Film, History and Memory

Fearghal McGarry,Jennie Carlsten

• Editorial: Palgrave Macmillan
• Año: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137468956
• Categoría: Storia
• Categoría: Storia sociale

Using an interdisciplinary approach, Film, History and Memory broadens the focus from 'history', the study of past events, to 'memory', the processes – individual, generational, collective or state-driven – by which meanings are attached to the past.

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A Very Long Engagement: The Use of Cinematic Texts in Historical Research

Gianluca Fantoni

We need to study film and see it in relation to the world that produces it. What is our hypothesis? That film, image or not of reality, document or fiction, true story or pure invention, is history.

Marc Ferro¹

Historians who base their research principally on cinematic texts may, at times, feel uneasy with regard to the epistemological foundations of their research. This is due to a number of reasons. Firstly, to study films, or principally films rather than written documents, means to go against a long and illustrious tradition of historiographical studies which normally privileges written texts over visual evidence as primary sources for historical research. Secondly, within the range of visual sources, historians have for a long time been especially suspicious of cinematic texts. Finally, a universally accepted, coherent and comprehensive methodology for studying film as a source for historical analysis has not yet been formulated. Such awareness accounts for the title of this essay: cinema and history have had a very long engagement, but a proper wedding has yet to be celebrated. It is worth noting that the long-term diffidence of historians towards film is not entirely unreasonable. The use of cinematic texts as historical sources presents difficult theoretical problems with respect to their selection, use and methods of analysis. In the mid-1970s, historian Paul Smith, while advocating the use of films in historical research, provided a succinct summary of the issues troubling professional historians:

[film] can quite easily be faked, or put together in such a way as to distort reality, give a tendentious picture, and practise upon the emotions of the spectator. Moreover, it is often a relatively trivial and superficial record, capturing only the external appearance of its subjects and offering few insights into the processes and relationships, causes and motives which are the historian’s concern.²

The concerns identified by Smith remain relevant and should not be overlooked. However, a corpus of methods, findings and suggestions concerning the use of cinematic texts in historical research has been developing over the years, especially since the mid-1970s. Together they provide – if not a methodology – a reasonably reliable theoretical base. By sketching the history of the relationship between historians and film, this essay takes stock of the methodological progress historians have made in analysing cinematic texts as a source for historical research. In particular, it focuses on the literature that has developed as a result of historians’ interest in cinematic propaganda. This essay outlines how well-established scholars have addressed a range of questions concerning the nature of cinema, and the relationships between cinema and society and cinema and audience. Key questions include: are historians justified in using cinematic texts in their research? What is the social role of cinema? Does cinematic propaganda work? How? And to what extent? With a closer look, everything boils down to a single, fundamental question: do films influence people, or, rather, do they mirror people’s ideas?³

The issue of the relationship between cinema and history is as old as cinema itself. As early as 1898, the Polish cameraman and employee of the Lumière Company, Bolesław Matuszewski, argued for the establishment of a ‘Cinematographic Museum or Depository’ where footage documenting historical events could be stored on behalf of scholars and students of the future.⁴ The use of the filmic image as historical documentation was a fairly intuitive idea. If history’s most sacred duty was to avoid that ‘what has come to be from man in time might become faded’, to quote Herodotus of Halicarnassus, what could be better than a tiny band of celluloid which constituted, in the words of Matuszewski, ‘not only a proof of history but a fragment of history itself’? It can be seen that Matuszewski had an essentially positivist attitude towards cinema: film was much more that a mirror of reality to him, it was reality itself.

Matuszewski’s call for the large-scale storage of footage for research purposes fell on deaf ears. Film archives were not established before the 1930s, and, for many years, historians did not give any serious thought to the use of film as a historical source. Even when the Annales School legitimized the use of a wider range of evidence in historical research, scholars generally remained suspicious of film. A certain intellectual snobbery towards the cinema medium, which was for many years regarded as nothing more than a form of entertainment for the lower classes, certainly played a part in this respect.

If there is a moment that can be considered a watershed for the study of cinema and history, it is the publication of From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film by German historian Siegfried Kracauer, first published in 1947.⁵ Clearly influenced by the work of Sigmund Freud, Kracauer came to believe that cinema represented a sort of psychoanalytic revelation of the collective unconscious. His study was aimed at accounting for the mass acceptance of Nazism in the Germany of 1930s by investigating the ‘hidden mental processes’ and ‘mass desires’ of the German people as they emerged from the films produced in the years of the Weimar Republic.

The chapter devoted to Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920) is perhaps the best known of Kracauer’s psychoanalysis-inspired investigations.⁶ Kracauer sensed that, in order to understand the historical relevance of the film completely, it was necessary to go beyond what appears on the screen, and investigate the film’s production process. It was precisely this investigation which provided Kracauer with the principal evidence informing his psychoanalytic reading. Kracauer learnt that the film’s original script, by two Austrian authors, exposed the perversion of power and the intrinsic violence of government institutions: the protagonist of the film eventually finds out that the despicable Caligari (who has enslaved the somnambulist Cesare and forces him to commit murder) is the director of a public lunatic asylum. In order to make the film more acceptable to the mainstream audience, however, German-born director Wiene imposed a fundamental change on the plot by encapsulating it in a new narrative frame: the entire story is just the fantastic account of a mentally ill patient secluded in the lunatic asylum.⁷ According to Kracauer, by turning a subversive plot into a reassuring and conformist film, Wiene had demonstrated a more heightened awareness of the ‘German soul’ than the two Austrian screenplay writers. In fact, according to Kracauer, Germans trusted authority above all else. Kracauer concluded that, when faced with the seemingly unavoidable alternative of tyranny and chaos, as had happened in the early 1930s, German people would invariably choose tyranny, as for them order was, in any case, preferable to anarchy. This is why they had eventually chosen Adolf Hitler.

To infer the ‘collective disposition and tendencies’, the ‘inner urges’, or ‘the intrinsic concerns of the collective mind’ from the production of a national film industry appears, nowadays, quite an adventurous approach to film studies.⁸ Nonetheless, Kracauer’s book remains fascinating in that it reminds us that film, fiction or factual, does not appeal exclusively to the viewer’s rationality. In order to be appealing and successful, films have to satisfy the audience’s existing desires and psychological needs.

Kracauer also added to his book a final chapter dealing with Nazi cinematography, in which he claimed that all of the films produced in Germany during the Nazi regime – newsreels, documentaries, or apparently escapist feature films – were to be regarded as propaganda films.⁹ There was, at the time, a growing awareness among scholars in this respect. Many historians realized that, when it came to cinematic texts, one could hardly speak of objectivity, given that every film, feature film or documentary conveyed an author’s point of view.¹⁰ This certainly did not help overcome historians’ scepticism over the use of film in historical research. As a consequence, studies on film and history did not flourish in the following years.¹¹

Historical documentaries and newsreels formed the focus of a conference held at the University College of London (UCL) in 1968 under the title Film and Historians.¹² This conference focussed on the use of films for didactic purposes. Significantly, scholars debated whether ‘raw material’ – that is, unedited footage – was the best visual source for the teaching of history, being the only type of cinematic text (almost) free from manipulation. This approach shows how historians generally contemplated only a narrow use of the cinematic text. Based on a sort of ‘criterion of truth’, the historian dealing with filmic documents had to perform, primarily, a philological operation aimed at detecting every kind of manipulation. Only the remaining true information could thus be safely deployed.¹³

The UCL conference stimulated British scholars to investigate the potential uses of cinema in historical research. In 1976, Historian and Film, edited by Paul Smith, took stock of the progress made in this field. In the introduction, Smith advocated ‘the full integration of film into the range of resources at the historian’s disposal’.¹⁴ Historian and film-studies lecturer William Hughes adopted a structuralist approach. He claimed that cinema constituted a visual language structured by specific elements which fundamentally shaped the cinematic text’s meaning. These elements were the result of how both shooting and editing techniques were handled by the filmmaker. Therefore, a proper interpretation of visual content depended upon a knowledge of filmmaking: ‘Just as they must often learn a foreign language in order to utilize essential written documents, historians must know how focus, camera placement, framing, lens selection, lighting, film emulsion, editing technique, and other factors combine to determine the form, content and meaning of a given length of film.’¹⁵

Hughes also listed a number of possible uses of cinematic texts in historical research. For example, unedited footage could be employed as a partial record of events and personalities. Films produced and distributed on a regular basis (such as newsreels) might be useful for audience research purposes. Sponsored films could provide insights into the motives of sponsoring institutions like governments and political parties (showing what they wanted and did not want people to see). Finally, feature films could be taken as an indicator of the moral values, prejudices, ideas, and political and social tensions running through a society at a given time.¹⁶

Of all the potential applications of film to historical study suggested by Hughes, it was especially the last one that seemed to ...