History and Film

Moving Pictures and the Study of the Past

Maarten Pereboom

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315508030
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The ability to view recorded moving pictures has had a major impact on human culture since the development of the necessary technologies over a century ago. For most of this time people have gone to the movies to be entertained and perhaps edified, but in the meantime television, the videocassette recorder (VCR), the digital versatile disk (DVD) player, the personal computer (desktop and laptop), the internet and other technologies have made watching moving pictures possible at home, in the classroom and just about anywhere else. Today, moving images are everywhere in our culture. Every day, moving picture cameras record millions of hours of activity, human and otherwise, all over the world: your cell phone makes a little video of your friends at a party; the surveillance camera at the bank keeps on eye on customers; journalists' shoulder-carried cameras record the latest from the war zone; and across the world film artists work on all kinds of movies, from low-budget independent projects to the next big-budget Hollywood blockbuster.

Moving pictures have had a great influence on human culture, and this book focuses on using moving images as historical evidence. Studying history means examining evidence from the past to understand, interpret and present what has happened in different times and places. We talk and write about what we have learned, hoping to establish credibility both for what we have determined to be the facts and for whatever meaning or significance we may attach to our reconstruction of the past. Studying history is a scientific process, involving a fairly set methodology. We tend to favor written sources, and we have tended to favor writing as a means of presenting our views of the past. But historians also use all kinds of other documents and artifacts in their work of interpreting the past, including moving pictures.

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Moving Pictures as a Historical Resource

The other night my twelve-year-old son walked into the room and asked: “What are you watching?” To him, it was some old black-and-white movie or maybe a Twilight Zone episode. Actually it was Since You Went Away, a three-hour sentimental drama from 1944 about a mother, Anne Hilton (Claudette Colbert), raising her two daughters (Jennifer Jones and Shirley Temple) alone while husband Tim is off to war. This was a “women’s picture” made by producer David O. Selznick of Gone with the Wind (1939) fame, based on a “women’s book” by Margaret Buell Wilder. It did well at the box office, earning almost $5 million, roughly double the cost of the production, and it was the third-highest grossing film of the year at a time when people went to the movies much more than they do today.¹ It was nominated for nine Academy Awards, including Best Picture, but won only for Best Musical Score. So, in its day, it was a “major motion picture.”

In its day, fine—but how many people today have heard of it? What was I watching, and why was I watching it now? This movie is long, mildly entertaining as a classic, but rather offensive as well: making a face, a police officer tells family friend Tony (Joseph Cotten), getting ready to ship out, to “get one of them Japs for me,” to everyone’s merriment. I was watching the film as a historian: to me the film is a significant portrayal of Second World War American culture, an artifact that I might be able to use with my students to illuminate and discuss attitudes and outlooks from the time. One interesting sequence even leaps out at today’s viewer as relevant to the topic of gay men serving in the military: might it be linked to codes used in other Hollywood films over the years to address that taboo subject? The movie’s portrayal of African Americans is a topic that can be explored in a little more detail, beginning with one of its major characters, the domestic Fidelia, played by Hattie McDaniel. She does not have a last name, apparently, and her name makes a very obvious point about where an African American woman’s virtue apparently lay in those challenging times: in loyal service to decent white folks. McDaniel played a role very similar to the one she had played in Gone With the Wind, and for which a stereotype was named: Mammy. While this portrayal may make today’s audiences cringe, it is also historical evidence of how white filmmakers and their audiences viewed or idealized the roles of African-Americans in “their” society.

Since You Went Away is most interesting both as a presentation and as a representation of feminine virtue in wartime. Anne is our heroine, but her struggle is to find the best way to serve. Her epiphany comes through her final confrontation with town gossip Emily Hawkins (Agnes Moorehead), and in the end, Anne pushes off from her to become a welder in the local shipyard. Yet for us to use Since You Went Away as a historical resource, we need to study the broader context in which the film existed and exists, and that requires, among other things, studying its production to understand what the filmmakers intended the film to be and the reception the film received by critics and audiences. The fact that it did well in its own time suggests that it resonated with audiences, and brings us one step closer to the conclusion that viewers shared its values and attitudes. I would also look at this film as an example of, to quote the subtitle of a book by film scholar Jeanine Basinger, “How Hollywood Spoke to Women.”²

A very different movie made fifty years later about the same war presents a very different story, but one which historians and film scholars also can study. Indeed, there are many books available on war films, and the Second World War in particular, including another one by Basinger.³ Saving Private Ryan (Steven Spielberg, 1998) presents a fictional story set against the backdrop of the D-Day landings and subsequent push into France. I recently used the opening sequence of that film in my Second World War class, because I think it is an impressively realistic reconstruction of what the landings at Omaha Beach must have been like that morning of June 6, 1944. Afterwards we discussed how Steven Spielberg, working with cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, had used the “language” of film to portray and interpret the D-Day landings. My students pointed out the rapid succession of short takes and close-ups, to show the initial fear, confusion, and horror as the first men came ashore, the arbitrariness of who lived, who died, who got an arm or leg shot off. The brutality is relentless and the viewer is not spared the worst: the takes are short, but we can assume the men seeing these things first hand did not linger or stare either. My students also commented on the absence of music and the cinematographer’s choice of a washed-out color palette. One suggested that redder blood might be harder to take, but another commented that the color scheme corresponds to soldiers’ descriptions of what they remember. As the men progress toward establishing a beachhead, the camera pulls back to give us a longer view, and the takes are also longer in duration. A student who had been to the Normandy beaches described the differences between what he saw there and what was portrayed in the film. We were all keenly aware that what we were watching was a reenactment and therefore not real, but despite its necessary limitations as such, it gave us insights into a pivotal moment in the history of the Second World War, based on the perspectives of those who experienced it firsthand.⁴

My point in showing the clip was to give students a sense of the Omaha Beach landing that I could not convey in words and an opportunity to focus on a pivotal moment in the Second World War. An outstanding director, working with the best talent in the filmmaking business, supported by a prolific and widely respected historian of the Second World War, Stephen Ambrose, and a big-studio budget had reconstructed the landing in a way that made the past come to life. While I am certain that my in-class PowerPoint presentations have a similarly riveting effect on my students, this scene from Saving Private Ryan is brilliant, and it engages students with the realities of combat to the limited extent that one can do that apart from the real thing.

These are two very different films, but both have something to contribute to our understanding of the Second World War and its enormous impact. They have different relationships to the events in question, but once we establish what those relationships are, these films become pieces of evidence and works of interpretation that can enhance our understanding of this massive event in ways that words alone cannot. This book is intended to give you the knowledge and skills necessary to make use of film as a historical resource. To do that, you must be able generally to determine a film’s historical context. Once you can identify the relationship of a specific moving picture to a historical problem you wish to address, your research into its content, production, and reception can yield valuable insights into that problem.

MOVING PICTURES, HISTORY, AND CULTURE

The ability to view recorded moving pictures has had a major impact on human culture since the development of the necessary technologies over a century ago. For most of this time, people have gone to the movies to be entertained and perhaps edified, but in the meantime television, the videocassette recorder (VCR), the digital versatile disk (DVD) player, the personal computer (desktop and laptop), the Internet, and other technologies have made watching moving pictures possible at home, in the classroom, and just about any-where else. Today, moving images are everywhere in our culture. Every day, moving-picture cameras record millions of hours of activity, human and other-wise, all over the world: your cell phone makes a little video of your friends at a party; the surveillance camera at the bank keeps an eye on customers; journalists’ shoulder-carried cameras record the latest from the war zone. We call this actuality footage, in that it purports to be recording and presenting real or actual life. At the same time, across the world, film artists work on all kinds of theatrical productions, from low-budget independent projects to the next big-budget Hollywood blockbuster. As we shall see, the lines between actuality footage and theatrical productions on film can blur or be blurred, but it is an important distinction to bear in mind.

Moving pictures have had a great influence on human culture, and this book focuses on using moving images as historical evidence. Studying history means examining evidence from the past to understand, interpret, and present what has happened in different times and places. We talk and write about what we have learned, hoping to establish credibility both for what we have determined to be the facts and for whatever meaning or significance we may attach to our reconstruction of the past. Studying history is a scientific process, involving a fairly set methodology. We tend to favor written sources, and we have tended to favor writing as a means of presenting our views of the past. But historians also use all kinds of other documents and artifacts in their work of interpreting the past, including moving pictures.

Of course, just because something is written down does not make it true: as historians we need to determine—or sometimes just make the best educated guess we can—who wrote the words, why, where, and under what circumstances. Likewise, the appearance of a moving image on a screen can provide us with historical evidence, but we need to learn more about moving pictures in general and the circumstances and characteristics of that particular moving picture to be able to use it as legitimate historical evidence. This book focuses on the use of moving pictures as historical evidence, but one point that will become evident quickly is that film and video also offer an alternative to writing as a way of presenting historical interpretation. They are unlikely ever to replace writing entirely, but they have become a very important medium for presenting the past. Indeed one could argue that, to understand our collective understanding of the past as a society, one cannot ignore the presentation of the past as we see it presented in documentary and narrative films.

Our culture is the human environment in which we live: while each of us is different, we are also similar in important ways. The anthropologist Karl Heider has defined culture as ideas about behavior that groups of people learn and share. It might also be described as a whole society’s way of life, as demonstrated in a wide variety of activities, including, for example, religion, politics, food, sports, art, and music. Probably the best way to understand what culture is, or what distinguishes one culture from another, is to visit a foreign culture, or to explore a subculture within your own society: there are particular qualities we can identify in Anglo-American culture, in African American culture, or in Latino culture that make them unique. We can learn about these through film, but film can just as well take us inside the lives of those whom we might consider to be “other” and show us that, essentially, we are not different at all. On a global scale, film gives us opportunities that real life unlikely will: to learn about cultural similarities and differences in settings we are unlikely to ever experience. Real life also does not permit time travel, so to the extent a film represents and interprets the past, we can see and hear the past as recorded or recreated on film.

Culture shapes who we are and how we think. Our culture, or cultures, will be reflected in the ways we respond to historical evidence, and how we interpret that evidence. It is not the only factor—everyone has his or her own unique character and outlook—but it is an important one. Engaging effectively and meaningfully in the process of reconstructing and interpreting human experience requires an awareness of all the different factors that affect how we look at evidence—what we in the academics business call theory—and while we very much want to get on with the business of doing history, we do need to be able to describe and defend what we do and how we do it.

In doing historical research, we distinguish between primary sources— any kind of document or artifact that can be used to reconstruct the past— and secondary sources—interpretations of the past presented in articles and books. John E. O’Connor calls drawing moving pictures into the realm of historical research moving image artifacts. These can serve as both primary and secondary sources: they can document aspects of the human experience, or they can present an interpretation of the past. Compared to the written word, moving pictures possess both advantages and disadvantages. While they are unlikely to replace the written word as the main means by which historians practice their craft, they offer an invaluable resource for the study of the human experience, and the twentieth-century experience in particular: they can document the most significant events or the most prosaic details of life; they can present us with the everyday realities of our own culture or those of any other culture in the world; and they can document events as they happen and preserve them forever.

Without dismissing the historical significance of your cell-phone videos (you or your friends may change the world famously one day), the bank surveillance camera, or the nightly television newscast, this book focuses primarily on what we call movies or films, arrangements of moving images into narratives or documentaries that can last just a few minutes or several hours. The analytical skills we develop from studying movies as historical evidence are largely transferable to the study of film fragments available in archival and other sources. They may also guide you one day as you try your own hand at presenting historical insights using film or video. But for now, we will focus on moving pictures in the form we most often see them and in the form in which they most often aspire to “do history.”

“Moving pictures” or “moving image artifacts” may sound a little awkward at first, but they represent attempts to refer generically to the body of material we want to study. More commonly we use the terms movie and film, which can be used interchangeably, to an extent: movie, short for moving picture, is more colloquial, and it is the word we are more inclined to use when we are talking about entertainment; film sounds a little more serious and highbrow, maybe even a bit snooty, but it better encompasses every kind of moving picture, whether feature-length or short subject, documentary or narrative. Its name derives from the physical entity on which the images and sounds are recorded, and from which they are projected, or at least used to be. These days the only place you are likely to see actual film projected is in a movie theater, and even there digital projection is beginning to replace film projection. Most major movies these days are still filmed, as opposed to digitally recorded. So while we may keep the term film around for old times’ sake, movie may turn out to be the more enduring term.

We experience movies by going to the theater, watching a television broadcast, popping in a DVD (or maybe still a VHS [video home system] tape), or downloading via the Internet. We make distinctions among the kinds of movies we watch. Crudely, a narrative film is “fiction” to documentary’s “nonfiction,” but the distinction between “real” and “made up” is much more complicated and requires careful thinking. A biographical film, or “biopic,” in which an actor plays a historical figure is not considered a documentary, even though it is, as the cliché goes, “based on a true story”; but some films labeled as documentary use actors to reenact scenes (though this makes some people uncomfortable), and others can be downright untruthful. Narrative movies can be of any duration, but conventionally they run between ninety minutes and two hours. Some of the all-time box office champions run much longer, such as Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972) at 175 minutes, James Cameron’s Titanic (1997) at 194 minutes, and the already mentioned Gone with the Wind at 226 minutes, but longer films are a more costly and risky undertaking. At 219 minutes, Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate (1980) became a legendary flop. Documentaries are less governed by convention, but the potential for commercial theatrical success is greater if a documentary is comparable to a normal narrative movie in length.

Their entertainment value may draw us to movies as a source of historical information and insight, but it can also present a barrier. Movies that ...