What Makes Films Historical

Whatever else has been said about that troubling admixture of home movie, testimony (true or false), and pederasty (alleged or actual) that comprises the documentary Capturing the Friedmans (2003), the film was possible only because of the Friedman family’s fascination with filming, such that their home movies became the enduring matter of lives bereft of almost everything else. That fascination reflects the perception that, unlike words, film/video/moving pictures capture something. This premise holds as well for The Blair Witch Project (1999), a fictional film promoted as salvaged footage recorded by three young filmmakers attempting to investigate allegedly haunted woods in Maryland. The footage chronicles their inability to escape the woods, and the effects of unseen events that cause the disappearance (death?) of each. While the hyped (albeit bogus) authenticity of the footage made it a box-office success, that ploy may be less interesting than how the film explores a cinematic understanding of reality and national identity, as it contrasts the growing desperation of characters who, like the Friedmans, compulsively look into (either end of) a camera to validate their experience. The doomed filmmakers and comparably doomed Friedmans become characters in a horror story, fixating on making movies while they are losing their bearings. The Blair filmmakers, perhaps speaking as well for the Friedmans, repeatedly assert that if they persist they can’t be lost because “this is America!” The people in both films turn relentlessly to the camera for a real life. To the extent that the camera makes their presence historic at the same moment that history obscures their existence, they are trapped at a genre crossroads where visual authenticity meets fairy-tale narrative: the impossible space delimited by the “historical film.” That space, explored by all the books at hand, exists because a visual record suggests, for some, authenticity unavailable in print. “Somewhere outside the confining walls of these words,” writes historian Robert Rosenstone in History on Film/Film on History, “lies a world of colour, movement, sound, light, and life, a world on screen that points towards, refers to, represents” (1). From this premise, Rosenstone argues that specific films are works of history. In the postHayden White era of historiography, Rosenstone believes, history cannot claim accuracy because it is as much informed by narrative conventions and current tropes as by research and subject matter, although “film will never be able to do precisely what a book can do, and vice versa . . . history presented in these two different media would ultimately have to be judged by different criteria” (7). This truism anchors not only Rosenstone’s work but, to varying degrees, all these works, which use him as reference or inspiration. J. G. Smyth, in Reconstructing American Historical Cinema from “Cimarron” to “Citizen Kane”, supports Rosenstone by providing histories of several Hollywood historical films produced between World War I and World War II. William Guynn, in Writing History in Film, makes theoretical arguments for the claims that Smyth makes empirically, and Richard Francaviglia and Jerry Rodnitzky assemble essays in Lights, Camera, History: Portraying the Past in Film to suggest “the unexplored potential of films to convey the intensity and complexity of history” (vii). Film’s pedagogical power focuses American History and Contemporary Hollywood Film by Trevor McCrisken and Andrew Pepper, who ostensibly share Rosenstone’s perspective, but in effect treat films chiefly as symptomatic of the moment and ideology that produced them. Partially incorporating and partially ignoring it, Rosenstone identifies three broad ways to represent history: dramatic film, documentary, innovative film. “The dramatic film aims directly at the emotions” (16), while the documentary “tells a linear and moral story” (17), and the opposition or innovative historical film “constitutes a baggy category” (18). The chapters that follow elaborate upon each of these types, drawing profitably both on Rosenstone’s expertise as a historian and his previous work on the subject—a collection of essays, Visions of the Past: The Challenge of Film to Our Film Quarterly, Vol. 62, No. 3, pps 76–80, ISSN 0015-1386, e-ISSN 1533-8630. © 2009 The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/FQ.2009.62.3.76 BOOK REVIEWS