Reconstructing American Historical Cinema: From Cimarron to Citizen Kane (review)

When I reviewed the manuscript of this book for University Press of Kentucky I had no knowledge of its author, Dr. J.E. Smyth, of Warwick University in England. I knew only that I was encountering an unusually powerful work, bold and confident in its challenges to prevailing scholarship in several disciplines concerned with the cinematic representation of history, based not only on film analysis but on extensive primary research in documents held by archives throughout the United States. Not until the book was published did it become clear that it had originated as a doctoral dissertation at Yale, which made its combination of audacity and thoroughness all the more impressive. My blurb on its jacket, culled from my reader's comments, predicted that it would "surely revise current views on the subject held by historians, cultural studies specialists, and film scholars". A second blurb, by Robert A. Rosenstone, forecast that the book would be "controversial in the best sort of way" in multiple fields – cinema studies, communications, and history – as a "sustained attack on the conventional wisdom".

I returned to the book for this review in part to look for signs that any of the controversy or revision envisioned by us blurb writers had in fact begun to occur, or whether perhaps we had exercised a bit of hyperbole to encourage a university press to take a chance on an outstanding but not obviously saleable manuscript. My search, not necessarily exhaustive, found reviews in the American Historical Review and the Journal of American History, print publications that extensively review new books of interest to historians, including works of film history, for which there is no equivalent in cinema studies. In the latter field, a review in Film Quarterly covered the book with several others dealing with historical representation in cinema, and – closest to our anticipation – a detailed and appreciative reading of the work, by Tom Kemper, appeared in The Moving Image. It was also reviewed online for Screening the Past. Whether it has been accorded attention at conference sessions or other symposia, or how many copies have been sold, I know not. Perhaps controversy and revision only show themselves over Braudel's longue durée.

The fundamental argument of Reconstructing American Historical Cinema is that the films that the author treats – commercial fiction films on historical subjects made by the Hollywood studios during the 1930s – are works of historiography; that is, they "write" history on screen, and are to be taken seriously as such along with works of history written by scholars, popular historians, historical novelists, and others communicating about the past. What's significant about this assertion, beyond the readings of screen texts, is its foundation in archival sources that indicate how historiography was conceived of and put into practice by producers, directors, writers and other filmmaking personnel throughout the making of historical films. The bibliography lists more than forty different collections of papers – of persons, companies, and organizations – that the author consulted in Austin, Bloomington, Boston, Chicago, New Haven, Provo, and elsewhere, as well as at the major sites in Southern California.

In the book's introduction, Smyth challenges, as Rosenstone put it, the "conventional wisdom" on the subject in three different fields. To paraphrase and summarize: historians tend to regard historical films dismissively and focus on their factual details rather than on emphases and interpretations that contribute to broader historical discourses; cultural studies scholars are concerned with historical films as constructions of national myths rather than as interventions in historical debate and understanding; and many cinema studies scholars remain in thrall to an idea of "classical" Hollywood that insufficiently takes account of temporal change, historical context, and cultural interplay. In the latter field, the lingering if diminished influence of "continental theory" from the 1970s valorizes universal concepts that ignore or deride historical knowledge (Foucault excepted).

Reconstructing American Historical Cinema isn't the first work in Cinema Studies to advocate an understanding of historical films as historiography – for example, Leger Grindon's...