In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Editor’s Introduction

With this issue (38.2), we complete our two-part volume on “The Documentary Tradition.” Whereas 38.1 emphasized aesthetic and epistemological concerns about documentary-style films, this issue emphasizes historiographical concerns about their production and reception. How was the film made? What social or political variables affected its audience? What historical records did it draw on—or suppress—and to what effect? What cinematic tradition was it steeped in? What larger psychological and social paradigms controlled its plot, setting, or characterization? How does personal history affect national history?

Neo-fascist Italy, ancient Imperial China, post-9/11 U.S.A, and pre- and postcolonial India, Australia, and South Africa—these are the venues for the five articles in this issue. Thomas Cragin, in “Making Anti-Fascism into Fascism: The Political Transformation of Tiro al Piccione,” explains how the change in the political and social environment of post-WWII Italy dramatically altered the reception of a film that was based on a popular contemporary novel. When readers gauge not only the effect but the very meaning of a film (as it appears to them at the time), they would do well to remember how powerfully its surrounding historical forces determine that meaning, quite apart from artistic intent. As if in subversion of its own title, which referred to fascist atrocities, Tiro al Piccione turned into a shocking “pigeon shoot” for the mounting radicalism of the 1960s.

In “Character Assassination?: Empire Building and Cultural Pathology in Chen Kaige’s The Emperor and the Assassin,” Deborah Porter traces the foundations of the Chinese national character to a critical, and surprisingly personal, moment of self-denial, mostly subconscious, in its first emperor. Ying Zheng unified his people under the aegis of a monstrous anxiety about his own identity, and that anxiety rippled throughout Chinese history.

Traveling slightly west, and forward a couple millennia, Frederic Jaher and Blair Kling examine how British and American filmmakers during the 1930s sought to exploit the West’s cultural fascination with India, whose exoticism lent two empires the backdrop required to express their own hegemonic ambitions and fears upon the eve of WWII. As it turned out, however, the marquee empire film of 1939, Gunga Din, prefigures a more complicated racial, ideological, and cultural portrait than most filmmakers, not to mention politicians, of the time could register—or control.

Looking below the equator, in “Say Who Made Her So: Breaker Morant and British Empire,” James Kirschke puts on trial the definitive cinematic depiction of the court-martial of Harry “Breaker” Morant, an Australian officer in the British army who killed Boer prisoners on orders, allegedly, from his superiors. Predictably, the film’s narrative does not entirely match the historical records, and the discrepancies are revealing, but Kirschke’s larger aim is to explain how the film presents a compelling argument about Britain’s tragic approach to national identity at the turn of the previous century.

Finally, in “ABC’s The Path to 9/11, Terror-Management Theory, and the American Monomyth,” Mark Poindexter anatomizes the documentary-style television movie that re-made the largest terrorist attack on American soil into, perhaps, the most pervasive mythology in American culture: the story of underdog mavericks battling elitist bureaucrats in order to expose and expunge barbaric villains at the gates of America. The movie’s version of history reminds us that facts, though certainly functions of perspective and context, are not mere props. We owe to them—whatever they turn out to be in our best judgment—the same respect we owe to the people standing behind them. And it is this fidelity to people, to life at large, not just to “history” or “art” or any other abstraction, that gives the documentary its moral power. [End Page 9]

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