CHAPTER 1

Introduction: From the Archive to the Screen

It is not easy to fully convey the sense of personal fulfillment I felt the first time I saw on the big screen historical characters that I had created – to watch them act and express emotions in words and actions that I had meticulously written or co-written. That sense of fulfillment was compounded by my awareness that tens of thousands of viewers were going to watch those images and sequences in the following weeks and months, whether at movie theatres or on television, and would draw from that story whatever understanding they could about the past.

Yet I was also aware that those characters, the events they were part of and the impulses that made them act, were the culmination of a long process of historical research that – not unlike most historians – I had pursued through a variety of documentary sources that ultimately were transmuted into an eighty-four-minute motion picture. Thanks to the creative skills of the director and the production team, the film in question (Caffé Italia, Montréal, 1985) received an enthusiastic welcome by both film critics and academic historians, and after a long screening life on television, in film repertoires, and in classrooms, today is considered a classic in French-Canadian filmography.

But from my own perspective as a historian, I wondered, was I contributing to simplifying history by taking the shortcut of filmic narration? And by mixing fiction and facts, was I not manipulating the viewers’ perception of the past?

While in the back of my mind, at the time those kinds of questions were held at bay by the excitement for what I thought to be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to use my research in a different way and through a medium that would allow me to make my historical findings available to larger audiences.

Yet, in one form or another, questions regarding the manipulation or distortion of the past by films had been with me since my early days as a history student and moviegoer, and in the ensuing years they kept cropping up every time I watched a historical film – sometimes as afterthoughts, other times in disturbing ways.

I vividly remember the first time I attended a screening of D.W. Griffith’s 1915 movie The Birth of a Nation at the local student film club. The movie deals with the American Civil War and the subsequent “heroic” rise of the Ku Klux Klan. It can rightly be considered one of the first historical long feature films since the birth of cinema. The student who introduced the movie stressed its pivotal importance in the history of motion pictures, particularly for its use of the camera and its editing techniques, and simply warned us that it was a racist movie. As those interminable sequences of battles, political intrigue, and romance unfolded, there was no question in my mind that, despite Griffith’s artistic genius and the technical innovations of the movie, Griffith was also intent on imparting a history lesson. Apart from the movie’s unambiguous white supremacist interpretation, Griffith assorted scenes and sequences with written quotations from historical personalities and contemporary historians (from Lincoln to Woodrow Wilson) and ensured that viewers could appreciate that several locations he used were historically authentic. One such location was the South Carolina Legislative Chamber. In what was portrayed as an ordinary legislative session, newly elected Afro-Americans – many of them former slaves – were shown sitting (when not lounging) with their naked feet on the tables, some dozing, others devouring chicken legs, none taking seriously the state business for which they had been elected. And how could they, as the less-than-civilized beings the film made them out to be?

Film scholars have dwelt at length on the reasons that led such a talented artist to choose that historical theme and to treat it as he did, as well as on the immediate repercussions that his movie had on US race relations. My point here is that, along with its grand filmic style, The Birth of a Nation had signalled the irreversible entry of the historical motion picture into the American universe of cinema. And it had done so by corroborating and pushing to the extreme the white-supremacist interpretation that prevailed at the time among scholars.

With the growing professionalization of filmmaking and the rise of the Hollywood film industry, subsequent historical movies tended to be more guarded in conveying explicit messages or interpretations about the past than The Birth of a Nation. But much like most viewers – whether historians or not – I did not possess the critical tools to fully analyze those movies. While I might have enjoyed them as entertainment – appreciating the acting, images, and that particular “magic” that only the silver screen can produce – more often than not, I left the theatre with a sense of skepticism or mixed feelings about the accuracy or even credibility of the events and characters. Such mixed feelings were compounded by the fact that historical films came (and still do) in a variety of stylistic forms and narrative traditions. One does not have to be a film critic or scholar to notice the striking contrast in the use of the film medium to portray the past in two of the most celebrated historical movies of all times, both of which deal with critical chapters in national history: Victor Fleming’s Gone with the Wind (1939), set against the backdrop of the American Civil War and the Reconstruction era and told from the perspective of white Southerners, and Sergei Eisenstein’s October (1928), a celebratory dramatization of the 1917 October Revolution meant as a Soviet silent propaganda film. These two films stand at opposite extremes in terms of the aesthetics of the images, style of acting, use of romance to achieve a desired narrative ending, and in their ability to make “the past come alive,” so to speak, for the viewers. This comparative exercise could be extended to hundreds of historical films that grew out of different cinematic and artistic cultures.

My European upbringing had no doubt exposed me to a variety of filmic productions and cinematic styles, despite the hegemony that Hollywood has exerted on the world’s silver screens. And though I was not a film student, I was able to differentiate between a typical Hollywood studio production and movies – mostly European – known as cinéma d’auteur, where directors enjoy a much greater artistic autonomy in their use of filmic language and a greater freedom to interpret the past in keeping with their artistic (and often ideological) convictions. Still, despite a director’s good intentions, I wondered, was the filmic treatment of the past in itself bound to distort renditions of the past because of the technical imperatives that the film (as opposed to the typical historical monograph) imposed?

Looking back at those experiences, I am pretty sure that much of the frustration and ambivalence I felt resulted from my inability to reconcile in my own mind the dual quality inherent in most of those kinds of movies – their being at once works of art and vehicles of historical information for large viewing audiences.

In later years, I began to pinpoint some of the sources of my frustration when I came across the seminal essay by the eminent German art historian and philosopher, Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.”¹ Written in 1935 when film was still a relatively new art form, Benjamin analyzed the most relevant epochs in art history, particularly with regard to the relation between the art object and the beholder, and provided arguments for considering film-making a revolutionary art form. Benjamin’s objective in that essay was not to produce a theory of film. He was, rather, intent on showing the ways in which film had radically transformed the traditional relation between art objects and audiences thanks to unprecedented advances in technology. Building on previous technical innovations, film constituted the historic culmination in the trend of reproducing mechanically works of arts and making them available to increasingly large numbers of viewers.

Although Benjamin did not pursue this issue further (his life came to a tragic end a few years later), his analysis in many ways prefigured the two major tendencies that were already underway and would increasingly mark cinema into the twenty-first century: its being both an art form and a product for mass consumption and, at the same time, the most complex medium from a technical and aesthetic viewpoint. As such, cinema would feed mass culture and influence the worldview and the behavioural patterns of many of its consumers. In fact, as early as 1923, figures released in the United States showed that in any week of January 1923 an average of fifty million Americans had sat in the fifteen thousand movie theatres throughout the country to view one or more of the several dozens of films distributed at the time.²

A sort of two-track race was already well underway: on one track, film artists working at exploring and experimenting with new techniques and approaches to create and refine a filmic language that could convey to the fullest the narrative potential of the medium; on the other track, the film industry bent on making their products the most appealing to the tastes and psychic needs of an increasingly large viewing public by using narrative formulae that were constantly updated as changes in popular moods, market trends, and lifestyles evolved.

We know very well the outcome of this race and which one of the two “racers” prevailed; we know how, for much of the twentieth century, cinema became the most potent vehicle of mass entertainment and a leading shaper of mass culture. Even more to the point, since the birth of cinema, filmmakers have regularly drawn their stories from the past. War-related movies are probably the leading example, but this trend extends to the portrayal of well-known historical personalities and major events in a nation’s history (and in many cases minor events or figures drawn from historical novels). It is no exaggeration to say that for large sectors of our societies, these kinds of movies have often been the major source (however impressionistic) of knowledge about the past – much as historical novels and theatrical productions had played a similar role prior to the advent of movies. When films like Cabiria, The Birth of a Nation, or October invaded movie theatres and electrified viewers, few would have guessed that an epochal transition in historical culture – from one based on the written page to one based on the moving image – had begun.

And yet it was only in the 1960s and 1970s that scholars began to take motion pictures seriously. Along with the technological, institutional, and stylistic evolution in moviemaking, scholars’ growing awareness that films were also “documents” or “texts” that reveal a great deal about the prevailing cultural and societal dynamics in any given era led to the rise and rapid growth of film studies as a distinct field. Previously pursued primarily in film institutes or academies, film studies underwent an exponential growth as one university after another integrated them into their programs. Moreover, scholars from disciplines such as literature, sociology, anthropology, and communications made films a part of their research agendas.

Historians’ interest for the study of films moved at the speed of a snail. When, in 1968, Marc Ferro, a young French historian, cried “eureka” in the pages of the prestigious historical journal Les Annales, he conceded that historians could not be entirely faulted for having neglected cinema and cinematographic sources: “The excessive cult for the written document has nailed them to the ground.” As a result, he added, “it has escaped them that, at least for the contemporary era, they could avail themselves of documents of a new kind and of a different language”³ – documents that required a major reassessment of conventional historical methodologies. Ferro had recently got his hands on newsreels of military and diplomatic events in the Great War. As he recalled in later years, “watching those images came to me as a shock … and from that time on I realized that the image does not say exactly the same thing as the written document, or at least it says it differently.”⁴ In many ways, his short Annales piece was a sort of scholarly manifesto urging fellow historians to make cinema central to historical studies. And he predicted that “This cinematic sociohistory will develop at the levels of the research, creation, and teaching.”⁵

Ferro’s words proved to be prophetic. The ensuing years, in fact, witnessed a gradual, if unequal, interest in cinema among historians in a number of countries; this interest gained momentum through the 1980s as the study of cinema became part of the agenda of several historical associations, and films – especially documentaries – began appearing in the curricula of history courses.⁶ By the end of the twentieth century, research on film history had resulted in an ever-expanding body of literature that touched on virtually all aspects of the movie-making enterprise and filmic discourse; yet this research was hardly able to keep pace with the growing output of visual history coming not merely from film studios but also from television chains in the form of docudramas and especially documentaries. In 1999, writing in the American Historical Association’s newsmagazine, historian Richard White commented, “Television documentaries have become, for better or for worse, the medium through which most Americans learn about the nation’s past” – an assessment that one may easily extend to many other countries.⁷

To be sure, this rapid surge in the historical literature did not come without perplexing consequences. In one of the first reviews of this body of scholarship, Rémy Pithon found that studies on the relations between history and cinema had become a sort of container for all kinds of interests and approaches, and he lamented that the lack of clear methodologies was partly responsible for what he termed “a great deal of confusion … on the relations between cinema and history.”⁸ As recently as 2012, a leading film historian characterized history and film “a sub-field in search of a methodology.”⁹

Still, few contemporary historians need to be convinced about the relevance of films for the historical study and the teaching of society, culture, and politics. Unlike previous generations of historians, they have grown up in the image-driven age of mass communication, and they are more aware of the many ways films, whether on theatre or television screens, have impacted their world and life views.

A tangible sign of today’s historians’ rapprochement to the medium of film may be observed in their ongoing involvement in the production of historical documentaries. Historians often offer filmmakers the initial idea for a film project, act as historical consultants, and appear on screen as experts. Though much less frequently, some of them have produced their own documentaries. This should not be surprising as the making of conventional historical documentaries has several important affinities with the production of scholarly works. The conventional historical documentary, in fact, aims at being informative, when not overtly educational. It is structured around a thesis that often unfolds with the help of a narrating voice – what the Italian film scholar Marco Bertozzi has ironically called “history’s voice of truth.”¹⁰ Moreover, it documents its thesis through the display of “evidence” in the form of visual sources, such as archival films and photographs, and real witnesses – though it often gives viewers the opportunity to draw their own conclusions. Finally, like a scholarly bibliography, the credit section of the film lists all the audiovisual sources used as well as the archives and repositories from which the sources originated.

Of course, one should not minimize the creative work that goes into a historical documentary where the camera work, sound effects, and especially montage allow directors to use their cinematic artistry to bring out the poetics or accentuate elements of real-life drama to make the film both informative and entertaining. Still, the historian’s influence on the documentary’s narrative strategy and message varies from case to case. Referring to his frequent consulting experiences, historian Richard White concluded, “[it] is not always a happy partnership” and is often a source of frustration.¹¹ For Daniel Walkowitz, who has also written about his frustrations as a historical consultant to documentary films, the ideal solution would be for historians to ensure control on the final cut or even direct and produce their own documentaries.¹²

The historians’ relationship with the feature historical film – the genre that is the focus of this book – has been more problematic, however, mainly because the centrality of fiction gives freedom to filmmakers in their treatment of the past. Moreover, unlike in documentaries, they are exempted by long-established artistic conventions from revealing the sources of their research on screen. Furthermore, while some historians and viewers in general are willing to acquiesce in what Samuel Coleridge called the “suspension of disbelief,” others maintain a critical stance regarding the standard practice of placing invented characters or events in a historical narrative.

But as I shall argue in the following chapters, the question should not merely be whether the use of fiction is problematic. After all, other academic disciplines that study historical films understand fiction as an integral part of filmic narration and rarely question it. Rather, the question should be about how fiction is employed: Is it used to give unbridled liberty, as indeed it often happens, with the primary objective of making the film more attractive to viewers’ tastes and more likely to score commercial success? Or as a narrative device in the service of the most expressive art form in ways that may enrich a portrayal of the past while at the same time enhance its understanding? In either case, one can appreciate the bittersweet experience that some historians have had while serving as advisors in dramatic history films, even more so when the subjects of the films were based on books they’ve written. Those who have cared to write about it have offered illuminating thoughts on how, in some cases, they helped sensitize the filmmakers’ historical perspectives but have been unable to influence their narrative choices.¹³ Robert Brent Toplin expressed the feeling of many fellow historians when, commenting on these collaborative experiences, he stated that “many historians who have worked behind the scenes as consultants to film projects are not happy with their experiences. They complain that filmmakers often assign them to advisory roles only to advertise that the films received a scholarly stamp of approval.”¹⁴

However frequently this form of “utilitarian exchange” between the historian and the filmmaker may occur, there is much more to it. And it has to do with the very nature of the historical feature film and the narrative modes it calls forth. While the borderline between “scientific knowledge and artistic creation,” to use Marc Ferro’s expression, has proven somewhat porous in the production of historical documentaries, when it comes to historical feature films it is as if no crossing of the line were allowed. Most often, in fact, filmmakers tap into the historical knowledge derived from archives or other sources, including the expertise the historians/advisors offer; but then they move on to moulding “history” (in the sense of research-generated historical knowledge) into a story to be communicated to large audiences, and they do so by using, as best as they can, the language of cinematic fiction. They are now squarely on the terrain of artistic creation, where techniques, experience, intuition, and imagination become paramount, and where the director and the various members of the production team contribute their talents and aesthetic sensibilities to the construction of the moving image and the pursuit of their vision.

One may dare say that in most intellectually engaged historical films, a sort of “fictional turn” occurs whereby research-generated knowledge gets transformed into filmic narration. At what point in the lifecycle of a film project this turn occurs would have to be scrutinized case by case. In films that entail an original subject (and not an adaptation of a historical novel), the turn is most likely to occur at the screenwriting stage (see Chapter 2). In the film project that led to Water, for instance, writer/director Deepa Mehta was initially moved by a desire to know more about the phenomenon of child widowhood as it existed in India before its abolition. As she recounts, “Once I was deep into the research … I realized it would be a great story.” From that point on, she had to re-envision the knowledge she had accumulated as a “story” to be told cinematically, starting with the writing of the screenplay.¹⁵ Noted Italian directors and screenwriters Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, who don’t hide their love for historical research, are more concrete: “From our discussions, notes, readings,” they say, “emerges the idea of a possible story to tell. We write a treatment of about 100 pages in order to verify on paper whether the project may work … if we find it convincing, we move on and write the screenplay.”¹⁶ In my own case, when the research surrounding a much-publicized murder case that occurred in Montreal in 1904 was completed, in theory I had three options: (1) to write a scholarly monograph on the clash of immigrant and native cultures occurring in what at the time was Canada’s leading urban/industrial centre; (2) to get a filmmaker interested in my historical material with a view to producing a documentary on that subject; (3) to reshape that historical material into a story to be narrated through filmic fiction. Why I chose the third option, and how my director and I effected the “fictional turn” by writing successive versions of what became La Sarrasine, is discussed in detail in Chapter 4.

Still, the fictionalization of history on film has hardly made history movies less worthy of historians’ attention; indeed, historians have continued to review these films in academic journals, discuss them at conference panels, and write articles and books on them. Although there is no consensus as to the most apt methodology for studying these films, there is no question that, thanks to scholarly interest, we know a great deal about historical films as cultural products of their time and as reflections of time-bound values and states of mind of producers, directors, and the viewing public and their ways of treating or mistreating history.

A few historians have gone further and have engaged historical films for their potential to offer alternate visions of the past in keeping with the intrinsic qualities of the medium and the specificity of its language. Thus far, their efforts seem to have done little to crack the wall of scepticism that, often justifiably, continues to prevail within the historical profession. Yet any historian genuinely interested in or intrigued by this perspective will profit enormously from what Robert Rosenstone, Robert Toplin, and Natalie Zemon Davis have had to say. Within the North American context, Rosenstone is unquestionably the historian who has most systematically explored the relations between film and history through an impressive array of books, scholarly articles, and conference papers and panels. To the question first raised by Marc Ferro as to whether a legitimate filmic narration of history could be possible,¹⁷ Rosenstone has not only answered in the affirmative but has also insistently invited the historical profession to take seriously the challenge of film as offering alternative interpretations of the past.¹⁸ Toplin’s main contributions have been to demystify the image of Hollywood as mere “dream machine” and to offer viewers a set of analytical tools that help to understand why mainstream filmmakers have tended to treat the past as they have.¹⁹ Since the 1980s, Davis has regularly insisted on the importance of taking filmic narrations of the past seriously. More recently, her skilful and informative analysis of well-known films that deal with slavery in various historical settings has enabled her to see in such filmic productions a particular kind of “thought experiments” in approaching the past that deserve serious attention.²⁰ At the same time, she has suggested a number of narrative devices some of those filmmakers could have used to meet the concerns most commonly expressed by historians, as a way to favour a dialogue across that nearly insurmountable boundary that separates the historical discipline from the world of feature filmmaking.²¹ It is far from accidental that these three scholars whose fields of historical specializations had little to do with film studies turned to this line of inquiry, presumably as a result of their direct collaboration as historical experts in the production of historical films.²² Their interactions with directors, screenwriters, actors, and producers gave them access to the ways filmmakers think and operate, and must have brought them face to face with what lay behind the content and artistic choices of their historical films.

In some ways, the reflections I offer in the following chapters are in line with the efforts carried out by these historians. While I have greatly benefitted from many of their insights and share many of their concerns, my perspective largely grows from inside the creative process. Much like them, I too was invited into the filmmaking universe on account of my historical research and expertise, which in the eyes of directors and producers made me a valuable collaborator to their film projects. In my case, too, my initial involvement in a film production opened my eyes to the complexity of filmmaking and made me aware – much more than I could have ever imagined – of the particular technical and aesthetic exigencies imposed by the medium, regardless of whether the theme treated was historical in nature.

However, as I’ll discuss in greater detail in Chapter 4, what makes my experience and hence my perspective decidedly unusual was the nature of my involvement in a number of film productions. Besides being entirely responsible for the historical research that went into the movie, I collaborated fully in the creative process that led to the actual shooting of the movie. Thanks to his open-mindedness, director Paul Tana welcomed me as a partner in giving birth to our first collaborative project and in making the crucial decisions about the content of Caffé Italia, Montréal. Most unusually, this included also the opportunity to co-write the screenplay.

I should add that, beyond my predictions, my initial involvement in that film turned out to be more than an isolated case. In fact, no sooner had Caffé Italia, Montréal been completed than Paul and I were already exploring subjects for new productions. And, as with the first production, the long feature film that soon followed (La Sarrasine) dealt with a subject that largely grew out of my scholarly research. Once again, besides being responsible for the historical research, I was involved in designing the story and co-wrote the screenplay. Although I was not responsible for the many choices that go into the making of the final product, I found myself in an ideal position to learn “in action” the craft of screenwriting – a craft that I have pursued in a number of subsequent films. I should underscore that working as independent filmmakers, rather than as employees of a large production company, gave us complete creative control over our film projects. This creative context contributed enormously to my position at the centre of that process of transformation whereby the knowledge drawn from historical research gets reshaped and finally transmuted into filmic narrative.

All along, my engagement in filmmaking has not swayed me away from academia. On the contrary, my commitment to innovative research as well as to the training of young historians has continued to be one of my main sources of professional gratification. Despite the criticisms I express in Chapter 2 regarding some of the inherent limitations of scholarly historical narration and how the discipline of history is generally practised in academia, I am a strong believer in the historical craft.

As a practitioner of the craft, along with my fellow historians, I have been producing historical knowledge, or, to use a common expression, I have been “doing history.” But because of the many ways the word history is used in everyday language and in academic discourse, it is useful to clarify how I employ and do not employ the term and to identify the implications of these usages for the work of both the historian and the filmmaker.

I intentionally omit from my discussion one variant of that term: History with a capital H. Whether referring to the unfolding in time of God’s plan for humankind, or to a process that follows precise laws of development, or to the forward movement of the “human spirit,” these and similar totalizing notions of history have long been and still are the object of theological and philosophical inquiries and speculations. In most university history teaching, we avoid engaging students on this terrain, preferring to teach the development of historical writing – from Herodotus to the most recent schools of interpretation and methodological trends, such as cliometrics and oral history. I also discard from my discussion the indefinite notion of history as the sum total of all that has happened in the past, with its tragedies, conquests, emancipatory moments, and so on – a notion exemplified in the expression “as history teaches us …”

I find it more useful to adopt a more concrete and operational notion that equates history with the known and knowable past – known due to the recording of facts and events transmitted through the ages to successive generations by chroniclers, literati, monastic and lay scholars, oral traditions, and, more recently, professional historians and, as we shall see, filmmakers. The known past, however, is far from being a fixed entity; rather, it is constantly in flux as historians, writers, filmmakers, and politicians keep stirring it in search of new meanings, inspiration, and national myths. This history is knowable because of the unending existence of “traces” of the past, whether in the form of archaeological remains, documents in public and private archives, or events and individuals previously considered marginal or insignificant and as such excluded from historical inquiries. The constant awareness of a knowable past, the usefulness of that knowledge (for both the individual and society), and the need for adequate analytical tools to attain it have contributed to the rise of the discipline of history. Once the discipline was firmly established institutionally and culturally by the early twentieth century, the word history became synonymous with the discipline of history and its definition became the almost exclusive domain of the discipline. It is the definition most history students, professional historians, and research granting institutions operate by. It informs what we may call the “historiographical project” as opposed to the literary or to the filmic project, for example.

Yet it may seem ironic that, by and large, historians have shied away from giving a firm definition of history. When trying to do so, they have preferred to focus on what Rosenstone has called “the rules of engagement” of their profession or on the inquiring process.²³ For the eminent French historian Marc Bloch, “the word history … commits us to nothing other than ‘inquiry.’”²⁴ And in editing an influential anthology of classical texts by nineteenth- and twentieth-century historians, Fritz Stern informs the readers that the book “is by historians about history.”²⁵ But the book title – The Varieties of History – announces a variety of historians’ approaches to the study of the past. E.H. Carr goes further when, in his influential book, he maintains that the word history must be understood in a double sense – that is, “both the inquiry conducted by the historian and the facts of the past into which he inquires.”²⁶ But which “facts,” one may ask? And what kind of knowledge is to be extracted from them? These questions are pivotal in my attempt to frame the notion of history as a known and knowable past.

Since the positivist turn in historical scholarship ran its course and the quest for “historical truth” was revealed as being an epistemological dead end, there has been a wide consensus among us historians on two basic points. One is the rejection of the notion that facts exist as “objective” entities that speak for themselves. The other, flowing from the former, is the interpretative nature of the inquiring exercise, or, to put it in Carr’s terms, that “interpretation is the life-blood of history.”²⁷ An illustration drawn from my own research concretizes these points. There is little doubt that the explosion that occurred at 10 a.m. on December 6, 1907 at a coal mine in Marion County, West Virginia, that killed several hundred miners was a “fact” as recorded by county authorities and reported in the local newspaper.²⁸ If no one made it a subject of inquiry, it would remain part of the local chronicle and buried under the thick cover of recorded local events – its relevance limited to the individual histories of the families of the deceased miners and to local oral tradition. Yet a researcher inquiring into mining safety conditions in the early twentieth-century United States would confer to that fact a special historical meaning because its interpretation would provide some answers to the questions his research project had posited. For a biographer reconstituting the life of one of the miners killed by the explosion, that accident would acquire meaning as the terminal fact of his or her narrative. As a historian of Italian immigration to North America, that fact acquired special meaning for me when I found out that thirty of the miners who died in the explosion were Italian immigrants. Along with similar fatal accidents that occurred at the time in other North American locations involving Italian migrants, that fact became an important piece of information in my attempt to know and understand the kind of working conditions Italian migrants subjected themselves to sustain themselves and their families. As an academic historian, my historiographical project in this case entailed researching that event and its ramifications by adopting the rules of engagement of my craft and finding the appropriate language to communicate my findings to expert readers. Yet I am aware that my academic status does not make me the appointed interpreter of that mining disaster. A novelist, a playwright, a live-performance practitioner may make that event and the constellation of facts surrounding it central to their respective narratives and endow it with particular meanings. The historiographical project, though institutionally associated with the historian’s inquiry, is by no means the only path to address and interpret the past. Bloch had already called his fellow historians to task when he wrote, “Are we then the rules committee of an ancient guild, who codify the tasks permitted to the members of the trade, and who, with a list once and for all complete, unhesitatingly reserve their exercise to the licensed masters?”²⁹

But what exactly does this discussion have to do with historical films? Essentially, this brief explanation of what constitutes history is meant to differentiate the historiographical project from what I would call the “filmic project” in the exploration of the known and knowable past. Most directors I’ve talked with, read about, or heard in interviews like to say that what they wanted to do first and foremost through a film was to tell a good story. But behind this disarmingly simple formulation lay a complex process of conception and creation aimed at arriving at a narrative strategy they feel as the most effective for conveying their stories through film.

When it comes to historical films, the research undertaken by the various film crafts gives content and shape to the story that the film will narrate. I find the distinction that the eminent film theorist David Bordwell makes (in part based on earlier film theorists) between story (fabula) and plot (syuzshet) quite useful: story contains all the major elements (events, characters, chronology, context) that, in one way or another, will inform the narrative; plot refers to the shape all that “story material” takes on once it has been transformed so as to serve the audiovisual dramaturgy the film will employ in narrating its story.³⁰

What needs to be stressed here is that, unlike the historiographical project, the filmic project explores and reflects on the past through the art of cinematic narration. It communicates knowledge not in the pedagogical sense of the term, but at a pre-theoretical level, as other forms of storytelling do, while also engaging viewers both emotionally and intellectually. In the best of cases, many of which will be discussed in this book, the filmic project produces a “narrative understanding” that many thinkers from Aristotle to Paul Ricoeur have considered to be “much closer to the practical wisdom of moral judgement than to science, or more generally, to the theoretical use of reason.”³¹

This fundamental distinction between the historians’ and the filmmakers’ stance toward the past is a key premise to the discussion that unfolds in the following chapters. Chapter 2 shines some critical light on several pivotal moments in the development of filmic narrations of the past in parallel with the development of history as a discipline. The main objective of the chapter is to clarify the distinctive nature of filmic language and discuss its potential in portraying past events and in conveying the filmmakers’ visions of the past.

Another key distinction between the historiographical project and the filmic project is the latter’s use of fiction as a fundamental dimension of its narrative mode. Yet the use of fiction is also the main issue that prevents many historians from engaging historical films seriously. Chapter 3, therefore, shows the kind of historical research a number of intellectually engaged filmmakers have pursued and how their use of fiction has provided compelling interpretations of particular historical situations. The many elements that go into the making of a historical film are then analyzed in Chapter 4 through a detailed practice-based demonstration of my role as both historian and screenwriter in transforming research-generated knowledge into filmic narration. At the same time, the chapter offers a rare view into the filmic history of one of Canada’s major ethnocultural minorities.

Finally, aware that most of the debates on the relationship between history and film occur among academics, I have brought into the discussion six well-known international directors. In the conversations that make up Part Two of this book, I invite them to comment on various aspects of their making of historical films, including why, at some point in their filmmaking career, they turned to the past for their films; the historical visions they have sought to convey through their works; their use of filmic language; and the research they have undertaken to arrive at a filmic narration of the past. Their contributions to this book open the way to a meaningful and constructive dialogue between the universe of filmmaking and that of academia.