Approaching Recent World History Through Film

Context, Analysis, and Research

Scott C.M. Bailey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367280888
• eBook ISBN: 9781000382907
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

Approaching Recent World History Through Film: Context, Analysis, and Research explores the relationships between twentieth-century world history and film by providing analysis of a diverse range of films organized by global history topics, including war and conflict, decolonization, political economy, and long-distance travel.

This insightful text describes how to analyze films as original historical sources and how to carry out research projects using films. The text provides guidance on the types of world history films, their conventions, and how to analyze the historical arguments in movies. Scott C.M. Bailey incorporates in-depth discussions of the historical content and context of a wide range of international films connected with important twentieth-century global history topics. The book also offers many prompts for discussion, historical timelines, and suggestions for further reading and viewing, as well as instructions on how to construct research papers and projects which employ the use of films as historical sources.

This book will be of interest to students in world history and film history courses.

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INTRODUCTION

World History Through Film

The Evolution of Historical Methodology

In this chapter, we introduce the connections between world history and films as historical sources. To initiate that, we begin with a discussion of the history of history writing and research. During the late nineteenth century, the carrying out of archival research in written sources, especially primary source documents, was the main research activity which defined the historical profession. Students of history (both undergraduates and graduate students) would learn how to become historians by spending long hours in the archives, poring over written texts in attempts to discover the historical “truth.” This methodology, which first gained prominence in Prussia (Germany) in the late nineteenth century, has continued to influence the methods that professional historians have followed for the past 150 years or so. Leopold von Ranke’s (1795–1886) belief in pursuing historical inquiry to discover “wie es eigentlich gewesen” (how it actually happened) required a grounding in the close analysis of the written word, especially government documents, letters, manuscripts, and journals, typically written by white Western men from elite backgrounds.

Historians did not believe that sources which were not on paper were valid. For something to be a fact, it needed to be written down, and the older and mustier the paper that it was written on, the better. Traditional historical research centered upon the collection of factual information through accumulation of documents. There were few if any other ways of “doing history” in this narrow Western view. This “scientific” approach to history (also known as a Rankean approach) continued to shape and dominate historical research and education in Western countries for many decades.¹

However, during the mid-to-late twentieth century (beginning during the 1960s), the practice of history began to change for the better. The rise of social history during this period was associated with the de-centering of historical narratives in order to bring out the voices of commoners, the working classes, ethnic or cultural minorities, women, and children. Social history was closely associated with liberal political movements of the time, such as civil rights, peace movements, and environmental activism, which often reflected the political views of many of those employed in academies and universities. Social historians changed the way that historians thought about the past by making conscious efforts to analyze what happened to the many whose names were ignored in traditional histories, which had focused almost entirely upon the actions of male upper-class politicians and elites. The social history project directly challenged the Rankean approach by asserting that the stories of history can be told in many different ways. This was to be done in part by drawing general assumptions about the day-to-day lives and experiences of common people: workers, agricultural laborers, women, children, and others. Social history derived many of its conclusions about the past through an analysis of economic historical records and by projecting macroeconomic data into an interpretation of past experiences. The social history project, therefore, began to reshape how historians attempted to re-create the past or rethink about it and represented an important departure point from traditional historical methodology.

Beginning in the 1980s, the field of subaltern studies, which originated in the study of South Asian colonial history, was another historical project rooted in a re-reading of historical source materials in a way which would bring out neglected voices. The topic in their research was the subaltern or people of the lower classes who “had no history.”² This field extended the notions of social history to attempt to extract historical meaning from the experiences of colonized peoples, originally those colonized by the British Empire. The subaltern school drew heavily upon the use of theoretical perspectives to conduct their research and to employ theory as a way to vivify the colonial past. The subaltern studies project breathed new life into the nature of historical research. This was done just as social historians had done by challenging all historians to rethink traditional methodologies and providing yet another avenue for thinking about and re-creating our understanding of history.

During the past several decades, we have also seen increased attention devoted to ethnic studies such as Black Studies, Latinx Studies, Caribbean Studies, Pacific Island Studies, Indigenous Studies, and many others. These movements have in part aimed to refocus historical narratives away from those of the nation-state in order to bring greater attention to transnational, diasporic, and indigenous communities. Many of the histories of these groups had previously been relegated to local oral traditions and rarely to the written word. This has resulted in another rewriting and rethinking of world history which is more rooted in reality than histories which were written earlier, which often ignored or downplayed the experiences of non-white historical actors.

These developments in historical methodology over the past half century or so have greatly enriched and expanded our understandings of world history by bringing in more voices into the historical conversation. This has made our understanding of the past richer and more rigorously related to historical reality. When one reads world history academic books published today, there is only the slightest resemblance to the earliest world histories written during the paradigm of Rankean historical methodology.³ Just as the nature of historical interpretation has changed in the examples given earlier, which has led to a more globalized (and accurate) view of history, we want to present in this book why recent world history can best be understood through new forms of interpretation, namely the use of films. But before we do that, we should define what we mean by world history in this text.

Defining World History Research and Scholarship

How do we define world history? World history is a vibrant field of historical inquiry, which is aimed at locating the global connection points that have existed in history. World historians attempt to answer questions like: what are the global processes that have been most important in recent world history during the past century? Among these processes are the importance of human movements, travels, and migrations. War and conflict have unfortunately been a major element of the human experience of the twentieth century. The past century has also been a time of resistance to global imperialism, often referred to as decolonization. We can also see the processes of world history at work in the lives of individuals whose experiences can be (and often are) reflective of important historical developments.

Today’s scholars of world history attempt to analyze the global patterns that have emerged from historical experience. They include economic, cultural, intellectual, biological, and technological factors, all of which have played an important role in connecting people around the world. World historians are interested in the connections between diverse and geographically distant peoples. They attempt to answer questions like: how have human ideas been transmitted across space, national borders, oceans, and hemispheres? Or, which have been the main driving agents of historical change? Have they been economic, cultural, or ideological? To what extent have people been driven by their participation in organizations and communities? These are all questions which world historians wish to research and find answers to.

World history is defined here, therefore, as the study of the past that is not confined to a regional or national perspective. It is instead a historical inquiry that pays a close attention to the ways in which the past has been shaped by international developments.⁴ The twentieth century was a time in which global historical events loomed large and thus requires a global approach to historical research.

The Great Depression of the late 1920s and 1930s was one such event which we cannot understand only from a national perspective. The same is true for the two world wars, as well as global conflicts and wars of the entire century. The processes of decolonization and migration were also themes that can only be understood from a global perspective. During the latter part of the twentieth century, the rise of what became known as globalization, namely the intricate linking of the world’s financial and economic markets through transportation networks, financial connections, global trade, media and communications infrastructures, meant that the world was connected together in an unprecedented fashion.⁵ We have also become more aware of the ways in which biological factors connect the world, such as the way the 1918 influenza pandemic affected (and infected) millions of people.⁶ The degree of global integration in the twentieth century was unprecedented in world history. This means that we cannot study the history of the twentieth century without looking at the bigger picture and the connecting nodes of the global world.

When we approach the study of recent world history, which is defined broadly here as the long twentieth century (technically from the very late nineteenth century until the very early twenty-first century), we as historians should ask questions about the global nature of recent historical events. World history as a coherent field of historical inquiry aims to go beyond the understanding of history as being confined within national borders. This means that world historians try to understand big themes of history by looking at multiple examples of how those themes developed, often from the perspectives of different geographical regions or groups of people.

World history is, in part then, a comparative approach to understanding the historical past. Rather than study the history of politics in late Qing China, for example, a world historian or scholar would aim to understand politics of a group of states in the early twentieth century, in order to note the overall patterns, so that the history of politics in the late Qing era can better be understood comparatively. There is a belief common among world historians that the greatest value for historical study is in illuminating the global processes at play in different lands. In the early twentieth century, the world saw the decline of a number of autocratic states like the Qing in China (1644–1911), the Ottoman Empire of Turkey (1453–1922), and the Romanov Russian Empire (1613–1917). World historians prefer to compare the characteristics of a range of societies in order to grasp a macro-historical truth about the past and to make better sense of the range of experiences. There is little value in studying early twentieth-century Qing China politics in isolation and great value in comparing what happened there with similar developments in other countries, such as China, Turkey, and Russia, during the early twentieth century.

World history academics today publish on a wide variety of topics through books, journals, and online websites. If you are interested in reading the writings of academics in world history, you may want to access the Journal of World History or the Journal of Global History or the free access online journal called World History Connected.⁷ World History Bulletin, which is published by the World History Association (WHA), also publishes many articles on world history research and teaching. There are many publishing presses which produce important scholarly books in world history, including Routledge Press, University of Hawaii Press, and others. And there are many excellent world history textbooks, providing another important way through which undergraduate students learn about world history.⁸

Today’s academic publications on world history have one common element. They all engage with the existing body of global theory on a given topic to some degree. For example, if a world history scholar wants to write a book about Russian colonialism in Central Asia, they will need to think about their topic in light of what previous scholars have written about the process of colonialism worldwide. They will need to think about the economic implications of colonialism, for example, not only in Central Asia but also in other parts of the world. Some scholars may try to find theories from other works, which have examined the economic implications of a colonial action and use that as a point of comparison or contrast.

If they are trying to analyze the history of Russian colonization in Central Asia, it may be helpful to compare the economic implications of that with what the British attempted to do in South Asia or the French colonial presence in Indochina (Vietnam). World historians aim not to examine their subject “in a box,” then, but to compare and contrast the examples which they have researched with similar examples in other national or even historical (temporal or time period) contexts. In this textbook, we will take a similar approach to thinking about the different interpretations of historical phenomena in different locations around the world.

The Different Types of World History Films

Now that we have defined what we mean by “recent world history” and world history scholarship, we will now turn our attention to world history films. In order to utilize films for expanding our understanding of recent world history, we should first identify some of the different types of world history films. Each type has its own somewhat clearly defined set of conventions, which we can find used in particular types. In this section, we will look at the types of historical films which are most common, provide examples of these types of films, and identify the typical conventions or techniques which we find in those types.

Biographical Historical Films

One of the most common types of historical films is the biographical historical film, often referred to somewhat negatively as the biopic.⁹ The biographical historical film typically centers on an account of some aspect of the life of an individual, who is typically someone either very powerful, important historically, influential culturally, or otherwise intriguing for elucidating a period of the historical past or for pointing the audience toward contemporary issues which can be better dealt with by understanding past historical circumstances. The Hollywood-centered American film industry has especially devoted a lot of its studio time to the genre of biographical historical films.

A recent popular example of this genre included the very successful Bohemian Rhapsody (2018)¹⁰ about the life of the rock musician Freddy Mercury.¹¹ This film focused on the prime of Mercury’s life (born as Farrokh Bulsara, lived from 1946 to 1991), the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• How to Use This Book
• 1 Introduction: World History Through Film
• 2 Historical Biographical Films and World History
• 3 Filmic Approaches to Global Conflict and War: Japanese Wartime Experiences
• 4 Comparative Approaches to Colonization and Decolonization on the Screen
• 5 Film and Global Migration, Immigration, and Mobility
• 6 Mass Violence, Oppression, and Global Conflict on Film
• 7 Problems of Political Economy on Film
• 8 World History Films as a Basis for Research and Writing
• Filmography
• Index