • What is the film’s audience? (TV viewers, general film audience, students) • What is the film’s main historical point? (what sense of history is it trying to convey “metaphorically,” as per Rosenstone’s article) • What evidence does this film use? (relevant to both documentary and feature films) • In what ways is this film successful? • It what ways does this film fail as history?