Film, Document, and the Historian

FILM, DOCUMENT, AND THE HISTORIAN By Patrick Griffin I would like to address myselfto two questions, which frequently arise whenever the historian approaches film: Why concern oneselfwith the film process and for what purpose? Specifically, I would make a few remarks on the film as document. The last decade was one during which the disintegration ofthe old nitrate film accelerated. Efforts ofgroups such as the National Archives, the AFI, FIAF, the imperial War Museum, among others, frequently with agonizing decisions ofselectivity, have resulted in the restoration ofmuch ofthe film document ofthe twentieth century. However, whether I have been concerned with commercial or public archives, a question often raised to me was "how" the historian would reach out and use film, and how soon. In our traditional role as paleographers,, we have scarcely begun to answer these questions. A substantial part ofthe document ofthe twentieth century is still disintegrating without our directed interest or knowledge as historians. For example: there is a European archive which holds 80,000 meters ofdisintegrating tinted and hand painted color drama produced before 1914, including films containing as many as seven colors. It has been unable to attract the concerted effort of financial interests and professional historical associations. It looks toward our creative interest and use. While possibilities ofarchives such as this have been largely ignored by us, we are to be faced in the near future with an even greater crisis in our activity as documentarians ofthe twentieth century. Today the greater percentage ofhistorical events is recorded on videotape rather than film. Although the first videotape has not yet electronically "disintegrated," the life expectancy ofvideotape has been estimated at 25 years. Ifone considers the relationship ofthe visual to the written in our times ~ a relationship strikingly similar to that ofthe late fifteenth century ~ then it may not be an exaggeration to suggest that the document ofthe times is disintegrating before we have acted upon it O)That film documents the twentieth century is obvious to all ofus who have used film as a part ofour history presentations. That film is a document ofthe twentieth century is as obvious; but until recently, less acted upon in a creative fashion. Happily, the increasing interest ofthe historian in the film process is reaffirmed by the number ofmedia programs on the AHA agenda. This year it is six (2). Last year there was one. This recent interest in a more active role for historians in the film process, the problems and potentialities ofthis activity, was most clearly expressed by Professor John Grenville ofthe British Universities Consortium on film in an inaugural address delivered last March, 1 970: The historian investigates the evidence offilm in a 14 different way from the film maker who is not an historian. He can relate and compare film evidence with written evidence thereby widening his analysis ofthe visual and written materials. But, he also interprets the film evidence in its own right. Evidence whether written or film does not interpret itself. It has to be interpreted by historians ifthe result is to be "History.".... The historian's approach to documentary film making can not be first write a script about some historical event and then to search through film archives. This would be using film evidence not in its own right adding further to our understanding but merely as illustration which adds to our interpretation. A good many documentaries have been constructed in this way nevertheless. They may be excellent as entertainment but they are certainly not historical studies using film(3). The word "documentary" as one thinks of it in a film sense was reputedly first used by John Grierson, who defined it in 1926 as the "creative treatment ofreality." The phrase tends to stir controversy. The arguments, pro and con, are inherent in seemingly divergent direction during the first days ofmoving pictures. On the one hand, the cinematograph opened by the Lumière brothers in Paris in 1895, the product of a half century search by Europeans and Americans to quantify reality as it really was: workers leaving their factory at Lyons, a beach and bathers, a locomotive coming into a station, a falling leaf. However, George Melies, another showman among the...