The Specious Past: Reflections of a Film Historian in Canada

By way of introduction, I should say that my talk originally had as a subtitle—"With Apologies to Pardon Tillinghast." I included this because my title The Specious Past is also the title of a book on historical method by this historian.¹

I'll be discussing today some of the issues that writers of film history need to consider. I want to do this because I think that writing the history of the moving image raises different issues than the writing of literary history, or social history, or art history. And I think it does so because of the very nature of moving images and institutions that surround them.

At the same time, though, we can't forget that there are issues of moving image history that are similar to general issues of historiography—issues about the writing of history. These issues certainly include questions about facts and questions of point of view—the perspective of the historian. And I'll have some comments to make about these issues.

However, in particular, I'll refer to the special problems of writing film history in Canada—a country with a history of filmmaking outside that of mainstream film histories. And I'll do so from the perspective of having been part of that process for many years.

I sometimes say that the writing of history is comparable to making a documentary film. In theory, the whole world is open. In practice the camera can only record where the human hand points it, and see only with the lens that has been used. And, even after recording, there's a whole structuring process of selection and editing before the final work is available. Here, quite simply, is the answer to why a few of us began working on Canadian film history some three decades ago. No one had thought it worthwhile to point a camera in our direction, quite apart from thinking about what lens might be appropriate. This is perhaps hardly surprising given the orientation of most film histories at the time. If I can oversimplify, these leaned heavily in the direction of a "great films / great personalities" view of history. And the personalities, of course, were usually male. What we had to discover (and discover it through practice, not theory)—what we had to discover was an approach now widely espoused as what has been called "the new film history." This approach insists that history is not what art historian Charles Harrison called "a history of triumphs of the will." On the contrary, it might well be a "a history of the wasted and unauthenticated, the abandoned and destroyed."² This new approach emphasizes that the history of film is not simply an aesthetic history. Film history exists at the intersections of aesthetics, and economics, and technology and culture. It's also an approach that, out of necessity, I adopted in my early film history—a book called Embattled Shadows.³ I say "out of necessity" partly because it was a practical approach developed long before the theories of the "new film history." It was necessary because we had few "triumphs of the will" we could celebrate. So, it was essential to develop an approach that considered film in a broader framework than simple artistic achievement. To use my earlier analogy, the camera lens had to be pointed in a different direction, to consider whether failures might be as interesting as successes. And, indeed, to explore how aesthetics might intersect with economics and with culture.

American historian Hayden White has been perhaps the single most significant influence on the rise of what's been called "new film history" in the United States. Not the least of the influences has stemmed from White's emphasis on history as discourse, history as a process of narrative history as necessarily filtered through the perception of the historian.

For example, in his own work on meta-history, White examined why certain modes of historical discourse were selected in particular periods, why history was written in a certain way at a particular point in time.⁴ Hayden White was...