Reframing the Past: History, Film and Television by Mia E. M. Treacey (review)

Mia Treacey begins her preface with the title “Not another Book on History and Film” (xiii), and in fact this is not just another book on History and Film. It is an essential intervention in history’s critical engagement with the past on film that advances a series of important and convincing arguments about what historians have had to say about the past as it is represented on film and television, where it should go next, and what to call it.

Treacey provides an engaging, thorough, and accessible guided tour through the historical debate about history on film from 1898 to the present, reconceptualizing the study of history depicted in film and surveying scholarship siloed by time, geography, and disciplinary boundaries. The book organizes the work to date, filling in gaps and resurrecting scholars whose ideas are worth reconsidering, revisiting, and building upon. It is international in approach, placing well-known American contributions into a context that includes Europe (beyond Ferro and Sorlin), the UK, and Australia. Treacey opens with a call for an inter-disciplinary approach to the study, for historians and filmmakers to engage each other, and introduces the term “Screened History” to refocus the field and tidy up the myriad, spiraling combinations of terms, including, as she catalogues them, “... ‘History and film’, ‘History on film’, ‘historiophoty’, ‘televisual history’, ‘media history’, ‘Film History’, ‘history on film’ and ‘audiovisual history’ (and memorably at one conference, ‘history and/on/in film’).”(2) Her argument that the term Screened History will encourage the interdisciplinary collaboration that she advocates and be “reasonably future-proof” (2) is well supported throughout the book and convincing. In addition, she calls for a stronger inclusion of reception studies within the field.

Treacey is a historian committed to multi-disciplinarity, as evidenced by her command of the scholarship of history on film and its crossover into cultural studies and film theory. She takes a chronological approach, exploring Screened History in Chapter 2 from the beginning of film until 1949, tracing the academic response to history in moving images, and the early interest in realism, archival films, newsreel and documentary. In the third chapter she covers the 1950s and 60s, a period that she notes, marks a surge in Screened History, particularly in the UK and Europe, which is now largely forgotten (31). This era was more interdisciplinary than it would become in the US in the 1970s. Treacey pays particular attention to the impact of the Annales School on Screened History, American Jay Leyda’s Films Begets Films: Compilation films from propaganda to drama (1964) and the siren call of the BBC series The Great War (1964) that inspired historians to take notice of how their trade was plied by technicians, artists and salesmen. She focuses as well on the inter-disciplinary example of the Film and the Historian conference held at University College, London in 1968. It was an event that stands out for its inclusion of members of the film and television industries, alongside academic historians, and the wealth of work and debate it engendered in Britain for years to come. Other highlights of these earlier chapters include the misfires of these conversations in Britain—for example, the blustery disciplinary chauvinism of historian A.J.P. Taylor, from the Film and the Historian conference (1968): “What we hope for ultimately is that in the end we shall be, as it were, the master and filmmakers, and the technicians will do what we want” (45).

Later chapters cover ground that will be better known to those familiar with the American context, including The American Historical Review’s ‘Forum on film and the historian’ from 1988. Her fifth chapter, entitled, “A Tale of Two Roberts,” tackles Robert Rosenstone, describing his impact and place in the field, and setting up his approach to history on film in opposition to another Robert, Robert Brent Toplin. Treacey explores these two approaches, with Rosenstone championing experimental and “marginal” film and Toplin commercial films, though she...