Films As Historical Representations

CHAPTER 5
Films as Historical Representations

and Resources
I
ncreasingly how the public understands the past is through its repre-
sentation in films, videos, and television programs. So ubiquitous are
these media that they constitute a significant part of modern memory.
In many nations, most citizens cannot remember a time without motion
pictures nor can younger generations remember a time without television
programs. Filmed representations of the past more and more shape pop-
ular historical consciousness, particularly as the memory of what was
taught in school, if not the actual teaching of history, declines.1
Movies from the very beginning of the industry frequently used the
past as setting and background, as vital to the plot, or even for the story
itself. The first epic feature-length motion picture, D. W. Griffith’s The
Birth of a Nation (1915), depicted the Reconstruction of the South after
the Civil War, using the most vicious stereotypes of the former slaves as it
promoted the superiority of the “Aryan race” by lauding the Ku Klux
Klan.2 One of the all-time blockbuster films, Gone with the Wind (1939),
also propagated stereotypes of blacks and whites alike in depicting the
Civil War and Reconstruction.3 These days the History Channels in var-
ious English-speaking countries ostensibly devote their entire program-
ming to representing the past as history, but the British Broadcasting
Corporation, the Public Broadcasting System in the United States, and
other national and private television channels also sponsor and present
films as histories.4
Historians, documentary filmmakers, movie and television producers,
and others debate both the benefits and disadvantages of the medium for
representing history. These debates, like so many about the nature of his-
tory, oversimplify the great variety of forms films can take as histories.5
R. F. Berkhofer, Jr., Fashioning History

© Berkhofer, Jr. 2008
176 • Fashioning History
What I call “films” in this chapter cover a broad gamut of cinematic and
other moving image media just as “texts” and “things” embraced a wide
variety of forms in chapters 4 and 5. Historical films can include every-
thing from didactic classroom historical films to grand Hollywood spec-
tacles swathed in a historical setting like Cleopatra (1963) or Titanic
(1997). Films also embrace both the distinguished historian Simon
Schama’s fifteen-part series on A History of Britain (2000–2001) for the
British Broadcasting Corporation and the prizewinning documentary
filmmaker Ken Burn’s eleven-hour series on The Civil War (1990) for the
Public Broadcasting System in the United States. Popular and full-feature
films range from the efforts of Oliver Stone arguing the conspiracy
behind the assassination of JFK (1991) to adaptations of famous histori-
cal novels, like the most recent version of James Fenimore Cooper’s The
Last of the Mohicans (1992). Films have been made from microhistories,
but Le retour de Martin Guerre (1982), supplemented in a book by the
chief historical advisor Natalie Zemon Davis, and A Midwife’s Tale
(1998), based on a book by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, are quite different
from each other in their approaches to the medium and how it should
represent the past.6 Historic sites frequently offer documentary films as
an overall orientation to their enterprise, for example, Williamsburg—
The Story of a Patriot (1957). The History Channels in the United
Kingdom, the United States, and elsewhere show visual depictions of his-
tory ranging from a miniseries on Sex Life in Ancient Rome (2005) to the
history of sewers from ancient Rome to modern Los Angeles as Modern
Marvels of technology (2005) to seemingly endless programs on the
Second World War. And who can say how much popular historical con-
sciousness around the world was permanently affected by such film sta-
ples as the swashbuckling pirate, the British costume drama, the gangster
movie, and the American Western? (Remember those British boys playing
cowboys among the Iron Age Welsh roundhouses in the last chapter.)
It is this very profusion of products that creates some of the problems
about what and how well a film can represent the past from a professional
historian’s view. So first we look briefly at some of the arguments raised by
historians and filmmakers about each other’s proclivities and products.
Second, we observe one customary division of film genres classified by
their supposed proportion of factuality and fictionality. Then, we turn to
investigating films as evidential sources for the historian through ques-
tions akin to the external and internal criticism of texts. Next, we exam-
ine films as histories, as representations of the past, in their own right.
The last section offers some brief conclusions about films and history.
Films as Historical Representations and Resources • 177
Complaints and Issues

Given the vast variety of films that present history in some way, no won-
der historians and other scholars argue about the ability of films to repre-
sent the past as history. In fact, much of the discussion of films by historians
concerns how much they must present fiction rather than the facts pro-
fessional historians accept, purvey simplified heritage more than complex
proper history. A major point of comparison seems to take as its standard,
full-fledged written histories. Historians and media people argue over
whether a film can be as scholarly as written history. The number of pages
in a script for a full-length film version of history seems very short in
comparison to the number of pages even in a learned article.7 Although
films interpret the past, it is difficult for them to discuss explicitly various
interpretations or the conflicts over their application in any given
instance. In other words, historians lament the lack of annotation parallel
to the text that informs the reader of disputes over evidence, counterin-
terpretations, or controversial application of a thesis in a book or article.
Thus films are often accused of oversimplifying circumstances and usu-
ally omitting the larger context all together.8
To some critics the very strengths of films are considered weaknesses:
their visual and aural complexity and eyewitness quality. Films commu-
nicate through the alleged reproduction or simulation the looks and
sounds of the past as they also convey the activity and other matters at the
center of focus. Films need to show a physical setting visually while books
can generalize, merely sketch, or even neglect that aspect. Thus buildings,
landscapes, artifacts present the same problems of setting and interpreting
the scene that any museum or historic site confronts. The demand that
the persons appearing in films use words, develop thoughts, and show
activity accurate to those of past peoples presents problems similar to liv-
ing reenactments. Such common activities as eating and walking or phys-
ical details of surroundings may be finessed by a writer of a history but
not by a filmmaker. But this problem seems no different conceptually
than any other living reenactment. Problematic as their achievement may
seem, films appear to convey the very “look” and “feel” of a particular era
or place. Old films, whether a short newsreel or full-length feature movie,
appear to offer “windows” on the era of their making. They communi-
cate, seemingly directly, how people lived and behaved then.
Some complain that the need for a clear narrative line makes matters
seem too certain in a film. Even if the lack of footnotes is somewhat com-
pensated by the appearance of historians and other experts as “talking
heads” in, say, a documentary, a film shows the “noise of events” better
than the structures that shaped them. “Great Men” and “Great Women”
photograph better than great trends. Just as history from the top down
needs embodiment through some concrete individuals rather than
abstract organizational entities, so too does history from the bottom up.
Unless complicated situations can be reduced to personal trials and solu-
tions, they are usually omitted or oversimplified. If ambiguities are not
neglected entirely, they are not developed very often unless they can be
dramatized. To show change over time through film is easy enough, but
to show why is far harder. The juxtaposition of various shots and scenes
convey the what of change but less so the how and rarely the why. Historians
believe that long, annotated texts do a better job at showing the com-
plexity of representing the past. Filmmakers believe that films convey an
experience of the immediate and the memorable that no book can com-
municate. Historians worry that far too many popular films embrace cher-
ished metanarratives rather than accurate narratives, promote heritage
more than history.
To the extent that films “personalize, emotionalize, or dramatize” spe-
cific historical situations, their creditability as history is on the line.9 In
that sense the factuality of film as history seems more immediate to the
viewer/listener, for films are both aural and visual. Film is a show-and-tell
medium. Films use words like texts but can show things better than texts
can. They can show things like museums and historic sites but integrate
words and sound into the showing. But what and whose criteria should
be used to judge the result? All too often, historians would seem to want
filmed books, while filmmakers want a product that translates the past
into what is appropriate for the medium of film and the nature of its mass
audience. Even successful documentary filmmakers measure the audience
for their products by the tens of thousands, sometimes even hundreds of
thousands, while many of the best proper history books count success in
the thousands, except for the breakout best sellers.
Films have their own language, so to speak, as a medium that the his-
torian needs to appreciate and understand in order both to evaluate them
as evidence for a history of her own and for judging the accuracy of those
films claiming to be histories in their own right. Filmmakers and those
historians long interested in both the use of films as evidence and in the
production of histories through film warn that the technical aspects of
lens focal length, camera angles, framing, composition, lighting, editing,
and other filmmaking techniques must be understood in order to fully
comprehend what goes on in a film. Presentation in a film like on the
stage depends upon the mise en scène, or the arrangement of actors, cos-
tumes, props, and lighting to convey the overall effect. Such editing tech-
niques as the fade, dissolve, wipe, and cut tighten plot; convey temporal,
spatial, and causative connections through juxtaposition of shots; and
enhance or establish viewpoint, among other things. In many ways the
techniques of filming influence not only how something can be presented
but as a result what is presented. Historians must recognize the “visual
language” employed in a film in order to interpret it as evidence.10
Just as film has methods and approaches unique to it as medium like
both texts and things, so too it shares with them the problems of repre-
senting the past as history. In the end, films like texts and museum
exhibits are complex, multilayered syntheses that combine narrative and
arguments, explanation and understanding, perspectives and meaning,
and Great Stories. Thus historians must understand how films put these
elements together according to cinematic methods in order to infer the
facts and generalizations they will incorporate into their own syntheses or
to evaluate films as histories in their own right.11
Fact, Fiction, and Film Genres

Film critics and theorists categorize films by many genres, but those of
most interest to historians classify by proportion of fact to fiction in the
medium. By distinguishing among documentaries, docudramas, and dra-
mas, theorists and critics along with filmmakers acknowledge a crude sys-
tem of classifying films by their faithfulness and accuracy in depicting the
present or the past. Some indication of the system occurs in the phrases
“a true story,” “based on a true story,” and “inspired by a true story” that
appear on screen or through voice-over at the beginning of a film. Even
those films claiming to be “a true story” or “based upon a true story” usu-
ally contain smaller or larger amounts of fictional invention. Those claim-
ing to be “inspired by a true story,” as the phrase suggests, take still greater
artistic license. So let us look at this crude but customary system prelim-
inary to a more detailed examination of films first as sources for their
times and then as historical representations in their own right like any
other history.12
What are called actuality footage or films supposedly record just what
came before the camera lens without any intervention by the filmmaker
beyond operating the camera. Thus they presumably offer direct evidence
of what the footage shows. They differ from documentaries therefore by
their relative lack of intervention by the filmmaker, for documentary
filmmakers deliberately emplot the elements in their works to promote a

goal or message. Documentary filmmakers at times use actuality footage
to re-present past persons and activities as originally recorded. Such re-
presentation serves the same function in a filmic historical representation
as a quotation does in a textual historical representation. 13
Among the most famous actuality footage is the twenty-six-second
home movie taken by Abraham Zapruder of the shooting of John F.
Kennedy in Dallas on November 22, 1963.14 Still photographs from it
appeared in the national media soon after, but no public showing of the
complete footage occurred until March 6, 1975. The Warren Commission,
investigating the assassination in 1963–64, issued a twenty-six-volume
report that relied heavily on minute analysis of its 486 frames. The House
Select Committee on Assassinations examined it frame by frame in
1977–78 to answer lingering questions about how many persons were
involved in the shooting. The director Oliver Stone re-presented the
silent, black-and-white footage repeatedly in his feature film JFK (1991)
along with his own invented black-and-white footage to argue the case for
a high-level cabal. A Google search on the Internet of the film or of the
Kennedy assassination reveals that the issues of who shot the President
and how many were involved directly and indirectly still generates con-
troversy supported by references to the film. Some even argue it was faked
or altered in order to support their opinion that the assassination required
the work of several persons at a minimum.15
Old-time movie newsreels and modern television interviews and on-
the-spot coverage combine actuality footage and interpretive shaping of
the narrative. Movie theaters showed weekly newsreels until television
news programs superceded their venue and adapted their format. Newsreels
and television news coverage frequently insert stock footage of a previous
similar event, place, or people to supplement a presentation or provide
visual accompaniment to a spoken text. Sometimes an event is created
through editing, such as Hitler’s little jig at the surrender of Paris. Other
times a seemingly documentary news film is a reenactment. Newsreels of
World War II and the Korean War were staged at times for propaganda
purposes. Most scenes from battles in earlier wars were reenacted, because
the cameras and other equipment were technologically inadequate to
record the real fighting. Actual sequences, inserted stock footage, faked or
reenacted scenes, and director’s or other interpretations can all be grist for
the historian’s mill to produce facts, albeit of a different kind perhaps
from those presented as such in the film under study.16
Film theorists usually separate documentary films from docudramas

and biographical pictures (biopics) on the nature of their implicit promise
to the audience of actuality and/or a true story, entirely nonfiction as
opposed to any invention. Documentaries, as their name implies, seek to
document actuality in the present or the past either through direct film-
ing of a slice of life, as it were, or re-presentation from archival or other
sources.17 Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922) is generally acknowl-
edged to be the first important documentary. He supposedly filmed the
actual harsh life of the Canadian Inuit (one of those peoples lumped
together as Arctic Eskimos), but he staged traditional customs and events
no longer practiced by them.
Documentaries can vary by length, subject matter, location, veracity,
intended audience, and moral and political purpose. Such films range in
intended audience from classroom and other instructional settings to art
houses and mainstream theaters, from the History Channel or Public
Broadcasting System to an exposé on one of the major television chan-
nels. They can support or oppose their government, as two controversial
films show. Leni Riefenstahl’s brilliant Triumph of the Will (1934) employed
great artistry in filming the 1934 Nazi Party Congress rally in Nuremberg
and thereby supported Hitler in spite of her professions to the contrary
after the Second World War. Michael Moore in Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004)
mixed his own filmed interviews with edited clips of George W. Bush, his
aides, battle scenes, and casualties to fashion a controversial case against
the election of a sitting president, how he responded to the bombing of
the Twin Towers, and steered the nation into wars in Afghanistan and
Iraq. Documentaries can focus on individual biographies, groups, social
problems, or nature among many subjects. They can be about musical events
and even the making of movies themselves. For example Woodstock—3 Days
of Peace and Music (1970) documents that iconic festival. Eleanor Coppola’s
Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse (1991) takes the audience
behind the scenes to witness the difficulties her husband had filming his
version of the Vietnam War in the heralded Apocalypse Now (1979).18
Docudramas, cinema verité, and biopics all mix documentary ambi-
tions with dramatic development. They can be about the present or the
past. Rather than reproducing film or other documentation, this genre
uses actors to portray actual persons and reenact events and its makers
construct sets to replicate the original environment. No narrator on
screen or in voice-over describes the action; rather it is depicted as if it
were really taking place as it happens. The chief characters represent per-
sons who actually lived, and the events shown actually occurred, even
though staged. The dialogue, costumes, and sets attempt to avoid anachro-
nisms as does the movie or television show as a whole. Docudramas employ
typical dramatic devices to arouse such emotions as happiness, suspense
or anguish and evoke such moral reactions as empathy, indignation, and
alienation. As the difference between the American word “docudrama”
and its English cousin “dramadoc” suggests, theorists dispute the propor-
tion of documented actuality and dramatic invention, even melodramatic
license, this genre entails. The dispute shows that the genre contains a
spectrum of exemplars ranging in their proportion of factual documenta-
tion and narrative invention.19
Biopics are by far the most prevalent films in this category. Biographies
are a popular subject in all genres ranging from documentaries to dramas,
but they define the very category of biopics. Biographies have been the
subject of films since Jeanne d’Arc (1899) till today. A person’s life offers
filmmakers both a focus and a story with beginning, middle, and end that
an audience can follow and even identify with. Biopics treat in various
ways famous persons in the past like Abraham Lincoln and Napoleon,
two of the most prevalent; infamous persons like Jesse James or Al
Capone, also popular; and nonfamous persons, like a union organizer or
a counterfeiter. In the present, they explore the lives of politicians and
prostitutes, scientists and singers, elite and common people.20
Docudramas, biopics, and cinema verité all seek to combine a story-
line about actual persons and events with typical dramatic film tech-
niques. A curious example of success was the widely acclaimed 1965 film
La Battaglia di Algeri (The Battle of Algiers) by the Italian director Gillo
Pontecorvo. Some early critics and viewers thought that the director had
produced a documentary of a guerilla movement fighting for Algerian
independence from France in the mid-1950s. Pontecorvo, however, had
conveyed the illusion of actuality by employing many unknown nonpro-
fessional Algerians to act the scripted scenes. (Some of the dialogue had to
be dubbed because of the actors’ inexperience before the camera.) The
one professional actor portrayed a composite of French military officers.
Moreover, the movie was shot in newsreel-like grainy black and white to
further the appearance of filmed actuality. Thus what appeared as a doc-
umentary to some was in reality a docudrama or a staged drama, although
the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) leader, producer, and actor
Saadi Yacef (but not Pontecorvo himself ) claimed the film was based
upon a true story. Although the two-hour film depicted atrocities on both
sides—terrorist tactics by the insurgents and torture by the French mili-
tary—Pontecorvo sympathized with the FLN in its efforts to overthrow
the colonial occupation of the Algerian homeland. As a result of the film’s

politics, the French government banned its showing in France for some
years. The vivid and naturalistic portrayal of what we now call terrorist
tactics in asymmetrical warfare became a virtual handbook for radicals
around the world.21
Documentaries and docudramas, as is evident, proffer the same basic
quandary to historians whether used as historical sources or judged as his-
torical representations. This is not just the problem of distinguishing
those documentaries, docudramas, and biopics presenting historical as
opposed to present-day subjects. Rather all combine varying degrees and
kinds of factuality and interpretive invention. Documentaries, like news-
reels, promise their audiences actuality and true stories, but like newsreels
they too combine the inventive with the re-presented, even at times reen-
acting and staging what their or some other camera failed to capture in
reality. They usually offer their contents organized by viewpoint and
interpretation. If docudramas are guided by past actuality, they also seek
to enhance that reality through staging and dramatic techniques. Thus
the historian must investigate each of these film forms for what is factual
and what is fictive in order to evaluate their use as evidence or to judge
them as history.
To designate a film as “dramatic” indicates this grouping is more a left-
over or residual category than a very precise or descriptive one according
to this genre classification. It embraces feature films of many genres in
their own right from gangster movies and westerns to adventure films and
historical epics. Such films range from avant-garde and so-called inde-
pendent films to big budget and mainstream movies plus the many in
between. They depict times in their present as well as in the past. They
range from describing actual persons and events to using “artistic license”
to come up with characters, plots, and locale. Dramatic films thus range
greatly in their factuality as well as their subject and temporal content
from a historian’s viewpoint.
Hollywood has long played fast and loose with past persons, events,
social practices, and values in the cause of art or commerce. Some histo-
rians delight in pointing out misrepresentations of the past in the
“Hollywood versus History” tradition. Thus historians authored books
with such titles as Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies and Reel
v. Real: How Hollywood Turns Fact into Fiction.22 The History Channel
offered in 2001 a series on History vs. Hollywood in which historians and
others discussed the accuracy of various films. Some scholars questioned
the criticism of the show’s experts.
British director Ridley Scott’s Gladiator (2000) is a good example of an

action-adventure film that greatly pleased the popular audience but
whose historical details and larger perspectives were challenged by the
experts. The Australian actor Russell Crowe starred as a Roman general,
Maximus, who is sent off to slavery by the jealous Emperor Commodus,
played by Joaquin Phoenix. He is trained as a gladiator in a distant Roman
province and eventually wins his way to fight in the Coliseum before
Commodus and the crowds. In the climax the two fight a duel in the ring.
Inspired by the typical sword-and-sandal movie, Gladiator pursues a plot
based upon vengeance, the struggle for imperial succession and power
among the elite, and a supposed yearning for the return of the republic—
all leavened with plenty of blood and gore. The blood and gore and the
disdain for life whether in battle or in the arena may have represented
Roman reality of the latter decades of the second century CE, but few if
anyone at the time wished a return to the republic.23
The time between the death of Emperor Marcus Aurelius in March
180 CE to the assassination of Commodus in December 192 CE is com-
pressed into perhaps two years in the movie for dramatic purposes and
focus. The deranged Emperor Commodus did fight in the arena to the
disapproval of the Roman elite. He was light-haired and left-handed but
played by a brunette, right-handed actor. Maximus was invented, possi-
bly inspired by stories of Spartacus and Cincinnatus, and seemed to
embrace twentieth-century American democratic values more than sec-
ond-century Roman politics. In the movie Maximus kills Commodus,
but in reality the emperor was assassinated by a man named Narcissus.
The twenty-five hundred weapons, the ten thousand costumes, and the
battle and arena scenes appeared authentic to the layperson, but critics
found fault with small details as well as big themes. The grandeur of
imperial Rome was probably inspired by earlier movies and was computer
enhanced to match the director’s imagination. No such climatic battle
took place between the Roman army and the Germanic tribes that starts
the movie (and certainly not in the English forest where it was staged and
filmed).
Film historian Robert Brent Toplin believes that in recent decades
filmmakers have come up with narrative strategies that blur fairly suc-
cessfully the line once so evident in films between fact and fiction. Thus
those concerned with facts have a harder time criticizing a film’s factual
content these days, especially in light of its larger moral truths. He coined
the term “faction” for this merging of fact and fiction:
Faction-based movies spin highly fictional tales that are loosely based on
actualities. Their stories identify some real people, events, or situations
from the past but blend these details into invented fables. Often the lead-
ing characters in faction are fictional people who represent a composite of
several historical figures or are largely invented to advance the drama.
Drawing inspiration from myths and legends as well as traditional prac-
tices of cinematic history, the creators of faction employ history in a man-
ner that is less subject to debate over veracity than are the biopics or
historical epics of earlier years.
He concludes: “From beginning to end, these movies send only a nebu-

lous message about truth claims. Faction references history, but does not
represent it specifically.”24
Supposed greater historical awareness by filmmakers has produced
films that more successfully combine fact and fiction into a seamless web
for the viewer. As a result, historians must work more systematically to sep-
arate professionally accepted facts from fiction in judging a film as a his-
tory. If the job is harder, it is more interesting as we shall see. Only
extended questioning of the film’s contents distinguishes fact from fiction
in our postmodern era.
Since feature and dramatic films also depict their own times as well as
other eras, they can also serve the historian as sources for historical research
about a period. In depicting their own times, they convey, seemingly
directly, the “look” and even the “feel” of an era. As with other texts and
things, inferences made from film sources need corroboration from other
kinds of evidence. Dramatic and fictional films can and do serve as evi-
dence for social and cultural and even political and economic history, but
in these cases the facts must be inferred by sophisticated methods. Even
in representing other times, films suggest clues to the popular historical
consciousness and collective memory of their own era.25 Once again only
extended questioning of a film’s contents can produce the facts historians
seek about an era as we shall see in the next section.
Evaluating Films as Sources

All films, like all aural and pictorial media, artifacts in general, and texts
come from the past and therefore can be interpreted as historical sources.
Film technology has existed for only a short time compared to the span of
history covered by texts and things, and so films can only serve as primary
sources for persons and events for little more than a century. Even for this
relatively short time, different kinds of films can produce different answers,
or the same film might prove a primary source for one question and a sec-
ondary one for another, as with any other historical survival. Once again,
evidence and investigative purpose unite in the interpretive questions put
to the source and the answers re-presented or constructed.
Like other survivals, films too pose problems of credibility, authentic-
ity, and whether they are to be used for re-presentation or construction of
specific facts or more general depiction of an era. As with other sources, a
film (or more likely a frame, shot, scene, or sequence in it) can be a pri-
mary or secondary source depending upon the question asked and what
answers it most accurately. That so many films present history as an
explicit narrative in addition to embodying directly the past through their
contents complicates their use as sources. (The historian Robert Rosenstone
called the first “film on history” while he termed the second “history on
film.”)26 Thus the seemingly obvious distinction between films consid-
ered as evidential sources in themselves versus historical representations in
their own right depends both upon the nature of the film’s contents and
the investigator’s interests. Hence the historian must consider both the
different kinds of interpretation as well as the degree of invention by the
filmmaker in using various kinds of films as sources.
Although types of films differ greatly in their factual content, their use
as historical sources hinges upon the same quintessential question asked
of all texts and things: what (and how much) can a movie, television pro-
gram, or video tell us about the times of its creation and production?
Questions akin to those used in textual external or source criticism estab-
lish the credibility and reliability of films. Before an investigator can derive
facts from a film as source, she must establish that the film is a reliable
source for what she hopes to find out about specific individuals, their val-
ues, their behavior, and their institutions during a specific era and in a
specific place. As with other sources, therefore, films must first be authen-
ticated as being what and from when and where they claim or purport to
be. Thus, of prime importance are questions about its genesis: who, what,
when, and where was it produced? Moreover, when was the film made as
opposed to when was it shown? Dating is as important in historical
research using films as it is for texts and objects. Such dating establishes
the exact era to which a film can offer clues. Was it created and produced
not only when but where it supposedly takes place? Who produced the
film and what was their purpose? In order to gauge the nature of its
authorship, so to speak, the investigator must ascertain whether the film
was produced by an individual, such as home movie; a small team, such
as an independent film; or a very large group, as in modern feature films
and television shows. The multiple skills needed in putting together a

major film leads to vast collaborative effort among directors, actors, cos-
tumers, set designers, camera operators, editors, and the host of other per-
sons listed these days at the end of a film or television program. Yet the
auteur theory of filmmaking ascribes to the director not only the overall
coordination of the film but also the eventual perspective and even “feel”
of it as an author/artist.27
Second, is the film the original version, a copy of it, or a copy of a
copy? Is the modern or surviving version of a film, for example, the direc-
tor’s initial or final cut, an edited or abbreviated version? Has the film as
made by the director been abridged to fit an allotted time in theater or
television? Did the director reedit the film for another audience or add
previously cut footage for a DVD version? Has the film been resized from
movie screen aspect ratio to that for television screen, for example, so the
audience and investigator see different things in the two versions? If an
old film, has it been restored from a faded to a fresh, supposedly like-new
version, or even colorized from a black-and-white version? As with the
cleaning of museum objects, each of a film’s versions offers its audience a
somewhat or greatly changed view from what the director intended or
was seen earlier. Some older films were filmed at a different number of
frames per second than today’s, and, unless shown at the original speed,
the viewer gets quite another impression of the film. All versions of a film
afford facts to the historical investigator but not necessarily the same facts.
If the cinematic counterpart of external criticism establishes the authen-
ticity and credibility of films as sources, then the equivalent of internal
criticism inquires what the investigator needs to consider in deriving reli-
able and accurate facts about specific persons, places, and eras from them
as original sources. Does the film not only come from the indicated time,
but is it also about that time? To ask this question is to explore to what
extent the film can be accepted at face value or prima facie evidence as to
what it shows about a time, regardless of whether the historian adduces
constructed or re-presented facts. That is why stock footage, faked scenes,
and propaganda pieces misrepresent their role in documenting the film’s
supposed era. Nevertheless, they all offer their own kind of facts about the
creators and their times.
Of equal importance is the basic question: whether what is seen and
heard in the film is actual or acted? Were the various aspects of the film’s
content staged or planned by the scriptwriter, the director, or even the
actors, for example? Or, did the filmmaker just film the actual behavior of
everyday people being themselves? Individuals and groups, of course, can
and do plan their words and actions, especially in certain events deemed
newsworthy. Such questions begin to suggest what can be considered pri-
mary and secondary about a film’s contents, always depending, of course,
on the questions the historian asks.
To apply basic internal criticism to a film’s contents as source for the
derivation of facts about its time and subject requires attention to the fol-
lowing aspects at a minimum:
Persons. Are actual individuals featured in the film? Or are they actors
impersonating actual persons or even just playing imaginary characters in
a story? If actual persons, has their behavior been altered by the camera’s
presence? If the actors are portraying people contemporary to them, even
if fictional, then their posture, habits, language, and so on, might be more
authentic than if they were reenacting past persons from a time before
their own experience and memory. As with a text, the more contempora-
neous the times depicted in a film to the actors in it, the more likely the
action, dialogue, hairstyling, fashions, and gestures are accurate. Likewise,
the closer in time to the actors’ memories of the events, colloquialisms,
clothing, bearing, and body language, the better they will recall them,
and the more likely the portrayal can be trusted as such.
Setting. Are the people and their actions in the actual locale in which
they lived or the actions took place? Or, is the film location merely simi-
lar or even unlike what is supposedly represented, as in many an old
movie? Or, are the environs and buildings on studio sets created by a set
designer? In modern movies, were they digitally created? Moreover, are
the objects used by the persons in the film the actual ones, or are they
stage props supplied from the prop room or bought by the properties
buyer? Once again, the setting and the props, if contemporary to the time
of the film, would seem more accurate than those created for times before
the experience and memory of those providing them.
Costume. Is the clothing worn by the film’s subjects their own, or are
they designed by the costumier or supplied from wardrobe. Of course,
actual people may appear in noneveryday costumes if dressed for a parade
or a religious or academic procession, for example. Once again, actors
would know better how to wear modern clothing and wardrobe people
would know better what to provide if the garments and the fashions come
from their own times.
Dialogue. Is the film’s dialogue unscripted and unrehearsed; impro-
vised by an actor; or provided by the scriptwriter. Of course, actual cere-
monies and similar events are usually planned, and political and other public
speeches are written, even rehearsed for such occasions. Colloquialisms,
speech mannerisms, accents, and dialects contemporary to the actor’s and

movie’s time would appear to make for their more accurate delivery in
dialogue.
Sound and music. Are the ambient sounds actual and customary to the
action and the location? Or, are they scripted by the writing team and
produced by the sound technician? What of the music accompanying the
film? Was it part of a parade or other actual ceremony, or was it composed
to enhance the action and plot of the film? Was the style of music selected
to further delineate the culture and outlook of the actors? Would the per-
sons appearing in the film have listened to or at least heard of such music?
Action. Is it authentic? Is that what really happened? Or, is it rehearsed
and/or reenacted? Once again, the more contemporary the action is to the
time of its portrayal, the more probable its representation is accurate.
That is why stock footage from another time or place in a film betrays the
trust of the viewer.
Interpretation. Who supplies the viewpoint(s) presented in the film?
Does the film show only the viewpoint of the director or also the sup-
posed ones of past persons as well? Are the viewpoints therefore multiple?
Do they conflict? To what extent is viewpoint explicit in dialogue, say, as
opposed to shown through camera angles and framing? Whence derive
the story and plot: from actual everyday persons and their activities or
from the team of writer and director? Does the film portray the perspec-
tive and meaning held by the actual subjects in it, or does it embody those
of the writer and director? Many a film contains a Great Story, either as
central message or theme, through symbol and metaphor, as popular ide-
ology or implicit metanarrative. Cowboy movies long embodied the
American myth of individualism. Movies, like textual histories, presumed
race and gender even when they did not focus on these matters as such.
Even dramatic fictional films could show racial and gender etiquette com-
mon to a time.
The Time. Does the film depict the times when it occurred, that is, in
its own era or not? If the film portrays actual events, then presumably the
time is coincident with the time of its occurrence (unless it is stock
footage inserted for the sake of “authenticity”), and the historian can treat
it as first hand evidence of what it shows. That a dramatic feature film
portrays action and attitudes contemporary to the time of its filming
means it too can serve in its own way as firsthand evidence of those times.
Thus whether a dramatic film constitutes firsthand or secondhand evi-
dence of what it shows depends to some extent on whether the writer,
director, actors, cinematographer, wardrobe and prop room managers,
and others associated with the film experienced or at least remembered

first hand what they film. In the end, of course, what is first hand and
second hand evidence for the historian studying films as sources always
depends upon the question asked. Thus almost all types of films offer
some form of primary evidence for certain questions, just as all films can
be considered secondary evidence for other queries.
What kinds of facts can the various categories of films tell us that we
want to know? Does a specific film tell us the facts we want to know directly
or indirectly, simply or interpretively, plainly or symbolically? Factual
statements can derive from and be about shots, scenes, sequences of
scenes, or whole films. Facts can be re-presented or constructed.
Constructed facts are common in discussing films as with other visual
materials. Constructed facts can be developed from shots, scenes, sequences,
and perhaps whole films. They thus become the historian’s representations
based upon the film’s representations, especially when discussing values,
memory, culture, and traditions. What does the historian need to know
about the production of a film that would influence answers to questions
about social institutions and cultural values? How did producers, direc-
tors, and actors take into account current events and contemporary prob-
lems in making a film? On the other hand, what was the impact of current
events and contemporary issues in general on a film as seen in its con-
tents? How much does the historical investigator need to understand
technical and other aspects of filmmaking in order to derive such facts?
Last, to what extent does the investigator develop facts that presume the
reception of a film by one or more audiences? A film’s contents do not
convey its actual reception, nor does the reaction by a viewer today to a
film from years ago indicate how an audience responded when it was first
screened.28
Re-presentation of facts from films can range from still photographs of
single frames and shots to a moving visual re-presentation of facts by
reproducing scenes even sequences from films as part of another docu-
mentary or other film. Such facts can be simple or summative but are
always interpretive and more often than not demand some text to eluci-
date their relevance. Still pictures, for example, usually are captioned
beneath to give the proper guidance to the viewer.29 Words from inter-
views and other dialogue can be quoted in a written text or reproduced in
a recording or another film. Scenes can be described or summarized in a
text. Visual re-presentation of facts can show people, costumes and fash-
ions, the use of artifacts and environment, and the physical world in which
the action takes place and the people live, fight, or otherwise occupy.
As the reader has concluded by now, types of films and kinds of facts
do not correlate in any single, simple way. Actuality films and perhaps
newsreels and on-the-spot news seem to offer their factual contents suffi-
ciently directly that the historian can re-present them through photo-
graph, transcribed dialogue, or, perhaps, another film in her own interpretive
representation. Since amateur and journalist movies, for example, seem to
offer everyday or extraordinary events with minimum interpretation,
they provide greater opportunity for re-presented facts through reproduc-
tion. To the extent, however, that home movies and newscasts are pro-
grammed and interpreted by their creators, the historian needs to exercise
great inferential care. Feature films about their present, on the other
hand, would seem to require even more inference and interpretation by
the historian to derive facts from them. Hence facts from them would be
constructed more often than re-presented, but the proof of a generaliza-
tion about the habits and values of some group in an era might come
from reproduction of a still frame, transcribed dialogue, or a filmed scene
or sequence (for a documentary historical film). A documentary film or a
docudrama about its own times presents the historian with an in-between
case for developing facts. To the degree that these film types depict actu-
ality they can result in re-presented facts, but not as text of course, unless
quoting dialogue. Depending upon how the films present their interpre-
tations, historians can derive their own re-presented and constructed facts
according to the interpretive questions they ask. Even grand historical
epics, however, can be explored for what they show about popular histor-
ical consciousness in the era in which they are created.30
The most direct use of all kinds of films as sources would seem to be
for histories of filmmaking and films themselves. Filmmaking, of course,
has its own history. Films, like documents and other artifacts, reveal nei-
ther their own reception nor their own larger context of production. Such
reception and context is a key concern of those historians of film who
investigate documentary and other trails to discover the organizational
nature, the economics, the creative inputs, and impact of the film indus-
try in various countries. Since movies are by definition central to the
notion of mass media, that field particularly argues about how to measure
and discuss audience reception. The history of films and filmmaking pro-
vide valuable background and context for understanding films as primary
and secondary historical sources. Such contextual use ranges from authenti-
cation of a film’s contents to the external analysis in general of a film as a
source of facts about it.31
Essential to such research these days are modern film archives. Many
early motion pictures have disintegrated because of the fragility and
flammability of the film stock.32 Perhaps 50 percent of films made before
1950 have disappeared. Early television programs exist only in obsolete
and deteriorating formats. Institutional collection, preservation, and orga-
nization began rather late. The Library of Congress, for example, only began
collecting movie films in 1942 but added television films by 1949.33
Second only to the Library of Congress in the United States in size of its
holdings is the University of California at Los Angeles Film and Television
Archive Collections. It claims to be the world’s largest university-held col-
lection of motion pictures and broadcast programming.34 Its holdings
include 220,000 films and 27 million feet of broadcast programming.
The International Federation of Film Archives was founded in 1938 with
four members and today has more than 127 groups affiliated.35 The
expansion and proliferation of such archives make easier primary research
in the actual films and broadcasts. Likewise, as various archives and man-
uscript libraries collect the personal and business papers of directors, pro-
ducers, actors, distributors, and others as well as company records,
researchers can investigate the production and reception side of filmmak-
ing and television programming. To fulfill this role, film archives, like
other archives and manuscript libraries, have instituted procedures for
acquisition, preservation, arrangement, cataloguing, and granting access.
As a result, the staffs of these archives have increasingly become historians
of first resort for moving visual images.36
Last, films can be used in other films to re-present the past. The most
common use is in documentaries, but biopics, docudramas, and perhaps
period films might employ such excerpts. Producers of a historical film
can use such films as settings for their own reconstructions and guides to
their own narratives. The director Oliver Stone reproduced the Zapruder
actuality footage to good effect in JFK. Historical documentarians can
make such films objects of their own analysis.
Judging Films as Histories

A film whose chief purpose is to represent the past as a history like any
text or museum exhibition must cope with the problems common to all
historical syntheses: factual re-presentation and construction, narrative
interpretation and invention. It too faces the problems of form and con-
tent, story and argument, perspective and meaning, structure and
sequence, grand and metanarratives—all using the various techniques
open to filmmakers. Films as representations of the past can range from

re-presenting evidential material to constructing an overall interpretive
synthesis itself to speculative, highly inventive, even fictionalized versions
of the past; from a filmed lecture with good illustrations to carefully
researched reenactment to creative acting; or from purporting to be true
and accurate to the past to speculative interpretation to merely using “his-
tory” as backdrop, setting, or supposed story.
Distinctions among film genres recognize these differences somewhat
by distinguishing historical documentaries from the class of films called
cinema verité, biopics, and docudramas about past subjects and those in
turn from period dramas, action adventures, romantic melodramas, west-
erns, and gangster movies that use a historical setting. These genres range
filmed histories along a continuum from nonfiction to the fictional, from
attempted re-presentation and reconstruction to the purely inventive. On
one side of the continuum are those films, or more likely some of their
parts, which are unstaged and essentially show what came before the cam-
era. On the opposite side are staged, scripted historical films that resem-
ble historical fiction in their high degree of invention. In between are
biopics, docudramas, and cinema verité, all of which combine documen-
tary and melodramatic elements. As with other historical representations,
the various kinds of films combine the factual and the inventive, the re-
presented and the constructed in varying proportions.37
It is just this proportion among the reproduced, the reconstructed, the
simulated, the speculative, and the entirely fictional that so concerns his-
torians when reviewing a film purporting to represent the past. When
considering films as historical representations of the past, one can raise
the same basic questions and issues in relation to the general and specific
contents of films as applied to texts and things as histories.38 Without pre-
tending to either an extended analysis or application, let me sketch some
of the possibilities for exploring this mix of re-presentation, invention,
and interpretation in relation to the historical evidence. In each of the fol-
lowing general categories, filmmakers have a range of choices or options
open to them for representing the past as history. In each of the following
categories, historians can assess the nature and amount of interpretation
producing a given kind of filmed history, just as was done for texts and
things in chapters 4 and 5.
Re-presentation of sources. Films can reproduce visual sources such as
paintings, photographs, and maps as well as parts of other films from the
past. They can use images of actual textual documents such as handbills,
newspapers, letters, and court documents from the past. Films can show
up close or in background such authentic material artifacts as tools, cook-

ing utensils, rooms, houses, and landscapes. Last, they can reproduce the
sounds and music of an era. In each instance, the viewer must ask how
authentic are the images and sounds relative to the times and places
shown. Are the pictures and moving visual images on the screen, for
example, of whom or what is talked about by the narrator or others? Or,
are they some generic pictures of persons or scenes at or near the time, or
even pictures made later. Ken Burns seemed to animate actual still pic-
tures from the Civil War era through the use of a rostrum camera that
moved slowly across the image in line with narration and music to give a
sense of action and animation. But he also used a film of a 1920s march
of the Ku Klux Klan to illustrate his documentary about the period
immediately after the Civil War, when motion pictures did not exist.39 In
the end, then historians ask whether the visual images are reproduced
from past sources or created in the present for any given film. Are the
material artifacts authentic or reproductions or simulations? Is the dia-
logue based upon actual diaries, letters, and other authentic documents,
or is it scripted by a modern writer? Is the music from the period or com-
posed in the present to affect mood or enhance story?40
Dialogue. Whence derive the words used in a filmed history? Do they
come only from authenticated documents, from people remembering the
persons and events in their past, from historians and other experts (so-
called talking heads), or from written scripts? If they come from scripts,
then how much is constructed like any other proper history? Who deliv-
ers the words? Options range from a hidden or on-camera narrator deliv-
ering the constructed script to various disembodied actors reading the
words of a real letter or edict to the actors on the screen delivering the
purely scripted lines. (Ken Burns used over nine hundred quotations
from documents in his Civil War series and more than three dozen
“remarkable voices” to deliver them.)41 If the viewer sees the narrator on
screen, is she a historian, a well-known actor, or a character in the story?
Should the narrator appear in the buildings and landscape of the time as
they have survived or been reconstructed or just in some present-day
environment? Should the narrator dress like and act along with the char-
acters in the film?42 What voice quality should historic leaders, everyday
people, and others possess? How depict various persons through their
voices? Should the voices be plainly male and female, young or old,
accented or in dialect? Is the language that of the characters and place
depicted; an accurate or plausible translation of what was or might have
been said; or is the dialog in modern-day language and idiom? Do the
ancient Romans speak Latin or modern English in a film? Do actors por-

traying modern French and Germans in an English-language film speak
standard English or with a supposed foreign accent? For example, the
German-speaking reenactors in Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) suddenly
switched from German to English during the fictionalized trial of four
Nazi judges tried for complicity in Nazi crimes against humanity after
World War II. Do the scripts mainly repeat the documented words of the
actual individuals being impersonated on the screen? In one case, the
actors portraying revolutionary-era persons in the PBS series Liberty! The
American Revolution (1997) only delivered lines from letters, newspaper
articles, military accounts, and other authentic documents from the
time.43 Or, are the scripts like any reenactment: created from extensive
research so as to seem plausible and realistic? Or, perhaps the scripts result
from imaginative forays into a supposed past by the writer, director,
actors, and others.
Sounds and music. What of the other sounds in a film, particularly the
ambient ones? Are the sounds from the scene at the time, or are they
added by the filmmaker to enhance her interpretation of the event? Can
one use the sound in general of a horse’s gallop or blacksmith’s hammer to
represent those sounds centuries or millennia earlier? Perhaps all horses
sound alike no matter when on grass or cobblestone streets, but surely
wagons and carriages do not. Should the sound of a carriage come from
an actual one of the period shown? Beyond making sure that specific guns
and cannons sound as they once did, can the filmmaker simulate a gun
firing rather than using a real one and still maintain authenticity?44 Is the
music throughout the film authentic to period, or was it newly composed
to enhance plot and message? When listening to the sound track, the
investigator must always ask from where comes the sound: from the char-
acters, from within the scene, from outside the scene, and from whom.
Many of the tunes in Ken Burn’s The Civil War were from the period but
one of the most memorable songs was composed for the series and served
as its principle musical theme.45 Does the sound extend from one scene to
the next to suggest continuity regardless of what is being shown?
Characters. Should a filmed history restrict the characters appearing on
the screen to only those historically identified in documented research, or
can the filmmaker employ characters invented to make a point or fill out
a scene? How does the filmmaker portray those many unnamed persons
in the past who appear as servants, workers, shopkeepers, and the public
in a filmed history? To what extent must such people be invented and
“fictional” to be as “realistic” to the best of documented knowledge? What
justifies their physical appearance? Some few persons exist in statues,

murals, and paintings and more in photographs that allow filmmakers to
suggest realistic or at least plausible dress, hairstyles, posture, and maybe
attitude for the featured actors. More often, as in many a reenactment,
the actors adopt gaits, gestures, dialects, demeanor, and behavior pre-
sumed authentic or plausible from extensive research into the times and
place. In some ways, details will always need invention, but such details
are easier at times than the interpretation needed to depict the subtler
aspects on film of gender, racial, and other roles. Once again, these seem
the same problems as any good reenactment, and once again the viewer
can ask what is reenacted from documented sources; what is acted with
educated guesswork; and what is derived from the actor’s instincts about
the role? Even serious documentaries invent fictional characters to focus
and carry a story. For example, as mentioned in the last chapter, the hero
in the Colonial Williamsburg orientation film, The Story of a Patriot, is a
fictional member of the Virginia Assembly. Filmmakers sometimes com-
bine several real persons into one character to simplify and carry the story.
Historians protest such composite characters, but filmmakers justify their
use to aid the viewer in following the narrative thread. Particularly noto-
rious was The Patriot (2000), which featured Mel Gibson playing a hero
very loosely based on two or three men at the time of the American
Revolution (as was his antagonist). In the opinion of many historians
who study that era, not only were their original prototypes misrepre-
sented but so were their actions and times.
Setting and environment. What is the source of the material objects,
built environments, and landscapes appearing in a filmed history? The
options range from reproducing old film of the earlier era, to using
authentically old museum objects, historic sites, and landscapes, to con-
structing buildings and landscapes as sets on a studio lot. At times, for
example, the United States military loans ships, rockets, and other war
paraphernalia to favored films and their makers. When the narrator dis-
cusses locale or an actor reads a diary or letter about a place, is it legiti-
mate for the filmmaker to show a modern version of that river bend or
bank, of a mountain or plains or desert? How does the filmmaker find a
built urban environment to represent earlier eras without electric wires,
tall buildings, and other modern anomalies? Remember the producers of
Benjamin Franklin (2002) who resorted to Lithuania to represent eigh-
teenth-century London and Paris. Even in filming a battlefield or other
landscape today, the camera must avoid communication towers on the
horizon, modern roads, and even car sounds in the neighborhood. At
other times, computer-driven graphics can restore, so to speak, a ruined

environment. Such computer-driven graphics particularly can summarize
and dramatize how people in the past constructed an ancient Egyptian
pyramid, a Roman coliseum, a medieval cathedral, the Brooklyn Bridge,
or a modern skyscraper.
Viewpoint. Technically speaking, point of view in a film results from
both camera position and editing, but a filmed history incorporates the
same kinds of viewpoints as any other history: perceptual, conceptual,
evaluative, and emotional. Does the viewer perceive the action and scene
from the viewpoint of a character, of several characters, or with a bird’s-
eye or godlike and seemingly omniscient view? Does the editing indicate
from whose view matters are to be conceived and understood by the
viewer? Whose viewpoint shapes the overall film and how many view-
points are represented throughout the film? Is the film mostly presented
from the viewpoint of the past actors of from that of the modern film-
maker? Does, in other words, the viewpoint come from inside or outside
the actors’ world? If it comes from inside that world, how does the writer,
director, and others know that? If it comes from outside that world, is it
particularly present-minded? Or, are multiple viewpoints, past and pre-
sent, displayed? To what extent should conflicting viewpoints be pre-
sented in a film and how should they be shown? The director John Sayles,
for example, believes that an audience finds it difficult to follow more
than three points of view in a film: omniscient, protagonist, and antago-
nist.46 Conflict of ideas and actions can be dramatic, but most filmmak-
ers believe that too much interpretive conflict can be confusing in a film.
Is such interpretive conflict depicted by the actors, discussed by talking
heads, or declared by a narrator? Last, what feelings or emotional view
should the viewer carry away from the film? Should the viewer sympa-
thize with or condemn the characters in the film? (Hence the delicate task
of the director of the German film Downfall (2002), which portrays the
last days of Adolph Hitler, his chief henchmen, and others in his under-
ground bunker.) To what extent is nostalgia for the past reinforced by the
look of a film or the beauty of its setting? To what degree is the viewer
repelled by the past through deliberately colorless or gray and dark scenes?
British director Ridley Scott in Kingdom of Heaven (2005) depicted the
cultural backwardness of twelfth-century Europe by gray or dark scenes
and the advanced civilization of the Muslims at the time by bright, sun-
drenched scenes. Film techniques and interpretive choices mutually inter-
act in viewpoint, but even more so in plot and perspective. Questions
about viewpoint, especially emotional and evaluative, shift the analysis
from the mainly factual side of historical representation to the overall

nature of the synthetic side.
Story and Plot. Unlike paintings and photographs but like music and
books, films are a sequential medium. Whereas the viewer of a painting
for example sees it in a sense as a whole all at once, the viewer of a film
like the reader of a book must “consume” it over time. The fact that movies
depict time and yet take their own time necessitates both the nature and
need for emplotment plus techniques for showing the passage of time.
Emplotment in films as in texts transforms events into episodes and
chronicles into stories. Plot turns an aggregation of materials into a sig-
nificant narrative structure showing continuity, coherence, causality, con-
tingency, or other type of connection. Agents, goals, means, interactions,
circumstances, and ambient environments are organized into coherent
temporal structures through plot and subplots in films (as in books).
Agents, aims, actions, settings, and outcomes are plotted as narrative in
films as in other histories to reveal a story. Filmmakers use such narrative
devices as turning points, crises, and resolutions to advance their stories.
Moreover, a film’s depiction of events in time rarely coincides in the order
or duration of their supposed chronological occurrence. The sequence in
which the story’s events are told is usually different from how and when
those events supposedly took place in calendar time. This is particularly
evident in when a film begins and ends compared to the actual beginning
and ending events in chronological time, as the frequent use of flashback
at the commencement of a film demonstrates. Needless to say, the actual
length and duration of events in a film is usually less than the referred-to
duration in actual hours and time. Cutting between scenes and events
throughout the film shows the manipulation of time through the distinc-
tion between the chronological sequence of events and their narrative
sequence and the duration of actual time as opposed to its depiction on
the screen.
The big picture. That all genres of films can use these same narrative
means raises the question about how films claiming to represent the past
as history differ from other films. Thus the difference between historical
documentaries and docudramas on one hand and semifictional or com-
pletely fictional representations of the past on the other results not from
film techniques as such but from the purposes to which they are put. The
particular plot and subplots in a filmed history purporting to be true to
the past, like the emplotment of the film in general, are guided by what
the professionally accepted, documented historical record shows. To eval-
uate the overall emplotment of a film or television series against such a
record demands the reviewer compare her overall interpretation of the

persons and events against that of the filmmaker. In other words, one syn-
thesis is compared to another synthesis, for evaluating the nature of an
overall synthesis as such is more than a matter of the particular facts. The
truthfulness of any synthesis is more than the truth of its component
facts. Even though a wrong fact can disprove a synthesis, all of the facts
combined do not necessarily prove a synthesis. On the other hand, a mul-
titude of questionable, let alone wrong, facts can justify distinguishing
between a good and bad docudrama as history and whether a feature film
should be considered mostly historical or mainly fictional.
It is the many-layered nature of a synthesis as opposed to the evalua-
tion of its facts per se that makes for both the interpretive diversity among
films as histories and the arguments over the proper criteria for judging
them better and poorer history. Thus the director John Sayles, in dis-
cussing his film Matewan (1987) about a bitter 1920s coal mine strike
that eventuated in a “massacre,” looked beyond minor factual errors or
omissions to being “true to the larger picture, so I crammed a certain
amount of related but not strictly factual stuff into that particular story.”
In line with this approach to overall synthesis, he admits employing his-
torians the way most directors do: for advice on specific details but not for
“the big picture.” 47 Arguments between historians and filmmakers over
the big picture in the end turn on the issues of perspective and meaning
and the nature of the Great Story.
Great Stories. Whether explicit or implicit, whether as grand narrative
or metanarrative, Great Stories provide the larger context for organization
of a history. Films, like other histories, long depended upon such stan-
dard Great Stories as progress and decline, the superiority of one nation-
ality or race over another, the rise of the West or the inevitability of liberal
democracy. Even the criticism of such explicit or implicit, standard, old
Great Stories substitutes new ones for old. A Great Story as the ultimate
context in a film is frequently discussed in terms of the film’s main
theme(s). Thus the noted American historian Eric Foner points out that
Sayles in Matewan does more than “chronicle a particularly dramatic
episode in American labor history”; Sayles offers “a meditation” on “the
possibility of interracial cooperation, the merits of violence and nonvio-
lence in combating injustice, and the threat posed by concentrated eco-
nomic power to American notions of political democracy and social
justice.”48 But Foner also notes that Sayles omits the larger historical and
political context in which these themes operated by leaving out the coal
mine owners and their control of the West Virginian government; the
general restrictions imposed by the court system and the state and
national authorities at the time; the long history of efforts to unionize the
mines; and most of all for giving the miners “no sense of their own his-
tory, forcing them to rely on an outsider for lessons in union organization
and racial tolerance.” In spite of high praise for Matewan, the historian
Foner faults the filmmaker Sayles in the end for evoking nostalgia for a
time when the “brawny industrial worker” did the “real” work and women
were only their “loyal helpmates.” Thus ultimately what Sayles pictured
as the real history of that era, Foner sees as still promoting a male-domi-
nated heritage downplaying actual women’s roles in the labor movement
then and subsequently.49 Foner’s assessment demonstrates the salience of
context to the historian’s arsenal of criticism and sense of professional
authority. It also illustrates the importance of perspective and meaning in
films as in other representations of the past as histories.
Perspective and meaning. All films, but especially narrative ones, use
emplotment and various film techniques to make their larger point. In
the terms of this book, that larger point is perspective and meaning. As
Foner’s critique of Matewan suggests, viewpoint, emplotment, and Great
Story all convey and result from perspective and meaning in films as in
other histories. In current jargon perspective and meaning constitute the
“agenda.” In older terminology, they comprise the “message.” In any case,
they express explicit and/or implicit purpose. Sometimes a film’s perspec-
tive and meaning flow from a writer’s, director’s, or sponsor’s avowed rea-
son for making a movie: to reveal a particular injustice, to expose human
suffering, to sympathize with the downtrodden, or to depict the horrors
of war, for example. Other times historians and other critics point out the
covert message or the hidden agenda that undermines or contradicts the
filmmaker’s avowed aims. When historians juxtapose a film’s interpretive
synthesis against their own, they often contrast their perspective on the
past and the meaning it should have with that of the filmmaker. When
Foner criticized Sayle’s manly worker and passive female helpmate, he was
measuring the perspective Matewan suggested against his own conception
of the actual as well as potential role of women. When Foner accused
Sayles of neglecting the agency of workers, one witnessed his own per-
spective on the efficacy of agency from below. In the end, Foner appears
to believe that Matewan, like all history, derives its meaning from the con-
tinuing struggle of workers and others for economic justice and interra-
cial harmony.
Foner’s critique of basic perspective is even clearer in his judgment on

how (and why) Ken Burns and his colleagues mishandled the end of the
Civil War and the era that followed.
Issues central to the Civil War and of obvious contemporary relevance—

self-determination, political democracy, race relations, the balance of force
and consent in maintaining political authority—are never addressed. The
abolition of slavery is never mentioned explicitly as part of the war’s mean-
ing, while the unfulfilled promise of emancipation is all but ignored as
central to its aftermath. Nor is it ever suggested that the abandonment of
the nation’s post-war commitment to equal rights for the former slaves was
the basis on which former (white) antagonists could unite in the romance
of reunion. In choosing to stress the preservation of the American nation
state as the war’s most enduring consequence, Burns privileges a merely
national concern over the great human drama of emancipation. The result
is a strangely parochial vision of the Civil War and its aftermath, and a
missed opportunity to stimulate thinking about political and moral ques-
tions still central to our society.50
At issue here is more than a scholar specializing in the history of

Reconstruction asking for another kind of film than Burns produced.
The difference from Foner’s viewpoint revolves about the proper perspec-
tive on American history and its meaning for today. Foner is concerned
that a “romantic” stress on reunification reinforces Jefferson’s worry that
slavery was bad for white society, and so he prefers to emphasize that slav-
ery was bad for African Americans then and subsequently. In short, he
believes that the series attributes too much agency to the whites and too
little to the African Americans both in what happened during the war and
in its outcome.
Burns denies these criticisms. He thinks his narrator and “talking
heads” handle this problem. (His chief writer argues that Foner asks for
an entirely different film series than Burn’s The Civil War.)51 Regardless
of how the reader resolves this dispute, it underscores how perspective
and meaning result from and in viewpoint and emplotment, shape a
Great Story, and presume a Big Picture. At this level of disagreement,
facts as such are not the issue but rather whose grand narrative and Big
Picture should prevail and therefore which facts should be included along
with all that goes into a history.52
A Matter of Interpretive Mix

The preceding outline of categories—re-presentation of sources, dia-
logue, sounds and music, characters, setting, viewpoint, story and plot,
big picture, great stories, perspective and meaning with the many possible
options within them—may be too few, too brief, and too schematic, but
even so it points to seven general conclusions about films as historical rep-
resentations of the past.
First, the categories and their many options suggest the limitation of
the three-fold division of filmed historical representations as documen-
taries, docudramas, and dramas. True, this three-fold division suggests the
factual basis of the scheme, but it oversimplifies any approach to the syn-
thetic side of historical representation in a film. Even the most resolute
documentarian includes inventive and speculative elements in a film, as
we shall see below. Even outright works of historical fiction can include
factually accurate elements such as costumes, settings, and even charac-
ters. Once again, as with other forms of historical representation, the dis-
tinction rests on the relationship between evidential sources and their
interpretation on the factual side and the overall nature of the interpretive
synthesis on the other. Documentaries strive to stick closer to the evi-
dence than docudramas and biopics. If they cannot re-present the sur-
vivals visually or aurally, they try to interpret the past within the bounds
of disciplined professional reconstruction, especially through historians as
advisors or on-camera experts. Thus documentarians hope not only to be
as accurate as possible to past words and sounds, characters and actions,
and props and setting, but also be true to past viewpoints and events.
Historical documentaries do not make up stories or plots, even though
the film’s sequence of events may not be in strict chronological order of
their happening for narrative reasons. In the end, documentary films
hope to offer perspective and meaning, Great Stories, and even a big pic-
ture that is compatible with current historical scholarship. The difference
among the three general genres comes down to what guides the emplot-
ment and their Great Stories in relation to what (most?) historians accept
as the big picture. Documentaries use current historical scholarship as
their guide; historical dramas use artistic license and intuition to reach a
higher truth—or at least a larger audience. But even the extreme racism
manifested in The Birth of a Nation (1915), so evident to us today,
embodies the prevailing (white) professional historians’ interpretation of
black freedmen and Reconstruction at the time of its filming just as it
exemplifies the racial repression and white terrorism of the early twenti-
eth century.
Second, the ten categories outlined in the preceding section on “judg-
ing films as histories” and their countless associated options certainly sug-
gest and perhaps explain why such a range of film genres can purport to
represent the past as history. Certainly quite different films result from
different choices among the many options within the ten categories.
Surely this profusion of filmed representations of the past as history
accounts also for the variety of opinions existing on the ability of (a) film
to convey history. As a result of these numerous differences, it seems less
useful for historians to complain about films in general or even particular
genres than to examine individual examples. Thus it seems more perti-
nent to ask of a particular film whether it presents too little history and
too much heritage, stresses story and character over long-term causes and
complex context, or caters too much to the audiences’ emotions rather
than their intellect as opposed to asking these questions of all kinds of his-
torical films lumped together. The wide range of film genres means that
examples can be found for each kind of criticism. As with histories in gen-
eral, no one generalization fits all kinds of films.53
Third, every film like every text and thing can serve as primary evi-
dence if the right questions are asked of it. Both the New Deal sponsored
documentary The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936) and the movie made
from John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath (1940) treat the impact
of the severe drought that affected farmers in the American heartland
during the 1930s Great Depression.54 The latter dramatized the migra-
tion to California of a fictional poor rural family forced from their Dust
Bowl lands in the period, while the Plow interpreted the social and eco-
nomic background that led to the ecological disaster and then showed
what happened to 1930s farm families’ lives as a result. The well-studied
documentary and the Academy Award–nominated movie were con-
demned as socialist propaganda at the time and as politically conservative
in more recent times. Both serve as evidence for particular facts about the
1930s, but not always in the same ways. Even though the movie followed
a fictional family and chronicled fictional events, some classify the film as
a docudrama because it deals with the era’s real social problems. Both
have been studied for what they tell us today about the social practices,
cultural values, and the politics of their era. (Even lavish 1930s Busby
Berkeley musicals and Disney animated films can provide primary evi-
dence for certain questions about depression-era America, especially
larger social and cultural trends.) As these brief remarks suggest, what is
primary and secondary evidence in or about any film depends upon the
questions posed. The answers range from particular facts to generaliza-
tions about large-scale social and cultural phenomena to Great Stories
and metanarratives.55
Fourth, even documentary films praised for their historical accuracy
can make different choices of options about how they represent history.
Various documentary films show different attempts to reconcile interpre-
tation and reconstruction, invention and re-presentation. I have chosen
three examples to show diverse but equally valid approaches to represent-
ing the past as history.
The seventy-four-minute Home Box Office documentary production
of Unchained Memories: Readings from the Slave Narratives (2002) relies,
as the title suggests, on the seventeen volumes of transcripts of slave nar-
ratives in the Library of Congress. The film gives voice to a few of the
more than 2,300 first-person ex-slave accounts gathered between 1936
and 1938 by mainly white and some black interviewers working under-
the auspices of the Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Progress
Administration of the New Deal. Eighteen prominent African American
actors give expressive readings of selected excerpts from as many ex-slaves.
The well-known African American actress Whoopi Goldberg provides
contextual commentary throughout the film on the nature of slavery as
an institution and its place not only in the South but also the entire
American economy and society during the antebellum period. The film
has no plot as such but covers systematically a multitude of topics from
childhood to work to punishment to marriage to running away and
emancipation.56
Most of the film is in black and white because it combines still and
moving images spanning from the decade before the Civil War to the
time of the interviews themselves. A few of the images reproduce ante-
bellum handbills and broadsides about runaway slaves and slave auctions.
Most, however, derive from the twentieth century, especially the movies
of cotton picking and the living conditions of a poor Southern black pop-
ulation. The photographs of ex-slave interviewees in the collection are
also mainly twentieth century, as are the pictures of the actual typed nar-
rative transcripts that are scattered throughout the movie. Even the
African American actors appear in modern black clothing before a black
background, so as not to attract attention away from the words they deliver.
The few instances of color in the film indicate modern times: a few
reenactments and the singing and dancing of the McIntosh County
Shouters. The few reenactments show scenes without people, such as a
moving horse-drawn coach, an empty plantation dining room, and

bloody footprints in the snow. The McIntosh County Shouters sing recon-
structed slave songs throughout the film and are shown at times singing
and performing some dance steps.
In all these visual ways, the film illustrates as it concentrates on the
words of the narratives themselves. The actors deliver their monologues
with the emotions and voice quality they think appropriate to what they
see on the page and in the photograph of an interviewee. So some read-
ings are humorous or sad, others cynical or angry. Since the interviewers
were instructed to try to transcribe the actual language of the ex-slaves,
the actors pronounce the words and grammar or speak in dialect as ren-
dered on the page. (The name of a dialect coach appears in the credits at
the end of the film). So although the film depends upon re-presentation
of its primary source, both that source and its reading are reconstructions
in fact. (In one case, for example, a relatively young actress depicts a 103-
year-old woman, and the sounds of a supposed slave auction accompany
the handbill advertising such a business transaction.)
Because Unchained Memories concentrates so single-mindedly on the
transcripts themselves, even to showing photographs of some pages, any
praise or complaint must begin with them as an example of oral history.
The project has proved immensely valuable to historians, and one of the
best authorities on the history of slavery served as senior historical advisor
to the film. His own approaches to slavery showed up in the voice-over
commentary of Whoopi Goldberg about slave life. Both the methods
used to obtain the interviews in the first place and their subsequent tran-
scriptions have raised questions. Just as the film fails to mention the
grounds for the few interviews chosen for monologues, so the Federal
Writer’s Project seemed equally random in who was interviewed among
the estimated one hundred thousand ex-slaves still living in the 1930s. By
that time all of the ex-slaves were old, at least over seventy and some
claimed to be over one hundred years old. Thus they were usually quite
old people remembering experiences three-quarters of a century earlier
with all the problems associated with such oral history. The interviewers
were given a list of questions but allowed to follow their own best
instincts. Did the race and gender of the interviewer make a difference in
how present and past were described by the ex-slave men and women?
How were the interviews recorded? In at least one case, a woman recalls
being ten years old when she took down in short hand the interviews
done by her father, who was an Arkansas African American educator and
minister.57 How accurate are the transcriptions, since the interviewers
employed their own methods of rendering their interviewees’ vocabulary

and pronunciation into written versions? How much were the transcripts
edited? The interviewers were encouraged by the project’s Washington,
DC, administration to take down their interviewees’ statements “word
for word.” We know some editing of ideas and sentiments as well as lan-
guage did occur. Presumably, the historical experts advising on the film
considered if not solved all the problems the transcriptions presented as
sources.58
My second choice is more conventional in its approach to the docu-
mentary as a genre and to historical representation itself. Northern Light
Productions’ Slave Catchers, Slave Resisters, which premiered May 25,
2005, on the History Channel, consists mainly of reenactments by actors
and interviews with five historians as experts. As the title suggests, the
one-hundred-minute film emphasizes the agency of the African American
slaves as much as that of their white owners and oppressors. Unlike the
previous documentary, this one downplays re-presentation of archival
documents in favor of thirty-two actors playing slaves and their white
owners, slave patrollers, and the paid catchers who plied their nefarious
trade in the North as well as the South. The chronological story, if not the
film itself, begins around the turn of the eighteenth century in South
Carolina with the formation of patrols to control the lives of slaves, par-
ticularly when off plantation. It ends with the founding after the Civil
War of the Ku Klux Klan to continue illegally the psychological and phys-
ical intimidation of the now-freed population. In between the film
stresses the multiple and creative ways African American slaves used in
escaping slavery as well as the brutality and physical punishment the
whites employed to maintain the system. The film covers at some length
the 1739 Stono Rebellion and the 1831 Nat Turner Rebellion as well as
the mass escape of slaves to the English during the Revolution and to the
Union side during the Civil War. These conflicts make for good drama as
well as prove the case for the slaves’ continuing desire for freedom.59
Although the filmmakers re-present some images of old paintings and
prints, authentic broadsides and newspaper advertisements, old maps and
pamphlets, and old photographs, they mainly rely on reenactment to
convey the action amidst generic scenery. The documentary images come
from both the period being discussed and later (especially once again the
movie of the Ku Klux Klan). The actors are both African American and
white to portray the respective races in the slave system, and mainly male
to depict who did most of the running away and the enforcement of slave
codes. Past slaves, slave owners, and catchers are named as well as the time
and place where the events occurred. The actors (and their horses), how-
ever, appear recycled through the centuries depicted. The locales and
buildings are not readily identifiable by the viewer. Much of the action
takes place in nonspecific fields, swamps, and woods, and, since the slave
patrols operated from sundown to sunup, often in dark or poorly lit
scenes. The only locations listed specifically at the end of the film are all
in Massachusetts, the home of Northern Light Productions.
There is no dialogue from the actors, only a few readings of diaries and
other documents. The professional narrator mostly tells the story from
the omniscient viewpoint so common in written history. The five histori-
ans are all experts on slavery in general or on patrols in particular. They
offer up-to-date interpretations of the nature of slavery, the role of a white
“racial police,” and the natural and normal resistance of African Americans
to their enslavement. They all stress the immorality of that part of American
history and how deeply the slave system was entwined in the American
legal and political system, the national economy, and Northern as well as
Southern society. Some of the experts venture controversial interpreta-
tions of numbers of runaways, and all speculate on the psychological
dynamics of the master–slave relationship, the motives of runaway slaves
and slave catchers, and particularly ten generations of white brutality and
African American resistance. Last, the music in this film does not try to
replicate old tunes but only sounds synthesized as background for the
events being narrated.
All in all, this film treats history like most history books except for the
concrete visualization of the action. Even with the visualization most of
the interpretation is spoken by the omniscient narrator or by the five his-
torians. In this sense, the film is more like a textbook with living illustra-
tions and boxed interpretive quotations than an innovative documentary
film in its own right. Nevertheless, the interpretation is professional and
current in the discipline. On the whole, the mise en scènes represent the
past accurately enough. (But did one see a modern zipper on an actor’s
pants?) As with other historical representations, Slave Catchers, Slave
Resisters combines re-presentation with invention, speculation with evi-
dence. After all, almost all the people portrayed, their actions, their cloth-
ing, and their environment (including the kinds and colors of their
horses) are educated guesses at best. Like so many histories, this film con-
ceals the proportion of speculation to re-presentation behind the façade
of continuous narration. The hard work of investigating and synthesizing
history is hidden by the seemingly simple nature of the overall presentation.
The third documentary film was inspired by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s

A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785–1812.
This prizewinning microhistory about a Hallowell, Maine, woman
inspired the filmmaker to bring it to screen. The film, using only the
short main title, was first shown in 1997 on the American Experience
series on the Public Broadcasting System. It very deliberately explores the
role of the historian in fashioning representations of the past. Laurie
Kahn-Leavitt, writer and producer, decided that the film should inter-
weave scenes of Ulrich piecing together the story of Ballard’s life from the
usually very short, sometimes cryptic, references in the voluminous diary
with reenactment by actors of the midwife’s various daily activities. As
part of this process of showing the self-conscious construal of persons and
events in the film, Kahn-Leavitt writes at some length on all her own
activities in constructing the historical documentary on the extensive
Web site covering the diary.60
In accord with this dual focus on past actors and present historians,
two sequences of scenes open the eighty-eight-minute documentary. The
film starts with a woman rowing a canoe across the vaporous waters of the
Kennebec River in 1785 and then delivering a baby. The words in voice-
over are spoken by the actress playing the midwife and come from the
diary. The second sequence shows Ulrich studying the diary and other
documents as she describes the problems of piecing together the stories
behind the often cryptic diary entries and in general the importance of
documentary evidence to the historian. She admits that in spite of the
nearly one thousand diary entries, she still does not know what Martha
Ballard looked like, where the children slept in the crowded house, or
much of the family dynamics as well as many other minor and major mat-
ters. On the other hand, the film like the book reveals that Ulrich feels
confident in reconstructing the female domestic economy of the era, even
suggesting some of the larger political, social, and religious conflict and
change occurring during the twenty-seven years the diary records.
These two opening sequences begin two narrative trajectories. One
trajectory follows Martha doing her various tasks as housewife, mother,
healer, midwife, and domestic economy manager, with the words coming
from the diary and voiced by Kaiulani Lee, the actress playing her.
Another trajectory follows Ulrich as she researches the diary entries, con-
strues their context, and infers the stories and subplots they imply. The
process is described in her words, sometimes on camera, sometimes as
voice-over. As the film proceeds, Ulrich’s appearance on camera declines
and Martha’s increases until her life and times are the only subjects on the
screen and sound track. Nevertheless, the viewer is always aware of the
different perspectives on the past as lived, researched, and reenacted, espe-
cially since almost all the words come from the diary via the actress play-
ing Martha or from Ulrich herself. These perspectives are only enhanced
by the long discussion by Kahn-Leavitt on all aspects of preproduction,
production, and postproduction of the film on the Web site. The film
seems a close collaboration between Kahn-Leavitt as producer and writer
and Ulrich as historian and expert. In the film, and more so on the Web
site, the viewer learns the limits of historical reconstruction and the neces-
sity for imaginative invention—in spite of Ulrich’s explicit denial of the
latter on camera.
Both speculative reconstruction and disciplined invention are done
with care by the producer, Ulrich, seven other historians, and many for-
mal and informal advisors. Thirty-nine actors play husband Ephraim
Ballard, sons and daughters, neighbors, town worthies, mothers in labor,
servants, “white Indians,” persons in a parade, and ordinary and/or
female roles mentioned in the selections dramatized from the diary. How
these persons appeared, dressed, walked, and otherwise thought and
behaved had to be done by inference. Even how Martha herself looked is
unknown, but the actress playing Martha was in her forties and so had to
be made up to appear to be fifty years old when the diary and its drama-
tization begins and seventy-seven when it ends and she dies. Even the
newborn babies in the film were nearly so, being borrowed from recently
delivered mothers, often through the cooperation of their own midwives.
Yet for all this care, neither Ulrich nor the other experts knew how close
or far apart various persons from different classes stood, or whether she
touched a person of elite status when she examined him, or even the
dynamics within the Ballard family. Social standing and class are not dis-
cussed explicitly in the film but exemplified through terms of address,
clothing, and house furnishings, among other indicators.
Since present-day Hallowell, Maine, and its sister city across the river,
Augusta, were too modern, the location scout had to hunt up a site that
still looked more like one from the revolutionary era. He found such a site
in a Loyalist-founded town in New Brunswick, Canada, which had a
river, some old postrevolutionary-era houses, and even a mill that might
have looked like what Ephraim Ballard owned. Thus, all the exterior
scenes like the interior ones are educated guesses. The mise en scènes used
both authentic period pieces and simulated artifacts, and building interi-
ors and exteriors were both actual in their new location and faked. The
filmmakers always knew, however, what the weather outside was, because
Martha recorded season after season whether the day was clear or rainy,
warm or cold. Ambient sounds are constant and frequent, but the char-
acters engage in little dialogue—perhaps because such language departed
from the diary in being scripted by the writer or delivered impromptu
by the actors. Even the words by Martha are mainly voice-over from the
diary as the scene plays. Pronunciation was an issue of course. Many of
the ambient sounds came from the Foley room and were created to fit the
scene. The composer for the film used some old songs but created new
music in the supposed spirit of the project.
The film employed the same basic approach to story and emplotment
as Ulrich did in her book. Thus the film presents some selected diary
entries and then reenacts the supposed story each set contains: midwifery
and healing, household activities, gardening, and spinning; land disputes
and surveying; conflict with male doctors over who would control obstet-
ric events; rape by a prominent judge; illegitimate childbirth and mar-
riage; funeral preparations and autopsy; conflict between Martha and son
and daughter-in-law; and murder among others. These events and hap-
penings appear to follow chronology so plot and subplot look as if they
follow Martha’s life.
The film like Ulrich’s book relies on a Great Story about social and
political change and resulting conflict in the decades after the revolution.
That Great Story is not featured so much as relied upon to provide the
larger context for such events as uppity servants, squatters on the lands of
rich merchants, the assault of Ephraim by “white Indians” while survey-
ing those lands, and the jailing of husband Ephraim and son Jonathan for
debt. Martha and Ephraim disliked the new, more democratic social
order coming in, but her husband and son engaged in the speculative new
commercial economy emerging. Martha preferred the older order when it
kept servants in their place but lamented it when a town notable escaped
rape charges because of social rank. Since this Great Story of these
changes is so male-centered, they receive little explicit, let alone extended,
mention in Martha’s diary.
The film, like Ulrich’s book, makes a virtue of the limited viewpoint of
the diary in order to highlight the role of women in the economy and
society of the period. Midwifery was the best paid occupation of women
at the time. Martha also exploited her growing daughters’ labor to spin
and weave cloth for the market. The film emphasizes the multiplicity of
activities and managerial capacity Martha needed to organize the domes-
tic economy of her household. On the other hand, her husbands’ sawing
and mill management, land surveying, and tax-collecting duties were
“foreign” in a sense because they were male. Thus Martha says little in her
diary about the roles of doctors, except for their interference in her mid-
wifery; ministers, unless through their wives; public officials, unless jailed
like her husband; or even farmers who comprised the bulk of male popu-
lation. She omits politics and religion to a surprising extent, even though
she attended church regularly (except for four years when irked that
Reverend Foster was hounded from the pulpit). The relationship between
male and female roles is seen in the film in the 1800 parade honoring
George Washington after his death the preceding year. Sixteen maidens
from better families marched in front to symbolize the states in the union
at the time, but the body of the procession was male and arranged by
social rank. In fact, the account of the procession is in a male diary and
not Martha’s. Ulrich emphasizes the legal inferiority of women by point-
ing out that Martha could not own house or land in her own name under
the law of the time while her husband lived.
The film offers explicit and implicit perspective on the nature of his-
torical research and synthesis. Ulrich’s description of her research and
insights in the film emphasizes that history is more puzzle solving and
storytelling than construction and analysis. Disciplined imagination and
invention is played down in favor of “piecing together” the many bits of
evidence and clues, even though Ulrich’s own book, the film itself, and
Kahn-Leavitt’s own description of the film’s making suggest quite other-
wise. If the film plumbs the limits of reconstruction and re-presentation,
it also exemplifies well what disciplined and educated guesswork can
achieve in historical synthesis.
To sum up the implication of this fourth conclusion: historical docu-
mentaries like history texts and museum exhibitions can pursue a variety
of factual and inventive options and still be considered legitimate, proper
history. That documentaries as a genre can contain quite different syn-
thetic combinations of fact and invention suggests the question to ask of
all films, and by extension all histories, is not whether one of them includes
fictive invention but rather of what kind and how much before it crosses
over the line dividing fiction from history as a genre.
Fifth, to return to general conclusions, films have techniques and
methods customary or unique to them as a genre to achieve factual and
interpretive goals. Construction of facts just like perspective and meaning
can be through music, lighting, and editorial juxtaposition among other
techniques. Surely the exterior shot of a cottage or house versus that of a
mansion or castle and scenes from their respective interiors imply as they
depict the social status of the inhabitants, even if that fact is never mentioned
in dialogue or text. That fact is further elaborated through dress, lan-

guage, mannerism, and attitude as shown in a film. The physical appear-
ance of a person or of her surroundings can indicate emotional states.
Various editing techniques can imply through juxtaposition of scenes
connections, even causation, as well as temporal sequence. As pointed out
previously, lighting can affect whether the viewer accepts the scene shown
as desirable or the opposite with the corresponding perspective and
meaning for that condition of affairs. The mise en scène reinforces the
facts asserted in a reenactment. Steven Lipkin points out in his captions
for some frames from the motion picture Shine (1996) how they reveal
the mental breakdown and psychological state of the classical pianist
David Helfgott through the use of water.61 Filmmakers use music to estab-
lish the time a film represents as well as enhance a mood. Classical music
often accompanies eighteenth-century scenes just as jazz signifies the
1920s or hip hop the 1990s.
Sixth, what films may lack in complex and abstract argument, they
more than make up for in complex visual and aural detail. Both types of
complexity pose problems for historians and filmmakers alike in both
analyzing and producing films. The complex aural and visual details give
the eyewitness, “you-are-there” feeling to films, but that very complexity
renders historical accuracy so much harder to achieve for filmmaker than
book author. The infinitude of detail enables greater possibility of accu-
rate historical elements at the same time as it almost guarantees the inabil-
ity to be correct about everything no matter how hard the filmmaker
tries. The greater possibilities open the door to invention as the multitude
of details necessitates some solution in the filming. Theå book’s author
can finesse through silence or brief mention what the filmmaker must
provide concretely and specifically to fill, so to speak, the mise en scène.
Complex, abstract argument and analysis of sources so common to books
and so uncommon in films provides further grist for the mill of historical
criticism without solving the filmmaker’s problem of trying to achieve its
equivalent. But in the end, which medium renders better the larger truths
about the big picture of the past for its audience?
Seven, even though films may have methods and approaches unique
to them, they also share general problems of historical representation with
texts and things. Filmed histories exhibit the same hybrid qualities as
other kinds of historical representations. Although the show-and-tell
qualities of the medium may be different than those of texts and muse-
ums and historic sites, films too in the end struggle to reconcile science
and art, fact and fiction, objectivity and propaganda, explanation and
interpretation. They too raise questions about judging the factual accu-
racy of a product’s parts as opposed to the larger truthfulness of it as syn-
thesis. In that sense, films like other historical representations combine
factuality and invention, re-presentation and construction, heritage and
history, narrative and explanation, perspective and meaning. As with texts
and things, it is all a matter of interpretation and mediation. The big
question, as pointed out earlier, is just what kind of invention and how
much before the representation crosses over the line separating history
and fiction.
In line with these conclusions, this chapter on films parallels those on
texts and things in order to indicate comparable problems and their
respective solutions in each genre or medium. The three chapters show
how each medium has methods and approaches unique to it, but collec-
tively they also point out how texts, things, and films share the dilemmas
of representing the past as history. Each of the chapters offered examples
of different kinds of solutions to the common problems within its medium.
In each kind of solution and in each genre in general, it was, to repeat, a
matter of kind and mix, whether of re-presentation and construction,
interpretation or invention.

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Films As Historical Representations

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CHAPTER 5

Films as Historical Representations

R. F. Berkhofer, Jr., Fashioning History

Complaints and Issues

Fact, Fiction, and Film Genres

filmmakers deliberately emplot the elements in their works to promote a

Film theorists usually separate documentary films from docudramas

the colonial occupation of the Algerian homeland. As a result of the film’s

British director Ridley Scott’s Gladiator (2000) is a good example of an

He concludes: “From beginning to end, these movies send only a nebu-

Evaluating Films as Sources

and television shows. The multiple skills needed in putting together a

speech mannerisms, accents, and dialects contemporary to the actor’s and

and others associated with the film experienced or at least remembered

Judging Films as Histories

open to filmmakers. Films as representations of the past can range from

up close or in background such authentic material artifacts as tools, cook-

ancient Romans speak Latin or modern English in a film? Do actors por-

justifies their physical appearance? Some few persons exist in statues,

other times, computer-driven graphics can restore, so to speak, a ruined

from the mainly factual side of historical representation to the overall

record demands the reviewer compare her overall interpretation of the

Foner’s critique of basic perspective is even clearer in his judgment on

Issues central to the Civil War and of obvious contemporary relevance—

At issue here is more than a scholar specializing in the history of

A Matter of Interpretive Mix

moving horse-drawn coach, an empty plantation dining room, and

employed their own methods of rendering their interviewees’ vocabulary

The third documentary film was inspired by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s

in dialogue or text. That fact is further elaborated through dress, lan-

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