1983 - Raack - Historiography As Cinematography

Historiography as Cinematography: A Prolegomenon to Film Work for Historians
Author(s): R. C. Raack
Source: Journal of Contemporary History , Jul., 1983, Vol. 18, No. 3, Historians and
Movies: The State of the Art: Part 1 (Jul., 1983), pp. 411-438
Published by: Sage Publications, Ltd.
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/260545
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R.C. Roock
Historiography as Cinematography:
A Prolegomenon to Film Work for Historians
'Like writing history with lightning', American President

Woodrow Wilson, quondam scholar, teacher, and university
president said, seeing the didactic usefulness of 'The Birth of A
Nation', which first came to the screen in 1915. Famous
propagandists were equally quick to perceive the importance of
the new medium. Lenin and Trotsky saw its value for their
political message. 'Of all the arts,' Lenin said, 'cinema is the
most important instrument.' Reichminister for Propaganda, Dr.
Paul Joseph Goebbels, took control of the German film
industry early on and turned feature films and the German
Weekly Newsreels into masterpieces of the art of deception.'
Scholar-president and political leaders who sought to move the
great mass of their peoples - these men quickly saw the
radically different uses of film for recalling the past.
Since the early twentieth century, when amazing new devices
for locomotion, communication and for increasing production
and comfort suddenly broke through to the public conscious-
ness, thinkers and users alike have tried to grapple with their
long-term, often unintended effects. One of these new devices
was, of course, the moving picture. Like the still camera earlier,
it revolutionized the possibilities of representation and
consequently deeply affected patterns of thought.
The cinematograph was first used for public entertainment,
but soon showed its potential as an information-providing
device. Today, historians, like their students and the public, sit
before cinema and television screens watching, being entertained
by, and learning from filmed history in romanticized 'features'
and seemingly objective documentaries. Seeing something on
film often becomes 'being there', as Roland Barthes has said.2
Everywhere, history reported in film has been influential and
there is firm evidence of its pedagogical effects.3
Journal of Contemporary History (SAGE, London, Beverly Hills and New Delhi),
Vol. 18 (1983), 411-438

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412 Journal of Contemporary History
But who now controls its historical content, its medium and
thereby its messages?4 How many watching historians wonder at
the fact that virtually none of what they see is scripted, researched,
compiled, or made by professional colleagues? Should we
historians not ask why this is so when it is obvious that history in
film reveals new historical evidence, offers new perspectives for the
representation of time and space, gives alternative behavioural
insights, and opens up new ways of presenting the past in an
overwhelmingly effective didactic form? Indeed, film presents the
opportunity for renewed interest and systematic study in history,
both of which have fallen lately if, it may be hoped, transiently,
upon bad times. And the crying need, so apparent, for teaching the
languages of the electronic and mechanical media to those whose
historical learning is formed by them challenges every historian in
his role as history teacher, the role which occupies the majority of
time of most professional historians.5
This being so, what are our national historical associations doing
to help capture the audiovisual media for professional uses? Why
don't our most prestigious trade journals deal critically with filmed
history? Why have so few of us developed the ability to analyze and
master these new, different and vastly more complex genres of
expression, offering forms of understanding and cognition
unattainable in all linear forms? Why have we devoted so little
research to the exhumation and organization of film and sound
records? Why have we failed to develop curricula for our schools to
bring a professional level of historical content in film to the
impatient young and the television-sodden old?6
Historians had better accept that, whether we like it or not,
history is regularly being represented in film, and usually more
often than not, uncritically. Entrepreneurs, propagandists,
journalists, dramatists, and technicians have taken over the task of
representing the past in film. Unfortunately, a film, like a book,
may convince when it is produced with no concern for truth, or
deliberately to misinform. Yet there are few means for historians to
control the quality of history in film. The critical apparatus
through which written history is judged simply does not exist for
filmed history. Widely viewed, but largely without critical
supervision, it is dangerous, but influential.
Perhaps those historians still sceptical of the power of film
and sound expression should reflect on the emotional power of

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Raack: Historiography as Cinematography 413
words themselves, and on the varying qualities of spoken language

and gesture. For centuries teachers have trained students in the
critical analysis of literature and rhetoric. A written passage is
susceptible to long consideration and reflection. Public and
private speaking can be submitted to similar treatment, especially
these days, with the ready availability of electronic recording. But
usually we do not, or cannot, stop a film sequence for a rerun.
What, then, shall we do? Here is the most widely influential mode
of historical representation almost wholly outside professional
control and immune to the usual methods of analysis and
treatment.
It is true that in the last fifteen years historians' distance from

film has slowly begun to diminish. An international organizat
of interested historians has been founded.7 In a few countri
notably the United Kingdom and German Federal Republic, sm
groups of historians have produced some remarkable teachin
films or have effectively revived and prepared archive film
documents for the classroom.8 A few catalogues of archival fi
sources have been published.9 Many articles and books, chiefly
feature films, have appeared explaining what the films, or th
various creators, were trying to tell us. These, collectively, sur
indicate the beginning of a more generalized awareness and th
development of a systematic programme for the introduction
film study by historians and in historical training. Still, it see
important now to offer both an urgent manifesto to those who y
need it, and an admonitory prolegomenon to those who will ca
out future historical work on film. Archival film and sound
especially actuality material - i.e. film recording some real
happening - is the natural habitat of historians.
In actuality films - 'news' film, government record film,
commercial and industrial film, amateur film, 'home' movies,
etc. - each frame, sequence or completed production is a
separate first-hand record of the past. A completed actuality film,
made up of all of these parts, contains the documents in
themselves, whether it is a production filmed and completed
under one direction, or a compilation of the shots taken from the
works of different producing groups. For perfectly obvious
reasons intrinsic to the nature of the documentation, these films
provide the records of the past with which the professional
historian will find it easiest to work. Historians will discover

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that these records are often stored in archives readily accessible to

the professional public, and that they are, on the whole, far less
restricted by the complexities of copyright than feature films, and
therefore, very much more economical to use. The actuality film
is, therefore, quite clearly the best place for the largest investment
of historians' work.
The feature film, or 'acted' film, is also a document of the past.
It may convey a great deal of historically useful information, and
the emotional power of reinforcement in its message may be as
great as that of the actuality film document. But the value of the
feature film as an historical source is similar to that of a single
artistic or literary document used in intellectual or social history
and its usefulness to a historian is subject to the same
methodological hazards. Feature films carry their collective
creators' visions of their own or other times.'? But, by contrast
with the film of actuality documents, their usefulness as an
historical source is functionally reduced in value if we break them
apart in the reverse order of their creation: from completed
production back to sequence and to frame. Their utility is the
highest when they are edited and complete." By contrast, unedited
actuality materials are more valuable first-hand historical sources
than an edited, completed actuality film, except that the latter, of
course, like the completed feature film, has value simply as a
statement of its creator's point of view.
How and why does film in general possess the power to convince
people, to persuade them, to remain vividly alive in their memories
to a degree hardly possible for history written in standard
narrative forms? It is the very nature of this power that must be
understood, for from it come the expressive qualities which
historians must command in order to make film into historians'
parlance.
Hayden V. White, proposing alternative approaches to written
history, asked us to consider the fact that historians have so far
failed to reconstruct history in forms akin to modern literature.
Much historical research could surely be presented most
satisfactorily in such forms. But historians, White noted, have
confined themselves to the narrative and to nineteenth-century
storytelling. An explanation for this could be that they have

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done this largely because this way of telling has suited the
traditional chronological and geographical organizing concepts
and metaphors widely accepted in history. When historians have
opted for other forms of expression, it has been for those
inductive modes of analysis characteristic of the social sciences,
modes which offer forms of reportage suitable only for a few
historical studies, and which usually incorporate large segments
of traditional explanatory narrative anyway.'2
Yet our sensibilities remind us what reflection on archival
findings suggests, what many of today's litterateurs confirm f
us vicariously: happenings do not really follow one another in t
linear fashion of the single-subject narrative. History, as it
happens to us, is simply not just one damned thing after another.
To recount it in narrative as if it were is to tell it poorly, because
it is to tell only part of it, and to juxtapose its events as they did
not occur. History as it happens is many things on many stages in
'cataracts of times'.3 These happenings are later perceived in the
reporting historian's mental and psychological space and time,
then altered in transmission to a public by being partly
recombined, and partially reported, as the reporter requires.
Typical statements in narrative history, like 'Russia and Japan
went to war', or 'Kant came to the conclusion that Hume had to
be refuted', are not more than convenient word summaries of
masses of events. In fact, such summary sentences elide action,
time and space for the sake of convenience, to serve the brevity
reportorial time and space require. They do not tell what really
happened nor describe the mass of operations leading to the
actions of such entities as Russia and Japan, or the mental
workings of Kant, were these properly evidenced and available
for description. Such statements fail to present the reality of the
experience of the people who worked through the events - as we
know ourselves through experience: ideas, words, images,
preoccupations, distractions, sensory deceptions, conscious and
unconscious motives and emotions, and whatever else makes up
life's daily perceptions. Hence, though traditional narration is
surely necessary in some of the historian's reporting, it can at best
be inadequate to many projects, and it will always be partly
misinformative because its coverage is partial. So much is sure.
An unrelieved effort to render reported history in such a way is
likely to mirror a dead past, to reflect it at best in pale and

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uninteresting contrast with the experience of our actual daily

round. History set down without more of the dimensions of
experience is apt to be the 'antithesis of life, movement and
individual existence'.'4
Since historians tacitly or expressly presuppose the continuity of
human behaviour, so, analogously, must they presuppose that the
historical experience has been witnessed as we witness the
present.The events referred to above about Russia, Japan and
Immanuel Kant were once actually known by historical observers,
as by the participants, incomplete and incompletely through a maze
of conflicting perceptions. Present historical study should be able
to report this way of sensing past reality. It should give an
empathetic reconstruction to convey how historical people
witnessed, understood and lived their lives. It should seek to
recover all the past's liveliness, - partly that of dream and
memory, of time decomposed and recomposed, all corrected and
interpreted, of course, and then rejoined to the external 'reality' by
the multiple perspectives the mass of historical source materials so
often affords. These are the aspects of the past least perceptively
reflected in traditional history. And they are what film reports best.
The universality and verisimilitude of these conscious and
subconscious perceptions are what modern literary experience
validates. Encounters in literature, not to mention film, very often
meet deep needs because they offer a psychological prophylaxis,
timely relief to accumulations of loneliness and alienation. Our
awareness of ourselves and our ability to accept our perception of
the world which impinges on our consciousness is enhanced when
we collect vicarious validations of it. The world outside, we
thereby happily rediscover, appears to others at least somewhat as
it does to us. The traditional written history, pale by contrast, does
not accurately mirror the multi-dimensional world we daily
encounter. It can only satisfy a small part of our quest for
continuity with those who have gone before us, a quest we make to
establish ourselves, and to find personal dimensions.
Raymond Durgnat, a well-known film theorist, has written:
'Film is not a survey of life; all its devices outrage literalism."' To
which one can add, but it may seem like life; real life, not a survey
of it. Indeed, the contribution of cinema to the expanded
perception of the world and to self-perception has already been

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advertised by film theorists. They have pointed out that the origins
of one of the most important story-telling techniques, the kind of
montage pioneered by D.W. Griffith, are to be found in the
novel.16 Conversely, they have discovered the effect of cinematic
expression on the twentieth-century novelist. Film theorists have
referred in particular to prose forms developed in this century
under cinematic influence by the very writers historian White
described as having broken through to new forms, with their
wholesale departure from narrative representation. These authors
- James Joyce, Marcel Proust, and Virginia Woolf (to which
group can be added John Dos Passos, among others) - he
commended, for their evocative style, to the attention of the
historians. 7
It is the cinema's ways of representing multiform reality which
writers have repeated by adapting them literally. The lens has seen
differently from the eye. Cinema has provided its own new
language with forms adapted to conveying experience in memory
and its recasting in dreams. It sets forth alternative moulds of time
and space, encouraging elliptical economies of expression and
emphasis on the indirect or unspoken in storytelling - and these
techniques add to the film's persuasive power, which itself rests
solidly on its capacity to present a document of apparent external
reality.18 Thus a convincing verisimilitude of the observed world
may be joined in film to an uncanny simulation of mental time and
space. Film's now well-known power to transmit mental and
psychological states subtly and instantaneously (e.g. the face and
body close-ups in Griffith's and Eisenstein's films) to express the
perceived world conveys sharply the 'cataracts of times' and
plethora of spaces in which we live. When D.W. Griffith suggested
over sixty years ago that the real first world war he viewed in
Europe was unexciting as drama compared with cinema war, he
meant the edited celluloid war, without the humdrum, the waiting
and the boredom. Can we now doubt that the intensification of
time and the foreshortening of experience in film account for so
much of the dissatisfaction among youth, impatient with the
slower pace of real life experiences?'9 In this twentieth century,
only the formal discovery of the subconscious has had the
equivalent of the film's stunning effect on forms of expression
and behaviour, and on the expansion of human awareness. Is it,
then, any wonder that our students and others who have grown

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accustomed to the capturing of emotional and cognitive encounters

in modern film and sound have grown impatient with traditional
historical reconstructions?
The source of film's power lies also in the nature of its delivery of
images. Because the film image strikes the physical body on its way
to the mind, it delivers a message affectively reinforced. Film
images physically batter the viewer's eye at twenty-four frames a
second. A series of stills flashes by the viewer, tricking the mind
into recording motion by deceiving the visual sense. Quick cuts to
new sequences, dissolves, fades, speed-ups, slow motion, and all
the other chemical, mechanical and electronic techniques known to
the film-maker, joined to sound waves, alter the mind's perception
of two-dimensional scenes. To change the mechanics of conveying
the picture is to change the metaphor, and to alter the message.
Form thus helps to arrange content. The very force of the film
working on the visual senses overturns the viewer's contemplative
stance, as narrative reporting can only rarely do, and, somehow,
conditions the reception of the filmed message. The end product of
elements and technique is something entirely new, different from
the original parts.20
Historians should learn that the mechanics of film can be
understood. The actual workings are no mystical process eve
they are often exploited by mystics. Back in the twenties, Dadaist
and Surrealists had already discovered and delighted in the
spiritual and intellectually disjunctive temporal and spatial
capabilities of film. They exploited it in works like 'Entr'acte',
'Le Chien Andalou', and 'Le Ballet Mecanique'. Salvador Dali,
one of Surrealism's enfants terribles, rejoiced because film could
'systemize confusion and thus help discredit completely the world
of [external] reality'. To others among his contemporaries, the
radical rearrangement of the accepted order of the commonplace
through the order and pace of film images could depict the
surrealistic inner world, the only 'reality' that mattered to them.21
Far more sophisticated cinematographic disjunctions engineered
by often unscrupulous disjoiners have prepared the way for the
penetration of the most cleverly devised and dangerously
influential messages of our time.
While acknowledging the power of film, historians should also
recognize the almost equal power of sound, which for almost fifty
years, has, when intelligently used, enhanced synchronously or

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worked in effective counterpoint to the film sequence. The effect

of each medium, astutely conjoined, is intensifed. Yet the
importance of sound has been overlooked by many film theorists
and film-makers, even by some who have actually recognized its
importance in theory, while ignoring it in practice.22
Anyone living through the last fifteen or twenty years and
familiar with the highly engineered stereophonic sound of
popular music will understand the emotional persuasiveness of
music and words specially edited and amplified. Film-makers
take advantage of sound even when their ideas about the
medium are stale and given over to unimaginative literalness and
trustworthy audio cliches. In the documentary film, for example,
we often see some of the worst examples both of imperfect film
research and of unimaginative sound. Even the setting of
authentic historical audio sources to suitable film sequences is
rare.
Enormous creative reportorial opportunities for hist

film and sound, therefore, do exist, because the histo
is often so bad, the reporting so unimaginative, and
because so little has been done.
The tasks now before historians willing to work with film an

sound media are as follows: to learn to assess the media records
as sources of information; to identify and catalogue these
records; to learn the forms of expression, or language, of film
and sound; to master the techniques of film and sound
production, and begin film reportage. In addition, it is
imperative that historians carry their newly won skills into the
classroom as soon as possible, and that at least some institutions
which train historians provide the opportunity for doing this.23
First, we must assess the media records as sources of information.
Media records come in both unedited and edited form. In unedited
form they reflect both events recorded by chance (e.g., the
Hindenburg disaster), or planned events (e.g., a parade or rally
when the camera captures that which it is intended to film). But even
unedited actuality material is only a partial record of the original
ambiance, in spite of the simulation of reality which an unedited
film or sound source may appear to offer. The actuality film source,

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like the sound, is only conditionally a document.24 It is not

'objective reality'. After all, a camera or microphone has been
aimed, a choice has been made about the recording material (type
of film or tape, lens, microphone, etc.). The mechanical or
electronic devices used (length of film cassette, type of recording,
etc.) have dictated part of the nature of the record.25 Historians are
familiar with the problems of testing and evaluating written
records. Once they understand that the camera and tape-recorder
can and do lie, and learn the special nature of the problems of
evaluation they will encounter, they should be able to weigh the
value of the information provided by the visual or sound source
using the very tests they have long employed with written records.
Unedited actuality film and sound provide all sorts of
information which other sources do not readily provide - not only
historical facts, such as who was where, or with whom - but
important records of environment and social and personal
behaviour. The behavioural characteristics of individuals and
groups are actually best revealed by film and sound source
Contemporary values are excellently recorded in the old fi
makers' choice of subject, treatment and even, in edited mat
of title cards. These present that important 'unwitting' testimo
which is so valuable a part of the film record for the historian.
But actuality film, edited and unedited, generally records
particular and limited areas of human conduct. What it does
document, however, can give pause for reflection and does supply
vital information not provided elsewhere, sometimes in
photographs. California actuality film of the first four decades of
this century reveals male citizens - visibly of all social groups -
clad in costumes similar to those of the eastern United States and
Europe, from where most of them had recently come. San Diego
scenes from around 1916 show all of the men in a number of
outdoor scenes wearing dark overcoats and felt hats. Perhaps eve
more reflective of the enduring relationship between chronolog
and changes in public and private behaviour and attitudes are th
pictured interchanges between men and women, adults and children
Feature films, of course, often reveal stylized renditions of the same
some of them very humorous because self-evidently zeitgebunde
But actuality material is even more convincing when patently
ingenuous. Let the reader imagine the dimensionless naivete in

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the happy mugging for the camera of Warsaw boys standing

before grave-diggers and graves for people recently killed in the
early German aerial bombardments in September 1939; and
likewise, the sad earnestness of young Jews doing the same for
German cameramen in sequences from Poland in late 1939 and
even 1940. Marc Ferro tells of how the cameras caught important
changes in crowd behaviour, those viewing, participating in, and
ignoring a series of political demonstrations in Petrograd between
March and July 1917 - particularly important here is the
evidence he cites from the films of the social status of the parade
participants.27 Early first world war scenes taken by all of the
belligerents show us the mindless as well as the studied
enthusiasm at home: the cheers in Berlin, Paris and St.
Petersburg in 1914 are innocently repeated in New York in 19
Two film episodes, at least, catch Hitler off guard, showing sm
satisfaction with his oratory (in a 1932 'German Weekly
Newsreel', and in 'Triumph of the Will'). Films and out-takes
from a Swiss cameraman's extensive travels in the German-
occupied Ukraine in 1943 give an eye-opening picture of an
occupied country apparently living through unevenly distributed
hardships and joys, a picture totally at odds with that presented
by the official reports of Soviet film and history. Hitler's rapid
aging and physical deterioration after 1942 is inadvertently as
well as chronologically caught in the later war-time German
Weekly Newsreels. And Soviet cameras recorded his last
commander of Berlin, General Helmuth Weidling, imitating for
his Russian captors and interrogators the hunched and trembling
Adolf Hitler, as the latter appeared just before his suicide.28 It is
a last dramatic witness of the Fiihrer caught only by the
cameraman.
What does film not give us, and why are some kinds of
film-reporting difficult, if not impossible? Film and sound have
provided the historian with a broken record of the past. The
witness of edited material in particular, has often been
deliberately falsified. These documents, like the written ones to
which we are accustomed, can easily be manipulated. There are
edited films in which whole newsreel stories and substantial
parts of documentary films have been manufactured out of
totally irrelevant stock shots. These were then titled and

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reported as authentic news-reporting of specific times and

places. Recording devices have rarely been on hand for
unanticipated events.29 Censorship had, and has, its effects.
Hitler was one of the most important figures of the twentieth
century, but American newsreel company-employed cameramen
were denied the right to film him. Their bosses thought that his
appearance on newsreel would be favourable propaganda!30 In
the immediate aftermath of the war, all of the incredibly
valuable out-takes of the 'German Weekly Newsreels' are said
to have been inadvertently destroyed by the Russians near
Berlin. Single copy out-takes from completed films, those
sections shot but not included in the final edition, like early
drafts of written manuscripts, are frequently thrown away.
Those that survive, like the completed film, often do so solely
by chance.
Some types of sound material, especially sound recordings of
popular music, have been badly neglected by all except a few
private collectors. It is as if these fantastically important
artifacts of popular culture were of insufficient value to be
housed with other documentation. Whatever the reason for
neglect of this fast disappearing resource, it is disappearin
the sound record, like the decaying film record of the hum
past, is, therefore, ever more severely limited.31
Likewise, access to this material, not to mention its
reproduction and use, is often limited by the indifference o
possessors to anything more than the complexities of copyrig
The outlandish greed of cinema and recording entrepreneurs
well known in the industry: its effect on the scholar is serio
to restrict his access to the media record. The same restrictions
are enforced by the dictatorial chiefs of various countries
holding officially predetermined views of the past. These
countries often deny scholars access to printed material, so that
access to the more explicit film record is even more restricted.
The present writer was not allowed to research in Soviet
archives, although all that was requested was a view of specific
published films from the secolid world war in order to
complete descriptive catalogues of certain actuality material.
1984 has been with us for a long time.
Technical limitations can make film research yet more
difficult. Sometimes film printed on old nitrate stock has
degenerated chemically to such an extent as to be unusable, or
has become dangerously flammable. Recording material may

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have actually shrunk, or faded. In view of the fact that the

whole range of film equipment is quite expensive, archives
cannot always provide adequate viewing facilities. Just as
formidable a barrier to the scholar at present is the fact that
much archival cataloguing is and will continue to be seriously
deficient, both incomplete and without adequate cross-
referencing. Published catalogues (to which we shall return later)
are almost non-existent, as are widely circulated descriptions of
collections. It is certainly fair to say, then, that film and sound
record and scholarly accessibility to them are deficient if not
non-existent. Serious film study, like all serious historical
research and writing, means work.
In these circumstances there is a real need for historians to
enter the archives, and even the attics and basements housing
collections and to assist in the largely neglected work of
discovering, identifying and cataloguing film evidence. Research
carried out by the present writer has proved that film evidence is
scattered and fragmentary, but that much of it can be identified
through comparative viewing and the finding of internal
evidence. Historians often have the travel and research time plus
the language skills which enable them to do the kind of
comparative research which is denied archivists, who are often
hard put just to keep tabs on and maintain the material they do
have. A recent, and unique publication of the British Universities
Film Council presents an absolutely invaluable model of the sort
of work that historians can accomplish in collaboration with
archivists.32 This writer's recent work of the same nature has
convinced him of the value of this work, if only because such a
publication will for the first time firmly establish the value of
film evidence. At the same time, cataloguing lays down the
challenge, rarely understood by historical documentary-makers
heretofore, of completing the kind of exhaustive research the
reconstruction of history always requires. At the very least, such
catalogues will give professional historical reviewers the chance
to ask a documentary film-maker to complete his research. At
the same time, the possibility of doing a more complete job will
be made obvious to other film-makers. There is no excuse for
publishing a film report (or any other report, for that mat
without reference to sources whose existence is made known in
readily accessible print. The recent texts coming out of the
United Kingdom set a standard which scholars from other

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countries should aim for. For a century or more, one of the

recognized tasks of historians and archivists has been the critical
editing for publication of documents as well as the edition of lists of
inventories. This is the task now facing scholars with regard to film
sources - to compile similar inventories, including content digests.
Learning the forms of film and sound expression is like
mastering a new language. As noted earlier, films communicate in a
number of ways, most of which we do not completely understand,
the peculiar working of an aesthetic and affective process which
Rudolf Arnheim called 'visual thinking',33 similar to that of music.
Yet film touches our minds as well as our emotions.34 Our making
cognitive sense of an edited film is probably learned. Sergei
Eisenstein tells the enlightening story of a Siberian peasant who
came to see his first silent film and was unable to make head or tail
of the montage of pictures, many of which he saw as baffling series
of views of faces, parts of bodies, arms, hands and legs. Film-goers
learn early on that the disconnected parts are actually arranged
systematically and seriatim to express something about the person
in the film - a cut to a hand or face may show nervousness,
firmness, shyness, certain mental or psychological states. Together
they utilize a commonly accepted argot to communicate.35
It is simple for the historian to develop some awareness of the
language of film and sound. The best way to begin is perhaps by
looking at some of the classical feature films, while continually
asking the question, 'How am I being given information?'
Historians working in film archives will probably have the
marvellous opportunity of seeing - and showing their students -
prints of little-known film documents - an effective way of
demonstrating first-hand historical sources as well as of training
themselves and students in film analysis.36
The study of some of the writings of the early documentary film-
makers in conjunction with their films will likewise be exceptionally
edifying for scholars and their students. Some documentary
workers have attempted to describe the rationale of their
undertaking and of their quest for representation, sometimes even
for truthful representation. Historians used to sophisticated
epistemological discussions may find certain aspects of film-
makers' statements somewhat ingenuous. For example, John
Grierson, though not referring to the historical compilation
film as such, wrote that documentary film is the 'creative
treatment of reality'. Dziga Vertov, equally famous among the

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early documentarists, noted that in his work he was 'organizing

the visual world'. The issue, of course, as historians will
immediately recognize, is, who creates, who organizes? And
from what standpoint? The fact is that while documentary film-
makers have been less concerned with the quest for truthful
representation, historians, by contrast, have so far been little
concerned with how to represent the historical truth.37
Eventually, an awareness will develop of the language and
conventions of film and the need to see the film author's biases,
and how they are conveyed. Bringing the same awareness to
students, who are so regularly battered by the visual and sound
media, but rarely trained in their analysis, is one of the most
urgent classroom tasks - one not to be shirked by historians.
Finally, and perhaps most important, the historian who has
gained some familiarity with film and sound sources and with
the language of film and sound should take up the challenge of
attempting to reconstruct history in the media. Every historian
writing today ought to set aside his pen until he has at least
considered alternative and potentially more expressive ways of
representing the past. To historians willing to do so, the
following are a few preliminary methodological observations.
For methodological thinking about how to depict the historical
subject matter is an inevitable concomitant of this wholly new
approach to scholarship and reporting.
Let it be assumed that the main film work, and thus the main
methodological problems, will be in the field of the compilation
film. As noted, reconstruction of history via re-enactment (by
contrast with the compilation of actuality documents) is almost
certain to be vastly more expensive, comparatively more difficult
to exploit meaningfully, and more restricted in its historical
value. Such work requires a different methodology. We shall,
therefore, only deal with the compilation film, which will almost
certainly become the metier of most historians who will
ultimately work in the medium. In the first place, compilation
film-making is closer to traditional academic budgets. Second,
the historical researcher finds the source materials in archives
and collections; he therefore begins with a familiar approach to
work. Third, actuality film and authentic sound have the
substantial qualities of real artifacts, as already suggested, and
possess the powerful evidence of any real document. The

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historian working in these media knows he is preparing a report

which, following the effects of discovery and design, can range
from the monographic to the broadly interpretive, but whose basic
pictorial substance is always primary sources one or more times
removed (but only via the film-printing process) from the original
material.
The historian working in film and sound meets the same kind of
initial methodological problems as the historian working in prose:
research and collection of dependable materials, communication of
the general and specific issues, and the discovery and revelation of
historical truth.
The raw stuff of film and sound compilation, chiefly found in
public and private archives, is rarely indexed as completely and as
exactly as archives of written documents with which most
historians are familiar. Hence the historian who has decided upon
his topic as a result of reading or, perhaps, after discovering some
film in an archive or an attic first turns to books and catalogues to
discover the further availability of material for his project. He may
subsequently make additional discoveries through the critical use of
internal evidence. For example, research work in audio-visual
media may actually add factual information which has not been
available in traditional source materials. But the film researcher
always remains in constant touch with available printed accounts
which may help to date, locate geographically and otherwise
identify the source. He works creatively and systematically through
his sources, his progress actuating that reciprocal interplay of
system, hunch, discovery, reflection, serendipity and patience
which characterizes all historical research.
Like other records, film and sound sources can be tested against
internal and other evidence to determine their authenticity. Thus
the historian-film-maker's planning, and the collection and
evaluation of materials against external and internal evidence
should follow the time-honoured course of traditional research, up
to a point. That point is reached when the film-maker-historian
reaches the limits of his visual and sound sources. A great deal of
what the historian knows to have occurred from other sources has
no film or sound record. Because of this, the historian must be
prepared to deal with problems of presentation when there are gaps
in the media evidence available for reconstruction. This leads us
inescapably to the methodological issues which underlie the
problems of construction. There has been little in the way of

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methodological theorizing about the relation of form and purpose,

medium and message in the informational film. This significant
semiotic gap cannot be filled here except by suggesting how history
and the audiovisual media best relate. This brief excursus, which is
meant to serve as a link with what has been said above about
reporting,38 is all there is room for here. Undeniably
documentary film contains both artistic (the creative manipula
of film and electronic technology) and thespian qualities (con
or unconscious behaviour before cameras and microphones an
exploitation of lighting, positioning of subject, etc.), however
'actual' the sources. These qualities ought to be recognized and
consciously, and in good conscience, exploited by the historical
compilation film-maker to help 'get the message' across. They
should not be treated as unimportant obliggati, or poorly used, or
ignored, out of a desire to deliver an 'objective' report whose
factualness is certified only by a sententious accompanying lecture.
At the point of actually joining the evidence, where the chosen
film-clips and sounds are strung together at the montage table, the
historian-film-maker first deviates from the traditional forms of
prose portrayal. Here he is confronted with the problems of filling
the gaps and of the form of the film. But, unlike the historian who
writes down his findings, the film-maker may publish in several
media at the same time. His expressive possibilities are manifold,
comparatively speaking, and so therefore, are the possibilities of
filling the gaps.39 The film-maker may likewise suggest information
via the use of cutting techniques to speed-up or retard the pace. He
may use flashes forward or back. He may add printed words where
the film and sound, separate or together, fail him in his story-
telling. He may use titles or subtitles, or interject sound-
commentary and narrative drawn from printed or other sources.
He may exploit the emotional mood set by music to reinforce or
affirm cognition. One thing he may not do, given the expense of
production, is leave the viewer a long time for contemplation of the
material.
Perhaps the reader reflecting on the usual historical compilation
film will not recall the use of most of these techniques. For most
compilation films have actually been carried forward almost
exclusively by narration with pictorial continuity established only
by voice accounting. In such films, the very authenticity of the
visual sources is implicitly affirmed in the same way.
What are the problems involved in the use of this technique? Let

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us imagine a hypothetical battle-scene, used symbolically by the

film-maker as an example of the typical use of film and sound in an
imaginary historical compilation film. 'Tanks crushed the German
eastern front late in the war,' a well modulated, all too often
ministerial voice intones. And we visually observe just such
weapons rolling across the screen (heard with super-added motors
at full roar), albeit probably crushing no-one just then. The
Germans in the next clip are moving homeward, in the same
direction; in the next, guns (hopefully Russian) fire: in the next,
Germans shoot from behind buildings in an east European village.
The continuity of the film hangs upon the sequential juxtaposition;
the quick identification of the action and its metaphorical
significance depend on the narration, which itself has told us the
symbolic meaning of the sequence. One small German retreat
suggests Germany's final defeat in the second world war. The
words augur that end. But this may have been a metaphorical battle
never fought, made from a number of film-clips from several battle
scenes. With such sequences used symbolically, no harm is done, so
long as the compiled heterogeneous sequences are not represented
as the Battle of Kursk, or some such specific conflict limited in time
and place.40
Of course, many film-makers who have no historical training will
have taken some care to see that the pictures in symbolic montage
illustrate, at least superficially, what is being narrated, though the
numerous gaffes to be found in cinema literature will suggest how
rarely even this minimal care is applied, Alas, one gaffe portends
another, just as one misused source in written work suggests
careless scholarship and, likewise, doubtful history. The language
of film will best convince us that those Germans are really fleeing
those tanks (whatever the narration, however disparate the sources
of the four slips, and irrespective of how metaphoric the
expression) if the Germans run west, e.g. from the viewer's right to
left, and shoot east. Our acceptance of the truth of the film also
depends on our seeing that the physical and climatological features
of the landscape in the several clips are similar and appropriate.
But the narration is usually utterly necessary to the sequencing in
such films in order to make the rhetorical point. The success of the
film probably depends on it.
The above sequence is from an imaginary film which, like those
which make up the bulk of the compilation genre, is a much
disdained 'lecture with pictures', in the style of 'The March of
Time' of the 1930s. Probably such films began as scripts to which

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were then added shots. This is a technique which the film-maker-

historian should avoid as far as possible, even when the temptation
to yield to it is great. Narrative should not carry the structure of
film.4' The richness and infinite possibilities of expression through
the historical materials of film and sound themselves are such that
taking refuge in literal narration to give the sequence its major
sense should be regarded as a last resort, to be chosen only when
further possibilities of reporting in the actual languages of film and
sound are denied. It may even be suggested that for a film-maker to
take refuge in a narrative, whether printed or spoken, which sets
forth the temporal-spatial development the pictures are supposed
to reveal, is a tacit confession of creative bankruptcy. Narration
may be a last available resort in an otherwise insoluble reportorial
dilemma, but it is not to be seized on lightly. Siegfried Kracauer has
proposed a film-maker's canon which most compilation film-
makers have ignored: 'the interpretation [must remain] a
photographic one'.42 To this one could add, it must also be a sound
one. It is through the techniques from which the media themselves
derive that the imaginative historian must primarily report his
results.
It is easiest to avoid the 'lecture with pictures' if the historian
working in film tries to pick his subject matter from collections of
the richest visual and sound sources, and eschews beginning with a
script culled from written sources which he hopes to go on to
furnish with visual sequences. There are so many unexploited or
poorly exploited collections of visual sources which cry out for film
expression.
Practically speaking, then, the historian-film-maker is driven
away from this kind of narrative to the very economies of style and
expression which, as has been noted, are the virtues of the visual
and sound media. The cost of production alone may be enough to
drive him to this. Beyond this, the success with which film-makers
have used the media on other subjects should inspire him. He may
accept the views of some theorists of the use of film in pedagogy
that the actual film - and sound - document carries with it such
authenticity, such a compelling power of reality, that it stimulates
further interest and inquiry into its subject matter, which the
didactic style of lecture accompaniment actually discourages.43 For
the narrational style forces the filmed report into the linear mode of
prose, annuls visual thinking, and undermines the very possibility
of critical teaching of the media languages. The viewer inevitably
participates in the film, which works on him physically and,

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especially when the message is inexplicit, forces him to work to

make all sensible continuity beyond that of the physical
sequencing. Work commands involvement. This means that the
narrative style, the lecture style, is at odds with the process of open-
ended classroom learning; not to be sure, the only process, but an
important one in history teaching. Finally, the super-added
narrative may destroy the effects of the different expressive
possibilities of the media described above, while contrasting
narrative history with modern film literature.44
The use of music and sound vis-a-vis the visuals should also be
mentioned. Music itself adds a dimension which helps to orient the
viewer's reception of the visual information. The silent film
accompanists and composers were probably amongst the first to
discover this and exploit it on a large scale. Certain selections went
well with sad scenes, or made them sadder, others seemed suited to
comic scenes, or made them funnier. Speed of perception was
partially controlled by musical rhythm. The conventions of music,
or numerical language, like film language, are also learned,
understood, and accepted by the viewer before he comes to film.
It is not only the content of a narration, but the very voice of the
narrator which carries some information. In a film on the political
and social work of Will Rogers, the American cowboy film-star of
fifty years ago, our film-making group deliberately chose a
narrator with a southwestern-American accent, not only to suit the
subject matter, but also to give a plausible home-spun touch to
appeal to the audience. Not only regional accents but also
phonetics carry added emotional value, with regard to printed
words, their style of presentation on the screen, as well as type
format and verbal sounds whether actual ambient noise, effects, or
music.45
It was pointed out above that music possesses the quality of
altering the reception of visual material. Now, of course, music and
other sounds are regularly manipulated even in visual and aural
advertisements to enhance the message. Music can make a
commentary for ironic purpose by way of counterpoint as well as
reinforce a film passage.46 It can also add to the stimulus of the
dramatic action. Programme music description by title and musical
quality of the passage may comment on two levels to the informed
and sensitive viewer. Music can sometimes be chosen from the time
and place of the film action.
In this writer's film on the destruction of Dresden,47 works of
composers who had worked in Dresden, whose music affectively as

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well as thematically and programmatically reinforced the historical

line presented, were used, as was music generally contemporary to
the action. Chanting Nazi mobs backed by Nazi music from
actuality recordings underlay the title sequence, which itself was
cinematographically designed to telegraph Dresden's fate to the
viewer. The music commented on the film sequences. The bells of
Dresden's Kreuzkirche, destroyed in 1945, rang over the death toll
shown in the final titles. Touches, perhaps, but important ones if a
sophisticated audience is to accept the verisimilitude of the
production.
Does the use of music undermine the nature of the actuality
material as a document?48 To some extent, yes; but the exact extent
has not been seriously considered by historians or others. The use
of actuality visuals without music or other sound, other than
ambient sound, if any, is also possible. The use of silence with
visuals, starkly juxtaposed with music or other sound before or
after, can be extremely dramatic, a comment as powerful as any
sound.49
In any case, the use of music or any other sound in film should
sustain critical analysis, like any other ingredient in the
composition. Music should not be added simply to tidy up a
botched or dramatically uninteresting, but necessary, sequence. As
usual, we are only at the beginning when it comes to understanding
and exploiting, not to mention critically teaching, the
understanding and exploitation of sound. Certainly it is fair to say
in the light of the above comments that the sound ought to bear
some relation to the film documents, and should be a document
contributing to historical understanding, affectively as well as
cognitively. It is high time that much more be said and written on
this neglected subject of sound and the documentary film -
specifically with respect to the historical compilation film.
Practically speaking, historians will perhaps at first have to work
with film and sound technicians to master production skills (and
the regrettably extensive and all too often misleading technical
jargon of the film and video world).50 But a simple beginning can
be made with how-to-do-it books, intelligent questioning of those
technically competent, and practice on home and school video and
sound-recording equipment.51 Practising video and sound-editing,
which requires no particularly sophisticated equipment by today's
standards, is the best start. Home video-sets and sound-recorders
often feature simple editing facilities. Universities, colleges, and

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some secondary schools often have basic sound-recording and

video facilities as well as eight- and sixteen-millimetre film-editing
stations. Open-reel sound tape-decks with instant pause plus live-
recording head features are suitable for editing. Hooked up in
tandem they can be used for many basic sound-composition tasks.
Both stereo open-reel and cassette decks can be used for sound-
mixing. The mixed-sound tape, once composed, can be recorded
onto the video tape on many home decks, and the film-shots can
then be cut back into the prearranged sound (this can also be done
the other way around).52 With such equipment, or with eight- and
sixteen-millimetre cameras and film editors, many schools have
long been encouraging students to make sound, video and film
productions. History teachers and professors can do the same,
drawing their material for practice use from copies of junked films,
amateur films or home video and sound-recordings.
More ought to be, and will be, written on, and done about the
whole subject of making films about history. It is high time. The
twentieth century is almost behind us. An attempt has been made to
move from the theoretical to the practical, touching with regard to
the latter at least briefly on the all-important task of archival
identification and cataloguing of film sources, on acquiring a
knowledge of the means of film expression, and on the actual ways
of changing ideas and sources into film productions. The type of
historical film which will best repay the considerable investments of
time and money required has been described. These films should
meet the requirements of creative and accurate expression as well as
the demands of various potential publics conditioned to sophistic-
ated understanding through extensive viewing.53
Historians need to move creative effort, money, and research
and classroom-time to film study and reporting rather than to say
just how all of this ought to be done. Not all historians will be able
to do the creative work of film production. Yet the rest of the tasks
described above also urgently need the sustained efforts of trained
historians - unless the media are to remain the possession of
entrepreneurs, propagandists, dramatists, journalists, and technic-
ians, and historians continue to forfeit to them the chance to try to
introduce the professional historical conscience into the most
important means for bringing our work before our many potential
publics.

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Notes
I am most grateful to the following institutions which made the writing of this article
possible: the International Research and Exchanges Board; the Deutscher
Akademischer Austauschdienst; California State University, Hayward.
1. Woodrow Wilson quoted by Lewis Jacobs, 'D.W. Griffith and the Film
Today', in David Talbot (ed.), Film: an Anthology (Berkeley, Cal. 1967), 312; Lenin
quoted by Siegfried Kracauer, The Theory of Film (New York 1960), 160. See also
Marc Ferro, Cinema et histoire (Paris 1977), 85, 122.
2. Quoted by Christian Metz, Essais sur la signification au cinema (Paris 1968),
15-16.
3. See, especially, the study of Janus Rulka, Wplyw filmu na rozw6j myslenia
historycznego uczni6w (Bydgoszcyz 1969), passim.
4. Roy Huss and Norman Silverstein refer to Stephen Daedalus' (from James
Joyce) description of the artist to suggest the role of the person who controls film
content: '. . Like the God of creation he remains within, or behind, or above his
handiwork, invisible.' The Film Experience. Elements of the Motion Picture Art
(New York 1968), 38. Very useful is the sharp dissection of the 'documentary' film
in all its aspects, done with a view to showing just how film for schools is
manipulated, and how it may yet be exploited effectively by the teacher: Bernhard
Wember, Objektiver Dokumentarfilm? Modell einer Analyse und Materialen fur
den Unterricht (Berlin 1972), 9-16, 61-79.
5. See, especially, Rudolf Arnheim, Visual Thinking (Berkeley, Cal. 1969), 315.
6. See, Sergei V. Drobashenko, Film und Leben. Uber das kunstlerische Bild im
Dokumentarfilm (Ger. trans., Berlin 1963), 34, on the tremendous propaganda
influence and success of the Soviet documentary film during the second world war;
also, Ferro, Cinema et histoire, 85. Ernest Lindgren, The Art of the Film (London
1963), 62; and Olaf Groehler, 'Zum Verhaltnis von Geschichtsschreibung und
Dokumentarfilm', in DEFA - Dokumentarfilm. Internationale Tendenzen.
Dokumentarfilm im Gesprach (Berlin 1978), on the importance of the historical film
in the formative years of the East German state (33).
7. The International Association for the Study of History and the Audio-Visual
Media.
8. In the United Kingdom, the British Universities Film Consortium; in the

Federal Republic of Germany, the Institut fur den wissenschaftlichen Film in
Gottingen.
9. Most important, Francis Thorpe and Nicholas Pronay with Clive Coultass,
British Official Films in the Seond World War. A Descriptive Catalogue (Oxford
1980); and, Elizabeth Oliver (ed.), Researcher's Guide to British Film and Television
Collections (London 1980); Maxfield Bray, Guide to the Ford Film Collection in the
National Archives (Washington, D.C. 1970).
10. Many authors have suggested that the importance of these films is not that
they give us historical reality, but that they tell us 'how it really was'. An
insubstantial play on words, in my opinion, since even the best historians nowadays
have little confidence in their abilities to reach Ranke's goal. But authorities are
frequently summoned to suggest this excuse. See also John Howard Lawson, Film.
The Creative Process (second ed., New York 1967), 301: 'The creative (!!-RCR)
organization of the material necessitates strict observance of the requirements of the

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theme, which is not at all the same as strict subservience to the data of history '
(301).
11. It is true that the rejected parts (out-takes), or other partial versions of the
same film may be useful to the historian studying the creation of the feature film for
which they were prepared, or the works of the film's author(s).
12. See Hayden V. White, 'The Burden of History', History and Theory, V
(1966), 127-131.
13. Siegfried Kracauer, History. The Last Things Before the Last (New York
1963), 182-183, 199.
14. Hans Mayerhoff (ed.), The Philosophy of History in Our Time (New York),
14, quoting SOren Kierkegaard.
15. Raymond Durgnat, Films and Feelings (Cambridge, Mass. 1967), 31-32.
16. BoYeslaw W. Lewicki, Funkcje informacyne struktury dziela filmowego
(Zeszyty naukowy Universytetu Lodzkiego 1963, ser. 1, z. 29), 96-98; Kracauer,
History, op. cit., 182; Sergei Eisenstein, 'Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today', in
Film Form (ed. and trans. by Jay Leyda, New York 1957), passim.
17. Arthur Miller quoted by Gerald O'Grady, 'The Preparation of Teachers of
Media', in John Stuart Katz (ed.), Perspectives on the Study of Film (Boston 1971),
310; Kracauer, History, op. cit., 182; White, loc. cit., passim.
18. Lindgren, op. cit., 62; Drobashenko, op. cit., 34; Ted Perry, 'The Seventh
Art as Sixth Sense', in Katz, op. cit., 114; Susan Sontag, 'Theatre and Film', ibid.,
84; Marcel Martin, in Cinema 63 (1963) quoted by Leyda, op. cit. 26-27 fn.
19. Jacobs, in Talbot, op. cit. 397; Hugo Mauerhofer, 'Psychology of Film
Experience', in Richard Dyer McCann, Film, A Montage of Theories (New York
1966), 231.
20. John Stuart Katz, 'Interaction and Film Study', in Katz, op. cit., 286, fn 9;
Huss and Silverstein, op. cit., 38; John A.S. Grenville, Film as History. The Nature
of Film Evidence (Birmingham, Eng. 1970), 17, 22.
21. Dali, quoted by Kracauer, Theory, op. cit., 189.
22. Paul Rotha, et al., Documentary Film (third ed., New York 1963), 347; Bela
Balasz, Theory of the Film (London n.d.), 218-219; Lincoln F. Johnson, Film,
Space, Time Light and Sound (New York 1974), 178; Sergei Eisenstein, et al. 'A
Statement', in Film Form (ed. and trans. by Jay Leyda, London 1963), 257-259;
Pierre Schaeffer, 'L'element nonvisual au cinema', La revue du cinema, ser.
nouvelle, I (1946), No. 1, 45; No. 3, 51-54.
23. Sol Worth, 'Film as a Non-Art: An Approach to the Study of Film', in Katz
op. cit., 199, thinks it is imperative to found a new field of study, 'vidistics'. Good
introductory essays for historians undertaking work in film are to be found in Paul
Smith (ed.), The Historian and Film (Cambridge, Eng. 1974). See, especially the
articles by Lisa Pontecorvo, 'Film Resources' and William Hughes, 'The Evaluation
of Film as Evidence'. A good many of the essays here have their chief value for
historians in the UK. A very important introductory essay is Pierre Sorlin's first
chapter, 'How to Look at an Historical Film', in his The Film in History. Restaging
the Past (Oxford 1980), although he is chiefly interested in the feature film.
24. Hans-Joachim Giese, Die Fillmwochenschau im Dienste der Politik (Dresden
1940), 21 and fn 18, p. 21.
25. WYadystaw Forbert, 'Wir die kinographische Armee', in Wolfgang Klaue,
et al., Dokumentarfilm in Polen (Berlin 1968), tells how wartime shots were
prearranged to suit pre-established shooting schedules (22-23); Antoni Bohdiewicz,
'In Warschau und Krakau', ibid., tells of more of the same (23-28); Marc Ferro,

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Analyse de film, analyse des societes. Une source nouvelle pour l'histoire (Paris
1975), 20-21; Lawson, op. cit., 260.
26. Jerzy Bossak, the noted Polish documentary film-maker, doubts that the
actuality film can show inner feelings. But Bossak himself notes that people react in
front of a camera or microphone, and that reaction itself is often the moment of an
unguarded psychological revelation. See Jerzy Bossak in 'Aus der Werkstatt -
Dokumentaristen uber ihre Tatigkeit', in Klaue, op. cit., 114, 116. I do not share his
observation after seeing an inestimable number of metres of actuality material,
edited and unedited, over the last ten years. See above, in the text, my observations
of Hitler, virtually a professional actor, in his unguarded moments. While reviewing
actuality metrage of the second world war, I have seen unstudied bodily and facial
reflections of emotions ranging from terror to joy - especially in scenes where it
seemed obvious that the camera was ignored, or unseen, by those being
photographed. Yet the sequences I described in the text of the Warsaw boys with the
graves and the smiles of the young Jews for the German cameras show fear and
innocence, and the Jews' smiles hope, as well.
27. Ferro, Cinema et histoire, 120-122.
28. For the film 'Berlin' (1945 and several later editions). See Boris Medvedev,
Svidetel' obvineniia (second ed., Moscow 1971), 153; and the German translation of
Helmuth Weidling's protocol, 'Der Endkampf in Berlin (23.4 - 2.5.1945)'.
Wehrwissenschaftliche Rundschau, 1962, Nr. 1, 40-52; Nr. 2, 111-118; Nr. 3,
169-174 (originally published in Voenno-istoricheskii zhurnal, Nr. 10 and 11, 1961).
A comment in authentication of Weidling (also supplied in part by the film evidence
unknown to the German commentator): 'Stellungnahme zur Dokumentation Gen.
d. Art. H. Weidling Der Endkampf in Berlin', Wehrwissenschaftliche Rundschau,
1962, Nr. 6, 355-357.
29. Giese, op. cit., 21.
30. Raymond Fielding, The American Newsreel, 1911-1967 (Norman,
Okla.1972), 278.
31. Leyda, op. cit., 106.
32. See above, fn 9, the work by Thorpe, Pronay and Coultass, and the very
useful directories by Oliver and others.
33. Arnheim, op. cit., 315; Worth, in Katz, op. cit., 199; and Drobashenko, op.
cit., 26: 'the purpose of Publizistik is to create an emotionally effective sequence'.
34. Marshall McLuhan, 'Movies: The Real World', in T.J. Ross, Film and the
Liberal Arts (New York 1970), 325-326.
35. One of my favorite didactic devices in film analysis classes at my university is
to play radically different musical selections with the same film sequence to show
how the quality and pace of the music helps to fix our reception of the film
information, and thereby to set up a discussion of the use of music in the
documentary film. On the nature of film sound see Christian Metz, Langage et
cinema (Paris 1971), 10; Schaeffer, loc. cit., No. 1, 45: No. 3, 51-54; Boleslaw
Lewicki, 'Film naukowy jako przekas informacyjny', Kwartalnik filmowy, XII
(1962), Nr. 3, 8.
36. See Martin A. Jackson, 'Film as a Source Material: Some Preliminary Notes
Toward A Methodology', in Journal of Interdisciplinary History, IV (1973), 73-80.
Jackson means a research methodology.
37. The quotes repeated by Bossak, 'Aus der Werkstatt', loc. cit., 110. A perfect
example: Paul Rotha undoubtedly meant well when he wrote affirmatively and, at
the same time, ambiguously, that cinema is 'by far the most potent medium by

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which a nation can disseminate its characteristic ideas in the popular mind
throughout the world': see Paul Rotha, et al., op. cit., 206-208. The perils of such
film-making out of political predisposition are also innocently revealed by Groehler,
loc. cit., 39, who hails from the 'Socialist' (Unity) side of Berlin, as well as by
Wember, op. cit., passim, whose outstanding critical approach is counterbalanced
by an equally fervid 'infantile leftist' (as the term has been used by some in the same
camp) political standpoint. Yet just as typical of film-maker's naivete, Claudia
Weill, former documentarist, telling why she quit the trade: '1 was tired of hanging
around waiting for people to say what I wanted them to say, then spending months
in an editing room manipulating what they had said into what I wanted them to say.'
Quoted by George F. Colt, in 'Claudia at 34: Film is Just my Way of Organizing the
World', Harvard Magazine, LXXXIII (1981), 35.
38. The historian-reader probably knows that there has been all too little such
consideration about historical reporting in general. On problems of expression in the
documentary film, see Lewicki, 'Film naukowy jako przekas informacyjny', loc.
cit., 3-11; Drobashenko, op. cit., 26-27, 64; and the replies by Jerzy Bossak and
Kazimierz Karabasz to the questionnaire submitted by the editors of Kwartalnik
filnowy to famous Polish documentarists, 'Z Ankiety rola i specyfika filmu
dokumentalnego', XIV (1965), Nr. 2, 23-29; Wember, op. cit., passim.
39. The imaginative possibilities of using 'Rashomon'-type solutions for the
representation of complex historical situations is one of the most exciti:ig that film
affords.
40. There is one annoying trick, most often used in battle sequences, and
sometimes elsewhere, that is certainly to be avoided, if only because it undermines
the confidence of the viewer in the accuracy of the report by suggesting the
improbable authenticity of the film evidence. I call this the two (sometimes three,
four or more) camera set-up. An example: gunners load and fire a giant artillery
piece (camera one); a shell explodes far away (the viewer is led to imagine himself far
off behind enemy lines with a second friendly camera operator - or to imagine that
film of the correct explosion was actually borrowed for the production from the
enemy). Improbable, but a technique often used just because it carries out the literal
thinking of the maker for -his imagining of the literal-thinking viewer. With air
battles, the number of cameras often reaches four or even more: e.g., view of
friendly plane taking off; plane in air viewed from accompanying aircraft; air battle
with first plane and opponent viewed from ground or third (or fourth, fifth, etc.)
aircraft; enemy aircraft falls (viewed from original aircraft, or from the ground or
both), then hits the ground with explosion (viewed from far, near, or both), etc., ad
nauseam. Films made up substantially of material like this have won major film
prizes. (N.B. Given by film-makers, and not by historians.) There are many of the
same sorts of tricks to be avoided. Cf. Sergei Drobashenko, op. cit., 166-167, 182.
41. Karabasz, in 'Z ankiety', loc. cit., 37. Ernest Lindgren analyses the non-film
origins of the 'lecture with pictures' (op. cit., 9); Jay Leyda years ago criticized the
unimaginative literalness of television documentaries, but so far without much
effect (op. cit., 107). For example, see the innocent pro domo apologia of the
makers of Thames Television's 'The World at War', not by any means the worst of
the recent series of historical documentaries, in Journal of the Society of Film
Television Arts (London), II (1974), no. 9-10, 1-28.
42. Kracauer, History, op. cit., 363; see also Bossak, 'Aus der Werkstatt', 120.
43. Arnheim, op. cit., 308, 315; Anthony Schillaci, 'Film as Environment', in

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Katz, op. cit., 217, 226, strongly advocates the open-ended instructional film.
44. Michael Roemer, 'The Surface of Reality', ibid., 106; Huss and Silverstein,
op. cit., 31; Balasz, op. cit., 218-219.
45. See above, fn 35, and Ferro, Analyse de film, op cit., 37.
46. Bossak, in 'Z ankiety', loc. cit., 28; Eisenstein, 'The Structure of Film', in
Film Form, op. cit., 178-179. Ken Cameron, Sound and the Documentary Film
(London 1947), 47-48.
47. 'Storm of Fire. World War II and the Destruction of Dresden'. See below fn
53.
48. A point made by Jerzy Bossak in an interview with the author, 30 January
1981.
49. An excellent example is found in the penultimate sequence of Erwin Leiser's

well-known film, 'Mein Kampf' (1961).
50. Compare, for example, Olaf Groehler's conviction (loc. cit., 36) that the
historian should work in collaboration with the documentary-maker, and the views
of Clive Hewitt and Arthur Marwick, shared by this writer, that it is the task of the
historian to master the techniques of expression in film and sound, just as it is
necessary for him to command them in prose (Hewitt and Marwick in University
Vision. Journal of the British Universities Film Council, No. 9, 1972, 16. My own
views expressed in 'Clio's Dark Mirror: The Documentary Film in History', The
History Teacher, VI, 1972, 109-118). Do not these points of view reflect as much as
anything the two political worlds, that of the GDR where all means of expression are
controlled by the central state authorities, and that of the two Britons and an
American, who can, as I have suggested in the text, easily succeed in gaining access
to available film and sound production resources plus laboratory facilities and
multiple points of entry to the laissez-faire world of public and educational
distribution?
51. One of the best how-to-do-it books is Jerrold E. Kemp, Planning and
Producing Audiovisual Materials (second ed., Scranton, Pa. 1968). Good
bibliographical leads provided.
52. My experience has been that, when using such simple equipment, it is easier to
do it this way than the other way around - though film professionals for a number
of reasons, including notions of the primacy of picture, usually edit sound to fit
film.
53. It is difficult to give many instructive examples of successful films by

historians. Certainly the films of the Inter University Historical Film Consortium,
those that I have seen, successfully represent the more traditional style of didactic
film; those of the Cadre Film group in the United States, with which I have made my
own films, were attempts to use maximally the powers of film and sound. They have
been sharply attacked by some historians as well as by non-historians for their
emotionally-laden reportage, which was purposefully designed to exploit these
reportorial media. These films were planned to give the instructor using the films
and accompanying materials the opportunity to dissect them, with the help of the
class, with a view to teaching both critical analysis of the historical content and the
mechanisms of film-reporting in history. The historian considering the form of a
proposed undertaking in film-reporting should surely see examples of as many kinds
of historical films as possible before starting work. Certainly we are all only
beginners when it comes to finding ways of historical expression in film. Those who
do history well will be those who best capture the sense of how things really were -

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as judged by all possible criteria, and especially by the use of all possible evidence.
The IUHFC films are available from British Universities Film Council, Ltd., 81
Dean St., London W1V 6VA. The Cadre films are available in the United States
from Churchill Films, 662 N. Robertson B1., Los Angeles, Cal., 90069. The Cadre
film, 'Storm of Fire. World War II and the Destruction of Dresden', (1978) is
available in the UK from Bolton-Hawker Films, Hadleigh, Ipswich, Suffolk, IP7,
5BG.
R.C.Raack
is a Professor of History at California

State University, Hayward. He is the
author of numerous articles on the use of
film in the teaching of history and editor
of teaching manuals designed to
accompany historical compilation films in
classroom use. He is currently working on
the compilation of a catalogue of actuality
materials on Poland in the second world
war and a catalogue of contents of
newsreels and documentary films from the
Soviet Zone of Occupation in Germany,
1945-49.

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1983 - Raack - Historiography As Cinematography

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Historiography as Cinematography: A Prolegomenon to Film Work for Historians

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/260545

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'Like writing history with lightning', American President

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words themselves, and on the varying qualities of spoken language

It is true that in the last fifteen years historians' distance from

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that these records are often stored in archives readily accessible to

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uninteresting contrast with the experience of our actual daily

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accustomed to the capturing of emotional and cognitive encounters

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worked in effective counterpoint to the film sequence. The effect

Enormous creative reportorial opportunities for hist

The tasks now before historians willing to work with film an

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like the sound, is only conditionally a document.24 It is not

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the happy mugging for the camera of Warsaw boys standing

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reported as authentic news-reporting of specific times and

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have actually shrunk, or faded. In view of the fact that the

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countries should aim for. For a century or more, one of the

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early documentarists, noted that in his work he was 'organizing

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historian working in these media knows he is preparing a report

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methodological theorizing about the relation of form and purpose,

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us imagine a hypothetical battle-scene, used symbolically by the

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were then added shots. This is a technique which the film-maker-

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especially when the message is inexplicit, forces him to work to

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well as thematically and programmatically reinforced the historical

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some secondary schools often have basic sound-recording and

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8. In the United Kingdom, the British Universities Film Consortium; in the

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49. An excellent example is found in the penultimate sequence of Erwin Leiser's

53. It is difficult to give many instructive examples of successful films by

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is a Professor of History at California

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