CHAPTER 2

Narrating the Past in Words and in Motion

CLAIMING THE PAST

Since the advent of film as a new medium, filmmakers have frequently turned to the past for their stories. In most of the European film-producing countries, such as Italy, Germany, and Soviet Russia, some of the earliest and most influential films narrated stories set in ancient or more recently passed times. Giovanni Pastrone’s 1914 film Cabiria was one of Europe’s very first long-feature movies, and it portrayed a critical episode during the wars between Rome and Carthage. In addition to its imposing set and the unprecedented number of extras, the film became influential for its original camera movements. The following year, the German actor-turned-director Paul Wegener produced Golem, the first of a trilogy inspired by an old Jewish legend. Though in this film Wegener sought to experiment with the horror genre, the story is set in sixteenth-century Prague. For the third film of the trilogy (The Golem: How He Came into the World), Wegener had the medieval ghetto of Prague reconstituted by a prominent architect, and the innovative photography of Karl Freund in the film is considered one of the earliest and most striking examples of German expressionism. During the Weimar years, Ernst Lubitsch’s Madame DuBarry (1919) and Anna Boleyn (1920) were set, respectively, in the French Revolution era and in the reign of King Henry VIII; these films established his international reputation for historical films. And Fritz Lang experimented with supernatural themes in his treatment of the ancient Siegfried legend (Die Nibelungen, 1924). In the country that had invented scientific history, these pioneering filmmakers did not need the approval of academic historians in their determination to search the past for their storytelling and in the process advance and refine film language.

The past was much more recent – and for many audiences, still alive – in the film that stunned the movie-making world with its powerful images and, most of all, innovative montage techniques. Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 movie Battleship Potemkin, in fact, recounted events that had occurred in 1905 in the port city of Odessa when the crew of a Russian imperial ship revolted against their officers. That uprising stood in Soviet historiography as the event that set into motion the historical process leading to the Bolshevik revolution.

Whether in Italy, Germany, or Soviet Russia, these pioneering filmmakers were part of their respective artistic and intellectual milieus and certainly did not feel that history was the exclusive prerogative of the few academic historians that existed at the time. The poet-writer-political activist Gabriele D’Annunzio, probably Italy’s most popular public intellectual of his time, collaborated closely in the making of Cabiria by writing the intertitles accompanying the images of the film. And Leon Trotsky, one of the leading intellectual and political figures before the advent of Stalin, wrote the introduction to Battleship Potemkin.

But once those countries’ regimes turned into dictatorships, what had been a spontaneous relation between filmmaking and history, between art and the past, turned sour as history became too precious an ideological tool to be left for the free use of artists and intellectuals. Mussolini, Goebbels, and Stalin, in fact, immediately understood the power of film to reach the masses with the right mix of ideology and drama, and they made sure that the nation’s past and its meaning for the present became the exclusive province of “regime historians,” to use D. Medina Lasansky’s expression, exerting their supervisory role as officials in commemorative commissions, cultural and educational institutions, and media and film agencies.¹ Eisenstein’s 1927 masterpiece October, commissioned by the Soviet government to commemorate the October Revolution, was met with criticism by the new guardians of the past who considered the film too brainy for the working masses. They also censored all the references the film made to Trotsky’s role in the revolution. When in 1938 the now world-famous Eisenstein tried his hand at a sound-film as he directed the historical drama Alexander Nevsky, he was assigned a co-director and a co-screenwriter to ensure that his proverbial artistic prowess would not lead him astray. In the face of a mounting Nazi military threat, Stalinist authorities had invested much political and financial capital in this epic of national history that was intended to stir popular sentiment against Teutonic hegemonic ambitions. But despite its immediate success with audiences, the film was pulled from distribution a few weeks after its release, following the signing of a non-aggression pact by the two powers.² In a society where art had to serve the agenda of the totalitarian state, a historical film could be moulded so as to meet political needs, and then, still for political needs, it could be obliterated.

At the other extreme of the ideological spectrum, the Italian fascist regime turned also to cinema in a big way with the production, in 1937, of Carmine Gallone’s epic film Scipio the African. Closely supervised by Mussolini’s son Vittorio and widely advertised during its making, the film recounts the heroic leadership of the Roman general Scipio in defeating Hannibal’s forces in North Africa during the Second Punic War (218–202 BCe) – a war that proved crucial for the expansion of the Roman Empire through the Mediterranean. The allusions to Mussolini’s determination to conquer Ethiopia and the widely advertised project of an Italian empire in Africa could hardly be missed by Italian viewers, most of whom had been enthralled by their country’s colonialist agenda. Nor could they miss the less than subtle visual parallels the film made between the film’s hero, Scipio, and the Duce.³

Whether in the film studios of Rome, Moscow, or Berlin, the historical film had entered into a relation of symbiosis with the regime. The past had become captive to both the immediate and the long-term political objectives of those regimes, and art and history became a powerful mix for rallying the emotions of the masses toward patriotic ends.

In the world’s most modern liberal democracy where moviemaking was on its way to becoming one of the major sectors of the economy, and where civil society had become more complex than de Tocqueville could have ever predicted, the relations between cinema and history took a peculiarly dynamic and open course. And much more than all other film-producing countries, the United States was a pluricultural and plurilinguistic country made so by uninterrupted waves of immigrants, one in which the notion of “Americanization” as a process and as a civic necessity had no equivalent elsewhere – certainly not in Europe.

Here, filmmakers had all the reasons to feel that the past was not the exclusive prerogative of any single group or governmental agency. Much as novelists, playwrights, journalists, and even politicians who had turned to the past for inspiration or to draw lessons for the present, filmmakers saw in history an inexhaustible mine for their stories. Not only was the past frontier-less, but American history also was rich with momentous events and heroic figures that lent themselves to cinematic storytelling. The struggle for independence, the conquest of the West, and the tragedy of the Civil War were the most prominent themes that had become part of a popularly accepted historical discourse. Filmmakers could transform this historical material into cinematic stories that would make episodes and iconic figures from their nation’s past accessible to large audiences and at the same time feed mass culture with a collective awareness of the country’s historical march toward progress and world leadership.

The man who for a number of years stood as the embodiment of cinematic art in America – D.W. Griffith – had produced and directed numerous films based on past events before he undertook his breathtaking and colossal epic on the American Civil War and Reconstruction. More than any other filmmaker at the time, Griffith was quite outspoken in considering himself a sort of cinematic historian. And he had good reasons to think so. Not only was his The Birth of a Nation the first film to be screened at the White House; it also received the enthusiastic approval of president Woodrow Wilson, who had previously held one of the most prestigious academic posts and had written his share of scholarly history books.⁴ Wilson’s often-quoted comment following the screening of the movie – “it is like writing history with lightening” – conveyed more than the amazement at watching the past recounted through captivating moving images;⁵ it could also be taken as an informal validation of the new medium’s power to “write history.”

As a number of film historians have noted, the movie’s unprecedented artistic and financial success did not prevent it from raising a storm of controversy on account of its explicit white-supremacist message. However lopsided and leaning heavily toward the centres of power, civil society was quite alive. For, despite its often gripping dramatic narrative, the film had touched on the sensitive chord of race relations at a time when black militants and their white allies were engaged, through the courts and the media, in unmasking the hypocrisy of “progressive America.” Faced with the prospect that his film be censored and its distribution stopped, Griffith the historian-filmmaker found out the hard way that writing history – whether on the printed page or the movie screen – entailed interpretation and a dose of civic responsibility.⁶

But this incident is worth mentioning here if only because it provides the first known case of a filmmaker having to defend publicly his perspective on cinematic history and the alleged factual accuracy of his story. Griffith defended his interpretation and the film’s historical accuracy by invoking one of the most cherished articles of the American creed – “free speech.” This act in and of itself is important for what it tells us about the American civic context with its emphasis on constitutional rights. Though in his pamphlet, The Rise and Fall of Free Speech in America, he spoke for all filmmakers whose works could be censored and disfigured by the guardians of civic morality, Griffith was also claiming his right to be a historian: “We believe that we have as much right to present the facts of history as we see them … as a Guizot, a Bancroft, a Ferrari, or a Woodrow Wilson has to write these facts in his history.”⁷ And as if the written pages of his pamphlet had not been enough (and possibly also to rehabilitate himself as a “progressive” artist), he devoted his next film, Intolerance, in an even more grandiose way to the theme of human oppression in the history of humankind.

In the ensuing years, Griffith would continue to alternate present-day dramas with “period movies,” as historical films were often called at the time, turning his attention to some major historical themes such as the French Revolution, the American Revolution, and Abraham Lincoln’s life. But by then he was far from being alone in this enterprise. Motion pictures set in the past –whether belonging to the “period” category, or to the western genre, or in the form of sweeping epics – had become a common staple among American producers and directors. In her well-documented study of what she calls “Hollywood’s historical cycle” during the interwar years, film historian Jennifer Smyth shows that, with no exception, all the major producers invested money and artistic talent to make historical films and that they were regularly among the prize-winning productions in a variety of craft categories.⁸

The reorganization of much of the film industry into a trade association (amounting to virtual oligopoly) and the ongoing perfection of the studio system of production had wide-ranging repercussions on the movie-making enterprise, including the future of historical films.⁹ Gone were the days when motion pictures were watched in unsafe nickelodeons most often located in red-light districts and when a national magazine could condemn them as being “more degrading than the dime novel.”¹⁰ Now, in the prosperous 1920s – and even so during the Depression-stricken 1930s – the silver screen had crossed the threshold of the middle classes and reputable neighbourhoods and districts. And in the industry that perhaps more than any other was attuned to the changing moods of its market, the new and more educated audiences could, and did, inject their own tastes, preferences, and fantasies while at the same time being more demanding when it came to the artistic and narrative qualities of a film. Films belonging to all genres (comedies, adventure, social dramas) could be appreciated or criticized for its style of storytelling, for the quality of the actors’ performance, and for its visual effects. While subject to those grounds of criticism, a historical film could also get a thumb down for its lack of verisimilitude in its portrayal of characters or historical contexts.

During the silent era, filmmakers had sought to avail themselves as best as possible of a variety of visual techniques in the form of texts – such as written introductions, intertitles, and quotations – to guide viewers through the story’s chronology or through its factual backbone.¹¹ The arrival of sound made dialogue all-important not merely for the dramaturgical quality of the film but also for the possibilities it offered to convey all sorts of factual information. Yet, while dialogue increased enormously the range of factual detail and exhaustiveness, the careless filmmaker could more easily fall into the trap of anachronisms, factual contradictions, shallow contexts, and unwarranted conclusions. Consequently, screenwriting, and the special techniques it called for, became increasingly an essential step in the production of movies. In the case of historical films – whether dealing with original subjects or adaptations – the screenplay widened considerably the possibility to lay out the factual configuration of a film plot. And inevitably it called for a degree of research on the part of the writer. Smyth has solidly documented how historically sensitive producers such as David Selznick and Cecil B. DeMille began to set up their own research libraries and other major producers rapidly followed suit, each one with its own research department and staff.¹² Much like the pioneering filmmakers who had preceded them, sound-era filmmakers could also proceed autonomously in researching a historical film; but now, increasingly demanding audiences and the greater narrative potential of film language made it necessary that they advance in a more orderly and exhaustive way, allotting funds for the research and the screenwriting and drawing from the available general historical scholarship as well as from original and specialized sources.

Of course, this heightened sensitivity and concern for the historical content of a movie did not in itself ensure factual accuracy or prevent filmmakers from indulging in “poetic licence” to an extent that could result in highly distorted or subjective historical representations. In fact, more often than not, the primacy of dramatic effects in filmic storytelling led to such distortions. Cecil B. DeMille, who had produced and directed his own share of historical films, voiced this concern probably better than any other filmmaker at the time while also trying to deflect real or potential accusations that his films entailed a manipulation of history: “History is not just a matter of names and dates – dry facts strung together. It is an endless, dramatic story, as alive as the news in the morning’s paper. That’s why I feel for the sake of lively dramatic construction, I am justified in making some contractions or compressions of historical detail, as long as I stick to the main facts.”¹³

One would think that the viewers most likely to detect historical flaws, whether of a factual or interpretative nature, were professional historians, who certainly must have not been immune to the seduction exerted by the silver screen. How they reacted to the “visual history” that tens of millions of Americans and immigrants watched regularly in movie theatres throughout the country is hard to know, as they did not write about films in their historical journals. Some of them must have surely reacted on an individual basis perhaps with fascination, as Woodrow Wilson had done, or with a critical spank, as did the University of Chicago historian Louis Gottschalk in a personal letter he sent to filmmaker Samuel Marx in 1935: “no picture of a historical nature ought to be offered to the public until a reputable historian has had a chance to criticize and revise it.”¹⁴ We don’t know how Samuel Marx took the rebuke or whether he even bothered to respond. Still, considering the enormous impact that filmic narrations of the past had on society’s historical culture, one may legitimately ask whether a sense of competition or rivalry may have set in between those two enterprises. After all – and this is not for mere historical irony – it is worth recalling that the long-feature historical film and the professional historian had come of age at roughly the same time. But while the former could draw from a long and vibrant tradition of “popular history” – and actually saw itself as an extension of it – staking its own ground with the backing of possibly the most modern and dynamic industrial sector and constantly refining its own language, the professional historian kept searching for a distinct identity within the realm of scientific endeavour.

In his inaugural address as the University of Toronto’s first history chair, George M. Wrong spoke for many of his colleagues in Anglo-America when he lamented that, unlike well-established disciplines, history lacked a specialized vocabulary. Consequently, he went on to add, any literate person, regardless of his or her rank in life, could read a work of history and make sense out of it.¹⁵ This was in 1895, at the dawn of the historical profession, when the Lumière brothers in France and Thomas Edison in the United States were perfecting their image-projection technology, and when the few academically connected historians sought to distance themselves from the large mass of amateur historians whose works could be read – and presumably enjoyed – by anyone. And distancing they did, as for an entire generation some of them set out in search of the laws of history, others took up the task of inventing and perfecting a “historical method” that would guide them through the sources in ways that could ensure an objective rendering of past events and thereby confer on history the status of a scientific discipline. Still others embarked on the daunting task of collecting and preserving documentary sources, thus helping to make the association of the historian with the archive the most tangible and enduring item of a professional identity. Although the discipline found a comfortable seat and a solid backing in the largest and most modern system of higher education in the world, this came at the price of professional inwardness that resulted in insulation from the general public.

But professional stability did not automatically entail consensus when it came to articulate the nature of history and the historian’s stance toward the past. Going through the yearly presidential addresses of North American historical associations during the first half of the twentieth century, one cannot help but notice the ongoing debate as to whether history was a craft, an art form, a science, something in-between, or all those together.

Moreover, the insular universe the profession had created did not suffice to shelter it from the wind of relativism that started to blow across the continent, which in its most challenging form dramatized the relation between the subjectivity of the historian and the alleged objectivity of the historical fact. The most iconoclastic (and to some, offensive) formulation of the primacy of subjectivity came from historian Carl Becker, a leading authority on the American revolutionary era and one of the rare historians who felt no sense of professional debasement about writing in non-academic magazines. What philosophers of history in Europe and in North America were debating through complex arguments, Becker put in the most direct manner. In a 1910 article he wrote for the Atlantic Monthly, Becker made his first éclat by straightforwardly stating that historical facts did not exist in themselves until the historian “creates them, and into every fact that he creates some part of his personal experience must enter.”¹⁶

The fact that in the ensuing years Becker went on to write several solid historical monographs – some of them still considered classics in American historiography – must have had the effect of sowing more confusion within his profession. He not only continued to hold to his views on history and on the historian’s stance, but he also shaped them into his 1931 address as president of the American Historical Association. The title he gave to his speech – “Everyman His Own Historian” – could not be more provocative. For it reflected his main argument that history was not the prerogative of a few, and that by his very nature, every man (or woman) had an ongoing relation with his past as long as that past was meaningful to him. And then came the sentence that must have sounded like a clap of thunder; he stated that historians were “story-tellers … to whom in successive ages has been entrusted the keeping of the useful myths.”¹⁷ Had D.W. Griffith and Cecil DeMille been in the hall, they would have certainly joined the majority of historians who gave Becker a long standing ovation.¹⁸

When a few years later another prominent historian, Allan Nevins, publicly voiced his rage for what he felt to be the dominant stance within the historical profession, he targeted the “entrenched pedantry” that marked a discipline and a profession that had taken refuge in the university system: “Though the touch of this school benumbs and paralyzes all interests in history, it is supported by university chairs, special foundations and funds, research fellowships, and learned bodies. It is against this entrenched pedantry that the war of true history will have to be most determined and implacable.”¹⁹ Nevins refrained from spelling out what he meant by “true history,” but in a few words he had managed to convey a sense of the systemic character that academic history was taking on.

Institutional inwardness and theoretical disarray were probably the two most visible signs of a profession that still in the 1930s was trying to define itself within the scientific universe and in society at large. John Higham, the leading historian on the subject, has summarized that critical juncture by stating that, after their initial confidence in “their capacity to grasp objectively the patterns of history,” American historians “lost that confidence, becoming simultaneously doubtful of their status, dissatisfied with their achievement, and sceptical about the character of historical knowledge.” The profession’s self-esteem must have also suffered, as Higham suggests, from its inability to wield control over the teaching of history in secondary school curricula. Its teaching, in fact, was diluted into the broader category of “social studies” – a formula that educators saw as more apt to contribute to “social efficiency.”²⁰ The expression “nation-building” had not yet become part of the lexicon of the social and political sciences, but if one may transpose it to that era, it was not the historical profession or the teaching of history in the school system that helped make Americans and immigrants conscious participants in the process of nation-building.

All along, the film industry had fed tens of millions of Americans (and as many viewers throughout the world’s screens) with its own versions of history weekly. By the end of the interwar period, the universe of cinematic history and that of scholarly history could not have been farther apart.

Through much of the post–Second World War era, the philosophical premises on which the discipline of history was made to stand would never find a consensus among its practitioners, and Nivens’s notion of a “true history” would remain elusive. Yet the growing institutional backing provided by academia, the civic and political support given for the collection and preservation of public archives, and the progress in the methods by which sources were studied and analyzed largely contributed to giving it a “scientific identity” and a solid place within the constellation of academic disciplines.

At the same time, the tight walls the profession had erected to protect its territory of inquiry could hardly remain airtight. The growing awareness that past human life and events were too complex to be apprehended from within the parameters of one single discipline and that other social sciences were supplying explanations through their own paths of analysis, slowly but steadily led historians to look beyond their walls and reconsider some of the interpretative frameworks they had adopted. In some countries this occurred earlier than in others. In France, for instance, the historians who founded the influential École des Annales turned to geography, demography, and economics to explain patterns in the everyday life of people of all social classes and to look at past societies through a variety of temporal and spatial scales. In the United States, historians could not ignore the difficult but relentless struggle carried out by some cultural anthropologists as they unmasked the prevailing notion of race and showed what it had really been: an ideological construct that had served primarily the purposes of racial supremacy. Other historians turned to social, psychological, and political theories to unearth, for instance, past phenomena of status anxiety underneath the mass behaviour of social classes and interest groups or to find the historical roots of what, in their eyes, had made “America” an exceptional experience within the community of nations. Whether in North America or in Europe, during the post–Second World War era some of the most successful historical studies considered to be path-breaking by the profession were those that adopted interpretative frameworks and concepts borrowed from other disciplines.

External pressures proved even more transformative than those coming from the realm of scientific endeavour. Contemporary developments in domestic and world affairs, such as decolonization, the changing character of international economic-military confrontation engendered by the Cold War, and widespread social movements, forced a new generation of historians to reassess the connections between past and present. This is because those developments turned a variety of nations, peoples, groups, and sectors of society whose voices had been muffled – when not downrightly suppressed – into protagonists in most national historiographies.

In the United States, for instance, historians writing in the aftermath of the Civil Rights movement could no longer look at plantation records from the Old American South with the same detachment and through the societal values their predecessors had adopted in the 1920s and 1930s. For in the intervening years, well-known African-American figures, along with multitudes of anonymous ones, had performed acts of resistance and claimed recognition in an effort to bring down the curtain that had kept their past as human beings hidden from the national narrative. In my own field, what the founder of US labour history John Commons had unveiled through his pioneering research on skilled union records during the early twentieth century appeared increasingly as the tip of an iceberg that had concealed millions of working men, women, and children upon whose backs the industrial supremacy of the United States had largely rested.²¹ Similarly, the radical questioning of the patriarchal paradigm in both words and actions by women throughout much of the West opened new vistas on the past, particularly with regard to the place of women in society, culture, and the legal system. Inevitably, feminism also prompted new paths of inquiries into the history of the family and gender relations.

These social movements compelled the discipline of history to branch out into a myriad of subfields, with the avowed goal of making history as inclusive as possible and viewing the particular as equally as important (if not more) as the general. By 1990, when the Journal of American History began to list recent scholarship in US history, the number of subfields within which the new works were grouped already amounted to thirty-five, and new areas were added in the ensuing years. On the one hand, this centrifugal development injected into the discipline a dynamism it had never known during its relatively short life. On the other hand, ever narrower specialization in methods, frameworks, and language has resulted in turning historians more into “specialists” and less into “intellectuals” – a trend that has come with the blessing of academia and one on which much of the research grant apparatus rests.

As a historian who entered the profession during the 1970s, my own academic career may serve as an illustration of the ongoing impact these transformations had on our research and publishing agendas. My initial inquiries into the Progressive Era in the United States had been largely influenced by the advances that occurred at the time among some British and American historians, as well as among some Italian and French intellectuals, in the exploration of the world of ordinary industrial workers. Conceptual frameworks that placed workers at the centre of the production process had unveiled a richer and more dynamic past than the limited and elitist one previously depicted by institutional labour historiography. I remember the excitement I felt when, as a junior social historian, my research tools and sources enabled me for the first time to gain a sense of what daily life was like for the men and women whose sociocultural universe I was researching. Soon, however, the awareness that trying to study the making of an American or Canadian working class made little sense without taking into account the large immigrant component of that class led me to extend my interests into the relatively recent field of migration history. Moreover, like many of my fellow historians, I participated in the conception and creation of multidisciplinary research programs and centres, aware that phenomena such as migration and integration could only be fully apprehended through the contribution of various disciplines. More recently, as someone whose historical research has also involved the US and Canadian past, I have joined in a collective effort to develop a continental historical perspective that sees in the development of Canada, the United States, and Mexico not merely three independent national itineraries but the interplay of transnational dynamics impacting – however unequally – their respective experiences.²²

What I want to underscore is that these profound transformations in perspectives and methodologies, far from undermining the systemic quality of academic history, have reinforced it while also having a significant impact on the character of the historiographical language we employ. Because we increasingly have been borrowing concepts from other disciplines and because the new subfields’ and new methodologies’ struggle for recognition encourages an analytical, argumentative mode of discourse, the historiographical text has reached a level of terminological complexity never known before. In my scholarly monographs dealing with migration and transnational history, for instance, I have borrowed concepts and methodologies from half a dozen disciplines, from historical demography to macro- and microeconomics to anthropology. Moreover, I wanted to try to be as sensitive as I could to issues of gender and ethnicity that are so central to the migration process. No matter how much I tried to simplify my language and exploit whatever stylistic techniques I was capable of, my texts could not avoid an argumentative structure and a technical terminology. My writing has been moulded by the awareness that I am addressing historians and specialists in other disciplines who are interested in migration phenomena and who, inevitably, assess the soundness of my interpretation also by the language through which I frame it.

Thus, the institutional system within which most of us historians produce and consume historical knowledge, the prevailing nation-centred parameters that structure the discipline, and the language of history that informs much of our written work render us ill-equipped to penetrate the wider culture through scientific renditions of our collective past and in ways that respond to the variety of needs consciously or unconsciously expressed in our society. Most importantly, they tend to produce a mindset that few of us are able to set aside when watching and judging the ways films have portrayed the past – most often unaware of the specific language the films have adopted to do so.

At the peak of the academic historians’ realization of the importance of paying attention to historical movies, one could see how that mindset was still operative. Mark C. Carnes certainly came up with a good idea when, in 1995, he edited a book in which he asked a wide spectrum of historians to comment on or critique films set in their respective areas of specialization. The anthology, Past Imperfect, has value in introducing or discussing historical films in a classroom context. Very few historians, regardless of their judgments of the films, took into account the specificity of the film medium as a narrative device. In fact, the majority of historians used the occasion to display their scholarly competence in an attempt to get “the facts straight.” In other words, they paid little attention to how and why the filmmakers had arrived at those specific renderings of the past. Moreover, the choice of the more than sixty films included in the anthology, while considerably varied (from D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of A Nation to Spike Lee’s Malcolm X), is largely Hollywood-centred and unfortunately leaves out numerous films that are known for their serious attempts to engage the past or to raise important questions of historical interpretations.²³

This is not to question the fact that many, if not the great majority, of historical films throughout the history of cinema do invite varying doses of scepticism and often outright rage for the gross ways they have used the past, for their banal treatment of important moments or junctures of history, and for sacrificing significant historical dynamics to the altar of the romantic imperative.

Yet, just as one should not judge literature – its nature, its potential to portray and give expression to life experiences – on the basis of those blockbusters we see on bookstands at airports or in supermarkets, so one should not judge film’s potential to depict the past on the basis of historical movies that were driven primarily by mercantile considerations and a conscious or unconscious lack of respect for the past.

Fortunately, despite the inevitable cost-and-profit considerations, the often frantic and risky ways a film is produced, and the constraints that the film medium imposes, cinema (the seventh art) has given us a significant number of movies that seriously engage the past – and often with astounding results. The several films I’ll discuss here (and in Part Two with well-known filmmakers) have all in common a conscious attempt on the part of their directors and their collaborators to make the past and its treatment a key element in their storytelling.

THINKING AND WRITING IN IMAGES

[Screenwriting] is like writing with a movie camera.

– Paolo Taviani, In Conversation with Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, 147, this volume

Cette langue des images.

– Robert Bresson, Notes sur le cinématographe

Both as a medium and as an art form, film employs the most sophisticated techniques of narration. Through the use of moving images, sound, and procedures to manipulate time and space (such as ellipses, flashbacks, slow motion, close-ups, long views, camera movements and angles, and montages), film can recreate as closely as possible the complex structure of temporality and spatiality that is inherent in most human events and at the same time give expression to the most intimate sentiments that spur people into action.

But the power of film stems also from its proper blending of the dramaturgical and the visual, as opposed to the conceptual and explicatory written language of the historiographical text. Reflecting on the place that dramaturgy has in filmic narration may help put into proper perspective the source of some of the most frequent criticisms that historians have of historical films. From their earliest days, the drama component of feature films constituted both the main challenge for directors and actors and the chief attraction for moviegoers. Much like in theatre, the construction of the story and the actors’ performance were a major dimension of a film’s artistry. It is not surprising that many of the greatest film directors and actors began their artistic careers in theatre. D.W. Griffith, Sergei Eisenstein, Charles Chaplin, Orson Welles, Lawrence Olivier, and Ingmar Bergman are some of the most eminent illustrations. To this day, the almost symbiotic engagement in the two artistic domains continues to mark the careers of many directors and actors.

Notwithstanding the novelty of the medium and the complex way a motion picture was produced and assembled, or still the different stylistic approaches directors adopted (realism, expressionism, etc.), the basic rules of drama had to be respected. This fact in itself explains the tendency in most traditional filmmaking toward character-centred narration and hence the driving role assigned to human motivations. At the same time, the rules and conventions of dramaturgy impose a temporal arc – one within which all the various elements of a plot must play themselves out to their dénouement.

In the case of historical films, many of the decisions that lead to the collapse of several real historical personages into one, leave out series of events, or simplify complex historical dynamics, are largely dictated by the necessity to make the story and the plot dramaturgically workable and coherent within that arc of time. This also means that dramaturgical choices made by the screenwriter, the director, or the producer may have a significant impact on the degree of factual accuracy or on the exhaustiveness of the events being portrayed or serving as context. Most frequently, these are choices made in advance by the film creators, and whatever the rationale that guides them, they have often made the difference between an excellent and a mediocre historical film.

In the most successful cases, drama as artistic challenge has proven its potential to enhance the historical veracity of the story and, consequently, the film. What makes Carl Theodor Dreyer’s silent movie The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) one of the greatest films in the history of cinema is the extraordinary way in which the visual and the dramaturgical are blended to produce one of the most effective and credible renditions of a historical character. In trying to portray one of the most heroic figures in Western history, Dreyer chose to focus on the trial and execution of that legendary young woman. His concern with being as true as possible to the historical record is evident from the initial sequences, which show a man (probably Dreyer himself) leafing through the pages of an old archival manuscript and then dwelling in close-up on the first page of what we understand to be the official proceedings of the trial. The unforgettable performance by Renée Maria Falconetti in the role of Joan contributes a great deal to the dramatic power of the film, which largely hinges on the contrast between Joan’s physical frailty and her iron-will determination to remain true to what she believed was a God-assigned mission to lead the French army to victory.²⁴

But central as it is to cinematic narrative, dramaturgy is only one component of film language. When looking at a shot or sequence, most of us viewers tend to be absorbed by the action that is taking place, most often exemplified by what characters are doing and/or saying. We tend to ignore or take for granted the fact that all elements appearing within the film frame – be they objects, furnishing, the clothes that characters wear, the prevailing colour tone, the light, and the sounds – are the result of carefully conceived technical and artistic interventions all aimed at making the given moving image produce the narrative effect the director had intended. The filmic image, in other words, speaks through its own language. And as a language that grew from technical invention and stylistic innovations, its basic “vocabulary and syntax” have transcended cultures and art traditions – though it must immediately be added that for each film project this language is deployed according to the director’s aesthetic tastes and narrative strategies, which, in most cases, have grown out of specific cultural and societal contexts. Just as literary authors from Miguel de Cervantes to James Joyce have pushed the frontiers of the written narrative language, filmmakers such as D.W. Griffith, Sergei Eisenstein, Jean Renoir, Orson Welles, Roberto Rossellini, and Akira Kurosawa (to mention some of the most influential) have extended the range and the depth of human experiences that filmic language is capable of conveying.

Obviously, what I am stating in rather simplified terms constitutes the subject matter that film theoreticians and film historians have long studied and debated, as shown by an ever-growing literature. While acknowledging the value of this literature, the thoughts I offer here are largely based on my own experience in filmmaking, on my interactions with artists from a variety of film crafts, and from their own recounting of their experiences to me or in published interviews or memoirs – the whole, complemented by my own sensitivity as a historian. From this perspective, it will be worth dwelling on the complex transition from the initial written conception of a given film project to its final realization as a motion picture, for it helps to appreciate the composite nature of film language and how it is constructed and employed in the making of historical films. Equally important, it should make us aware of the kind of research that often goes into those films and why that research is made to serve objectives that are sharply at variance from those we historians pursue when writing a scholarly article or a monograph.

I became fully aware of the nature of filmic language while learning the craft of screenwriting and having to come to terms with temporality. Temporality is a basic component in all types of narration. Film, however, more than any other form of narration, is able to convey the whole gamut of temporalities inherent in ordinary human life. At the same time, film employs a variety of narrative techniques designed to manipulate time – stretching it, slowing it down, stopping it, and portraying multiple and simultaneous actions. When applied successfully, these kinds of techniques make temporalities organic dimensions of the story and ensure the story’s continuity and coherence.

Because of these techniques an average-length feature film can narrate a story that in real life would span over several months or years and fill several hundred pages in a novel or historical monograph. That’s why the frequent criticism addressed to historical films – namely, that they “compress” time to the detriment of a more exhaustive treatment of a subject – fails to appreciate this inherent dimension of filmic narration and the extent to which those techniques are part and parcel of filmic language, not convenient shortcuts.

To a large extent, the issue of temporality is first confronted at the screenwriting stage of the production when the story a director wants to tell has to be reconstituted and moulded so as to become a cinematic blueprint for the ensuing production. In theory, in fact, the screenplay contains the entire story – that is, it includes all scenes from the opening scene to the final one as they will later be shot by the production crew. But in addition to describing in detail what happens in each scene, the screenplay constantly takes into account the ways in which the structure of temporality plays out in the story. It does so for instance by specifying the precise points at which a given scene starts and ends or by indicating when a scene that describes a certain action is intercut with a scene that takes us somewhere else in space and time.

Dialogue, a main component of the screenplay and of the film’s dramaturgy, may often be worded so as to allude to temporalities associated with, or growing out of, actions that occur in the scene. This can happen through information given by one of the characters or through verbal reference to events that occurred in a more or less recent or distant past (whether they are shown or not). Thus, time and temporality become malleable in the mind of the viewer, expanding or shrinking to keep with the unfolding of the story.

The Cannes Festival laureate film Kaos (1984), written and directed by the Taviani brothers, provides a great illustration of techniques used to manipulate temporality. One of the three episodes that make up the film, “The Other Son” (inspired by a one-act play by the renowned Sicilian writer and playwright Luigi Pirandello), is set in a late nineteenth-century Sicilian village and portrays the torment of an old illiterate widow who has been left behind by her two sons who migrated to “America” fourteen years earlier and have never sent news back to her. Yet that torment carries with it some painful moments of hope as the lack of news from her two sons tells her also that they are still alive and may reappear at the village any day. As she has repeatedly done in the past, she dictates a letter to a co-villager and entrusts it to a departing migrant every time a group of mostly young men head to America only to find out this time that the young woman who took up the dictation drew scribbles that resembled words and sentences, instead of writing down the widow’s words and thoughts, because she was convinced of the futility of trying to reach the two sons. The way the Taviani rewrote the story and shot the scenes involves a variety of narrative temporalities. Some actions are written and shown in real time while others are narrated through fast-moving flashback. In other cases, such as the fourteen years of the two sons’ absence, or the three hours needed to repair the wheel of the horse-driven cart that must take the group of departing villagers to a port town, a conventional order of time is given through dialogue. Yet the fourteen years become an abstraction and, in the viewers’ minds, are recomposed as “emotional time” as we feel the widow’s torment and desperation throughout the story. Those “three hours” it will take for the wheel to be repaired (as conveyed in the dialogue by the migrants’ leader) are also an abstraction. That they are three hours – 180 minutes of conventional time – becomes irrelevant; what counts is that the time of separation between the departing ones and their loved ones is lengthened, which allows the viewers to see how it becomes a source of unexpected sweet-and-sour joy for some and prolonged agony for others.

Conceiving the specific filmic language through which a given story has to be narrated is, therefore, a process that starts with the screenplay. This makes the screenplay a peculiar form of writing that employs particular techniques and is wholly instrumental in nature. To be sure, the dramaturgical dimension of the screenplay as expressed in the dialogue constitutes a major creative input. Still, unlike a novel or a play – texts whose literary value remains enduring – a screenplay is written entirely to serve the needs of a film production. While using the written word to describe actions and sequences, the author must, in the words of film director Andrei Tarkovsky, “think in terms of cinematic images.” Tarkovsky adds that a screenplay written “in literary form” is of little use to a director and to a film crew, and it would have to be reworked so that “literary images are replaced by their filmic equivalents.”²⁵ Paolo and Vittorio Taviani are even more graphic in commenting on their practice as screenwriters/directors: “While writing we try to ‘see’ the scenes and try also to anticipate the appropriate musical scores, and start to figure out the kind of lenses we’ll use. It is like writing with a movie camera.”²⁶ Unsurprisingly, then, most screenplays go through a process of constant rewriting in order to arrive at what the director feels is the desired shooting version. Nor is it surprising that often they are co-authored by several writers.

The issue of temporality and the place of the screenplay in the shaping of filmic language are aspects of moviemaking that are common to most genres of feature films – though some directors adhere strictly to the screenplay while others leave much room to improvise during the shooting. When the production involves a historical film, the screenplay poses an additional challenge. All the historical research the author has done about a specific time context and the characters that propel the story must be transformed into cinematic narration. In other words, the writing of this kind of screenplay presupposes that the author has drawn from the available historical knowledge, selecting it and transforming it to serve the purposes of filmic narration.

Very frequently, screenplays are adaptations of historical novels or plays. In fact, some of the best-known historical films in the history of cinema fall into this category. The advantages for the screenwriters should be obvious: the plot and the subplots are already laid out, the leading characters have been defined, and, most importantly, the historical research needed to properly contextualize the story has been done by the authors of those literary works. Yet the story needs to be reconceived in view of the constraints and possibilities that the film medium entails. Along with the more technical interventions that a screenwriter must undertake in containing the story’s temporal arch within acceptable and workable cinematic time, additional historical research is often required for a variety of reasons. Often the screenwriter and often the director want to immerse themselves in that given historical period without relying entirely on the novel’s author, which helps the screenwriter to find a proper or more rewarding angle through which that story can be told cinematically. Constantin Costa-Gavras’s discussion of Amen on pages 175–80 of this book is most illuminating in this regard as his film is based on The Deputy, the controversial 1963 play by German playwright Rolf Hochhuth, which focuses largely on the shameful failure of Pope Pius XII to intervene in the face of the genocide carried out by Nazi Germany. Costa-Gavras, instead, chose to broaden the temporal arch by including, as a sort of preamble, the Nazis’ extermination of the intellectually disabled and then dwelling on the immense industrial-bureaucratic machine created to keep the death camps operational. In other cases, the film authors chose to explore more in depth certain threads of the story for their dramaturgical and filmic potential. In still other cases, logistic considerations associated with the making of a movie (e.g., availability of historical locations, the need to reconstitute certain milieus in a studio) may influence the filmmakers to privilege certain aspects of the novel to the detriment of others. Several of the films discussed in Part Two were adaptations, and, as these directors explain, in each case a considerable degree of historical research had to be undertaken to arrive at the kind of screenplay they aimed at.

Whether original or an adaptation, what needs to be underscored is that, in the case of historical films, the screenplay constitutes the stage at which issues entailing factual accuracy, plausibility, and the credibility of actions and behaviour in the context of a particular period must be decided upon if, indeed, the directors’ intention is to render the reconstitution of a given past as authentic as possible. In Chapter 4, using a number of film productions I was involved in as both historian and screenwriter, I shall provide concrete illustrations of how that transformation has been effected. My point here is that in historical films screenwriting constitutes a sort of bridge between research-generated historical knowledge and the visual language through which a film will speak to viewers.

My awareness of filmic language, of its “rules” and of its narrative potential, grew also from my understanding of how the various film-making crafts bring their own special artistic talents and imagination to the construction of the moving image.

I shall not dwell on the role of the cinematographer or chief photographer, as it is well known that he/she is the one who provides the mechanical and artistic eye through which the various moments of the story are viewed and recorded. Nor shall I elaborate on the various post-production procedures and techniques that play such a crucial role in structuring the syntax, so to speak, of filmic language and affect its rhythm and accent. Movie viewers, however, are less aware of the crucial contribution of art directors (or “chief decorators,” as they are called in France) except, perhaps, when watching film festivals where an Oscar, a César Award, or a Genie recognizes the excellence of their work. Yet they are the ones who lead us to believe that the material universe we see in a single frame or sequence – whether a room, a seventeenth-century street corner, or a Second World War battlefield – not only looks authentic but also extends beyond the frame and into the realm of the unseen where our own imagination adds the rest.

Art directors who spend weeks and months to conceive the physical space that will be caught by a camera angle or movement, and within which an action takes place, can be quite eloquent about the “art/ificiality” of the image that appears on the screen. They do not hesitate to use expressions such as “make believe,” as does Allan Starski (Danton, Sophie’s Choice),²⁷ or even “illusion,” as does Christopher Hobbs (Edward II) to describe their work. Hobbs, for example, states that “art directors, much like painters, are illusionists as viewers forget that what they see on the screen is not the tridimensional reality they experience in their daily life.”²⁸ Art directors must ensure that the physical space contained within each shot or sequence – the physical space that surrounds actors in all their actions – must not only appear credible and organic to the story but also heighten its dramaturgical effectiveness. This requires being totally immersed in the story and understanding the particular sensitivities of the actors. In other words, art directors must be aware that the physical milieu within which actors move corresponds “naturally” to the characters and possibly help them to get the right inspiration in their acting. Wynn Thomas (Do the Right Thing, Malcolm X), for instance, tries to conceive the kinds of decor that, as he says, “seem to best define the characters that will evolve in that set.” For him, thinking in terms of the characters is “the best way to get into the story.” That’s why he asks actors to come and look at the set several days ahead of the shooting.²⁹ Henry Bumstead, too, stresses the degree of interdependence between the appropriate kind of set and the actors: “Indeed, the actors’ performance depends often on the atmosphere that the set creates. If they feel well [in that set] they will play well.”³⁰

But it is with the chief photographer that art directors usually establish the closest coordination in the construction of the moving image. Determining the range of shooting angles and conceiving the appropriate light – whether natural or artificial, coming from a single source or diffused through the space – are the basic responsibilities of the chief photographer. Consequently, in designing the set for a shot or a sequence, art directors must be fully aware of these key elements of movie making. For Stuart Craig (The Mission, The English Patient), it is important to meet the chief photographer as early as possible and show him or her the miniatures and sketches so as to find out what suits him best both in terms of camera movements and light; “Then, once the camera is positioned on the set, I make the necessary adjustments.”³¹ Allan Starski is more precise: “I’ve learned to think in terms of light – how to boost its value and integrate it to the set. I like to discuss with the chief photographer what kind of light he is going to use or create – even the kind of film’s technical specifications and the developing procedure he intends to use.”³² This coordination is even more essential when the art director proposes certain tones of colour or even thematic colours that are meant to create certain narrative effects, all of which call for particular kinds of light. Patrizia von Brandenstein (Ragtime, Amadeus) puts it very eloquently when she states that “the art director and the chief photographer are like the egg and the hen: one can’t exist without the other and our work is entirely interdependent. The set must take into account what the chief photographer thinks or plans to do, otherwise it does not work. I would not even think of using a given colour without having first discussed it with the chief photographer.”³³

The advent of colour film and the increasing sophistication in its chemical makeup has certainly contributed to making motion pictures more attractive and captivating as cinematic spectacle. It has also widened the narrative possibilities of movies, translating into a major challenge for both the photographer and the art director. It did not take long for them to realize how the use of specific colour tones running through their sets could enhance the dramaturgical effect of the story and enrich film language. In trying to conceive the sets for Amadeus, for instance, Patrizia von Brandenstein was well aware of the key role music played in a story that rotates around the rivalry between two composers trying to gain the favours of the Vienna court; and to accentuate the contrast between the two main protagonists – Mozart and Salieri – she adopted different colour themes. To her, Mozart’s music was representative of the age of enlightenment – “fresh, modern … luminous and reflective like a mirror or a floating light.” That led her to adopt a spectrum of colours ranging from silver to pastel. Salieri’s music, on the other hand, struck her as belonging to an earlier musical universe: “It was heavier, solid, and emotionless.” She felt she could render that universe through somber colours ranging from ochre to dark green. And whereas the scenes narrating Mozart’s musical triumphs are dominated by vivacious fabrics such as satin and silk, in those relating to Salieri, lethargic fabrics such as velvet dominate. “Once this contrast was established, I tried to express it through all the elements of the decor.”³⁴

The award-winning Chinese film Ju Dou is another notable illustration in which the selection of colour tones contributes significantly to the artistic success of the film and helps to root the story within a specific historical micro-universe. The film is set in a dye factory in the rural China of the 1920s and it recounts the story of Ju Dou, a beautiful young woman who has just been bought as wife by the childless and sadistic old owner of the factory. Much of the story takes place in that factory, where the dyeing of fabrics is the main daily activity around which a powerful interplay of emotions unfolds and leads to a tragic dénouement. The film’s art director, Cao Jiuping, thought of having each of the different colours employed in the dyeing process correspond to a specific emotional state. As a result, he explains, the film contains “a sort of colour theme much as we have musical themes. The early sequences of the story are dominated by pale colours; they then become increasingly live as passions surge and explode. At the end of the film, in the funeral sequences, all the colours have disappeared.”³⁵

As a final example, in The Godfather, a great deal of Dean Tavoularis’s contribution as art director entailed the use of specific colour tones to heighten the dramatic effects of certain scenes. In episode two of the film, where violent death and its consequences punctuate much of the narrative, Tavoularis sought to enhance the morbid atmosphere by using purple, brown, and black as the dominant colours of his decors. “With the time,” he adds, “I have become increasingly subjugated by the power of colours and the important role they can play in a film.”³⁶

If by conceiving and manipulating colour tones art directors may add important nuances to film language, they may also have a role in enriching such a language through the construction of filmic metaphors – a narrative device that is often used in cinema. An eloquent illustration of one such metaphor and the art director’s contribution may be observed in Schindler’s List where a number of sequences show Jewish prisoners in a labour camp as they are constantly tyrannized and terrorized by their Nazi guardians. In the midst of that camp stands Oskar Schindler’s metal factory – a multistorey building employing several hundred prisoners whose chances of survival depend on Schindler’s protection. Schindler’s top-floor offices, along with the several Jewish secretaries who attend to their tasks in safety, are visible from the outside. To the eyes of the downtrodden and increasingly hopeless prisoners working outside, those secretaries up high in the building must have looked like angels in heaven. Readers will recognize in this latter sentence a literal metaphor. In working on those scenes, the film’s chief decorator, Allan Starski, along with his director, Steven Spielberg, consciously created the filmic equivalent of that metaphor by installing large windows on the office to ensure that, from below, the prisoners could see the secretaries working inside.³⁷

Illustrations such as these could easily be multiplied many times. They should help to convey the specificity of film language, its composite nature, and its potential to explore the past and portray it in its multifaceted aspects. But however fascinating and thought-provoking many viewers may have found some of those cinematic portrayals, there is one threshold many of them are unwilling to cross. It involves the use of fiction and the liberty it gives filmmakers to misrepresent or even to distort the facts of history. Indeed, fiction does afford a filmmaker a great deal of narrative liberty. But as the two following chapters will attempt to show, the use of fiction may also be made to rest on thorough research of the past and be motivated by a quest that is not dissimilar from that of the conventional historian.