Visions of the Past

The Challenge of Film to Our Idea of History

Robert A. Rosenstone

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 1998
• Print ISBN: 9780674940987, 9780674940970
• eBook ISBN: 9780674266834
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: History

Can filmed history measure up to written history? What happens to history when it is recorded in images, rather than words? Can images convey ideas and information that lie beyond words? Taking on these timely questions, Robert Rosenstone pioneers a new direction in the relationship between history and film. Rosenstone moves beyond traditional approaches, which examine the history of film as art and industry, or view films as texts reflecting their specific cultural contexts. This essay collection makes a radical venture into the investigation of a new concern: how a visual medium, subject to the conventions of drama and fiction, might be used as a serious vehicle for thinking about our relationship with the past.

Rosenstone looks at history films in a way that forces us to reconceptualize what we mean by "history." He explores the innovative strategies of films made in Africa, Latin America, Germany, and other parts of the world. He journeys into the history of film in a wide range of cultures, and expertly traces the contours of the postmodern historical film. In essays on specific films, including Reds, JFK, and Sans Soleil, he considers such issues as the relationship between fact and film and the documentary as visionary truth.

Theorists have for some time been calling our attention to the epistemological and literary limitations of traditional history. The first sustained defense of film as a way of thinking historically, this book takes us beyond those limitations.

III

THE FUTURE OF THE PAST

8

Re-visioning History

Contemporary Filmmakers and the Construction of the Past

Early on in my research on the historical film, I became deeply interested in how filmmakers from different cultural traditions represent the past in ways that could make the mainstream Hollywood film (at least to me) seem visually, dramatically, and intellectually dull. When I was asked to review one of the following books, I took the opportunity to add several others and use them as a point of departure for exploring the historical film in three traditions obsessed by the past and determined, so it seems, to render its meanings in new ways: Africa, Latin America, and Germany. Typically, not one of the authors of the nine volumes deigns to consider the history film as a separate category. This blindness to the way film reconfigures our notions of the past is yet another reason we historians need to explore the realm of film—particularly the past as rendered in lands where its meaning can seem immediately crucial to personal and cultural identity.

Brazilian Cinema, edited by Randal Johnson and Robert Stam (Austin: University of Texas, 1988)

Cinema and Social Change in Latin America: Conversations with Filmmakers, edited by Julianne Burton (Austin: University of Texas, 1986)

The Cinema of Ousmane Sembene: A Pioneer of African Film, by Françoise Pfaff (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1984)

The Cuban Image; Cinema and Cultural Politics in Cuba, by Michael Chahan (Bloomington: Indiana University, 1985)

From Hitler to Heimat: The Return of History as Film, by Anton Kaes (Cambridge: Harvard University, 1989)

New German Film: The Displaced Image, by Timothy Corrigan (Austin: University of Texas, 1983)

Third World Film Making and the West, by Roy Armes (Berkeley: University of California, 1987)

Tradition Orale et Nouveaux Medias, edited by Victor Bachy (Brussels: OCIC, 1989)

Twenty-Five Black African Filmmakers: A Critical Study, with Filmography and Rio-Bibliography, by Françoise Pfaff (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1988)

The setting: a classroom in a village hut in Senegal. On the wall, maps of Africa and France. Barefoot young students, crowded together at long tables, repeat by rote phrases that their teacher reads from a book. Phrases that praise the accomplishments “of our ancestors, the fair-haired Gauls.”

Call it the primal scene. The classroom is at once real and symbolic; the filmed moment self-referential; the purpose educational. Remember that everywhere in the Third World the motion picture screen has always been filled with the faces of Americans and Europeans whose personal problems, stemming from ambition and love, speak of a rich world that can be no more than a fantasy to the audience. Just as bad—no, worse—are the films with Third World settings, films in which the natives are not masterful like the whites, but docile servants, vicious enemies, buffoons. (“We always cheered for Tarzan,” says an African filmmaker.) Either sort of image helps to rob a people of their heritage, their culture, their very identity. What to do? Fight the image with the image. Recreate your own world on the motion picture screen.

Call it the primal scene for this essay as well. The black faces of the children in contrast with the words they speak provide a uniquely filmic moment of meaning. It is a historical moment, too, one that points directly toward the theme of this article: How can motion pictures re-vision history? Not that all the books considered here specifically take up this topic, or even deal directly with the historical film. But all are deeply concerned with how film can be used to come to grips with the legacy of the past. Together they show how in the last quarter-century filmmakers in Africa, Latin America, and Germany have dealt with history on the screen in a variety of unusual and innovative ways. My aim in bringing them together is to explore these innovations, to understand the varied ways in which motion pictures can be used to speak about the past; to situate historians in relation to film and history, and film and history in relation to each other.

Practically and theoretically, interactions between the discipline of history and the practices of the visual media are problematic. Consider the scene above: clearly it is historical, but how can the historian relate to it? The scene is undated, the village unspecified. No doubt a similar scene occurred thousands of times over tens of decades in hundreds of locations in French colonies. No doubt it occurred many times in the village of the director Safi Faye, who has put it on the screen at the beginning of Fad’jal, a work that—among other things—goes on to visualize the oral history of her village. Yet questions hover in the wake of the scene. About, say, its specificity: Is that really a classroom or a set? Are the children really students or are they actors? More important: How would different answers reflect on the issue of historical truth?

By themselves, these questions may seem inconsequential. But they point to larger issues involved in any discussion of the possibility of doing history on film. It is not an easy subject to talk about sensibly. Something like media hype seems to rub off on sober professors. Astonishing claims are made for and against motion pictures. Partisans would have you believe that only film, with its world of moving images, can hope to approximate the complexity of historical experience. Opponents see history on film as a travesty that inevitably must fictionalize, romanticize, and oversimplify the past. Even academics who study the media hardly take the possibility of doing history on film seriously. Looking through the world on the screen, they treat the historical film not as a way of thinking about the past but as a reflection of the values of the period in which it was made.

These reactions are based on the sort of film made in Hollywood (or its suburbs in London, Paris, Calcutta, Tokyo). We all know this film too well; its aim is clearly not enlightenment, but entertainment; not truth, but profit. But the Hollywood model is not the only kind of history on film. Not at all. In the twenties, Soviet filmmakers created new visions of the past (e.g., Potemkin and Oktober) that we still admire, if more as art than as history. More recently, filmmakers from around the globe have been taking up the challenge of dealing seriously with the past. Their works are part of a larger historical moment, the arrival of a non-commercial cinema anxious to recapture particular traditions from decades—even centuries—of (mis)representation by outsiders. To fully understand their innovations, one needs to experience their films. Yet here we must be content with words—which is to say, with both their limitations and their strengths. Only words can ask the questions that guide this inquiry: To what extent can historians accept history on film as valid? How can we judge such history? What are the implications—or challenges—of the historical film for written history?

Whenever you make a historical film, whether it is set two decades or two centuries in the past, you are referring to the present.

—Humberto Solas

Let’s begin with the “struggle” (that favorite leftist word) against Hollywood. A struggle—as Roy Armes shows in his superb work, Third World Film Making and the West—against the two faces of Hollywood: the Hollywood that, through various economic policies and political strategems, has dominated film markets throughout the world, and the Hollywood that creates the particular kind of motion picture which we often take to be the only kind of motion picture. This dramatic film—a self-mystifying vehicle of Western beliefs—always focuses on the emotional life of the individual hero, the man or woman (almost always the man) whose desires for Jove, success, power, happiness, or even a better world take precedent over any social or political goals. Such men and women exist in a “realistic” world that is carefully constructed through a variety of techniques (matched sight-lines of characters, shots and reverse shots, seamless editing) whose chief aim is to hide themselves. The result is a work that seems not at all constructed. We stare through the window of the screen directly at a “real” world.

Not all Third World filmmakers refuse to make such films or object to turning a nice profit, and a major virtue of Armes’s book is its recognition of the complexity of response to Western film. In Bombay, Cairo, Rio de Janeiro, Mexico City, Manila, and other major media centers, Hollywood-type industries have grown and flourished. Yet like Hollywood, this commercial Third World cinema has been challenged by a cinema of opposition. In the sixties the challenge began with the so-called “Third Cinema.” Marxist in orientation, this movement aimed to “decolonize” both the industry and the image, to replace screen fantasy with “throbbing, living reality.”¹ No surprise that Third Cinema was the creation of artists and intellectuals who were themselves highly Westernized. No surprise either that it suffered from a central paradox: aspiring to be of the people, Third Cinema produced films that were rarely popular.²

For history on film, popularity is less the issue than vision. Here the Third Cinema may be judged a success. Oppositional filmmakers did create new filmic strategies, new ways of thinking on the screen about social, political, and cultural issues. Yet while many of their works dealing with history are mentioned by Armes, his book does not recognize the historical film as a category. How to explain this? One might argue that “history” itself is a Western project. But evidence exists for a simpler explanation: filmmakers have simply been too caught up in national liberation struggles to explore history systematically. They have set films in the past for the same reason they have set them in the present, have used history as a way of commenting upon current problems of race, class, gender, ethnicity, and nationalism. Ahistorical? Presentist? Perhaps. But not a wholly unfamiliar strategy to academics. Not so different from the reasons for the rise of such recent fields as ethnic, feminist, and gay history.

Black African films … are instruments which allow us to affirm our identity, to fight cultural imperialism as well as economic and political oppression.

—Gaston Kabore

Nowhere has the desire to recover control of one’s images been stronger than in Africa. Anyone who has encountered even a few African films will know something of this already. Anyone who has not can follow this theme (with some difficulty) in the pages of Françoise Pfaff’s compendious Twenty-Five Black African Filmmakers. More a work of reference than criticism, the book makes no systematic argument as it chronicles the diversity of sub-Saharan film in the quarter-century since its origins. The representative 25 (out of more than 250 living) filmmakers are dealt with in individual chapters. Only in the brief preface are their common themes even mentioned: to reject “alien stereotypes in favor of realistic images of Africa” and to depict “African realities … as a tool for progress through self-examination and self-actualization.”³

Such tasks call for representing a heritage that colonialism ignored and repressed. But this does not imply seeing history in Western terms. Though her work describes films set in the past, Pfaff—like Armes—does not recognize the historical film as a category. In this she follows her subjects. Of the two most common sorts of Western history film—those based upon actual people or events, and those in which the characters may be fictional but certain historical moments or movements are intrinsic to the development of the plot and action—Africa has almost none of the first and only a few of the second. These few, set in the recent past, relate the problems of post-independence: social dislocations due to development, student unrest, political and moral corruption, and the lingering hold of former colonial masters on the new native leadership. Shall we say they constitute a kind of “instant history,” one whose Hollywood forms may well reflect that postcolonial countries now live with a Western sense of time?

In dealing with more remote periods, Africans depart from Hollywood conventions to create films that seem consonant with an oral tradition. Common are tales of village or tribal ancestors and heroes, tales ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: Personal, Professional, and (a Little) Theoretical
• I. History in Images
• II. The Historical Film
• III. The Future of the Past
• Notes
• Sources
• Acknowledgments
• Index