Hollywood and the American Historical Film ed. by J. E. Smyth (review)

Smyth’s collection explores the link between American history and American film, focusing on four main questions: In what sense is a film a product of history (2); in what sense does it reflect history (4); in what sense does in interpret history (5); and in what sense does film shape history (6)? All are ambitious and large scale questions dealing with social and political histories and not at all with notions of an accurate or “true” history. Warren Sussman’s essay illuminates the questions, arguing that “films demonstrate … a vision of history as a process” (xvi).

Marcia Landy’s “The Hollywood Western, the Movement-Image, and the Making of History” demonstrates just such an historical image. Landy delves into the role of the Hollywood Western in the interwar years and slightly beyond. In these films, she recognizes a large scale project of nation-state building that followed WWI, buffered the Great Depression, and prepared the nation for WWII. To do so, she utilizes Giles Deleuze’s analytical framework of affection and action images and their attempts to build unity.

An essay by Susan Courtney, “Ripping the Portieres at the Seams: Lessons on Streetcar from Gone with the Wind,” focuses on two Vivien Leigh movies of the south, looking at both as vehicles of what Courtney defines as “leaky space” to understand how both movies interact. Courtney cites “leaky windows, curtains, doors, and the like in their perpetual unhinging of white Southern identity” in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) and the fall into madness becomes, thus, a rupture, a splitting apart of false sutures that have tied together the plantation myth in Gone with the Wind (1939). Yet Courtney both identifies and details the leaks in Gone with the Wind’s “melodrama of whiteness idealized,” which moves into “continual relations to threshold spaced at the perimeter of its Southern homes,” the most racially and culturally powerful metaphor of which is the Big House.

Still, with pages devoted to the cultural, racial, and historical role of Scarlett O’Hara’s home and its relevance to hers and the southern world’s unhinging, it is disappointing to see only a brief reference to Scarlett’s utilization of Tara’s drapes to disrupt the realities of the Civil War, and Margaret Mitchell’s era. Courtney locates Scarlett’s use of the threshold space in the curtains themselves, but in a text devoted to locations of disruption in the sutures of the privileged plantation South, Scarlett’s ultimate failure in her masquerade in Tara’s drapes, and Rhett Butler’s ability to see through her disguise and reject her seduction, leads to Scarlett’s belief that she will lose Tara, leading to another inevitable failure and loss, when she loses her sister upon seducing and marrying her fiancé so as to retain Tara.

Overall, the book’s twelve essays offer an original look at what we mean by historicity and how cinema has helped establish and unfold this meaning.