Lesson+1+Film+History+and+History+Films

=HIST 250 World History Through Film: Introduction and History of Film= Welcome to World History Through Film. In this course, we are going to be studying "history films."1Robert A. Rosenstone defines history films as any films that "attempt to make meaning out of the traces left to us from that vanished world" that we call the past.2 Movies have tried to make meaning out of the past in so many ways, and some have been successful while many have not. That films try to make meaning out of the past, though, does not necessarily mean that they are accurate. We'll be looking at films that attempt to "do history." This necessitates a comparison with the most traditional form of history narrative: books. It seems that films always come out badly when compared to history books. The point of this class, one that is echoed by Rosenstone in your textbook, is that history books really do the same thing as history films (i.e. try to make sense out of the past), and any quality historian will admit to you that she works with documents and artifacts that represent only a small percentage of the data about any given historical event, context, or firgure. Books on history do follow a set of specific rules by which historians keep each other honest about the quality of their analyses. In the end, however, they are also dealing with traces of the past. Books suffer from the same problem as films: they cannot be totally accurate. In this course, we are just going to have to live with the fact that history films are more or less inaccurate. Since lack of accuracy is a given, in this course, we will not be watching films to in search of those inaccuracies. Instead, we are going to look at history films from the perspective of a historian. We are going to try to learn what these films can tell us about the past, and about ourselves, despite their inaccuracies.

It is time to learn to think about history films in new ways. First, Rosenstone wants us to recognize that despite their problems with accuracy, an increasingly large percentage of the population of the United States gets most or all of its information on history from films rather than books. We want to learn not just what subjects history films dig into, but HOW they make meaning out of the past. We want to learn to "read" films, so that we can understand the vocabulary that they use to communicate their messages. Ultimately, academic historians write history books to, as I said earlier, make meaning, or make sense out of the past - historians impose order on the disorderly universe of historical facts, documents and objects by asking specific questions and writing narratives of events that answer those questions. Film does something similar. It has in common with history books the device we call "narrative." Both films and books make narratives (stories) out of past events. Neither simply records random events. Each is able to tell stories in ways that work on us differently. "[A] film will never be able to do precisely what a book can do, and vice versa."3 Both tell stories, but each "mode" tells stories in a different way, and hence what we can learn from each differs, too.

This is what we are going to study over the course of this semester: How films tell stories about the past. We want to learn to read the visual. As historian Hayden White has pointed out, we will be engaging in "historiophoty" - the representation of history and our thoughts about it in images and filmic discourse.4 To do that, we have to learn about how films work. Films have a communicative effect upon us, but are we really aware of the techniques that film makers use to get their messages across. When we sit down to watch a film, we are rarely just watching passively. We usually have, at the very least, made up our minds about what genre the film we are about to watch fits into. We may even have preconceptions about the actors in the film, the location, or the historical events being examined. We come to the film with expectations, and part of what we get from the film has to do with the way that it does or does not satisfy those expectations. In a similar way, film makers are not simply showing us a story. They think long and hard about how to get across their ideas, and what ideas they are trying to communicate in the first place. Their work is very intentional. To understand the processes that they go through, we have to start with the first films, and work our way, like they did, through the discovery of cinematic techniques and methods. Once we understand that, we can begin to talk about film vocabulary, and eventually about the way in which films impose their own order on the past.

History as story.
As one of my favorite colleagues often points out to his classes, the term history can be conveniently broken into two separate contemporary words: "his" and "story." Now, my colleague means this as a lesson in the idea that history is written by the victors.[1] Ultimately, in this case, the victors would be men, and the idea that history is "his story," suggests that women have been effaced from history. That men, as the principal authors of history, and the principal characters within those male-authored histories, control both the population of the stories and their meanings. Etymologically, of course, this is not accurate. The term "history" is not constructed from two words that exist in the contemporary language of Americans in our own time. "History" is a much older word. The earliest word that can be related to history is the Proto-Indo-European language verb //weid//, which meant "to know," or "to see." //Weid// provided the root for the ancient Greek words //historein// (inquire) and //history// (wise man). These led to the Greek word //historia//, which meant "a learning or knowing by inquiry; an account of one's inquiries, history, narrative."[2] So according to this etymological definition, history is a story. Just not "his" story. It involves telling a narrative (a story), with a beginning, middle, and end, and often a moral or an educational point. Moreover, that story is a story of what one has learned, an account of inquiries – a narrative about the past and what it can teach us. There is an important component of stories that leads us to a problematic relationship between history and its subject: the past. Stories are narratives. A narrative is "1. a story or account of events, whether true or fictitious; 2. a book, literary work, etc., containing such a story; 3. the art, technique, or process of narrating."[3] So a history does not tell us everything that went on in the past that it addresses. Any past, just like our present, is so full of events whose relation to each other is questionable at best that to tell the whole past would create a story that was unintelligible. It would have no point, no meaning, and, most important in terms of the etymological definition of history, above, nothing for us to learn or know by attending to it. Instead, a history narrates that past. It, or rather, its author, picks and chooses what to put in, and what to leave out, in order to create a narrative of events that makes sense to the reader. Histories are stories, with a beginning, a middle, and an ending, that tell a tale with a point. Historians interpret past events to create a lesson for us. The great difference between this and, say, the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears is that one is a fictional cautionary tale (bears, after all, cannot talk, and do not live in houses), and one is based on reality, but is still intended to manipulate past events to create a lesson for the reader. Historians know this. We spend endless and pleasurable hours debating the choices that other historians have made when writing their books. If all of the lessons of history were perfectly accurate at true, then there would be nothing to debate. The sheer volume of debate suggests that, in fact, everything is up for debate. One reason for that is that the relationship of events can be interpreted and reinterpreted endlessly. Of course, this does not ean that there are no facts, or that facts have fungible meanings. On the contrary, facts are facts to a historian. It is just what those facts mean in relation to each other that is most up for debate. So to put forward their ideas of those relationships and meanings, and to answer an endless string of questions about how those facts led to the facts of today, historians create stories. These are just narratives that interpret facts according to the way in which the historian has come to believe they are related. Those interpretations, for good history, are based on specific methods. Historians will tell you how they interpret facts, and the specific methods they use for determining the relationships of facts to other facts and to time. Still, they are stories. They leave out events, people, and places that their writers have come to see as irrelevant, or of minor or tangential importance. Perhaps more important, historians themselves are human. They make mistakes, follow method inconsistently, or cleave to a certain point of view without being aware of it. All of this leads to the conclusion that while history books are authored and edited rigorously, and reviewed by many other historians before they are published, no history book constitutes the definitive last word on a subject. All histories are stories, and subject to revision when new facts come about, or when other historians see a need to reorganize interpretations in order to answer new questions about the past and its relationship to the present. A great example of a compelling story that is about a critical point in the history of the United States is [|this story about the Amistad slave trial]. It is short. Read it. Then come back to this lecture. Now that you have read about the Amistad, you can see that history is a story. There are some characteristics. The story of the Amistad clearly refers to events that actually happened, and to people who actually lived. The story uses as its foundation sources (we call them primary sources) from the time and the events about which it is centered. This is both good, from a historical perspective (it gives us the knowledge that we are talking about something real, or "true"), but not so good from a narrative perspective because we really don't get to see much of the drama of how events affected the lives of the real individuals involved. [|In this clip from Steven Spielberg's movie //Amistad//] you can see that there are emotions, messages, and meanings that cannot possibly have been recorded at the time. There were no visual images of the courtroom in which the trial took place that record a moment such as this. We don't know all of the people who were in the courtroom. There is no record of such an outburst by Senghbe Pieh. Even if there were, the actors in this scene are projecting emotions from individuals most of whom never recorded their emotional reactions to the trial, and who probably would have indicated them with different facial expressions and body language than the actors in the film did. My point is simple. History books can give us a terrific window on the facts of history, and how much of the truth we can know. But history books are limited by their sources. Fiction books, on the other hand, can give us the opportunity to see how individuals might have felt, and acted, in a time and place that none of us has experienced personally, but they lack the access to factual accuracy that history books have, because they deal with internal, individual subjects that have normally left no evidence behind. Fiction is, at best, a guess. At worst, completely made up out of whole cloth.

However, we cannot say that history books are completely factual, nor that fiction books, or movies, about history are completely wrong. In order to put facts together in a way that makes sense, historians must use method: a set of rules that creates a logic for surmising how the facts can best be put together. Any good historian, like any good scientist, has to begin with the premise that she or he might be wrong, not about the facts, but about the analysis - the mental leap that it takes to connect them. Method helps us to minimize inconsistences, but it does not completely eliminate the possibility of being wrong to some degree in our interpretations. The opposite side of this coin is that fiction can sometimes make reasonable guesses as to how these facts fit together, or how they might have meant something to those living at the time. Moreover, since the goal of both fiction (and movies) and history is to discover some connection between the past and present – some way to answer a question we have about ourselves by referring to changes that led to our society from the society of those in the past – then both are, in a sense, telling history. History books have advantages and disadvantages. Film also has advantages and disadvantages. The great similarity is that historians usually begin with a question. How did some reality come to be? What was the diachronic (change over time) process by which, for example, Americans who saw slavery as completely natural came to believe that it was a violation of human rights? This is the problem with which both the website you read earlier, and the movie //Amistad// are concerned. In other words, the historian and the film maker have the same explanatory goal in mind. A historian tells a story in order to help us illuminate the past and give it meaning. A filmmaker tells a history in order to help us see the drama in the changes that humans have experienced, and maybe to consider the questions those people may have faced as themes in the experience of being human. Therefore, if a historian can be a storyteller, it follows that a storyteller, or a film maker, can be a historian. The question is only to what degree, for what purpose, and with what result. I want to suggest that this is important, and this class relevant, because of this rough equality of historian and historical film maker. The most important element here is technology and the reading public. History books have dominated the telling of history virtually since its invention in every society where it has existed. Herodotus' histories were stories. Chinese histories were narratives that legitimized power structures through a system of morality. The history that came to dominate the field in the West and in Asia by the nineteenth century was in book form primarily because this was the dominant form of storytelling at that time. Historians found that they could increase accuracy and length (which allowed for more detailed, nuanced stories) by writing them down in books. Their very success often led to a lack of consciousness about their limitations, and the erudite scholarship of the historians – their massive knowledge of the past – gave a false sense of authority. But books are no longer the only, or even the primary way by which we access and process information. Since the Lumiere Brothers created their first films, movies have had an increasing role in the way in which we view the world. Since the 1940s, television has become nearly dominant. Movies and television have given most of us our first visions of foreign geographies. For many of us, even the state next door we saw first on TV or in a movie. During World War II, and even the Great Depression before it, movies provided news and information about events going on around us. Frank Capra's famous line in [|his series of WWII propaganda films, "Why We Fight"] is evidence of my point. Discussing the Japanese invasion of China, Ford's narrator told the audience (one can imagine the hush, and the nodding of heads) that "China is history, China is land, and China is people."[4] In the film, Capra claims that China has never been an aggressor in war. The "facts" he uses here are wrong. China has been an aggressor many times. But he makes this statement in the context of explaining the answer to a question: what has happened in China, so far away from the United States, that Americans should fight a war to help the Chinese? When watching these films, Americans in 1942 were getting a history lesson that explained their current predicament. That lesson was not coming from a history book. The film was effective because it could dramatize the point. Americans seem to read less now that we have for a century. In 2004, the NEA published a survey of 17,000 people that noted that only 47% of them had read a book in the past year. That was down from a similar survey done in the 1990s. If Americans are reading fewer books, we can assume that history books are getting less attention as well. So where to Americans get their information about history. Two sources are probably important here: television and film. As historians, we do ourselves and our discipline a disservice if we ignore these media. Rather than simply put them down because of their inaccuracies, we should study them, understand how they tell the stories of history, and perhaps even how we can help them tell those stories better. They can also teach us how to make our stories more interesting. Aside from that, many people become interested in history because of films they have seen. Among historians of Japan, for example, a debate has raged about the value of the Tom Cruise vehicle //The Last Samurai// for years. There seem to be two schools of thought. One group says that the movie is so inaccurate that our job as historians is to discredit the film. Others say that it has the effect of getting students interested in Japanese history. We should use that, and teach the accurate history once we are in their classes. But the film, as inaccurate as it is, does make an attempt to tell history. By looking at it closely, and critically, we can decode the questions that the filmmakers wanted to answer by making it, and the historical point that it is trying to make. In fact, it is possible to look at this film not as a history of Japan at all, but as a history of Western colonialism.

To able to read films well, however, we need to learn something about their history. So before we begin to think too deeply about history films, lets look at the history of films on the next page. First take the quiz, then move to the next page.

[1] This idiom is often attributed to Winston Churchill, though the veracity of that attribution cannot be established. [2] "Online Etymology Dictionary." Online Etymology Dictionary. Accessed December 4, 2014. http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=history. [3] Dictionary.com. Accessed December 4, 2014. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/narrative. [4] //Why We Fight: The Battle of China//. Distributed by Crown Video, 1943. VHS.

=A Brief History of Film= The first film cameras and projectors were invented in the 1890s. Below is a collection of short films by the Lumiere Brothers, some of the first people to create and display motion pictures. These films illustrate the interests that people had in film in its early days. Watch this clip and see if you can find some common patterns.

media type="youtube" key="4nj0vEO4Q6s" width="420" height="315" The Lumiere Brothers were among the first to bring film to audiences.

As you can see in the examples above, the earliest films were short. In the first three years of film making, from 1895-1898, movie exhibitions were novelties. Audiences delighted to see moving pictures, and did not much care what in them was moving. By 1898, however, the novelty was wearing off, and audiences were thiniing out. This led many movie makers and exhibitors into bankruptcy and failure. To survive, new formulas had to be invented. Audiences in the United States responded well to the forerunner of newsreels, as film makers documented the Spanish-American war of 1898. Both within the United States in in the other major movie-making parts of the world, also began making fiction films, beyond the "actualities" they had produced in the novelty ohase of movie production. These stories captured the interest of viewers, and were less expensive to priduce because they could be made in a studio with painted sets and special effects, rather than having to be filmed on location in a war zone to which travel was expensive. Because of this move toward fiction films, new techniques developed rapidly. Movie makers went beyond the single shot story to produce movies with multiple shots designed to move the story forward and communicate specific ideas within it. Modern editing was developed by producer/cameramen such as Georges Melies in France and Edwin S. Porter in the United States.6 So, if the Lumiere Brothers were the first to make "realistic," films (called "actualities"), the fantasy style of film making, in which whole worlds were created through the use of stage, props, camera angles, music, and direction, was pioneered by George Melies. Melies was also the pioneer of multiple-shot movies, and his sets and props were elaborate, as were the special effects he used. Melies and Porter were key figures in creating the modern movie as we know it today. Below is Melies' film about a trip to the moon. As you can see, it was carefully staged. It was a marvel of its time.

media type="youtube" key="7MYnbqgjAFM" width="560" height="315"

We see in these examples two of the primary branches of film-making: realism (at the time it was called "actualities," and fantasy. Many others developed over time, but these two branches are each much bigger than genre, and have come to define at least two of the major theories about what film is, and what it ought to be. Realism does not imply that the film depicts actual reality. Rather, in the spirit of the Lumiere Brothers, realist film makers strive to tell their stories with serious attempts to imitate nature. Fantasy film makers like to tell stories by overemphasizing unusual elements or unreal elements. Both are used in history films.

In the earliest years of film production, movies were produced in most states in the world, but the primary centers of production were France, Great Britain, and the United States. By the early years of the twentieth century, China, India, Japan and Germany joined the list. Movies were produced for saled to exhibitors who played them in Vaudeville houses, storefront theaters, curiosity shows, and carnivals. Until about 1905 there were no movie theaters per se. Those were develped in France, the leading movie making nation at the time, by the largest film company in the world at the time - Pathé. Pathé was a vertically integrated company, meaning that it had control of the production and distribution process, its factories built cameras and made film. It produced movies in its studios. Finally, it exhibited movies in venues that it owned throughout France. Such control of the entire production and distribution process allowed it to control costs and maximize profits, giving it a powerful competititve presesnce (and ironically, foreshadowing the reality that large movie companies tend to have more success than smaller independent movie makers). Pathé was also horizontally integrated, meaning that its distribution process was broadly based - in this case it owned studios and distribution facilities not only across France, but in most major movie producing parts of the world, including the United States, Germany, and Russia, where it was responsible for more than half of Russian movie production during the first decade of the twentieth century.

One of the products of the production techniques that Melies and Porter created, and that Pathé could afford, was the history film. Pathé was not the first to create history films. But it was able to begin the process of changing them from tableaux and mystery plays in which a largely static set of scenes depicted each step in a story to a moving narrative that involved the development of characters and plot, and aspired to show cause and effect connections. In other words, Pathé history films were critical in developing the narrative style that mainstream history films use today. An example is the film below. This is //The Assassination of the Duc de Guise//, released in 1905 (all subtitles are in French). media type="youtube" key="AOFZWXU_WHA" width="420" height="315"

The narrative structure in this film is relatively clear. It does more than just try to show vignettes of history, or give a couple of factual scenes. Instead, it uses an actual event in history, and extrapolates on that event to give it some meaning beyond the facts. The film makers made some choices about how King Henry III might feel, and why the Duke of Guise (the Duc de Guise of the title) might go to see the king despite having received a letter warning him not to go, and to take precautions to protect his life. This film uses two primary characters and a clear narrative to try to make an episode in history come alive. What percentage of the film is true, and what is fiction, is largely irrelevant. Probably the greater part is fiction, because it involves emotions, relationships, and decisions made by the characters that cannot be verified historically. Still, that does not mean that it is not trying to tell a story that makes meaning out of the event.

Narrative history in film developed rapidly after this. A wonderful example - perhaps one of the best ever done, is Sergei Eisenstein's //Battleship Potempkin//. Released in 1925, this is the story of one ship in the Russian Navy that started the naval rebellion in 1918 during the Bolshevik Revolution. The refusal of the Navy to obey the orders of the Czar's government was one of the major blows to the pre-communist regime. //Battleship Potempkin// personalizes that story, inventing many of the personal elements within an actual historical event in order to make the narrative interesting for film viewers. The result is one of the most impressive historical narratives ever put on film, despite the fact that it is silent. Viewing this film also helps us to see that one element of a history film is the point of view. Eisenstein had a point to make. He supported the Bolshevik Revolution, and felt that the destruction of the old regime was inevitable as the Russian People realized their role in the state. For him, this film tells the history of that realization. Others would disagree and have told the same story in a different way. This makes Eisenstein a historian in another sense. Not only is he telling a history narrative, his story enters the debate about the meaning of the actual events on board the battleship Potempkin and how they were related to the Bolshevik Revolution. One of the most important parts of academic history is this debate. Since Eisenstein joined it with a clear claim, we have to see him as "doing history." Since he did it within the parameters of film, rather than a monograph (book on a single subject) we have to judge him by the standards of that medium. His narrative stands up well to that judgment. He tells a clear story, makes several points about cause and effect, and addresses the overall debate about the meaning of this episode in history. media type="youtube" key="7TgWoSHUn8c" width="420" height="315"


 * Now that we have begun looking at films, it is time for you to do some thinking about them. Even before we start learning the vocabulary of film, I have two questions. What is history? What is a history film? You'll have to read the Introduction and first chapter of Rosenstone for this. Then, go to the Assignments tool in the left hand tool bar, and open the Paper #1 Assignment. I'll be looking for two pages, double-spaced, in which you define a "history film" as opposed to just a movie. To put it slightly differently, what specific elements make a movie a history film?**
 * Before you go there, though, make sure you've answered all the questions in the Quiz Groups in this lesson. There are three quiz groups. You get credit for the quizzes, but you have to answer the questions, then, at the bottom of this page, input a user ID (please use your real name) and send my your scores. Thanks!**