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Reviewed by:
  • Film Nation: Hollywood Looks at U.S. History
  • Paul M. Cohen
Robert Burgoyne . Film Nation: Hollywood Looks at U.S. History. University of Minnesota Press, 2010. Revised edition; 235 pages. $22.50, paper. 1

Unlike most scholarship addressing Hollywood's historical films, Robert Burgoyne's Film Nationdoes not ask who made a given historical film, how it was made, how it fared at the box office, or, least of all, if it "gets the facts right." Placing himself squarely in the postmodern historiographical camp of Hayden White, Robert Rosenstone, and Benedict Anderson, Burgoyne views history itself not as a straightforward, fact-based narrative mapped out exclusively by professional historians, but as constructed and contested terrain in which filmmakers may play a powerful, and at times "counterfactual," role. Accordingly, Burgoyne poses a more profound, if at times problematic, question of historical films: how might they reflect and even construct the national narrative? That is, what ideological and cultural story do they convey, whether intentionally or not, about what it means to be an American at a given time and place? "[C]ontemporary historical film," he writes, is "a privileged discursive site in which anxiety, ambivalence, and expectation about the nation, its history, and its future are played out in narrative form" (11).

Burgoyne's approach is to select films that address moments of historical crisis—the Civil War, the Kennedy assassination, Viet Nam, the founding of Jamestown, and 9/11, among others—and to read them against the grain of the standard national narrative. Thus, in his first edition, 2published in 1997, he treated five then contemporary—and controversial—historical films: Glory(Edward Zwick, 1989), Thunderheart(Michael Apted, 1992), Born on the Fourth of July(Oliver Stone, 1989), JFK(Oliver Stone, 1991), and Forrest Gump(Robert Zemeckis, 1994). For the current volume, he has added a preface as well as four new chapters covering six more recent, and equally controversial, films: The New World(Terrence Malick, 2005), Gangs of New York(Martin Scorcese, 2002), Flags of Our Fathersand Letters from Iwo Jima(Clint Eastwood, 2006), United 93(Paul Greengrass, 2006), and World Trade Center(Oliver Stone, 2006). Through interrogating these films, Burgoyne seeks explicitly to chart a Hollywood-made "counternarrative of the nation" (11) that exposes and perhaps opposes those conventional myths of national identity which exclude or marginalize racial and ethnic minorities, conceal class conflict, and justify nationalist aggression and environmental exploitation in America's past. [End Page 102]

Burgoyne's agenda, then, is clearly progressive; yet his readings are anything but simplistic or unilateral. Characteristically, he emphasizes both a film's—or filmmaker's—opposition to and its somehow unsettling reaffirmation of national mythology. Thus if Thunderheartcontests "the myth of settler heroism" in the West and affirms "the continuing reality of native resistance" (49), it also borrows "the visual and narrative conventions" (53) of the classic Hollywood western in ways that might reinforce the dominant white culture. Gangs of New York, by the same token, through its depiction of the ferocious conflict between Irish and nativist gangs as well as the violent intervention of the Federal Government which led to the Draft Riots of 1863, "exposes the deepest fault line in American society": that between "ethnic and racial identity" and "the 'imagined community' of national belonging" (144). And in World Trade Center, Oliver Stone, "who had earlier worked to dismantle the disfiguring mythologies of masculinity inherited by the Vietnam generation," resurrects the "myth of male agency" through a protagonist who fits into "the long line of American cinematic heroes whose mysterious pasts and uncertain futures are redeemed by the clarity of a singular quest" (210, 209).

As these examples demonstrate, Burgoyne writes about historical films in a manner that, owing to his methodological and analytical sophistication, can be daunting but is nearly always rewarding. Nonetheless, his work does raise its share of problems, some minor and others less so. First, a quibble. Burgoyne's introduction remains unchanged from the 1997 edition, so its caution about "armed militias in the United States" that betoken an escalating "white ethnic nationalism" (11) is clearly out of date—unless, of course, he means to refer to the...

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