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The Reel Joan of Arc:

Reflections on the Theory and


Practice of the Historical Film
ROBERT A. ROSENSTONE

Although historians in recent years have become interested in evaluating the contributions of historical film to our understanding of the past, they have so far evolved no
criteria for doing so. This essay moves toward doing just that by suggesting and
examining some of the ways in which the dramatic historical film creates the world of the
past on the screen. Operating metaphorically and poetically, the film set in the past
becomes a work of history when it engages the ongoing discourse surrounding its
subject, asking the kinds of questions historians ask, but answering them in a dramatic
and semifictional way.

ON THE WORLD WIDE WEB there is a site, centered at Fordham University, named
Medieval History in the Movies. 1 It is quite a substantial site. Printed out, it comes
to forty-one pages. with approximately ten or more entries a page, this comes to a
total of more than four hundred entries on individual films. True, some films are
mentioned more than once. And true, its notion of medieval is rather broad,
since it includes at one chronological end films set in what would normally be
called antiquity (such as the 1980 drama Caligula or Federico Fellinis Satyricon)
and at the other end, biographical films set in the late sixteenth and seventeenth
century, such as Derek Jarmans Caravaggio (1986) and Alexander Kordas
Rembrandt (1936). But I dont wish to quibble over boundaries and periods.
Whatever the parameters, it is still an impressive list.
I found this site after being asked to deliver a lecture on film and history at the
UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. I went to the web because,
though I have for twenty years been thinking about history and film, I am trained
as a historian of the modern world, and my investigations have convinced me that
we cant get very far with this subject unless we focus on movies set in periods
which we have seriously studied, researched, and taught. Indeed, when I was asked
to speak at the Center, I tried to beg off. What do I know about medieval or
Renaissance periods? But after some back and forth with the director, I agreed to
give a general talk about historical films, with some medieval and Renaissance
history. That decision led me to search out references to films about those periods
and let me find, if nothing more, a way to get into the talk.

Unlike the twentieth century, the medieval and Renaissance periods are not
popular eras in which to set historical films. Were we to leave aside works about
Shakespeare and Joan of Arc, we would rarely in recent years have seen something
set in those eras. And yet here is a web site annotating some four hundred such
films. For me this underscores what I have been observing since I began writing
about filmhistorians are increasingly interested in the visual media as both a
competitor and a collaborator in our attempt to convey the past to our students and
the culture at large. This interest is also shown by the changing attitudes reflected
in our conferences and journals towards film. When I was a graduate student at
UCLA some thirty-five years ago, historical journals never deigned to mention
film, and our doctoral advisers would have tossed us out of the program and
directly into the neuropsychiatric institute were we to have suggested a dissertation
on a film topic or claim a film might successfully do history. Pretty much the
same attitudes still prevailed in the early eighties. Yet two decades later, major
journals regularly publish reviews and essays on film, panels on film are held at
scholarly meetings, and whole conferences are devoted to the topicin the United
States, Europe, Latin America, and Africa.
Toward the end of the web site Medieval History in Movies there are three
fascinating lists: Worst Medieval Movies; Best Medieval Moviesby historical
accuracy; and Best Medieval Moviesas films. Taken together, these provide a
good deal of insight into the issue of historians and film. One can gather a good
deal by looking at the criteria for judging the worst. Mel Gibsons 1995
Braveheart, is, for example, characterized as a massively inaccurate portrayal of
the life of the 13th-century hero William Wallace, although without those
inaccuracies being characterized. The Adventures of Marco Polo (1938) also falls
short; for one thing, Gary Cooper does not make a very convincing Italian, and for
another, there is something ludicrous about the scene in which he stuffs dry pasta
in his pocket to take back to Italy. The Vikings (1958), with Kirk Douglas and
Tony Curtis, fails because in the rowing scenes you can clearly see one Viking
with a vaccination scar and another with a gold wristwatch. Franco Zeffirellis
Brother Sun, Sister Moon (1973), based on the life of St. Francis of Assisi, makes
the list because of its inappropriate do your own thing soundtrack by 1960s pop
singer, Donovan. Finally, The Conqueror (1956) is a failure because John Wayne
just does not make it as the great Mongol leader, Ghengis Khan.
The best list by historical accuracy contains only eight films; the best as
films contains seventeen. Four works manage to make it on both of these lists:
Becket (1964) with Peter OToole and Richard Burton; The Return of Martin
Guerre (1982), directed by Daniel Vigne and starring Gerard Depardieu and
Natalie Baye; the Carl Dreyer classic, The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928); and
Roland Joffes drama, The Mission (1986), starring Robert DeNiro and Jeremy
Irons. The comments as to why they are best are, if possible, less revealing than
those on the worst list. Becket, based on a play by Jean Anouilh, is called a superb
film, even though the review decries its central interpretation, for there is no
historical data to support the suggestion that there was a homosexual relationship
between Thomas a Becket and Henry II. The Return of Martin Guerre is

excellent because it is based on trial records and its director received solid
historical advice from Natalie Davis, who served as consultant. The Passion of
Joan of Arc is also based on actual trial transcripts; besides, the actress Jeanne
Falconetti gives the greatest performance ever captured on film. For The
Mission no reason is offered as to why it is included among the best.
These quotations point to something that occurs regularly when historians
write about film. Judgments are made about historical value on wildly divergent
groundsaccuracy of detail, the use of original documents, appropriateness of
music, the looks or apparent suitability of an actor to play someone whose body
language, voice, and gestures we can never know from the historical recordall of
these may be invoked as a way of praising or damning a film in the pages of
journals like the American Historical Review and the Journal of American History.
It also happens in the book, Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies,
where, in short essays, some sixty specialists assess one or more films as to their
historical content. (F ew come off very well as contributions to our understanding
of the past.) N ot untypical is Gerda Lerners essay on three film s devoted to the
life of Joan of ArcDreyers The Passion of Joan of Arc (mentioned above);
Victor Flemings Joan of Arc (1948), written by Maxwell Anderson and starring
Ingrid Bergman; and Otto Premingers Saint Joan (1957), based on the play by
Bernard Shaw and starring Jean Seberg. 1 Professor Lerner does her best to be fair
to the films, but the essay keeps veering back and forth between different sorts of
judgments and criteria. The Fleming and Preminger works, she says, adhere
closely to the main historical facts. Both succeed in creating a sense of historical
veracity by getting superficial details right, such as the weapons and costumes of
the time. Ingrid Bergman gives a luminous performance, and during the
burning at the stake, her pain and terror are wholly believable. But unfortunately
the miraculous ending, with a cross set against a golden sky, underscored by
typical Hollywood music designed to signify exaltation shatters the illusion.
The Preminger production, in following the Shaw play, gives us long, prescient
monologues by Joan which are totally ahistorical. A framing device, telling the
audience of events after Joans death, is clumsy, and distances the audience from
the main events: It is as though we are seeing a film about the historiography of
Joan of Arc rather than about her life and death. Jean Sebergs performance is
occasionally stirring but mostly unconvincing. She plays the maid as a teenage
waif and fails to convey her strength, drive, force.
Dreyer gets the highest marksas well he should. He has created, Lerner says,
mostly through closeups, an atmosphere of horror and ravaged innocence. The
intertitles of his silent film consist almost entirely of lines from the actual record
of Joans interrogation, which gives the work a spare and appropriately medieval
tone. (It is not clear if this is meant to indicate that there was something spare
about medieval times, nor, indeed, what this could mean.) Ultimately this film

1Gerda Lerner, Joan of Arc: Three Films. In Mark C. Carnes


(ed.), Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies (New York: Henry Holt,
1995), 54-59.

comes closest to conveying the historical truth. For while the two Hollywood
films imitate the life and times of Joan of Arc with varying degrees of success and
some moments of verisimilitude, Dreyer, by using film poetically and
metaphorically (my emphasis), makes us suffer the agony of the peasant girl Joan
and makes us feel the radiance of the presence of a saint. 2
These quotations from Lerners essay are chosen to highlight the jumble of
evidence she uses to make judgments. Adhering to facts, especially details, gets
pretty high historical marks. But facts alone do not in her view necessarily make
for good history. Other elements are also at work. One is believability of
performance, but against what do we measure performance other than some
prefigured notion of a historical figure? Who really knows how the actual Joan
looked, sounded, or gestured? How can we be sure she did not act like a waif
during the trial? For Lerner, a framing device which takes us into the realm of
historiography (and which some of us might wish to judge a good technique, at
least insofar as it broadens our view and makes us aware that history does not tell
itself) is judged to be clumsy and distancing. The work that she finds closest to
portraying historical truth certainly uses facts, but draws its historical power
largely from else- wherefrom what she labels as poetry and metaphor.
Such apparent contradictions do not belong only to Lerner, who has written an
interesting enough essay. But they are common to the historians approach. When
we consider historical films, it is easy to be critical of what we see. But ask what
we expect a film to be or do, and basically we historians dont know, other than to
insist that it adhere to the facts. This is because most of our notions come
directly out of our training and practice as academics. Our first reaction is to think
a film is really a book somehow transferred to the screen, and that it should do
what we expect a book to do: get things right. This viewpoint does not belong to
academics alone, but is shared by reviewers and critics. Yet as moviegoers or
anyone who lives in our media-soaked culture has to know, a historical film has
always been something more than a collection of facts. It is a drama, a
performance, a work that stages and constructs a past in images and sounds. The
power of the history on the screen emanates from the unique qualities of the
medium, its abilities to communicate not just literally (as if any historical
communication is entirely literal), and not just realistically (as if we can define
historical realism) but also, in Lerners words, poetically and metaphorically. In
thinking about films and trying to assess how well they construct the past, we have
to stop expecting them to be books and begin to see and judge them as dramatic
works on a screenand even, I would argue, as visual metaphors.
The idea that works of history speak as metaphors is not unfamiliar. Frank R.
Ankersmit has long argued that the metaphorical dimension in historiography is
ultimately more powerful (and more interesting?) than the literal or factual
dimensions. We already know, he says, far too much about the past ever to absorb
what has been published. In the future, our relationship to the past should focus
less on the acquisition of new data and more on the language we use for speaking

2All quotations ibid., 56-59.

about the past.3 Though Ankersmit does not say so, it seems clear that one of the
languages for talking about the past can be the language of film. It is a language
we should (must?) learn how to read, a language which consists (at the very least)
of both the possibilities inherent in the visual media and the practices (drama is
one of them) which those who utilize the media have created.
In approaching film, we might follow the sensible suggestion that Ankersmit
has made with regard to philosophers who study written history. Their task should
not be, he argues, to prescribe for historians the right and wrong way to write
history. Instead, they should derive theory from practice by analyzing the
development of how the past has been and is written. The same should apply to
film. Rather than focusing on how film gets the past wrong, or theorizing about
what film should do to or for the past, or how it should construct history, we had
better first study the way in which historical filmmakers have been working for the
last century. This will help us to understand the rules of engagement by which
history can be rendered on the screen.
To give just a taste of some of these rules, and to suggest how they differ from
history on the page, I will examine sequences from three very different films: one
set in the 1960s, another in the nineteenth century, and a third in the medieval
period.
The first sequence comes from an obscure but for me important work entitled
Walker, devoted to the life of William Walker, an American adventurer who, at the
head of an army of fifty-eight men, invaded Nicaragua in 1856, lent his forces to
one side of an ongoing civil war, and within a year had been elected president of
that country, which he ruled as a dictator. This film taught me a great deal about
the normal rules, practices, and expectations we have for a historical filmand it
did so by breaking those rules. Walkers story, which falls somewhere between the
history of free booting and that of American imperialism, is treated in the film as a
piece of outrageous black humor, one that includes many deliberate anachronismscomputer monitors, Mercedes automobiles, and Time magazine all are
briefly part of this mid-nineteenth-century world. Yet the films portrait of the
Democrat as imperialist rings true. Reading everything written about the man since
the 1850sa dozen books in three languages, numerous chapters, essays,
newspaper, and magazine articlesI found that although the facts of the matter did
not change (virtually everything we know about the historic Walker was known
during his life), interpretations of his life and career have varied greatly over 150
years. Overtly fictional and absurdist in some of its moments, the film provides a
powerful interpretation of the manas well as the relationship between
democracy and that kind of imperialism which nineteenth-century Americans
called Manifest Destiny.4

3F. R. Ankersmit, Historiography and Postmodernism. In History


and Tropology (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1994), 162-81.

The sequence takes place somewhere beside a train track being laid by Chinese
workers in what seems to be Arizona. Here Walker meets with the tycoon,
Cornelius Vanderbilt. This hugely rich entrepreneur tells Walker that he owns the
lucrative shipping route from New York to California, a route that runs across
Nicaragua. But there is a civil war in Nicaragua, and Vanderbilt wants stability
there. He asks Walker, who previously had led an invasion of Mexico, to go and
take over the country, insinuating it will be a lucrative venture. Walker demurs,
claiming that his goals are higher than the pursuit of personal profit. Vanderbilt
then changes his tune and asks if Walker doesnt believe in the ideals of the
Founding Fathers, in democracy and universal suffrage? More than in my own
life, comes the reply.
Nicaragua needs democracy, Vanderbilt says. It also needs a canal. Im
interested in Nicaragua, and so are you, whether you know it or not. 5
The first thing to say about this sequence is that it never happened. It is a
fiction, the invention of a screenwriter. For though they ended up as antagonists,
with Walker the Nicaraguan president expropriating Vanderbilts ships and other
holdings, the two men never met face to face. Yet this encounter is crucial to the
meaning of the film. Here is a clash between two powerful individuals,
emblematic of two sorts of American imperialismseconomic and democratic.
These two men stake out the terms of an ongoing debate with each other and with
the larger world. Their exchange reveals the clash of greed and self-interest, the
fervent if misplaced idealism, and the hidden complicities which have fueled
American expansionism for a hundred and fifty years. To portray this same
conflict, the historian who works in words might have created their encounter on
the page, by outlining the ideology or belief system of each. The notion that ideas
compete in paragraphs on a page is, I would argue, as much a fiction (but a
fiction we accept) as the encounter we have seen between Walker and
Vanderbilt. The film actually signals its fictiveness by setting the meeting in an
obviously mythic spacea railroad track in Arizona decades before trains came to
the West. So while the incident depicted is not verifiable, I would argue that it is
historically true. True as a filmic way of turning an ideological conflict into a
dramatic one.

4Robert A. Rosenstone, Walker: The Dramatic Film as


(Postmodern) History. In Rosenstone (ed.), Revisioning History:
Contemporary Filmmakers and the Construction of the Past (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1995), 202-13. Reprinted in
Rosenstone, Visions of the Past: The Challenge of Film to Our Idea of History
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 132-51.
5Rudy Wurlitzer, Walker, Witness 1, no. 4 (Winter, 1987): 11-77.
The encounter between Walker and Vanderbilt can be found on
pp. 22-24. This screenplay differs somewhat from the shooting
script of the film.

The second sequence is from Oliver Stones acclaimed work, Born on the
Fourth of July. The setting is Syracuse University in May, 1970, a few days after
the American incursion into Cambodia, and the day after the shooting of four
students at Kent State University. For anyone who lived through the 1960s on a
campus, there has to be a shock of recognition on viewing this sequence. My own
feeling on first seeing it was that I had been present at this very scene, saw these
very students on the steps of a university hall, with their long hair, Afros, beards,
Levis, bandanas; witnessed these very gesturesthe raised arms, the clenched fists
heard this very speechifying by Blacks and Whites, the denunciations of war,
the shouted words Nixon, On strike, Shut it down, Right on; saw these very
police wade into the crowd and break up the demonstration with tear gas and
clubs. Even that middle-aged figure on the steps, wearing a dashiki and calling for
a March on Washington, looks strangely familiarbut at the same time somehow
too old and out of place. Before the tear gas bombs explode and the cops descend
with swinging clubs, we may realize: that is Abbie Hoffman, King of the Yippies,
saying precisely the kind of things he had said at such demonstrations thirty-five
years before.
The sequence is based upon a real event. Syracuse was one of hundreds of
universities and high schools whose students went on strike the day after Kent
State. But the demonstration at Syracuse was different from the one we see. The
words may have been violent, but there was no confrontation with police. Nor was
the demonstration attended by either Ron Kovic, the hero of the film (played by
Tom Cruise), and author of the book on which it is based, or by his girlfriend, for
he did not have a girlfriend. Nor was it addressed by Abbie Hoffman. Yet though
the sequence was created by the director, it is not a complete invention, but
instead, a cunning mixture of diverse elementsfact, near fact, displaced fact,
invention. It refers to the past, it prods the memory, but it does not reproduce a
specific, document- able moment of the past. Yet for all that, it is a historical
moment, one that claims its truth by standing in for many such moments. Like
other elements in historical films, it serves to open out the story of one man to
encompass those of others like him. It tells the truth that such demonstrations were
common in the late sixties. The truth of the chaos, confusion, and violence of such
encounters between students and police. The truth of the historical questions the
sequence forces viewers to confront: Why are these students gathered here? What
are they protesting? Why are they so critical of national leaders? Why do the
police break up the rally with such gusto? What is at stake here for our
understanding of the 1960s?6
Two final sequences come from the recent film, A Knights Tale. The first takes
place only a couple of minutes into the story. A knight has been killed at a jousting
match and one of his three attendants decides to take his place for the next turn in

6For a fuller discussion of Stone, see Robert A. Rosenstone,


Oliver Stone as Historian. In Robert Brent Toplin (ed.), Oliver
Stones USA (Lawrence, Kans.: University Press of Kansas, 2000),
26-39.

the lists. As he rides onto the field, secure that the armor disguises his humble
origins, we hear people in the viewing stands singing over and over the MTV
refrain, We will, we will rock you as they extend their arms and move back and
forth in that contemporary gesture of fans that we call The Wave. At the top of
the stands, a girl dances solo, doing what very much looks like contemporary steps
and movements. Below her, groups of guys, long hair pulled back in bandanas,
slam beer steins together and roar as if at the Super Bowlor at least in a
commercial shown during a football game. Then the jousting starts and we are
back to more traditional sightsarmor gleams, eyes peer through slitted visors,
hoofs pound, enormous lances are raised, a huge metallic clash occurs, and a
knight falls off a horse and clangs to the ground. Or at least this is what we take to
be tradition, and we assume it bears some proximate reality to historical jousting,
though in truth all most of us know of jousting comes from other films.
The questions forced upon us by this sequence obviously concern the blatant
anachronisms: Dont they violate what we know about tournaments in the
fourteenth century? Yes and no. It depends upon what you wish to say
about such tournaments. The film, after all, is made for a twenty-first century
audience, for people to whom such a tournament, however exciting, seems no
more than a distant, exotic, and bizarre spectacle. To normalize it, to show that in
the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries such tournaments were wildly popular
spectator sportsmuch like, for Americans, football todaythe filmmaker utilizes
anachronisms that are so blatant (the MTV reference, the Wave) that nobody could
mistake them for an actual historical reference. Yet they do help communicate
something that would be otherwise difficult for that audience to comprehend, and
they do so precisely by using contemporary imagery and language.
A second sequence in the film does much the same thing. A formal court dance
that begins to staid recorder music, a kind of dance we know from other period
films, a dance that looks slow, stately, and not very much fun to our modern eyes,
speeds up and then segues into a modern rock dance to the music of electric
guitars. Here again the filmmaker translates an experience (or an imagined
experience) into a visual, aural, and dramatic vocabulary that we can more readily
appreciate. The shift in mid-dance is clear enough that nobody will really think
people danced this way, or that rock music was popular in that period. It is quite
clearly only a way of communicating in a modern vocabulary not some literal
reality (do we know the literal reality of the dances then?) but the spirit or feeling
of fun and eroticism that participants might have felt in such a dance in that era.
Maybe you are tempted to say: Alright. So at the level of the sequence, a
historical film has license to transcend the literal. But a film is more than
individual clips or brief visual quotations. What about the larger sense of the past?
Arent these sequences just part of the way in which historical films always
fictionalize and violate the people and events of the past? Dont they do precisely
the opposite of what we who write history do?
Okay. It is, of course, possible to admit that films do something different. But
as David Harlan has argued in a recent essay, we must understand that there is a

sharp difference between academic history and what Harlan calls popular history, a
category that includes film. Academic history is, at least in theory, a disciplined
way of getting outside ourselves, of seeing the past on its own terms, of trying to
look through the eyes of people long dead. Films, for the most part, make the past
accessible by collapsing it into the present. In popular history we dont get to know
earlier people in their strangeness, but get rid of the strangeness by making people
in the past similar to us. For the most part it is not the difference between the dead
and the living that interests filmmakers, but the similarities, what the living share
with the dead.8
8. David Harlan, Ken Burns and the Coming Crisis of Academic History, unpublished
manuscript. For a published version of the essay that, because it has been shortened, lacks the
quotations used here, see Ken Burns and the Coming Crisis of Academic History, Rethinking
History: The Journal of Theory and Practice, 7, no. 2 (Summer 2003):167-94.

Harlans essay, which provocatively calls documentary director Ken Burns the
most famous historian in America today, argues that the very purpose of popular
history is different from academic history. Film, in particular, gives us the past not
as a site we turn to for critical understanding, but a past we turn to for healing
purposesthe past as a source of reflection and recuperation. This is a past which
offers up modes of perception, habits of thought, and ways of being that, could
we but recover them and hold them in memory, might help us become the kind of
people we have always wished to be. If this aim characterizes the work of Burns
as well as most big budget Hollywood historical films, it does not apply to a kind
of film which Harlan ignores, a more critical or intellectual kind of work that is
often produced in other parts of the world. But he is surely right when he
characterizes popular history not as an incomplete or degraded form of academic
history; it is a legitimate and compelling genre in its own right, with its own aims
and objectives, its own rules and requirements, its own criteria of evaluation.
It is just such objectives, requirements, and criteria which I have been thinking
about for the last few yearswhat you might call the dramatic films Rules of
Engagement with the past. These are not easy to locate, nor are they easy to accept.
For starters, there is our general notion that such films are just too simple in the
characters they portray and the stories they tell, which means that they inevitably
oversimplify the complexities of the past. But I am tempted to argue the reverse.
Films seem simple because on a surface level they are so easy to watch. If we are
to understand the way they engage the past, however, we must learn to read what is
on the screen more deeply and widely. We must look at historical films not for
literal truths but for more symbolic or metaphoric interpretations. To do so, we
must pay close attention and learn something about film language, the way the
medium tells the past. In other words, we must work to find and unpack the
historical content and argument.
Films can speak in different tongues. Let me point to two different kinds of
dramatic films from the medieval/Renaissance periods. One is the traditional work
which purports to be a window onto past eventsThe Return of Martin Guerre.
Another is the work which plays with the past, winks at you as if to say this really
is only a filmA Knights Tale. The overwhelming majority of historical films
are of the former sort, but one should not dismiss the latter. For precisely by its

winking, A Knights Tale signals that it is not meant to be some exact rendition of
the past, some window onto a vanished world, but rather a kind of conversation
about that past, and a commentary on it. In this case the conversation speaks in
broad tones, with a clear villain who must get his come-uppance, a sappy love
story that doesnt pretend to be anything but sappy, and a comic book hero. The
film is, in short, a riff on a certain type of film and a certain period of history. Yet it
is a riff that speaks to and comments upon the issues of the age in which it is set,
the fourteenth centuryor so colleagues who specialize in the Middle Ages tell
me. The question at issue for our hero in the film, the son of a thatcher who begins
to impersonate a knight, is this: just what is it that makes a person noble? Is it
simply a matter of letters of patent attesting to four generations of nobility? Or
does nobility have something to do with qualities of heart and spirit? During the
period in which the film is set, real debates were going on precisely around this
pointwas nobility inherited or something that has to do with character? Many
commentators opted for the latterwhich is, of course, what the film concludes.
Our honest thatcher defeats the villain, gets the girl, and is officially knighted.
The Return of Martin Guerre is the more common type of historical film, one
that uses the sober tones we take as appropriate when speaking of the dead. When
it was first released, there was some debate over the extent to which it accurately
represented not only the mysterious case of Martin Guerre, but village life in
Languedoc in the sixteenth century. Complaints were voiced that the village of
Artigat was too neat, that there was not enough refuse and swill in the streets, that
the peasants looked rather too scrubbed. But such judgments are in part a matter of
perspectiveand audience. My students who see the film today find the village to
be oppressively filthy and primitive.
Like all such works, the film indulges in invention that adds to or violates the
historical record.7 Take, as but two examples, the fictional scene in which the false
Martin returns to Artigat and the Perry Mason-like confrontation before a packed
courtroom in Toulouse (where trials were held without spectators). Despite such
inventions, the central storywho in the village knew or suspected that the man
who returned was a false Martin; to what extent was the wife, Bertrande de Rols, a
willing co-conspirator in his longtime impersonation; how important the case was
to the famed jurist, Jean de Corasall this remains intact. So does a portrait of a
sixteenth- century French village, with its perpetual and collective work, lack of
privacy, dimly lit rooms, illiteracy, rude manners, charivari, and wise old women
who could lift curses. The central questionis Bertrande a sharp, even rational
peasant, a woman maneuvering for some individual space, or simply a victim of a
charming charlatan?also comes through. The former interpretation, suggested by
Natalie Davis in her book by the same name, itself became a matter of some
historical debate. Davis was taken to task in the pages of the American Historical

7Robert A. Rosenstone, Like Writing History With Lightning,


Contention 2, no. 3 (Spring, 1993): 191-204. Reprinted as The
Historical Film: Looking at the Past in a Postliterate Age. In
Rosenstone, Visions of the Past, 45-81.

Review by Robert Finlay for her supposed feminist rereading and rewriting of
the past.8 Here the issue became that old one for historians: how much do the
sources speak for themselves, and how much can (do?) we read into sources, or
use context to amplify their meaning. (And if we cant ever finally settle such
disputes within our field, how can we hope to with regard to film?)
As a traditional historical film, Martin Guerre, unlike A Knights Tale,
communicates in traditional historical film language and form. Yet such
language is subtler about history than we normally allow. Near the opening, there
is a sequence which exemplifies how such language alone tells us a good deal
about meaning of the past. The wedding of the young couple, Martin Guerre and
Bertrande de Rols, begins with an overhead shot from high up in the back of the
church, a shot which shows the whole community but no individuals. The second
image is of the priest, the third of the parents of the groom, the fourth of the
parents of the bride, the fifth of the ring being put on the brides finger, the sixth of
the groom, and the seventh of the bride. H ere, in this carefully constructed
sequence, we are (if we care to read it) presented with the hierarchy of human
relationships in Artigat, a hierarchy that controls the personal and property
relationships in a sixteenth-century village. Clearly the language is telling us that
this is no modern town in which the wedding couple are the center of attention,
and letting us know that in this period of history, marriage is not about personal
desire but about social cohesion and property. From the end of the wedding, we go
directly to the notary who draws up the marriage contract and calls it un bon
affaire. Good business.
It is just this kind of reading we must do if we are to more fully understand the
meaning embedded in and conveyed by historical filmsa reading which shows
how filmmakers encode messages not just in the characters or story, but in the very
visual language in which they choose to speak of the past.
You may ask: is this History? It is a question I ask myself. Maybe one should
not insist upon the wordat least not in its capitalized form. Call it Popular
History. Or History on Film. Perhaps we need to invent a new word for it. What I
want to insist is that the historical film can do history that is, recount, explain,
interpret, and make meaning out of the people and events in the past. Like written
history, it utilizes traces of that past, but its rules of engagement with them are
structured by the possibilities of the medium and the practices it has evolved. So
its claims on us will inevitably be far different from those of written history.
Perhaps a few more examples will help. The basic element, the camera, is a
greedy mechanism which must show more precise detailsarrangements of
furniture, the way tools are handled, stances or gestures, the exact locations of
peasants in a landscapethan historical research could ever fully provide. The

8Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge, Mass.:


Harvard University Press, 1983); Robert Finlay, The
Refashioning of Martin Guerre, and Natalie Zemon Davis, On
the Lame, The American Historical Review 93, no. 3 (June 1988): 553-603.

dramatic structure, which means the need for plausible characters and psychic
tension, and the limitations on screen time, ensures that events and characters will
be condensed, compressed, alteredeven invented, along with invented dialogue.
What we see on the screen isand in this sense precisely like written historynot
a window onto the past but a construction of a simulated past, not a literal reality,
but a symbolic or metaphoric one.
Written history works the same way. It too does not recreate the past but,
instead, enfolds its trace elements, into a verbal construction, creating a text that
attempts to explain vanished people, events, moments, and movements to us in the
present. Even the most scholarly works are, in the words of Robert Berkhofer,
more structures of interpretation than the structures of factuality they purport to
be. Indeed, the literary job of historical realism, the only mode of writing
historians recognize as legitimateand one to which most filmmakers adhereis
to make the structure of interpretation appear to be (the same as) the structure of
factuality.9 Both written history and films invoke the authenticity (or reality) that
comes from using those traces, that documentary evidence we call facts, and
then go on to employ a literary or filmic vocabulary to create History.
Let me emphasize this point: both films and books are more than the sum of
their parts. A written work is based upon data, but the totality of its words finally
adds up to a text that transcends the data and launches into a realm of metaphor
and moral argument. Film also utilizes data, if in a rather more casual way. Then it
too launches into the same realm. Vision, metaphor, argument, or moral is
precisely the point at which film and written history come the closest to each other.
One might stipulate that the details of the past, what we call facts, are more than
interestingthey are absolutely crucial for history. But ultimately what we really
want to know is how to think about them, what they mean. Like the printed page,
film is ready to tell usin its own forms and language.
If they share interpretive structure, a shifting relationship of what we might call
data to discourse, books and films divide on one crucial issue: invention. One may
talk, as Hayden White has long done, of the fictive qualities of narrative, but
historical narrative is always built on blocks of verifiable data. The dramatic film,
by contrast, indulges in the invention of characters, dialogue, incidents, and events.
Indeed, some historical films are made up of wholly invented characters placed
into a documented setting or situation. Yet this practice of invention still allows for
historical thinking. At least if by that term we mean coming to grips with the
issues from the past that trouble and challenge us in the presentquestions of
social change, gender relations, individual and group identity, class, ethnicity, war,
colonialism, revolution, ideology, and nationalism.
These kinds of social and cultural issues have long been explored in historical
films. In the 1920s, Sergei Eisensteins October created an interpretation of the
Bolshevik Revolution which still can stand alongside those of academic historians

9 Robert Berkhofer, Beyond the Great Story: History cos Text and Discourse
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 57, 60.

writing then and today (as my recent essay argues). 10 Oliver Stones Born on the
Fourth of July is, it seems to me, a brilliant portrait of the way America was being
torn apart during the Vietnam war; in this case, the symbol of the war within the
heros family clearly stands for the larger war within the family of the United
States. The Return of Martin Guerre addresses issues of women, individualism,
social control, property rights, and the nature of true marriage in early modern,
rural France. Dreyers Joan of Arc, according to all commentators, creates a
powerful and convincing portrait of the anguish and pain of the maiden on trial
and at the stake.
Films which grapple with such significant historical questions have been made
all over the world, though they are not always in fashion everywhere. Instead they
tend to appear in clusters of two sorts: as either several works by a single director
who seems haunted by the past (Andrzej Wajda, Poland; Oliver Stone, U.S.; Theo
Angelopolous, Greece; Ousemane Sembene, Senegal; Carlos Diegues, Brazil) or
as several films in a single country in a brief period of time (Cuban film in the
1960s, the New German Cinema or the Cinema Nuovo of Brazil, both in the
1970s). Such clusters seem to appear when nations are undergoing some kind of
cultural or political stress, change or upheavalthe attempt to come to grips with
the trauma of Vietnam (Stone); the corruption and internal conflicts that presaged
the end of Communism (Wajda); Nazism and the legacy of the Third Reich (New
German Cinema); the breakup of a nation (the cinema of the former Yugoslavia in
the 1990s and today); the desire to find (or create) a heritage for a postcolonial
country (Sembene, Cinema Nuovo); or to justify a revolutionary change of
regimes (Cuba).
My own studies of historical film in the last decade have attempted to answer
the question: how do certain films work as history? How do they make meaning of
the past? My focus has been films that are based on verifiable incidents, events, or
texts that themselves deal with the past. These include films such as Born on the
Fourth of July, Glory, October, Walker, works that recount, explain, interpret the
past by selecting trace elements and turning them into facts, using themalong
with other materialto comment on social, political, moral, and personal issues of
both the past and present. Historical writing does the same thingexcept perhaps
for that other material, which includes the inevitable inventions that are mixed in
with the verifiable facts, invented elements which are used to fill up the frame, or
to condense, symbolize, or displace things too complex or lengthy to fit into the
dramatic structure or the standard two- hour time frame of the film.
Inventions hardly constitute the entire difference between written and screen
history. Important as well are the elements of telling inherent in the medium. These
include elements of color, sound, and movement and of drama that heightens
emotional states and creates an intense and intimate relationship with characters;
of spectacle, bodies, faces, costumes, and landscapes. The facts delivered in
films include such elements, along with the very visual surfaces of the past that

10 Robert A. Rosenstone, October as History, Rethinking Histoiy: The


Journal of Theory and Practice 5, no. 2 (Summer 2001): 255-74.

film createsthe settings, landscapes, sounds, costumeseverything that comes


under the heading of what Roland Barthes once called the reality effect. For
Barthes, such effects were mere notations and not part of the meaning of History. 11
In film they achieve a sense of being facts under description, an integral part of the
world of the past and thus important elements of meaning. Such reality effects
can often tell us much about the people, processes, and eras.
A striking example of this occurs in Roberto Rossellinis three-part Age of the
Medici, a highly undramatic work based on a materialist notion of history, where
Renaissance Florence is conveyed through the surface of physical objects,
buildings, furniture, and long speeches that seem like recitations from textbooks.
In one superb sequence, the camera takes us into a small room, where a few
humble assistants are at work on the walls of an unfinished Brancacci Chapel,
which we recognize because there are the familiar figures by Masaccio, but only in
a sketchy outline. Today, this room has disappeared behind a (literal and
figurative) wall of enormous proportions and expectations. A wall which
proclaims: Here begins the Heroic Renaissance, and the way we view the world
will never be the same again. But what we see in the film is something physical
that recaptures a lost moment. The images take us back in a way no book can, into
that chapel long before anyone could know what this work would come to
symbolize. All we see are some men working slowly on unfinished walls while
their efforts are subject to blistering commentary by a British visitor, certain he
knows what good art is and that, whatever it is, its not what is being painted here.
How to read this scene? Certainly our understanding will depend upon what we
already know of Renaissance Florence. If we know nothing of the Brancacci
Chapel, the sequence will have little meaning. This is typical in films; they are
constructions which ultimately will be read in different ways. But is this not the
same for our written histories? The more you bring to the past, the more you get
out of it. Some historians have argued that meaning can be and is fixed in the text.
In plain language. Immutable. Verifiable or refutable. But the history of
historiography refutes this. Such an argument is part of a much larger struggle:
between those who believe words mean what they say and those who know that
words always mean much more than what they say.
Given its roots in drama and the visual media, the historical film cannot
possibly be about facts. Yet it must be about them at least to the extent that facts
are an integral part of the discourse of history. To be judged a historical film, as
opposed to a costume drama, a film must somehow engage the discourse of
history, the already existing body of writing, arguments, debates, memories,
images, moral positions, and data surrounding the topic with which it deals. The
films metaphors, compressions, alterations, and inventions must grow out of that
discourse and add something to it. The historical film does not, any more than the

11 Roland Barthes, Le discours de lhistoire, (1967), in


Barthes, Le Bruissement de la Langue (Paris: Seuil, 1984), 153-66.

written word, aim to deny or even alter a larger sense of historyits aim rather is
to evoke and comment upon the past.
Film is, as David Harlan suggests, a kind of popular history. To attend the
cinema (or to watch a television screen) is to undergo an experience far different
from that of reading words on a page. That difference lies at the heart of the
historical film. However we define, measure, and analyze that differenceand
none of this has yet been undertaken very convincingly, perhaps because of the
great slippage involved in translating a multi-media experience into linear words
it is at least clear that the experience is different enough to return us to basic
questions: what do we want from the past? Why do we want to know it? What else
might we want to know that we dont already know? Do we wish to learn by
example? To feel (or think we feel) what others (may have) felt in given
situations? To experience, if only distantly, what others experienced in war,
revolution, political crisis, times of trouble, and times of plenty? Or perhaps, as in
the history once practiced by the Greeks, to be inspired into ethical or aesthetic
contemplation of the human condition?
In theorizing and supporting postmodern history, Frank Ankersmit has called
for new ways of representing the past. Unlike other theorists, he does not want, he
insists, to reject scientific historiographyonly to draw attention to its limitations,
its implicit claim that nothing of the past exists outside historical texts. Yet for
Ankersmit, outside the texts of history lies the most important part of the past: the
whole domain of historical purpose and meaning. 12 This is a realm that does not
so much deny facts as cut loose from them. Surround them. Exist before and after
them. It is the precise realm into which the historical film can enter, not by
ignoring data but by using facts or playing with them in its own way. Which is to
say: the historical film engages much of the same stuff that scientific history
engages, but does so on its own filmic and dramatic terms.
Fifteen years of thinking about historical film have left me believing that the
visual media provide an entirely new realm for examining, telling, explaining, and
interpreting the pasta realm which is not history as we know it but something
adjacent to history, which builds upon the same materials as history and serves as a
commentary upon it. It is a realm whose location and dimensions exist at
coordinates yet to be determined. The charting of those coordinates, or standards
by which to think about the past
in historical films, can only grow out of a wide effort on the part of historical
practitioners. A few of us have already begun this process, but we need help,
critique, and assent from others in the field. Just as the boundaries of the game we
call history are altered over the years by the collectivity of historians (including
academics, public historians, museum curators, filmmakers, etc.), so must it be
with films. Only in this way will we be able to reach a point where we can think
more systematically about, say, the Reel Joan of Arc. Only in this way will we be
able to choose among and decide which of the many versions of her life (there are

12 Ankersmit, Historiography and Postmodernism, 181.

at least forty) present us with interesting, provocative, important depictions of the


maiden and her times.
Let us not forget that we in the West have been writing history for 2500 years
and putting it onto the screen for just about a century. Today the culture still
privileges what we historians have to say, but increasingly the messages about the
past are told upon the screen, large and small, and in forms such as the
documentary and the docudrama which, for lack of space, I havent even
mentioned here. In an age increasingly saturated with visual media, it is more than
mere speculation to wonder how much longer we academics who turn out essays
and books will be seen as the locus of historical explanation and wisdom. Film has
been making major changes in our notions of the past, but historians are still too
enmeshed in the old ways to understand precisely what they are, orheretical idea
to see if there are lessons in the practices of the visual media (montage,
flashback, condensation, apposite invention) which might serve to expand the
vocabulary with which we think and write history upon the page.

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