History in Film.

This week’s reading dealt with the presentation of history in the medium of film. Each article dealt with a slightly different topic: Toplin and Davis discussed popular film and how creative license is often employed when dealing with a historical topic cinematically. Frisch and Glassberg both explored the genre of the historical documentary and the way oral history is used within that style of filmmaking. It is apparent through the articles that the public is invested in history in film. It sparks strong emotion in viewers, as Glassberg shows us through the letters to Ken Burns about his documentary, The Civil War. Both The Civil War and Vietnam relied heavily on oral histories to tell a story. As evident from the letters, this kind of presentation of history captured viewers’ imaginations. I kept thinking about Rosenzweig and Thelen’s study. In their article, The Presence of the Past, they note that when people ranked the trustworthiness of a source, conversations with someone who was there received a mean score of 7.8, while movies and television programs received a 5.0 (21). I feel like these documentaries are an interesting combination of those two things – eyewitness accounts on a screen. Frisch warns that in using these oral histories, we need to be aware that they have the power to create a new authority that may contradict the historical facts. Presentation is key to interpretation.

The articles by Toplin and Davis discuss the more mainstream, creatively interpreted versions of historical films. Both recognize that while the historian has a place in the making of a film, the directors, producers, and writers will take creative license. Characters might be combined, details might be left out, and important events may be skipped because of time constraints. There isn’t as much room for expounding within a two or three-hour time frame; that job is better left to the documentary makers. But where do you draw the line? How do you create an accurate point in history within those constraints? Davis deals with this by writing a book about the process of the making of The Return of Martin Guerre. This gives her the opportunity to discuss why certain things were left out or altered from the fact-based version of the story. She takes responsibility for providing a more in-depth study of a film, “to bring to the debate both an understanding of the possibilities of film and a knowledge of the past” (Davis, 48). This complements Toplin’s article nicely. Toplin goes into the research methods of historians studying film and discusses three different levels of research. At the third level (did anyone else keep thinking of Inception?), historians begin to study the details of the filmmaking process and the production history. This kind of research can give new insight into the interpretation of a film and can help us to understand some of the reasoning behind the alterations of historical fact.