Writing History in Film

William Guynn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135524913
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Historical film has been an important genre since the earliest silent films. The French Revolution, the American Civil War, the conquest of the New World, World War II--all have been repeatedly represented in film. But how do we distinguish between fictionalized spectacle and authentic historical representation?

Writing History in Film sets out the narratological, semiological, rhetorical, and philosophical bases for understanding how film can function as a form of historical interpretation and representation. With case studies and an interdisciplinary approach, William Guynn examines the key issues facing film students and scholars, historians, and anyone interested in how we see our historical past.

1

HISTORIOGRAPHY

Stories of a Particular Kind

What distinguishes history from the other social sciences is its concern with human societies as they develop through time. To construct the temporal dimension essential to historical representation, the passage of time needs to be measured. Indeed, Claude Lévi-Strauss asserts that without dates history would cease to exist: “Dates may not be the whole of history, nor what is most interesting about it, but they are its sine qua non, for history’s entire originality and distinctive nature lie in apprehending the relation between before and after, which would perforce dissolve if its terms could not, at least in principle, be dated.”¹ Historical thought is, then, fundamentally diachronic, and even the slowest of histories of long duration (concerning seemingly permanent social, technological, or economic situations or even climatic conditions) never achieve a true synchronic analysis because their subject is, at its root, the study of social transformation over time.

What Paul Ricoeur calls the creative refiguration of time depends on such “instruments of thought” as the calendar. Calendar time, he argues in Time and Narrative, constitutes the “first bridge” that historians throw up between cosmic time and the lived time of the human individual. This third time is intermediary in scale: it does not attempt to embrace the universal, measured in the life and death of stars, for example, or restrict itself to the phenomenological perspective of time as experienced by the individual human mind. Historical time has a mixed character. On the one hand, calendar time creates for historical representation a system of measure, a frame of reference for historical action, calibrated in hours, days, months, years, centuries. On the other hand, historical time retains something of the character of psychological time because it represents “lived time,” with its fluctuating moments of intensity and emptiness, of rapidity and slowness. This intermediary time “serves as a common marker for members of a group,”² a means for structuring the collective experience of the past in its objective and experiential dimensions.

Another feature of historical time is that it is always teleological; the question of the relationship between a beginning and an ending arises at the very moment that the historian asks the question that is central to a piece of research. As Antoine Prost puts it, “It is the question that constructs the historical object by carving an original slice out of the limitless universe of facts and possible documents.”³ This original slice not only sets up the chronological frame for the historical narrative, but also sets in motion the search for a chain of causality that will turn the this-and-then-that into the this-because-of-that. In his narration of events, the historian constructs the necessary connections between them and shows how they lead toward the culminating situation, the ending that is at the origin of the initial question, “How did we get to here?” In his De la connaissance historique, Henri-Irénée Marrou states the principle this way:

History becomes intelligible only in so far as it shows it is capable of establishing, of detecting the relationships that link each stage of human development to its antecedents and its consequences: just as, statically, a historical situation, seized at moment t, always shows itself to be more or less structured, in the same way the unfolding of [historical] moments is not this discontinuous line of atoms of the real, isolated like beads of a rosary that the unfathomable will of God arbitrarily counts off (as Islamic theology likes to imagine it): the experience of history, which the conscientious researcher acquires from contact with documents, makes us discover that there are intelligible relationships between successive moments of time. Certainly, not everything is linked together: there are hiatuses in the development of time as there are limits in static structures; but the historian’s task is to discover these connections wherever they may exist.⁴

Constructing a causal development of events through time is the nature of historical understanding. To recount is to explain. In other words, historical narratives, like fictional narratives, have plots.

HISTORICAL OBJECTIVITY AND THE HISTORIAN’S SUBJECTIVITY

Are there differences of nature between historical and fictional narration? Does the epistemological break between history as a discourse of truth and fiction as discourse of the imaginary impose distinct narrative forms? The question has been hotly debated in the wake of the rise of modern historical consciousness, which toward the end of the nineteenth century posited a difference of essence between history and the rest of literary production. History could no longer be considered a literary genre among others—it no longer belonged to literature at all—and the techniques of fictional representation could not continue to be tolerated in texts that had serious historical intentions. At issue was the scientific claim of history. If history chose as its object the study of the reality of the past, then its representations had to have an objective character; therefore, historians had to adopt the kind of critical detachment that imposes a distance, both temporal and personal, between themselves as psychological beings and the material they set out to analyze. History abandoned as Romantic excess the idea of an intimate bond between the historical text and its author. It repudiated the declarations of a Michelet, who, reflecting at the end of his career, observed that history is as much a work on the historian’s internal life as it is the production of historical knowledge. Indeed, Michelet argued that the relationship between the creator and his creation is inverted in historiography because it is ultimately the progeny that gives birth to the procreator:

By penetrating deeper and deeper into the [historical] object, one grows to love it, and thereafter one regards it with increasing interest. The heart is moved at this second view, sees a thousand things that are invisible to the indifferent public. History and the historian are bound together in this look. For good? For evil? Something is operating here that has not been described and that we need to reveal: It’s that history, as time progresses,makes the historian much more than history is made by him. My book created me. I was in fact its work. This son has made his father. … If we resemble each other, that’s good. The traits he takes from me are in large measure those that I owed him and by which I am in his likeness.⁵

As part of a new reflection on their own practice, many historians since the twentieth century have acknowledged the role of subjectivity in the production of historic discourse. However, they have reformulated the idea of subjectivity in terms quite different from Michelet’s. Every intellectual enterprise is based on a personal commitment and motivated by personal pleasures that sustain the researcher through the difficulties of his work. Historians cannot be pure analytic spirits. They are driven by their immediate context—intellectual, economic, social, political—and the individual concerns that move them to select one project over another. Each historian works from a specific position in relation to the historical object, a bias implicit in his “angle” of observation that carries with it the risk of ideological prejudice. One could add that, despite the most rigorous effort, the historian’s text, like other writing, is not entirely the product of the conscious mind and is necessarily subject to forces of which the historian is by definition unaware. This is what Marrou terms, somewhat ironically, “this fearsome and devastating ‘subjectivity’” that threatens to undermine the scientific claims of historical research. Indeed, it is only in taking their critical distance from the facts stored in historical archives of all sorts that historians are able to winnow the grain of history from the chaff of myth and ideology and pass judgment on the errors of their predecessors.

As a historian, Marrou draws on Augustine’s City of God because, from his critical vantage point, he is able to distinguish the authentic representations of the Roman world the bishop of Hippo passes on to subsequent generations from the illuminations of the spiritual cleric. Historical practice that establishes truth through the techniques of documentation and analysis is not, by nature, different from practice in the “hard” sciences. He observes, for example, that there is broad agreement on how facts are identified and authenticated. However, whatever the rigors that historical method imposes, history, more than any other scientific discipline, runs the risk of losing its footing and slipping into the unscientific confusion of subject and object. It is precisely because the object of history is human action and its motivations that historians are prone to this slippage: “As knowledge of man by man, history is the capturing of the past through, and in, a human thought that is living and committed, an indissoluble mixture of subject and object.”⁶ What the historian can do to subdue subjectivity is to elucidate his own situation as a researcher and writer. As an integral part of the historical method, the historian can record the workings of his mind and emotions in a kind of Brechtian deconstruction of the historical process.

Scientific honesty seems to me to require that the historian, through an effort of self-awareness, define the orientation of his thought, specify its postulates (to the extent this is possible); that he show himself in action and make us observers of the genesis of his work; why and how he has chosen and demarcated his subject; what he was looking for and what he found there; that he describe his internal itinerary, for all historical research, if it is truly fruitful, implies a progress in the soul of its author: the encounter with the other.⁷

But the reality is, Marrou tells us, that few historians are inclined to take such a critical approach to their own work; most act as if historical research were a rigorous method that can be applied in unproblematic fashion. Theoretical problems like subjectivity are put out of mind and relegated to the domain of philosophy of history, whose abstractions remain disconnected from actual historical practice.

FICTIONAL STORIES AND HISTORICAL NARRATIVES

A second blind spot for historians is the narrative character of historic discourse. Historians have generally resisted acknowledging that historical explanation takes place through the process of narration; they work, rather, on the implicit assumption that history is a discourse sui generis that scientific practice has separated from literary discourses. This assumption would not remain unexamined. In an article published in 1967, Roland Barthes called into question the notion that history is a specific kind of discourse, basing his critique on the methods of the emerging field of semiology. He argued that structural linguists who apply linguistic methods to the analysis of discourses should not concern themselves exclusively with universal discursive characteristics but should examine the accepted categories of discourse called genres in order to determine whether or not there is a linguistic basis for distinguishing between historical and fictional forms of narrative:

Is there in fact any specific difference between factual and imaginary narrative, any linguistic feature by which we may distinguish on the one hand the mode appropriate to the relation of historical events—a matter traditionally subject, in our culture, to the prescriptions of historical “science,” to be judged only by the criteria of conformity to “what really happened” and by principles of “rational” exposition—and on the other hand the mode appropriate to the epic, novel or drama?⁸

Moreover, Barthes is critical of the notion of the fact, which presumably preexists the historian’s act of narration as an autonomous element within the field of reference. Citing Nietzsche, he observes that a fact does not exist already formed; it is produced as a result of “introducing meaning,” of integrating the “fact” as an element of human discourse about the past. Barthes is equally critical of the passive position historians claim to assume: it is as if they wrote under the dictate of past events, where facts are givens and discursive structures inhere in the material the historian is studying. The myth of the ascendancy of the referent obscures, Barthes argues, the properly linguistic character of historic narration. Why is it, he asks, that history is able to do away with the production of meaning that semiology discerns in every form of human communication? Such a conception would reduce the tripartite character of the sign to two terms: the signifier and the referent. Eliminating the signified, the language of historic discourse would directly express the real:

[T]he very idea that history can have a meaning (signifié) other than referential is rejected. The referent and its expression (signifiant) are seen as directly related; the function of discourse is confined to the mere expression of reality; and meaning, the fundamental term of imaginary structures, becomes superfluous.⁹

Paul Ricoeur also recognizes that historians tend to avoid the question of how meaning is produced in historical texts, a tendency rooted historically in epistemological concerns:

If this narrative continuity between story and history was little noticed in the past, it was because the problems posed by the epistemological break between fiction and history, or between myth and history, turned attention to the question of evidence, at the expense of the more fundamental question of what accounts for the interest of a work of history.¹⁰

By setting aside questions of representation, historians take a significant risk: they fail to examine critically the processes of signification that make historical representation possible.

There are, of course, historians who have questioned unspoken assumptions and have sought to dispel certain myths about history writing. In his iconoclastic Writing History (which Michel de Certeau suggests retitling Decolonizing History), Paul Veyne makes a frontal assault on a whole series of received ideas and makes the bald assertions that what historians do is tell stories, that telling stories is a universal mode of making sense of the world, and that historical narratives have a fundamental kinship, not only with fictional narratives, but also with the most mundane forms of storytelling in daily life. There is, he argues, no properly historical method, and no historian, if asked, could describe or define what it is. Historical explanation is not at all scientific but belongs to a more modest mode that Veyne calls understanding:

Everybody knows that when he opens a history book, he understands it, as he understands a novel or what his neighbors are doing; put in other words, explaining, for a historian, means “to show the unfolding of the plot, to make it understood.” Such is the historical explanation: entirely sublunary and not scientific at all; we will keep the name “comprehension” for it.¹¹

Historical and scientific approaches are different, he argues, because the objects they study are different. Science deals with phenomena that are abstracted from natural or historical events, as if “cut to the measure” of scientific laws. To explain scientifically is to demonstrate that these phenomena operate according to unvarying principles. History, on the other hand, deals with the totality of shared human experience across time, in its infinite variations. Moreover, there is no properly historical object—anything can become a document for the historian, provided it is part of what really took place in the past—and objects cannot be isolated from the historic context in which they evolve. Therefore, Veyne argues, history has no method in the scientific sense: it cannot explain individual facts by reference to general laws. It has, rather, a critical apparatus that allows the historian to examine whether the meaning he attaches to an event by placing it in a chain of cause and effect is justifiable.

Although this analysis seems to reduce—some would say radically—the distance between narration in history and fiction, Veyne is careful to make the fundamental distinction. History is “Nothing but a True Narrative,” as the first chapter of Writing History is entitled. Yet this apparently reductive “nothing but” turns out of course to be everything. History, like fiction, is “anecdotal,” it “interests” the reader through telling a story. But the veracity that distinguishes history is essential: historical narrative recounts true events, and because they are true, the historian-narrator does not need to “captivate” the readership. The search for dynamism of plot or for aesthetic effect is not the historian’s concern. Truth controls historical narration as verisimilitude controls the fictional.

Louis O. Mink, in his “Narrative Form as a Cognitive Instrument,” arrives at much the same conclusion. Narrative in history, he argues, is unlike narrative in fiction because the historian constructs his story out of vestiges of the past. In elaborating a narrative, the historian is bound to follow the development of events according to the relationships of necessity he sees linking them together in sequence: “History-as-it-was-lived, that is, is an untold story. The historian’s job is to discover that untold story, or part of it, and to retell it even though in abridged and edited form.”¹² An “untold” story is, of cours...