Film as a Source for Cultural History:
an Experiment in Practical Methodology
Enrica Capussotti
Giuseppe Lauricella
Luisa Passerini
 Click for larger view |
Figure 1
Edwige Feuillère and Pierre Richard-Willm in 'La dame de Malacca' by Marc Allegret, France, 1937. |
Prologue
This article is about the multimedia CD-ROM, Moving History, a practical and methodological experiment produced at the European University Institute in Florence, in 2003. Moving History has two parts. The first analyses the film La dame de Malacca (France, 1937)and its relevance as a historical source; examines the relationship between the film and the book from which it is taken; reconstructs the cast; and investigates the reception of the film in France. This written text is interconnected with images from magazines, from other films and from a documentary. The second part - entitled 'Montages' - prioritizes the visual and is based on images chosen from the film and organized around three main themes: the possibility of love between 'races' ('Couple'); conflicts such as those between generations, 'races' and gender ('Differences'); and the use of landscape as signifier of the 'Orient' in the imagery of Europeans ('Landscape'). [End Page 256]
We have chosen to write this article in the format of a montage to reflect the individual contributions and competences that came together in the experiment of making the CD ROM. The following three sections are written respectively by Luisa Passerini, Enrica Capussotti, and Giuseppe Lauricella.
Stages of Production
Moving History is the result of a research process that started in autumn 2000 with a workshop held at the European University Institute (EUI) on the topic 'Films as Sources for Cultural History'. A group of EUI teachers and researchers, including the present authors, took as starting point the reciprocal relevance of cinema for history and history for cinema, and looked for ways to go further. We also wanted to build a history that could meet the challenges coming from cultural studies, a history concerned with various forms of reality, including emotions and the imaginary as well as behaviours and material exchanges. We aimed at a history which could explore connections and discrepancies between texts and contexts, as well as between past and present interpretations of the texts; and since the texts in our case included images, we wanted to pay particular attention to visuality in its moving form.
There were disagreements in the workshop. The main division was between those who held that the interest of films for historians lay mainly in their artistic value, and those (like us) who insisted that any film, even of a commercial kind, could be relevant for cultural history, so long as proper care was taken in using it as a source. Some of us were dissatisfied with existing methodology and felt the need to explore further the relationship between the texts constructed by historians (interpretations) and the filmic sources. So we decided as an experiment to examine one of our workshop papers in relation to the film which was its main source. The particular paper chosen, on the film La dame de Malacca (France, 1937), was part of a research project already supported by the EUI on Eurocentrism in the field of passions: a history of the claim that Europeans had invented courtly and romantic love and transmitted it to the world, 'per amore o per forza'. This meant that our experiment could be funded.
Thus we found ourselves working on two texts, an interpretation and a source. The first text (included in the CD-ROM in the form of an essay) gives priority to the reception of the film, the relationship between the actors and the audience, and the relationship between written version and visual - the original novel by Francis de Croisset and the film based on it. The second text is the film itself. La dame de Malacca, directed in 1937 by Marc Allégret, was one of the few French films of the 1930s to present a happy ending for a love story between a European woman and a man of a different 'race' and culture. Many other films tell stories of impossible loves not only between whites and coloureds but also between coloureds of different cultures. The impossibility reflects and enforces the general taboo on mixed unions: the [End Page 257] 'forbidden couple' is a cornerstone of racism and underlies the ranking of discrimination. At the same time, our film is infused with exoticism: the Malaysian prince is played by a European actor, the oriental aspect of the servants and the landscapes is emphasized, and the conclusion is a triumph of a 'European' idea - the omnipotence of romantic love. It is precisely this series of contradictions that makes the film a significant and interesting example of the dialectics of exoticism, inherent in the benevolent colonialism that Allégret shared with his lover and patron André Gide.
Our procedure started from the simple point that any interpretation often has to go through long descriptions of what the source had to say, because the hierarchy of historical relevance gives priority to the written text. We tried to see what happens when images are given the first place. Still following the original scheme of the existing interpretation, we reversed the order of importance, using images as the main discourse rather than evidence or illustration. The consequences were first of all that we had to do additional research in order to find other images capable of establishing a dialogue with those of the film, such as posters, stills, and images from other films. Secondly, the interpretative text had to be broken up and rewritten to correspond with the 'chapters' of the CD-ROM: not only the chapter on the 'impossible' couple, derived from the interpretation, but also the new ones, especially 'Landscapes', that emerged from the images of the film.
Disassembling the text as well as the film, and creating a new montage, revealed unsuspected dimensions of meaning: for instance it produced a more effective analysis of the Eurocentric gaze in presenting the 'exotic'. This procedure amounted to a deconstruction of what historians do when they subject images to a translation into words, thus cutting away some of their implications. Thus it helped us to develop a better awareness of the irreducible nature of the moving images, their subtle stratifications, and the need for those who use them for historical purposes to understand such complexity from within. Moving History is therefore an experiment in historical methodology and could be used as such at various levels of teaching.
A comparable process, in methodological terms, developed in the oral-history movement of the 1970s with the move to recognize the spoken word as different, and relatively independent, from the written. The shift we experienced, which perhaps many others are presently experiencing, might be even more radical, although there is currently no large movement like the oral-history one to support it. The tendency of this shift is to criticize some of the assumptions and operations that still prevail in traditional historiography and to suggest ways of going beyond them.
Towards New Forms of Historical Narration
Passerini has described how the CD-ROM project came about. I shall deal with issues that arise from using digital technologies to write history and [End Page 258] the implications on several levels: methodological reflections, ideas of history, organization of work.
Moving History is part of the development over several decades of new approaches to the past. Exchanges with sociology, anthropology, psychoanalysis and more recently literary criticism have had important repercussions on how history is written and conceptualized as well as on the sources chosen. Emphasis on the 'literary' as a dimension of experience and on the structure of historical writing (for instance in the pioneering work of Haydon White and Dominick LaCapra) has had a major impact, bringing the role of language and narration to the top of the agenda. We had this discussion in mind when we started to think about the CD-ROM, although translating it to the field of popular culture and mass media. Obviously the use of digital technologies added to and complicated the state of the discussion. As we will repeat often in this article, new possibilities and problems were opened up by the fact that we were able to digitize the film, to have it on the hard disk of our computer, and so - while seeing it on the computer screen - to cut pieces of it and recompose them in different orders and patterns, interconnect them in original ways. The discussion is no longer about the narrative trope of historiography but about how to develop a methodology adequate to deal with the possibility of 'entering' into a source - a cinematic text. Moreover the 'quotations' from the film have become a text in their own right, no longer the evidence for the historian's interpretation but an integral part of the interpretation itself. And placing the images at the centre radically alters the associations created when the written has priority. The disciplining of the 'imagination' that Hayden White criticizes in historians is kept in check through the articulation of all these elements.
Last but not least the use of links between the different texts at the level of the CD-ROM turned out to be more problematic than we thought. Commonly the interconnections are the original syntactic and semantic elements of the hypertext. Although at the beginning the apotheosis was to have many different links (between different written texts, between words, between words and images, between images themselves) we ended reducing these conjunctions because it was too difficult to manage them. They seemed to be producing more confusion than understanding. For instance, what does it mean to be able to jump from the first piece of writing in Moving History,which explains why La dame de Malacca is a relevant film for the study of Eurocentrism in the field of emotions, to the montage 'Couple', which brings together the most significant images on this topic? This shows that what is normal in the digital world (in electronic encyclopaedias as well as on the web) can became problematic when digital technology is used to support a scientific essay.
This complex articulation subverts the various norms which shape modern historiography. Linear narrative disappears together with notions of the progressive development of time and society; imagination and fiction become part of historical reality and writing; and the idea that to describe historical [End Page 259] events requires narratives that 'display the coherence, integrity, fullness, and closure of an image of life that is and can only be imaginary' (Hayden White) dissolves with the use of film as source and hypertext as narrative.
The complexity of the field is well represented by the common difficulty of finding a verb for the use of a CD-ROM. Is it viewed? Is it read? Is it navigated? The vocabulary is still being developed. The CD-ROM is a hypertext that contains the synergy between different operations: we read, we see and we organize the narrative around a set of options already available in the text. To use 'navigate' stresses the originality of a text that is not linear and offers a new role to the 'navigator' who can interact in original ways.
Another significant effect of the use of digital technologies is on the organization of the work. It was feasible for us to make Moving History because of reasonably-priced software (CD-Rom Authoring Software Director 8) which though requiring some knowledge of programming language could be used by non-professionals. Such factors are important because the wider use of technology has important social reverberations. In the case of Moving History, it meant the production of a CD-ROM outside a professional setting (computer lab), on a limited budget, and for an audience mainly comprising scholars and students sensitive to cultural analysis and criticism.
The use of recent technologies also has important consequences for the organization of scholarly work. To construct a multimedia text is a collective task, a process based on 'co-operative knowledge'; it departs radically from the model of the lonely academic producing monographs and articles. It can be achieved through either of two main paths: either a technician translates the interpretation of the researchers; or the social scientists acquire technological skills and knowledge so that the traditional division between practical and analytical levels is renegotiated, though it will hardly disappear. It was this second model that we followed, and Giuseppe Lauricella provided the fundamental technical knowledge.
The Impact of Technology
We all shared the belief that technology influences the production of ideas. But opinions differ on the effects of technology. One view is that a new technology is now allowing what was not possible beforehand. This seems a common 'platonic' impression: I had this idea inside myself and finally I can share it with everyone. It stands in contrast to well-established assumptions in the history of art and communication: that 'photography killed painting' or 'cinema killed theatre', for instance, or more recently that television is responsible for multiple murders - of radio, cinema and even, according to Jean Baudrillard, of 'reality' in general. The latest, most massive technological revolution, however, the digital one, has ruined only the business of the record companies.
In our work using digital technology with the film La dame de Malacca [End Page 260] we were excited from the start with the prospect of combining text and images in the same spatial 'scene' at the same time. This was not a new possibility. Early cinema (the films of Georges Méliès, for example) often experimented with juxtapositions - men with tigers, the moon with explorers - while other arts, such as literature and painting, played with improbable or impossible combinations, creating monsters with the characteristics of different animals or surreal still-lifes and landscapes. The introduction of offset printing technology allowed photos to be set in text rather than on separate pages. Now the computer provides another new opportunity, to juxtapose a new interpretation of images with their original interpretation - the film.
But a film is a peculiar object in respect to static images. Time is the third dimension of a film and this requires a layout in which the film has to be located at the centre of the scene, in the form of blocks of text, because the film is always a 'story' that has to remain the focus. One option was to have the film on one side and the comment on the other side - the 'book' solution. Such a layout results from the movement of the eyes reading a written text, in the case of western languages, a left-to-right movement. The subjective experience remains basically that of reading a text, very different from seeing a painting or watching a TV or cinema show. We endeavoured to reproduce the spectator experience 'plus' some blocks of text to help with a contemporary interpretation of the film. Besides this problem of location, the other central issue to consider was that we had in the same framework the film and its interpretation.
Shakespeare's Hamlet provides a well-known example of 'a play within a play', when characters present a play very similar to Hamlet itself. There are similarly cases of 'cinema in cinema' such as François Truffaut's Day for Night (1973), as well as 'photography in cinema' and 'digital photography in cinema'. In Blow-up (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1966) the photographer protagonist analyzes a series of his pictures to find proof that a crime had been committed. In Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982) a similar scene uses digital rather than analogical photographic technology. There is an interesting mechanism at work in these films, of reflection on themselves, on their images. In Blade Runner Decker is collecting photos portraying himself because as a 'replicant' digital artefact he does not have a past. The representations of the humans in relation to analogical and to digital technology provide further interest. The two procedures are almost identical. In both Blow-up and Blade Runner the central character focuses on the blow-up of a detail of an image. But while in Antonioni's film David Hemmings uses his hands and instruments, Harrison Ford, the Blade Runner hunting for replicants, gives vocal commands (mostly numeric) to a machine processing a digitized copy of the photograph that has provoked his interest. In the sixteen years between the two films (not counting Truffaut's 1960s freelance photographer in 1973) the detective - the character who must try to understand what has happened - has been turned [End Page 261] back into an institutional policeman, but he is also someone who, in order to understand the past and combat digital replicants, must know how to master other digital objects. Blade Runner shows how digital technologies change the analysis of images by the human eye.
There are many changes, too, in how plots are edited. Thus, another major consequence of the use of digital technology in our work is connected to the editing of the films. A sophisticated, and now very cheap, class of computing software makes it possible to change the timeline of a digitalized film to produce a new montage. The previous technique, analogue video editing, is linear, subject to the limits of the source, tape or film. Digital video editing is non-linear, that is to say that you can produce and compare as many virtual montages as you like, without affecting your original source. In this way the story narrated in the film can become a digital artefact and many virtual stories can be drawn from the same film, shown at the same time. This non-linear editing technique allowed us to reorganize the film by topics in different montages.
The impact of a new technology on the existing state of the art tends to be seen in terms of displacement, killing-off, or Luddite rebellion. Our experience with this project has led us to refer instead to new layouts, different forms of representation and new interfaces between humans and reality - here between historians and their sources. Today's vanguard digital technology, then, is not so much a new medium as a unifying technology whose binary language makes it possible to translate and monitor other media, to experiment with radical juxtapositions and transformations, and to explore new insights and challenges.
The interpretation of the film in Passerini's essay was structured mainly around difference - between men and women, east and west, film and audience, scenario and book. With digital translation these differences can be highlighted. The users of this CD-ROM are spectators of the many virtual stories inside the film, like its original spectators, but their experience now is mediated by the historian's interpretation presented in the texts and through the montage.
In this CD-ROM we have tried to give a concrete form to one of the suggestions of the 1960s: that through images and stories one can reach knowledge by using the digital replicants of texts, stories and static and moving images. There is a scene in the film 'La Dame de Malacca' that we particularly love, which we therefore inserted at the beginning of the CD-ROM. The actress Edwige Feuillère is going to a masked party and she stops in front of a mirror to check how she looks as an oriental woman. The director uses a special effect typical of analogical film - instead of a reflection of the actress looking, which would reveal the team working behind her, the mirror shows another sequence overlaid. As the realization of the effect is not perfect one can notice that in the mirrored image Feuillère looks straight at the spectators, instead of looking at herself. The film in the CD-ROM is our digital mirror: we see in it the past of which we are talking, and it is looking at us.
