A Companion to the Historical Film

Robert A. Rosenstone, Constantin Parvulescu, Robert A. Rosenstone, Constantin Parvulescu

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781119169574, 9781444337242
• eBook ISBN: 9781118322642
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

Broad in scope, this interdisciplinary collection of original scholarship on historical film features essays that explore the many facets of this expanding field and provide a platform for promising avenues of research.

• Offers a unique collection of cutting edge research that questions the intention behind and influence of historical film
• Essays range in scope from inclusive broad-ranging subjects such as political contexts, to focused assessments of individual films and auteurs
• Prefaced with an introductory survey of the field by its two distinguished editors
• Features interdisciplinary contributions from scholars in the fields of History, Film Studies, Anthropology, and Cultural and Literary Studies

Part 1

History and the Medium of Film

Chapter 1

Politics and the Historical Film

Hotel Rwanda and the Form of Engagement

Alison Landsberg

In The Politics of Aesthetics, Jacques Rancière writes that “the logic of stories and the ability to act as historical agents go together” (Rancière 2006: 39). He thus posits a fundamental connection between aesthetic practices and politics. For him,

Political statements and literary locutions produce effects in reality. They define models of speech or action but also regimes of sensible intensity. They draft maps of the visible, trajectories between the visible and the sayable, relationships between modes of being, modes of saying, and modes of doing and making. (Rancière 2006: 39)

Literary narratives and political statements both describe and construct a version of reality. For Rancière, the political potential of aesthetics is a product not so much of the content of a particular art object, but rather of its form. The aesthetic realm, precisely because it is the site of formal innovation, is an arena in which new thoughts become thinkable and, as a result, new political meanings and horizons appear.

This chapter will consider the genre of the historical film in light of Rancière's observations. I will suggest that the historical film has a distinct—though not always exploited—capacity to provoke political consciousness. In part, this potential results from the fact that historical films make truth claims. But the power of such films is also a product of the formal strategies they deploy. I have elsewhere described the ways in which certain historical films create prosthetic memories in their viewers (Landsberg 2004); that happens, in part, as an effect of the specific power of film to bring distant events near, to produce affect, to physically and psychologically engage audiences. And indeed, political engagement inevitably has an affective component—we are only truly engaged politically when we care about and feel affectively touched by the issues. But, for a film to awaken political consciousness, there must also be techniques and strategies at play—both formal and narrative—that prevent overidentification with victims to the point of resignation. When what is being represented filmicly is an aspect of the historical past, the possibility emerges for viewers to engage deeply and critically, and quite possibly to embrace new political commitments, both in the present and in the future.

I would like to acknowledge right from the start that—to many readers—any consideration of the political potential of historical film is anathema. There is a tendency to think of history as properly impartial or objective, as a straightforward reflection of “what really happened.” But at least in the current generation of academic historians, there is an understanding that all histories, whether written or filmic, are interpretations, narrative constructions, and never simply transparent reflections of the past. Following Hayden White, Robert Rosenstone emphasizes: “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” (Rosenstone 1998: 35). This insight enables a consideration of the particular way in which any historical narrative works the past into meaning and opens up the possibility of analyzing the kind of ideological work that cinematic history might perform. However, most work devoted to uncovering ideology in historical films has tended to focus on those films that are ideologically conservative. Indeed, it is by now abundantly clear how ideologically inflected history can serve reactionary ends—particularly when it advances nationalistic and fascistic agendas. There is also a precedent for explicitly political historical films on the left. Filmmakers from Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov to Ousmane Sembene and Patricio Guzmán have considered the filmic medium a tool for raising political consciousness and for promoting revolutionary ideas. But very little has been written on the ways in which representations of the past in mainstream cinema might stimulate political consciousness.

In the American context, historical films with a legible politics are often condemned for bias.¹ Indeed, concerns about manipulation are legitimate. And yet any good history—written or otherwise—has a point, makes an argument, emphasizes certain details and omits others. In the end, historical films that take seriously their obligation or responsibility to the past, maintaining fidelity to the larger truth of the events depicted,² are less easily reducible to propaganda. What I am interested in here is how traumas of the past can be represented in ways that might move individuals toward an orientation where they are more inclined to pursue social justice. Because the historical film can touch, shock, provoke viewers in a tactile, palpable way, it can communicate as a written monograph cannot. This is particularly true of historical films that are overtly political, addressing or speaking to viewers, compelling them to listen. To make the injustices of the past visible, audible, palpable can be a crucial step toward raising political consciousness.

It is worth taking a moment to discuss what might constitute politics, or the political, in film. First of all, on the macro level there is a politics to aesthetic forms, as Rancière describes. Within any given society there is what he calls a “distribution of the sensible,” which “defines what is visible or not in a common space, endowed with a common language” (2006: 12–13). Rancière identifies “an ‘aesthetics’ at the core of politics.” Aesthetics, here, is

a delimitation of spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise, that simultaneously determines the place and the stakes of politics as a form of experience. Politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time. (Rancière 2006: 13)

It is thus first within the realm of the aesthetic, through “aesthetic practices,” that new formal arrangements in the social world become visible and thinkable. Second, film can immerse viewers experientially in a world that lies outside of their own lived experience and can, as a result, give them a stake in, or make them care about, a group of people, practices, or past events that they might not have other reason to care about. Third, film can challenge viewers' own taken-for-granted subject position and worldview. Through narrative strategies and editing conventions, it can force viewers into a subject position that might be uncomfortable for them and thereby force them to question their own naturalized understandings of geopolitics and their own role in larger social dramas. Finally, there is a politics connected to reception. Perhaps the most powerful reason for taking the historical film seriously has to do with its broad reach. Unlike the historical monograph—or even the more popular trade-press history books—filmic depictions of the past have the potential to reach and influence an enormous audience. The cinema's populist character is the grounds for its political efficacy.

Historically, radical or leftist politics have usually been associated with avant-garde films, while mainstream dramatic cinema has tended to reinforce the status quo. But, as my list of criteria above suggests, different filmic strategies engage politics in different ways. The conventions of the dramatic film foster identification, and the immersive quality of this kind of film compels viewers to have a stake in what they see. Furthermore, such films tend to attract much larger audiences. The innovative or experimental film, on the other hand, works in part through alienation and distancing, shock and disidentification. Between the poles represented by these two genres are those films—many of which are independently produced—that draw on elements from both. Such films tend not to be wholesale rejections of Hollywood, but they are more self-reflective and critical, more willing to break from the conventions of classical Hollywood cinema through innovative formal devices that structure a different form of engagement. Later in this chapter I will consider Terry George's Hotel Rwanda (2004) as an example of this sort of film. But first I will briefly examine the properties that enable the cinema to produce identification and connection on the one hand and distance and alienation on the other. Taken together, these contradictory effects have the potential to awaken political consciousness.

Identification and Bodily Engagement

When it comes to the historical film, there is reason to be skeptical of the use of affect, which is often regarded as an impediment to, or at least as a replacement for, cognition or intellectual work. Vanessa Agnew has described an “affective turn” in historical representation, an increasing interest and investment in experiential modes of engagement with the historical past (Agnew 2007). What worries her is that film viewers or participants in historical reenactments will misread the past by projecting their own contemporary responses backwards; the concern is that the experiential mode fosters an easy identification with the past, one that loses a sense of the past as a “foreign country.” And yet a large part of the power of the cinema derives precisely from its tactile, haptic, sensuous quality—from the fact that it addresses the body of the spectator, making her or him feel, and then think about, things he or she might not otherwise encounter.

The relationship between viewer and filmic text has long been of interest to film scholars, though the ways in which this relationship has been imagined and understood has changed rather dramatically over time. The notion that films affect the body of the spectator and thereby influence his or her thoughts dates back to cinema's first decades. In 1916 Hugo Münsterberg authored a psychological study of film, which was concerned primarily with the power of this new medium to affect viewers; writes Münsterberg:

The intensity with which the plays take hold of the audience cannot remain without strong social effects. It has even been reported that sensory hallucinations and illusions have crept in; neurasthenic persons are especially inclined to experience touch or temperature or smell or sound impressions from what they see on the screen. The associations become as vivid as realities, because the mind is so completely given up to the moving pictures. (Münsterberg 1970: 95)

For Münsterberg, film's power to shape consciousness derives from its sensuous and tactile mode of address; the sense experiences it generates in its spectators “become as vivid as realities.” German cultural critics of the early twentieth century, too, were acutely aware of the power of cinema to affect viewers in a bodily way. In the 1930s Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer began to theorize the experiential nature of the cinema. For Kracauer, film “seizes the ‘human being with skin and hair,’” as “the material elements that present themselves in film directly stimulate the material layers of the human being: his nerves, his senses, his entire physiological substance” (quoted in Hansen 1993: 458).

In part, these theorists are describing the ability of cinematic images to provoke a kind of mimetic response in viewers. In the words of anthropologist Michael Taussig, mimesis means “to get hold of something by means of its likeness,” which, for him, implies both “a copying or imitation, and a palpable, sensuous, connection between the very body of the perceiver and the perceived” (Taussig 1993: 21). Mimesis entails a “corporeal understanding” (ibid.). Certain filmic strategies—specific techniques of both filming and editing—powerfully elicit mimesis and thus foster identification with a particular character or point of view. One such technique is the close-up. When the camera is trained on a person's face as it registers pleasure or pain or humiliation or anger, the viewer cannot but feel his or her own body respond in kind. Similarly, point-of-view shots force viewers to look at the world quite literally from another's perspective, the effect of which is to bring them into the action of the film and into the mental and emotional life of the protagonist. Cinema, in other words, enables its viewers to inhabit subject positions to which they have no “natural” connection. It offers spectators access to another's mind and motivations, and that other might have different life experiences, convictions, and commitments.

This can be a particularly powerful device in the case of the historical film, where the events depicted are supposed to have actually happened. Linking those in the audience with the characters in the film has the effect of immersing the former in historical events and in foreign political, social, and economic dynamics, of making them care about these things, and even of prompting them to feel that they have a stake in the events depicted. The cinema, then, might be imagined as a site in which people experience a particularly intense bodily encounter with lives and contexts at great temporal and spatial remove from their own lived experiences—which of course is central to the acquisition of prosthetic memories.

In the 1970s the scholarship on cinematic spectatorship, influenced as it was by Louis Althusser on the one hand and by Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan on the other, conceptualized the cinema as an ideological apparatus,³ treating spectatorship as a process of ideological interpellation. Some recent film theory has posited a more fluid form of spectatorship, where the viewer moves in and out of identifications with different characters and scenarios even over the course of a single film.⁴ In part, this scholarship has sought to afford viewers more agency. At the same time scholars have also paid increased attention to the experiential, sensuous nature of the viewer's engagement with the image.⁵

Some scholars have challenged the very notion of spectatorship, in particular its inherent privileging of the visual, and have emphasized instead—like their predecessors Münsterberg and Kracauer—the multisensuous engagement that the filmic text invites. Scholars such as Laura Marks have become interested in the cinema's tactile mode of address: “film is grasped not solely by an intellectual act but by the complex perception of the body as a whole” (Marks 2000: 145). Similarly, Jennifer Barker insists that “meaning and significance emerge in and are articulated through the fleshy, muscular, and visceral engagement that occurs between films and viewers' bodies” (Barker 2009: 4), that film “comes close to us, and that it literally occupies our sphere” (2).⁶

Nevertheless, writes Barker, “we do not ‘lose ourselves’ in the film, so much as we exist—emerge, really—in the contact between our body and the film's body” (19). In other words, we engage with films deeply, but we do so as ourselves. We can be brought into a film, but not necessarily through identification with the characters. At certain moments the film speaks to us in our own bodies—we are touched, moved, perplexed; but not simply through a mimetic encounter with a character. And what emerges, I think, can be a kind of political consciousness, the awakening of a commitment to the plight of another body—a commitment mediated by affect. To engage in this way, though, depends upon the film's ability to draw the viewer into the historical past, to immerse him or her in its logics, no matter how foreign they seem; and this is predicated in large part on the film's ability to affectively engage viewers.

What I hope to emphasize here is that there is a difference between touching the spectator and bringing him or her into a kind of seamless, immersive identification with a character on the screen. The danger of the dramatic film as a vehicle for history is precisely its virtuosic capacity to lure viewers into a deep identific...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• Part 1: History and the Medium of Film
• Part 2: Filmmakers as Historians
• Part 3: Telling Lives: The Biopic
• Part 4: Cinema and the Nation
• Part 5: Wars and Revolutions
• Part 6: Premodern Times
• Part 7: Slavery and the Postcolonial World
• Index