The Frozen Moment: History and Some Uses of Film

THE FROZEN MOMENT: HISTORY AND SOME USES OF FILM by Patricia Ann Lee In a much underrated film, The Great Waldo Pepper, George Roy Hill explored the interrelationships, as well as the contradictions between illusion and reality. The central character, a barnstroming pilot of the twenties, is an emotional casualty of the war. A "hot pilot" who never had a chance to prove himself in battle, he has spent the postwar years trying not so much to relive as to remake his wartime experiences. He wishes that he had fought the great German Ace , Ernst Kessler, and appropriates the experiences of another pilot to pretend that he had done so. At the climax of the film, fantasy and reality abruptly convergeas Waldo (now a stunt pilot) is hired to play out on film the role about which he had so often fantasized. Hill is testing the boundaries which divide reality and imagination through Waldo himself, a man who tries to make his dream real by attaching it to the proper set of facts. He tries to correct the director. The planes, as he points out, are not the models that were flown in 1918, and the physical setting does not correspond to its wartime original. But the man turns away impatiently, untroubled by such errors. "Anybody," he tells Waldo, "can supply accuracy, artists provide truth." Perhaps. The problem will be familiar to any historian who draws upon creative work, whether paintings, or novels, or film, either as a research source or as a teaching aid. Students, too, need to think about the qualities of those different truths (or at least those different aspects of truth) which are the particular responsibility of the historian, the novelist, or the filmmaker. The habit of thinking VatsvicLa Ann Lee ti, Kòòociatd Vh.ohon o{, Ht&tosLy at Sktdmotit 35 critically and learning to formulate appropriate questions, so natural to the scholar when working with documents and other traditional sources, is one which in a media age must consciously be extended to its special products. The quotation is one which was used in establishing some of the problems and the themes in a multi-disciplinary general education course, "War: Illusion and Reality" which was taught at Skidmore in 1979 and 1980 and which tried to encourage students to learn to deal with such materials. General Education was an experiment for the college when it began in 1979, and was not without its elements of controversy. It grew out of a desire to reemphasize, in a very specific way, the integrative aspects of the liberal arts experience. It had been argued that most existing courses cover carefully defined subject matter from the perspective of a single discipline. They seldom make explicit attempts to relate that experience to other courses or to bring the perspectives of more than one discipline to a single topic. The new courses which were designed for the non-specialist would underscore the bonds among disciplines and show how a specific problem could be approached by specialists from their own particular areas of expertise. They were to be team-planned and team-taught by at least two faculty members from different disciplines and preferably from at least two different distribution areas (Arts, Sciences, and Humanities). Although it was anticipated that classes would be large (perhaps 60 students) and that lectures would be used to present much of the material, the guidelines specified that careful attention was to be paid to primary texts or to "significant experiences" in which the student would engage to understand the course theme. In practice, general education produced various teaching responses . But to some of us its requirements seemed almost an invitation to develop a course which would use film as a text and also as "experience." Working out of our individual disciplines (History, Government, and English), we designed an examination not so much of war as of the idea of war as perceived by participants, by scholars, and by artists—very specifically by the filmmaker. Our central model, which we examined in greatest detail and to which we returned as the basis for contrast and comparison, was World War I. The richness and availability of literary and historical materials...