History on Film/Film on History (review)

Real McLuhan

In Woody Allen's Annie Hall, the director's alter ego, Alvy Singer, is annoyed in a movie line when the person behind him (a media studies professor) pontificates upon the media theories of Marshall McLuhan. A frustrated Singer then produces the real McLuhan, who informs the verbose professor that he has no understanding of modern media. When my colleagues in the historical profession dismiss film history or narrowly focus their film commentaries upon cinematic adherence to historical detail, I wish that I could summon the eloquent Robert A. Rosenstone to expose their lack of intellectual imagination. Lacking such powers, I will simply have to rely upon Rosenstone's insightful History on Film/Film on History to counter the conventional wisdom that real history may only be conveyed via the written word.

Rosenstone, who teaches history at the California Institute of Technology, is the author of such scholarly works as John Reed, Romantic Revolutionary (1975) and the innovative Mirror in the Shrine: American Encounters with Japan (1988), in addition to being one of the first historians to seriously study film and theorize the impact of cinema upon historical thinking. In History on Film/Film on History, Rosenstone argues that filmmakers who seek to understand the present through engaging with the past have much in common with academic historians; for both refer to actual events, moments, and movements from the past in their efforts to construct history.

Of course, critics of history depicted on the silver screen maintain that filmmakers often invent dialogue and play loose with the facts. Thus, filmmakers lack the "objectivity" of academic historians. Influenced by post modernism, Rosenstone challenges the myth of scholarly "objectivity," observing that academic historians are reconstructing a version of the past with the written word just as a film director does with celluloid. Traditional historians use traces of the past to develop their historical interpretations by deciding which facts and events and from whose perspective to tell the story. It is a reading of the past, but it is not "the past" which scholars are able to recreate. Rosenstone questions the notion of scientific history, concluding, "History (as we practice it) is an ideological and cultural product of the Western world at a particular time in its development, one when the notion of 'scientific' truth based on replicable experiments, has been carried into social science, including history (where no such experimentation is possible" (133). In line with Aristotle, Rosenstone believes that the muse of history should be realigned with ethics and poetry.

Such realignment might encourage greater acceptance of cinematic history by academics who often bemoan the fact that the public increasingly obtains its history through film and media. Rosenstone, however, wonders whether the growth of cinematic history is necessarily a negative thing. History on film allows viewers to emotionally engage with individuals from the past, providing metaphors that allow us to better grasp the larger truths of history.

Rosenstone does not insist that all costume dramas contain such metaphors. Instead, he characterizes history films as dramatic feature films in which a filmmaker, such as D. W. Griffith with The Birth of a Nation, seeks to render an interpretation of the past; the documentary film; and the oppositional or innovative historical film which employs parody, non-linear stories, and absurdity as modes of interrogating history. Rosenstone observes that the innovative historical features are often the product of Third World cinema, and certainly one of the volume's strengths is that the author takes his readers beyond the narrow confines of Hollywood and American cinema.

Although Oliver Stone now eschews the term "cinematic historian," Rosenstone asserts that filmmakers such as Stone, Sergei Eisenstein, Vittorio and Paolo Taviani, and Theo Angelopoulos should be described as historians. It is not necessary, argues Rosenstone, for viewers or scholars to accept the controversial conclusions reached by Stone in JFK (1990). Of greater significance is the process in which the director "makes films that enter into, engage, comment upon, and contest the existing body of data and arguments on...