Film as an Agent, Product and Source of History

Author(s): Marc Ferro

Source: Journal of Contemporary History , Jul., 1983, Vol. 18, No. 3, Historians and
Movies: The State of the Art: Part 1 (Jul., 1983), pp. 357-364
Published by: Sage Publications, Ltd.

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/260542

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Marc Ferro
Film as an Agent, Product
and Source of History*

In its relation to society and history, film was for a long time
treated only as a work of art, its description and analysis being
matters for appreciation and assessment. Film, the new spectacle
which Eisenstein had claimed was the heir of all the existing arts,
sublimating as much as superceding them, caught its apostles in its
magic light: the critics and historians of film identified with the
masters of this new, seventh art-form and gladly took up the
cudgels on their behalf.
The critics' first objective was to get the film-maker recognized
as a creative artist. In a society of clerks and soldiers, which
accepted only the traditional cultural forms and tended to treat the
film with condescension, this was a very necessary task. At the
beginning, cinema was something for 'helots', it was 'mechanical';
in addition, the places where the film-shows were held - fairs,
cafe-theatres and the like - were, in Victorian and bourgeois eyes,
disreputable, immoral. For a film-maker to try to rank himself with
writers and artists was incongruous and obscene. Before the new
cultural product could be accepted as a 'work' or even, beyond
that, a 'work of art', its social and political function had to be
established. This legitimation was first effected by the counter-
societies, that is those societies - the USSR of the twenties and
nazi Germany - which were challenging the bourgeois order of
things. The other societies resisted for much longer. In the inter-
war years, a judge, a bishop, or a general in uniform was a rare
sight in the cinema.
It is not difficult to see how, in such circumstances, the men of
the cinema felt obliged to found their own private republic, setting
up their own conventions and laws, drawing their own line between

*Translated from the French by Mr. Anthony Wells.

Journal of Contemporary History (SAGE, London, Beverly Hills and New Delhi),
Vol. 18(1983),357-364

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358 Journal of Contemporary History

the sacred and the profane, determining what could be shown,

what could not be said, inside and outside the film, even what could
or could not be said of the film world itself.
Not surprisingly, early film criticism tended to imitate what went
on in the world of literature and the theatre: legitimation implied
identification, a similar status, a merging of the angle of vision.
Thus, as in literature, works were classified by genre and their
creators grouped into schools (expressionists, realists etc.) - the
critics founded their various Orders, making obeissance to this or
that film god. The similarities extended even to the perversions of
criticism: as, in the world of books, the 'great' publishers garner
the greatest number of reviews, so in film today the volume of
notices, studies, commentaries and analyses stands in direct
relation to a film's budget - one only has to look at the critical
fuss made this year of films like Tess or Reds or others now already
completely forgotten.
The critics, however, were not the only ones to have allowed a
fascination with traditional art forms to lead them into imitating
the ways of literature and the other arts. The historians of film did
likewise. They may have been dealing with a new cultural product,
but they treated it like any other event in the history of society and
sliced it up into periods and countries. Thus it was that these men,
who saw themselves as the heralds of a twentieth-century cultural
revolution, ended up perpetuating all the faults of the most
traditional positivism.
Grasping film in its relation to history requires more than just
better chronicles of the works or a description of how the various
genres evolved. It must look at the historical function of film, at its
relationship with the societies that produce and consume it, at the
social processes involved in the making of the works, at cinema as a
source of history. As agents and products of history, films and the
world of films stand in a complex relationship with the audience,
with money and with the state, and this relationship is one of the
axes of its history.
While these - the audience, money and the state - are the
protagonists, it is the evolution of the relationship between them
that determines how the technique and even the style of the film-
makers changes and also how the film develops as an art-form, for
the film as art cannot be separated from the cultures that secrete it
or the audience at which it is aimed. For example, American films
of the twenties had to cater for very motley audiences of a variety of

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Ferro: Film in History 359

of ethnic backgrounds and with a thousand different taboos. To

succeed, they had to be immediately comprehensible to everyone and
avoid flouting any prejudice or morality. The result was that American
society acted as a testing-ground - if a film did well in the USA, it
would do well everywhere in the world.
Today's Indian cinema is a modern parallel. Aimed at an audience
very largely illiterate, whose members speak a broad range of different
dialects, the Indian film industry - a major exporter to both Africa
and the Arab world - satisfies its public by rigid adherence to the
elementary rules of romance. To those impoverished peoples, the
Indian film offers a captivating dream of an idealized Indian society
unrelated to everyday existence in India, and thereby fulfils the
escapist function so often attributed to film.
Conversely, simple narrative and the audience's need for
identification, or rather the lack of them, explain how a complicated,
avant-garde cinematographic language meets with the greatest
incomprehension of the greatest number. In Russia, the moujiks
walked out of Eisenstein's films; Dziga Vertov's were complete
failures. Indeed, it can be argued that the Stalin-Zhdanov reaction,
which is traditionally explained in ideological terms and in the context
of a rising tide of totalitarianism, arose just as much out of sociological
and commercial reasons: by putting the Soviet people and its 'heroic
deeds' at the centre of the action, 'socialist realism' found a way of
bringing audiences and roubles back into the cinema.
Such examples are intended to show only that one should not
draw too sharp a line between art and industry, film and society.
Furthermore, the state can play a particularly restrictive role, as it
did in the Soviet Union after 1928, or in nazi Germany. At such
moments of maximum state control, even the differences between
film genres can disappear. In the two countries just mentioned,
directors would be making both fictional works and laudatory
industrial documentaries at one and the same time, and in the same
style, so that it is sometimes hard to tell the one from the other.
Social control in the form of money tends generally to be less,
although it is found, especially in countries engaged in civil or
foreign wars. Paradoxically enough, the most meticulous
programme ever imposed on a country's whole film industry was
that worked out by President Roosevelt in person as a means of
stimulating America during the second world war. In post-war
Stalinist Russia, on the other hand, the method of control was
radically different. It operated after the films were completed, with

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360 Journal of Contemporary History

the result that most of the films made between 1948 and 1953 were
quite simply banned. Such state control is compounded or replaced
by collective social censorship. The US film-makers of the thirties
voluntarily set up their own Order and imposed their own code of
honour and morality. In France, censorship of 'X' films has been
carried out as much by the profession as by the state. It is, of
course, the state that ultimately condemns these pornographic
films, but it does so with the consent of the film world, which does
not wish to be 'disgraced' by such products.
A social study of the cinema, however, cannot only be an analysis
of the relationship between film, its producers and its audience. It
must also go into the history of the film-maker's emancipation,
showing how, with or without the help of the critic, he gradually
succeeded in legitimating his art, in getting it accepted as a recognized
art-form. In the process, he achieved the expression of his own vision
of the world, a vision independent of reigning ideologies and of the
view of established institutions. He became a type of discourse, like
the writer, the politician or the scientist. Not surprisingly, these new
pretensions of his resulted in his ex-communication and, for a long
time his banishment to the ghetto, since the cultural high-priests
sensed straightaway that the film-maker was in a position to put
forward his own unique counter-analysis of society. The persecution
suffered in turn, in one guise or another, by Chaplin, Eisenstein or
Rene Clair, or, later, Kazan and Jean-Luc Godard, is a testimony to
how new a phenomenon was the appearance of the film-maker on the
great stage of culture and politics.
He even ventured into historians' territory - not so much when
he made 'historical' films, which for the most part translated the
discourse of the historians into film, but when, as in the case of
Renoir, he unwittingly became a social and political analyst. For
Renoir, to take him as an example, was not only a painter,
concealing as much as he ever revealed. He was also the first of the
experimental historians, borrowing his hypotheses from men as
different as La Fouchardiere and Gorki and turning to people like
Pagnol and Jeanson to put his experiments into practice. Renoir's
method, inspired by theories of any and every origin, de-
ideologized social analysis, however much he saw himself (as did
others) as a committed film director. Renoir's historical analyses
do not derive slavishly from any one party or group (despite
occasions when he toes the line, as in La Marseillaise) - Renoir's
analysis of history is not like that, it is not the servant of established

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Ferro: Film in History 361

sets of ideas, Marxist, communist or any other. The aim of his

uncensored reading of politics is to transcribe the functioning of
contemporary society: he cuts across the categories of existing
knowledge, allowing the analysis to emerge from les faits divers.
Other supposed 'left-wingers' such as Godard,Visconti, Rosi and
some others, will later follow, in this respect at least, in Renoir's
footsteps.
Hence it is in those films which are not historical or 'political'
that Renoir's political analysis is at its best. In these he manages to
identify in society that forbidding gap between collective
aspirations and the constraining force of the institutions, ideologies
and beliefs that these aspirations secrete. Deprived of hope, the
ordinary citizen seeks refuge where he can, caught between the rule
of money, the wants money gives rise to, and that species of
legality, which is its transcription, the law of iniquity.
The history of the cinema is a history of conflict, and at several
levels. The first of these occurs in the very making of the film,
where each of the various protagonists, writer and director, star
and producer, camera-man and editor, vision and sound, develops
his own strategies to maintain his rights or legitimize his primacy. It
is these conflicts, visible or invisible, which form the weft of the
internal history of each film, which in turn thus becomes a product
of society.
These conflicts interfere - or not, as the case may be - with
those that are fought between the film crew and the producer or,
later, the distributor, etc. From the point of view of social history,
the appearance of trades unions marks a turning-point in the
conflicts of production both in Europe and the United States.
Here, then, the problems are those of society itself, problems
which, while having nothing to do with film as such, still have their
effect upon it: the cost, for instance, and the production. The flight
from the land, a phenomenon entirely unconnected with the
cinema, creates the need for new policies of distribution; television,
when it arrives, is a source of direct competition, calling for negot-
iation between the professions ... This new context causes one to
wonder whether we may not have already seen the heyday of the
'cinema' proper in the half-century from 1925 to 1980 (at least as
far as Europe, North America and Japan are concerned) and
whether its place will not now be taken by other forms of film
better suited to televised or cable transmission. Forms of distrib-
ution and the types of audience, or audiences, never cease to evolve.
These are some of the problems surrounding the relationship

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362 Journal of Contemporary History

between the cinema and history. There is a further problem, one

that deserves a more systematic examination: namely film's
scientific role as an elucidator of society. Here we are obliged to go
beyond the categories established by the professionals:
documentary and imaginative works are both equally accessible to
analysis, the differences being only those of the procedures
employed, which vary with conditions of production, transmission
and direction. Clearly in film terms, there was more difference in
1939 between German and American newsreels than there was, in
the same year, between Soviet planned newsreels and Soviet
planned imaginative works.
The analysis of the one form and the other is a royal road to
knowledge of a society and its prohibitions, its lapsus. The first
step was to establish the connection between film and what is
outside film, with film being considered now not as a finished
cultural product, a 'work of art' - as the method had been
hitherto, a method so successfully employed by Kracauer - but as
an event, a symptom. The first experiment along such lines dates
from 1972. A study of a Soviet film of 1925 entitled Dura Lex
revealed that behind the story, a Western set in Canada, there lay a
covert critique of the Soviet regime, the people's tribunals and the
first trials of the Social Revolutionaries. It was an experiment that
worked. Many years later, at an international Slavists' colloquium
held at Banff in 1976, G.W., one of those who had been involved in
the making of the film in 1925, declared 'that this analysis had
brought home to him and made explicit something that neither
Koulechov nor Khatkova had dared think to themselves at the time,
but which definitely constituted the deeper reality of the film'.
Outside the film, the study had taken into account firstly what
Koulechov, the director, had declared his intentions to be in making
the film; secondly, Jack London's novel, which Koulechov said had
inspired him to make it; thirdly, the particular status of Koulechov
and his itinerary as they were perceived by the regime; fourthly, the
status of Jack London, the militant, socialist pacifist whose works
were available in translation in Soviet Russia and were well-known
there; fifthly, official critical reaction to the film. Within thefilm, it
looked at the screen-play in relation to the Jack London novel; at
the evolution of the characters who had been taken, or not, from it;
at the specificity of the camera angles and at the content of the
captions which were the film's substitute for dialogue. (Subsequent
studies added a number of new elements to these: the function of

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 Ferro: Film in History 363

close-ups, which Annie Goldmann illustrated a propos of Le Dernier

des Hommes; the relationship in Tchapaev's work between large
and small group-scenes; the function of cross-fades and their
implicit message in Jud Suss; the alternation of night and day
scenes in The Third Man, etc.)
Various critical methods - historical, structuralist, psycho-
analytic and others - have each been applied in an experimental,
and therefore not always viable, way, to all these systems of
relations.

Other relationships with what is outside the film have been

established: for instance, the way in which views of the same film-
object can change. A good example is La Grande Illusion, the
general interpretation of which did a complete about-face between
1938, when, on the eve of the war, it was seen as pacifist and left-
wing, and ten years later, when it was viewed as a film which had
foreshadowed Vichy and collaboration. Differentiations of reaction
have also been observed among different audiences of the same
film, amongst adults and young people, etc. Thus in 1965, in a town
in Belgium, Godard's Une femme mariee was favourably received
by the students but working-class audiences were outraged by it
(Annie Goldmann).
As for film as a source of history, we will not dwell on this here -
plenty of work has been done on the subject, primarily in Great
Britain and France. Clearly the next step to be taken was a systematic
collective study of a corpus of films. In this field, successful work has
been done by Helene Puiseux on German newsreels from 1919 to
1933; by Anthony Aldgate on the films of the Spanish Civil War; by
Richardson and Richard Taylor on German and Soviet propaganda
films; by F. Thorpe, N. Pronay and R. Fielding on the film documents
of the second world war, etc. As for fictional novels, Jeffrey Richards
scored a marvellous first with his study of English colonial films, while
Arthur Marwick has done pioneering work on the working classes,
where the world outside the film is juxtaposed with the film itself.
Currently following their lead are F. Garcon, who is working on the
cinema of Vichy, and P. Sorlin and others who are studying French
pre-war cinema ... Studies of this kind illuminate existing
knowledge (of the societies in question) in the way they do because
they all build a bridge to the world outside the film. Like the film
which is their object, these studies embody in themselves the three-
way traffic between society, the artist it secretes and the work which
is directed at it.

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364 Journal of Contemporary History

Marc Ferro
is Director of Studies at the
Ecole des Hautes Etudes, Paris,
and co-editor of Annales. He is
the author of La grande guerre,
la revolution de 1917, Cinema
et Histoire, Comment on raconte
l'Histoire aux Enfants d travers
le monde entier and Des Soviets
au communisme bureaucratique. He is
currently working on a book on Petain.

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