Abstract
Historians who base their research principally on cinematic texts may, at times, feel uneasy with regard to the epistemological foundations of their research. This is due to a number of reasons. Firstly, to study films, or principally films rather than written documents, means to go against a long and illustrious tradition of historiographical studies which normally privileges written texts over visual evidence as primary sources for historical research. Secondly, within the range of visual sources, historians have for a long time been especially suspicious of cinematic texts. Finally, a universally accepted, coherent and comprehensive methodology for studying film as a source for historical analysis has not yet been formulated. Such awareness accounts for the title of this essay: cinema and history have had a very long engagement, but a proper wedding has yet to be celebrated. It is worth noting that the long-term diffidence of historians towards film is not entirely unreasonable. The use of cinematic texts as historical sources presents difficult theoretical problems with respect to their selection, use and methods of analysis. In the mid-1970s, historian Paul Smith, while advocating the use of films in historical research, provided a succinct summary of the issues troubling professional historians:
[film] can quite easily be faked, or put together in such a way as to distort reality, give a tendentious picture, and practise upon the emotions of the spectator.
We need to study film and see it in relation to the world that produces it. What is our hypothesis? That film, image or not of reality, document or fiction, true story or pure invention, is history.
Marc Ferro1
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Notes
Marc Ferro, Cinema and History (Detroit: Wayne State University, 1988), p. 29.
Paul Smith (ed.), The Historian and Film (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), p. 5.
Issues related to the specular/non-specular relationship between text and reality are also dealt with by literary theorists, see for example P. Macherey’s classic, Pour une théorie de la production littéraire (Paris: Maspero, 1966).
The article, ‘Une nouvelle source de l’histoire: création d’un dépôt de cinématographie historique’, published in Le Figaro on 25 March 1898, has been translated subsequently by Julia Bloch Frey, see B. Matuszewski, ‘A New Source of History: the Creation of a Depository for Historical Cinematography’, Cultures 2 (1) (1974), pp. 219–222 (http://www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/classics/clasjul/mat.html, date accessed 7 March 2014). On Matuszewski,
see Anthony Aldgate, Cinema and History. British Newsreels and the Spanish Civil War (London: Scolar Press, 1979), pp. 2–3.
Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler. A Psychological History of the German Film (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974, c. 1947).
Kracauer based his interpretation on an unpublished typescript by Hans Janowitz, co-writer of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. An analysis of Janowits’ account of the making of Caligari, and a critique of Kracauer’s reading of the film can be found in D. Robinson, Das Gabinet des Dr. Caligari (London: British Film Institute, 1997), pp. 1–24.
Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, p. 275. The chapter on Nazi cinema tography was a reprint of the pamphlet titled Propaganda and the Nazi war film, issued, in 1942, by the Museum of Modern Art Film Library of New York. Nazi cinematography has since been investigated thoroughly. See, for example, D. S. Hull, Film in the Third Reich: A Study of the German Cinema, 1933–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969),
R. Taylor, Film Propaganda, Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany (London: Tauris, 1998), and
D. Welch, Propaganda and the German Cinema (1933–1945) (London and New York: Tauris, 2001).
Kracauer elaborated on this in a later work, see Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971, c1960), pp. 160–163. On objectivity in documentary filmmaking, Eric Barnouw has claimed that: The documentarist, like any communicator in any medium, makes endless choices. He selects topics, people, vistas, angles, lenses, juxtapositions, sounds, words. Each selection is an expression of his point of view,
whether he is aware of it or not. […] Even behind the first step, selection of a topic, there is a motive. E. Barnouw, Documentary, a History of the Non-fiction Film (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), pp. 287–288.
Kracauer’s book, however, inspired a line of research based on what could be defined as ‘the psychological paradigm’. See, for example, M. Wolfenstein and Nathan Leites, Movies: A Psychological Study (New York: Free Press, 1950). A critique of the psychological paradigm is in
Robert Sklar, ‘Moving Image Media in Culture and Society: Paradigms for Historical Interpretation’, in J. E. O’Connor (ed.), Image as Artifact: The Historical Analysis of Film and Television (Malabar, Florida: Krieger, 1990), pp. 121–123.
British University Council, Film and the Historian (BUFC, 1968).
On this point, see Aldgate, Cinema and History, pp. 5–11; Peppino Ortoleva, ‘Testimone infallibile, macchina dei sogni. Il film e il pubblico televisivo come fonte storica’, in Gianfranco Miro Gori (ed.), La Storia al cinema. Ricostruzione del passato/interpetazione del presente (Città di Castello: Bulzoni, 1994), pp. 299–332.
Michael Wood, America in the Movies (London: Secker and Warburg, 1975), p. 16. Although brilliant in some of its analysis, Wood’s book seems quite contradictory as far as methodology is concerned. While claiming that feature films mirror society, he also says that films, at least Hollywood movies, belong to an independent, self-created, self-perpetuating universe, an artistic tradition upon which both their narrative structure and significance ultimately depend; see Wood, America in the Movies, p. 8.
Daniel J. Leab, From Sambo to Superspade: The Black Experience in Motion Pictures (London: Secker and Warburg, 1975). Interesting investigations on feature films as a reflection of collective mentality can be also found in
Peter C. Rollins (ed.), Hollywood as Historian. American Film in a Cultural Context (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1983). On the same line of research, but more concerned with the political background of the films, and not devoted exclusively to America, are the essays contained in
K. R. M. Short (ed.), Feature Films as History (London: Croom Helm, 1981).
See Christian Metz, Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1974), and
Christian Metz, Language and Cinema (The Hague: Mouton, 1974).
On this point see Anthony Aldgate and Jeffrey Richards, Best of British. Cinema and Society 1930–1970 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983), p. 6.
A discussion on the theoretical contribution by Marc Ferro to the studies concerning film and history can be found in William Guynn, Writing History in Film (New York and London: Routledge, 2006), pp. 7–9.
On the relevance of film reviews for historical research, Pierre Sorlin exhibits a rather dismissive attitude in his book, Italian National Cinema: ‘I have read a large number of weeklies, specialized and not, in preparing this book. They have told me a lot about the names of famous people, the way of commenting upon films, the vocabulary in vogue, but, obviously, little about spectators’ deeper feelings’. See Pierre Sorlin, Italian National Cinema, 1896–1996 (New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 167.
Aldgate and Richards, Best of British and Anthony Aldgate and Jeffrey Richards, Britain Can Take It: the British Cinema in the Second World War (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986).
Jeffrey Richards, Films and British National Identity: From Dickens to Dad’s Army (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997).
See David Forgacs, ‘Marxist Literary Theory’, in Ann Jefferson and David Robey (eds), Modern Literary Theory. A Comparative Introduction (London: Batsford, 1986, 2nd edition), p. 167.
J. E. O’Connor, Image as Artifact: The Historical Analysis of Film and Television (Malabar, FL: Krieger, 1990).
On this point, see also Pierre Sorlin, The Film in History. Restaging the Past (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980), pp. 24–25.
L. Furhammar and Folke Isaksson, Politics and Film (New York: Praeger, 1971), translated by Kersti French, p. 243.
In the early 1980s, Stuart Hall pioneered this area, proposing his Encoding/Decoding model. See Stuart Hall, ‘Encoding/Decoding’ in Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe, and Paul Willis (eds), Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972–1979 (London: Hutchinson, 1980), pp. 128–138. Hall’s work revealed that the effects of mediated communication were not as direct as expected, and that different groups decoded the same message in different ways. For Hall, the central point was that a text could be understood in different ways, ranging from a dominant reading of it, in line with the intended meaning, or an oppositional one, which might add new meaning to the message. This meant that the audience had some degree of agency. If applied to our analysis, it also suggests that the potential impact of a propagandistic text, for example the effect of propagandistic cinema, cannot simply be assumed. However, alongside recognition of the complexity resulting from the audience agency, Hall also insisted on the idea of the media as a tool to set the political agenda. By reinforcing a dominant understanding of a text, for example by highlighting certain issues instead of others, the media exercises political influence on society as a whole. Subsequent research in audience studies went back to highlighting the power that media had in shaping attitudes according to a dominant ideology (the Glasgow Media Group). Nevertheless, the idea of a variety of effects, or different degrees of effects of the mediated text, within the same society at the same historical time, has remained a principal assumption of this research area until today.
See, in particular, the conclusions of Pierre Sorlin, Sociologie du cinéma. Ouverture pour l’histoire de demain (Paris: Aubier, 1977), pp. 290–297.
Ideological and cultural factors can also play a part in the audience’s perception of the artistic and political value of a film. An example can help to clarify this point. From the perspective of a modern viewer, it is rather surprising that a film like the Soviet biopic Kljatva (The Vow, 1946) — a piece of pure Stalinist cinematic propaganda — could have been considered an effective propaganda tool by the Soviet authorities, as its content is so explicitly propagandistic that its effect would appear, to a modern viewer, counterproductive. However, this was not the case in 1946 Russia, as noted by the director of Kljatva himself, Mikhail Chiaureli, during a press conference following the presentation of his film at the Venice Film Festival. Answering a provocative question by an Italian journalist about the presence of propaganda in Soviet feature films, Chiaureli claimed that although every film should be considered propagandistic — as every film, regardless of its nationality, endorsed an ideological vision of reality — the viewer whose ideology matched the one of the film would not perceive it as such. See Umberto Barbaro, ‘Il regista sovietico Ciaureli parla ai critici del Festival’, l’Unità (Milan, Italy), 4 September 1946. On The Vow,
see J. Leyda, Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film (London: Allen & Unwin, 1960), pp. 392–394. For complete cast and crew, see Leyda, Kino, pp. 452–453.
On this point see, for example, Bill Nichols, Introduction to Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), pp. 35–41.
Dudley Andrew, ‘Film and History’, in John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson (eds), Film Studies: Critical Approaches (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 183.
Robert A. Rosenstone, History on Film/Film on History (New York: Routledge, 2013), p. 133.
Nicholas Reeves, The Power of Film Propaganda: Myth of Reality? (London: Cassell, 1999).
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Fantoni, G. (2015). A Very Long Engagement: The Use of Cinematic Texts in Historical Research. In: Carlsten, J.M., McGarry, F. (eds) Film, History and Memory. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137468956_2
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