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  • The Adaptation of History: Essays on Ways of Telling the Past edited by Laurence Raw and Defne Ersin Tutan
  • William Cummings
The Adaptation of History: Essays on Ways of Telling the Past Laurence Raw and Defne Ersin Tutan, editors. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2013. pp. 223.

This collection begins with the position that history – stories crafted about the past – is not the preserve of professional historians. History as a practice has conventionally had a rigorous but limited scope. It is typically written, notes Hayden White for example, in one of the main narrative genres honed by novelists, essayists, and thinkers of diverse stripe in the 19th century. Fortunately, there have been considerable shifts in recent decades, and the grip of particular genres and a single medium has loosened. This collection of essays joins that growing chorus.

Ersin Tutan and Raw argue that all stories about the past should be treated as adaptations, by which they mean the range of narratives in which the past is interpreted to speak to present-day concerns. Histories that fail to do so are doomed to Darwinian oblivion. Such a practice is open to all, not only to card-carrying historians. This way of making sense of the past transcends the (irresolvable) problem of accuracy, of what “really happened,” and instead turns our attention to the delightful range of ways in which historians, filmmakers, writers, anthropologists, documentarians, and others make meaning from the past.

The Adaptation of History contains sixteen essays that exemplify different forms of narrative adaptations. Just over half engage directly with film. Though they naturally reach in many directions, the most useful chapters give fine-grained readings of particular texts or instances of adaptation. For example, one interesting contribution is by A. Bowdoin Van Riper, an independent scholar who examines six films that deal with the Manhattan Project. All six films share the same basket of [End Page 89] facts to work with, but each shapes a narrative that speaks to the particular concerns at the time of their making. The result is an interesting history of the Cold War that powerfully illustrates how accounts of the past – Van Riper calls them origin myths – inevitably link the stuff of the past to the concerns of the present. This is not a fault to be lamented, he suggests, but rather a feature to be explored and celebrated.

Walter Metz reads Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island as an exemplar of one type of adaptation history. Scorsese weaves together Dennis Lehane’s novel of the same name, the past events of the Holocaust, Hitchcock’s Vertigo, and Robert Weine’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Metz focuses on Scorsese’s intertextual reworking of these different sources to produce an adaptive history that draws attention to the role of masculine vengeance in American society. Similarly, Marco Grisoli reads Marco Martone’s film adaptation of the novel Noi Credevamo (We Believed) by Anna Banti. Martone adapted this novel, historical events of the Risorgimento that led to Italian unification in 1861, and Senso, Luchino Viconti’s melodramatic representation of byzantine internal conflict. The result is a film that reworks the audience’s melodramatic expectations to create a historical interpretation of Italian history as frustrated and repetitious. In both chapters, past events, films, and words are valuable raw materials that can be worked to reveal something critical about the present.

One nice pairing of similar dynamics concerns historical films from communist and capitalist contexts. Dunja Dogo examines how in two films from the 1920s, Dekabristy and S.V.D., Russian filmmakers adapted 19th-century events to position the newly established communist state as the culmination of a historical pattern. The effect was to help mold a popular historical narrative that emphasized the Bolshevik revolution as inevitable, fitting, and triumphant. Clare Foster turns our attention to classical antiquity’s representation in films such as Gladiator and 300. She explores how these films reworked 19th-century novels and their particular preoccupations with the ancient past, as it was during this century that authenticity, originality, and authority became prized, and the very notion of adaptation developed. To this legacy filmmakers add current popular associations with ancient Greece, and...

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