American Chronicles 1918-1961

Film Review The AIMS video series American Chronicles 1918-1961 offers a useful visual enhancement to any basic survey of twentieth-century American history. The series is composed of ten individual, thirty-minute, films each chronicling a three to five-year period. The only exception is the first film Between the Wars which offers an overview for the entire series and covers the twenty-one years from 1918-1939. These visual chronicles, like all historical chronicles, have an important place in any historical understanding of this crucial period in American history. The films are available from AIMS Media, 6901 Woodley Avenue, Van Nuys, California 91406-4878. Narrated by Eric Sevareid, whose voice intones the seriousness of even the most lighthearted moment, these films have a kind of instantaneous credibility and immediacy much like the nightly newscast. This is their strength. The films are very good at bringing students the moment of an event. In their "see it now" format, the sequence of images and the driving narrative bring the student into the events in a way that a book cannot. This is especially true given that more and more students accumulate more and more of their information base from visual sources, especially from television. For many of these students, the fact that they have seen an event is "the fact;" in many cases the only "fact" at their disposal. This leads to the weakness in the series. These films are at the weakest trying to explain the significance or analyze the meaning of the moments in history they portray so well. While the production values are good, and the images clear, the meaning of those images often remains cloudy. The connection between the events, except their chronological link, is often hard to identify, or confused. This is evident from the philosophy behind the series production outlined in the accompanying literature , "The immediacy of film brings cause-and-effect relationships into clear perspective." The immediacy of the film experience merely shows the viewer a sequence of images. There is no doubt that this can be a powerful experience. However, it is up to the producer or director of such a project to make visual or narrative connections between the pieces of film, and it is here that these films fail. In the episode Seeds of Discord, Sevareid tells us that Wilson returned from Versailles "confident that the treaty secured Europe." The image is of Wilson waving to a crowd somewhere, sometime. The assumption is that a "waving Wilson" illustrates this interpretation, and that the "immediacy of 68 film brings cause-and-effect relationships into clear perspective." This image of Wilson does bring into focus the narrator's interpretation, but does little to illuminate any cause-and-effect relationship. In fact, the interpretation runs counter to much recent scholarship about Wilson's attitude towards the treaty, so the image can be seen as confusing rather than clarifying the event it describes. In the film The Darkest Hour the narrator discusses the sinking of the passenger ship Athena as an event which strained relations between Germany and the United States. We are shown a ship sinking. With even minimal scrutiny, a student will recognize that the ship pictured has sixteen-inch guns mounted on its deck. Such are the problems of visualization. The director simply did not have any footage of this particular incident. Such footage might understandably be hard to come by. Therefore, the director substituted footage of which he had an abundance—wartime footage of navy ships being sunk. Finally, for the vast majority of the time period under scrutiny, sound film was available and used. However, only on rare occasions does Sevareid step back and let the film speak for itself. We see people making speeches, but do not hear what they say. Such episodes, together with the problems of interpretation, make the chronicles less than useful as history, but more useful for other purposes. Students acquire much of their information about the world from visual sources. This trend will probably continue. What students need to learn is how to interpret those sources. These films offer a useful laboratory for the study of visual literacy. Of course, as scholars we...