Reflections on What the Filmmaker Historian Does (to History)

Abstract

At a certain age, an age I have reached, the impulse is less to do new research and/or scholarship than to take the time to reflect on the scholarship that one and others have done in recent decades. Much of my own scholarly activity in the last quarter century has been devoted to the topic of the history film, by which I mean the dramatic motion picture that focuses on verifiable people, events and movements set in the past. I distinguish between the history film and the more common term, the ‘historical film’, because the latter can also refer to any important film that has been made in the past. Sometimes a film can be both. Orson Welles’ masterpiece, Citizen Kane (1941), for example, falls into both categories. As a history film, it is a thinly veiled biography of powerful newspaper publisher, the Rupert Murdoch of his day, William Randolph Hearst. As a historical work, it is famous for its use of multiple perspectives on the past (long before Akira Kurosawa’s celebrated film, Rashomon (1950)), its fragmented and contradictory way of telling a story, its special deep-focus photography and its luscious use of black-and-white.