Reconstructing American Historical Cinema (review)

Dexterously researched, alive with acute attention to the nuances and ripples in films, and fresh with new perspectives, J. E. Smyth's Reconstructing American Historical Cinema is itself a reconstruction of 1930s American cinema, yielding novel insights into a seemingly well-trodden field. Smyth examines the ways in which particular Hollywood films from this period engaged in writing history and the [Begin Page 56] tremendous influence and attention these works gained in constructing the nation's understanding of its own past. That Hollywood exerted (and continues to do so) a heightened perspective on the public imagination may not represent headline news. But the originality of Smyth's approach—amongst many exciting analytical angles, both on the films and in her own methodology—comes through in the way she balances the public discussion of the various historical films and the debates and struggles forming their production process with an investigation of academic histories published during the time period. She treats both films and more "legitimate" histories with equal scrutiny, so that archival research on the production process and film reviews interweave with an overview of academic trends in history, 1930s professional historiographical conferences, and the journalistic and popular reception of history texts from the time period.

Smyth's work represents part of a minor field in film and literary studies investigating how artworks not only represent or misrepresent history but also more significantly how artworks practice history, how they work alongside more traditional history texts and professional historians, and how much of our understanding of history comes through engaging with artistic representations of the past. Academic studies, journals, and anthologies have sprung up in this new scholarly arena. Smyth's work is both an original contribution to this field—original not only in her analysis but also in her solid and imaginative approach to research—and, more significantly, to a reinvestigation of the classical Hollywood era. She treats most of the films in her book not as symptoms of a hegemonic hypnosis of mass society, not as artistic exemplars of a formal paradigm, and not as discursive forces of subversion or transgression evident only to academics trained in Zizakian hieroglyphics or some equally trendy scholastic spin-game. No, she treats the texts as the products of various inputs—sometimes conflicting and sometimes complementary—from willful acts by different individuals. This intelligent approach deepens our understanding of the classical Hollywood era, offering a much more varied perspective on the creative possibilities, challenges, and achievements in this time period.

In her "Introduction," Smyth even offers a fresh take on The Birth of a Nation—talk about a dead horse!—presenting new angles on the film and uncovering pertinent archival documents to introduce her book's governing thesis. She demonstrates how critics objected not only to the film's racial politics, but also and equally to its historiographic practices. These critics were perhaps the first, in our media age, to express concern over the powerful mixing of film and documentary practices of history. And along the way, Smyth offers a devastating critique of that fetish object of 70s film academia: Cahiers du cinema's article on Young Mr. Lincoln, that excruciatingly comical and canonical analysis that no one teaches anymore, still manages to stay in print (what would become of articles like this one were it not for anthologies?). Her deft research on the film, its production process, its sources, the construction of the film's screenplay, and its reception, all marked by her rigorous use of memos, drafts, and primary material, makes a mockery of Cahiers' sloppy theoretical mishmash, even if she offers up analytical angles that remain controversial. (Are those Cahiers-semiotics days over? You better believe it. But just as you will find hippies lingering on Haight Street, surely you will still find a small handful of scholars imitating the impenetrable esotericism of Comolli and Company.)

Smyth's overall goal is to show the continuities between historical filmmaking and traditional historiography in the historical films from classical Hollywood. Smyth categorizes this genre...