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  • Discourse, Attitudes, and Values
  • Laurence Raw
Elaine M. Bapis. Camera and Action: American Film as Agent of Social Change, 1965–1975. McFarland, 2008. 255 pages; $45.00.

[Correction]

This short, introductory text considers the ways in which cinema and history interact with one another, focusing in particular on how films can be used as evidence of the discourse, attitudes and values prevalent in a culture at the time they were created and released. By means of detailed case-studies, Cinema and History shows how historical analyses of film can be undertaken, and what methods can be employed to give such analyses an empirical, historical base.

The first chapter focuses on the history of reception studies, showing how scholars shifted their attention away from the isolated ‘text’ and considered instead how the meanings of such texts were shaped by the cultures that produced them. Chopra-Gant draws on Janet Staiger’s hypotheses to show how films are “highly polysemic texts capable of ‘speaking’ within numerous discourses in the same historical moment as well as at different times” (21). To identify such discourses, the film historian can draw upon numerous sources: pre-release publicity material, reviews published in newspapers and magazines, diaries and oral histories. While some of these materials might be problematic (reviews, in particular, occupy a highly privileged position as opinion-formers in relation to the films they write about), they can be profitably used in conjunction with other responses to a film – for example, letters written by viewers to fanzines or more ‘serious’ publications.

Chopra-Gant’s second chapter offers a case-study of how this methodology works in practice, by looking at the contemporary reception of Rear Window (1954). He argues that Hitchcock contrasts the ideal masculinities represented in other films of the period and the contemporary scientific discourses (set forth in the Kinsey Reports) that conceived maleness as a physically fragile state. Chopra-Gant proposes other readings of the film shaped by differing viewer expectations: how might women have responded to Hitchcock’s film? Other approaches might prove equally suggestive—for example, looking at a film’s European reception, in cultures with quite different constructions of masculinity.

The third chapter discusses how motion pictures rewrite history, using Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915) as an example. Chopra-Gant argues that several critics dismiss the film as a ‘poor’ version of American history, sacrificing accuracy in favor of ‘pure’ entertainment. By looking at the film’s original reception, however, a quite different picture emerges: Birth of a Nation dramatized prevailing attitudes towards the Civil War (61). The same principle applies to Lawrence of Arabia (1962) which, while taking liberties with historical fact, nonetheless deals with important issues of colonialism at a time when the British Empire was on the point of collapse. With this in mind, Chopra-Gant proposes that historians should engage with films as alternatives to written texts in their attempts to make sense of the past.

However the final chapter tends to contradict this message, as Chopra-Gant argues that photodramas such as Gangs of New York (2002) and World Trade Center (2006) offer “a simplified and hyperbolic vision of the past” which might prove potentially damaging, in view of the fact that films are “the dominant source of information […] for the majority of the population” (93). Audiences might be encouraged to accept simple and linear constructions of history; for this reason, “attempts to represent history on film must be regarded with a highly critical eye” (97). Chopra-Gant fails to recognize the fact that historical films can inspire audiences at particular moments in time; if we look at In Which We Serve (1942) with “a highly critical eye,” as a fictionalized version of the sinking of the HMS Kelly, we would not appreciate its value as a propaganda piece, designed to improve public morale at a time when Great Britain appeared to be losing the war, especially in the Far East.

Nonetheless, Cinema and History is a useful book, especially for those interested in which theoretical interventions in both disciplines inform one another. Chopra-Gant [End Page 94] quotes Pierre Sorlin, who argues that historians have to take notice of film specialists, to...

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