Making History Move: Five Principles of the Historical Film

By Kim Nelson

Making History Move: Five Principles of the Historical Film builds upon decades of scholarship investigating history in visual culture by proposing a methodology of five principles to analyze history in moving images in the digital age. It charts a path to understanding the form of history with the most significant impact on public perceptions of the past. The book develops insights across these fields, including philosophical considerations of film and history, to clarify the form and function of history in moving images. It addresses the implications of the historical film on public historical consciousness, presenting criteria to engage and assess the truth status of depictions of the past. Each chapter offers a detailed aspect of this methodology for analyzing history in moving images. Together, they propose five principles to organize past and future scholarship in this vital, interdisciplinary field of study.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: Mar 15, 2024
• ISBN: 9781978829794

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Cover Page for Making History Move

Making History Move

Making History Move

Five Principles of the Historical Film

Kim Nelson

Rutgers University Press

New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey

London and Oxford

Rutgers University Press is a department of Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, one of the leading public research universities in the nation. By publishing worldwide, it furthers the University’s mission of dedication to excellence in teaching, scholarship, research, and clinical care.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Nelson, Kim (Documentary filmmaker), author.

Title: Making history move : constructing a historiophoty for the historical film / Kim Nelson.

Description: New Brunswick : Rutgers University Press, 2024. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023031270 | ISBN 9781978829770 (paperback) | ISBN 9781978829787 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781978829794 (epub) | ISBN 9781978829800 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Historical films—History and criticism. | History in motion pictures. | Visual perception in motion pictures. | LCGFT: Film criticism.

Classification: LCC PN1995.9.H5 N45 2024 | DDC 791.43/658—dc23/eng/20231001

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023031270

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright © 2024 by Kim Nelson

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

References to internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Rutgers University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

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For Rob, Hagen, Ella, and Clio—muses all

Contents

Introduction: Five Principles of Historiophoty

1 Narration

2 Evidence

3 Reflexivity

4 Foreignness

5 Plurality

Acknowledgments

Filmography

References

Index

About the Author

Making History Move

Introduction

Five Principles of Historiophoty

What is historiophoty, and to what should it refer?

Lace and metal, towering powdered wigs defying gravity, and reams of molded fabric—all characterize the sumptuous imagery of history films. While written, oral, and theatrical histories paint pictures that hold up a candle to specific details, guiding the perceiver with lumina enough to lay out evidence and argument, in history films, the filmmaker’s canvas is lit by stadium lights, manifesting a dizzying tableau of unaccounted detail from the shadows, unveiling specifics and spaces previously unfathomed, as they were undescribed. The splendor of seeing and hearing the alien—the evocation of vanished people, places, events, and times—is an intense attraction to experiencing history in moving images.

History has a special relationship to truth and identity; the moving image medium has great power to mesmerize and influence. Together, moving images and history merge into a substantial force, a moving history that makes a mass spectacle of memory (Nelson 2022). Moving histories enter a contract with their audience, different from films and series that craft fictional plots. Histories make truth claims that shoulder extra responsibilities that come along with what Hayden White described as The Burden of History (1966). Historiophoty, a term proposed by White in 1988, is the moving image answer to historiography, the collection of theories and methods that manage the burden and contract of history in the written word (White 1988). This book’s unique and ambitious contribution to the scholarship of history in moving images establishes five principles of historiophoty to organize and systematize a framework of analysis and classification of these works. The principles draw from a wealth of cross-disciplinary scholarship within the intersecting fields of film and history to offer a detailed assessment tool that contends with the processes and impacts of the most pervasive medium of history. Given the immense public impact of moving images as a platform of collective history and meaning production, structuring its analysis into a concrete theory and methodology of historiophoty is as critical as it is overdue. This introduction will lay a detailed groundwork for the methodology of this book by conceptualizing historiophoty, clarifying its core principles, and highlighting the works to which these criteria most readily and significantly apply—those about real people and events engaged in conflicts of broad sociopolitical significance.

Why Historiophoty?

This is a book-length argument for setting a foundation for the parameters of historiophoty, once and for all. Robert Rosenstone explains that understanding how history films construct a historical world and by which rules, codes and strategies are the most pressing issues for history in moving images (Rosenstone 1995a, 4). This is a call for historiophoty.

Recorded history, including filmic renditions, works upon the iterative and additive mechanics of human memory. History and memory share immense powers to adapt and alter traces from the past and remain convincing. History invokes the real, while film engages the emotions and senses in such a way that we recall history films almost like witnesses. What moving images bring to history are potent tools for learning. As Alison Landsberg explains, memories of our lived experience and moving images commingle, cobbling cyborg, pastiche identities (2004, 41). Further, Jeffrey Zacks, a professor of psychology and brain sciences, describes the biological effect of movies on us and the way they hijack our responses to the real world and program our brains to have experiences. They create events in our heads (2015, 276). When we read, we perceive our distance from the information, but as spectators of moving images, we use our innate senses to watch and listen, internalizing stories as pseudoexperiences. If, as John Durham Peters notes, writing is the bias through which we read history (2015, 279), we may surmise that filmmaking is the bias through which we experience it.

Setting Terminologies

I will occasionally use the word film as a simple, monosyllabic alternate reference for moving image media. In the same way that a train is a train, whether powered by steam, electricity, or diesel, the word film can withstand a shift in materiality. The term holds in describing the study and industry of moving pictures with sound, despite the transfiguration of film as an object, from celluloid to digital. Turning to the historical film, its generally agreed-upon boundaries include all works in moving images that engage the past, whether or not they deal with real people and events. The genre spans work from Mad Men (2007–2015) to Shoah (1985) to Till (2022). Because the latter two offer a realist interpretation of actual people and events, they have specific responsibilities that differ from those about a past of imagined characters and conflicts. I will focus this book on the subset of moving images that Philip Rosen calls the historical film in its purest form, the kind that audiovisually signals the past and consists of a ‘true story’ (Rosen 2001, 178). I call these works moving histories.

Histories are always palimpsests, inherently intertextual, distinguished from fiction as they always represent a relationship of copresence between two or [more] texts (Genette 1997, 1). Any history bases its status on its recourse to historical texts of one kind or another. Moving histories stake their claim to the real through reference to actual people and events, whether drawing from documentary footage, news reports, scholarly histories, novels, oral testimonies, or documents. I subscribe to Eleftheria Thanouli’s, Alison Landsberg’s, and Philip Rosen’s approaches by considering moving histories across fiction and nonfiction traditions together (Thanouli 2019; Landsberg 2004, 2015; Rosen 2001). As Thanouli explains, Any discussion of historiophoty is bound to be incomplete, unless it includes both fictions and documentaries, as two distinct genres sharing, nonetheless, the same underlying epistemological concerns (2019, 237).

This rationale is supported in a roundabout way by the two most prominent historians to contribute to this area. Natalie Zemon Davis focuses on historical fiction films because she finds them more problematic for the methods and aims of history than documentaries, while Robert Rosenstone primarily writes about them because he finds them less problematic (Davis 1987, 478; Fauci and Rosenstone 1988, 3; Rosenstone 1989). Although it makes sense in many instances to tackle these distinct approaches separately, it is equally important to contemplate them alongside each other toward a more complete survey of historicization in mainstream moving images. After all, every moving history fits John Grierson’s axiomatic description of documentary as a creative treatment of actuality (1933). As products of a popular medium, scripted and performance-based histories are genealogically linked to popular prose and the historical novel, while documentaries animate in the manner of a scrapbook or museum display, more in line with academic history in their focalization and direct indexical links to evidence.

The label moving histories incorporates several meanings of the verb to move, from the literal and material sense of images in motion to their poetic and emotional capabilities to move us, body and mind. Moving histories as a concept takes up the appeal by Alison Landsberg that intellectuals and educators respect the power of film to speak to history (2004, 154). This book investigates the implications of moving history as an artifact that

1. is physically composed of images in motion;

2. requires the theoretical parameters of history—designed for history in the written word—to move, shift, and adapt to encompass and benefit moving histories; and

3. possesses special powers to move audiences intellectually and emotionally.

Playing with the multiplicity of movement bound in historical movies, Vivian Sobchack writes that historians are often moved by movies—even historically ‘inaccurate’ ones (1997, 6). Describing the enchanting experience of watching historical epics as a child, Sobchack explains that she took the images to be real while understanding the stories were only stories—one way of stringing plot and meaning together among others, and yet, as histories, these spectacles offered "the most compelling accounts . . . in moving and showing human bodies disposed and active in space, they moved [her] in time" (15; italics in the original). And this is perhaps the most powerful aspect of movement in moving histories: their ability to sweep spectators up and transport them over years, centuries, or millennia.

Five Principles of Historiophoty

Robert Rosenstone and Natalie Zemon Davis are among the historians who have contributed the most to systemizing the key concerns of historiophoty. One of the most insightful and enduring appraisals of historians’ responses to history on film is Robert Rosenstone’s lead essay that prompted the American Historical Review’s (AHR) 1988 forum issue devoted to exploring the problems and possibilities of portraying history on film (Rosenstone 1988, iv; Rosenstone and Nelson 2023, 338). In this significant contribution, Rosenstone writes with trademark verve and eloquence about the threat and potential that moving images pose for history. He provides a practical and remarkably durable engagement with what historians find troubling about the distortions of history conveyed via documentary and feature films:

• forcing the past into a narrow, linear narrative with a singular point of view (1988, 1174)

• confusing memory with history (1174)

• conveying a paucity of historical information (1176)

• focusing on individual over collective struggles (1178)

• ignoring facts that contradict the overarching message, denying complexity (1180)

• making history conform to film’s genre conventions and visuality (1180–1181)

Throughout the essay, Rosenstone considers the validity of these critiques and, in the process, provides a sturdy navigation of the relationship of the historical film to the concerns of historiography, mapping an outline for the concept of historiophoty that Hayden White would propose in his corresponding essay in the same issue.

In the preface to her book Slaves on Screen: Film and Historical Vision, Natalie Zemon Davis reveals that her interest in the intersections of film and history has been long-standing, as she initially thought she would put her training as a historian to work in the arena of documentary film before becoming thoroughly enchanted by the archive (2000, ix). Davis, perhaps more than any other historian or philosopher, translates her concerns about history into a concrete, actionable context for filmmakers—while stopping short of attempting to rip the cameras from their shoulders. She is proactive, backing her ideas with creative and practical solutions based on her knowledge of historiography’s best practices, combined with her experience taking part in a film production associated with her work. In part, the role of historiophoty is to do what Davis asserts is necessary: create a framework that encourages films to provide more complex and dramatic indications of their truth status (459).

Like Rosenstone and White, she is not a chauvinist about academic history’s inborn superiority to popular history. Instead, Davis focuses on what film can do well and how it may incorporate the concerns and methods of history by adapting them to the language of this medium. She suggests several cinematic techniques that benefit the historical mission, including (a) Brechtian distancing, giving Fellini’s And the Ship Sails On (1983) as an example; (b) multiple telling, citing Rashomon (1950) and Last Year at Marienbad (1961); and (c) the context of historical knowledge, gesturing to Citizen Kane (1941; 1987, 478–479). In her book Slaves on Screen, Davis further develops parameters to demonstrate how film could do history better, which I will number for ease of reference:

1. Seek evidence widely and deeply with an open mind, avoiding the impulse to remake the past in familiar terms

2. Show the audience your sources and note when something is ambiguous, uncertain or contradictory

3. Qualify and highlight what is speculation of [the] historian

4. Understand, don’t judge, as the Annales historians advise

5. Never intentionally falsify or omit (2000, 10–11)

These are insightful directives for moving histories. Rule 4 is a vital call to temper our appraisals of past actors to avoid an ignorant sense of temporal superiority whereby we judge others for their backward ways, as though we are the autonomous authors of our own progressive views rather than the product of our environments and the values to which we have been exposed, benefactors of the development of ideas over time. This is a particular issue for films that seek to set up mythic oppositions of good versus evil that may entertain while doing a disservice to any sense of responsible historiophoty. In addition, we must remember that we cannot know every aspect of the past that contributed to decisions made and actions taken. This tempers but does not preclude judgment. Rules 1 and 2 intersect and could be more clearly delineated. Ultimately, Davis set the stage for solid historiographic principles that are open to the audiovisual interpretation of filmmakers. She is optimistic and realistic when it comes to the prospects of film for history, stating, As long as we bear in mind the differences between film and professional prose, we can take film seriously as a source of valuable and even innovative historical vision (2000, 15).

Building upon this foundation, the key principles to gauge historiophoty include

Narration—analyzing the historical argument through content and form

Evidence—linking historical claims to historical data

Reflexivity—employing audiovisual aesthetics and narrative methods of speculation

Foreignness—acknowledging difference

Plurality—democratizing history

The five principles of historiophoty contribute a detailed method of analysis that synthesizes previous contributions into a comprehensive methodology. The goal of this system is to yield critical insights into this intricate and influential category of reality-based and reality-shaping screen narratives. As such, a unified and thorough approach to their appraisal is as complicated as it is imperative. This method provides a formal mode of analysis to unify the field of film and history around a theoretical approach germane to scholars of film and history and to the vast audience that consumes historical content in moving images. Each principle is the focus of a chapter that will be laid out at the end of the introduction.

Historiography, Historiology, Historiophoty

A key contribution of the methodology presented here includes isolating, refining, and concretizing historiophoty as a theoretical and methodological disciplinary practice by clearly delineating its meaning and setting it upon a solid foundation as an analytical tool. Defining and engaging historiophoty first requires attending to historiography. A term known to historians from their first year of university studies, historiography is often taken for granted as a generally understood concept by many historians who have written about film.

In The Writing of History, Michel de Certeau describes historiography as history plus graphy (writing), a combination he calls a paradox between two opposing terms that refer to the real mingled with discourse, with the role of the historian being connecting these two disparate elements (1992, xxvii). In head-spinning fashion, historiography refers to history in writing as well as its theories, methods, and evolution over time. Earlier, in Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, de Certeau claims that historiography separates looser, older, popular modes of history—genres such as genealogy, regional or national myths, and oral traditions—from the methodologies of academic history (1986, 4). History has always functioned to define genres of remembrance and patrol borders between history and legend. It follows that historiophoty, as it attends to history in audiovisual form, would do the same for film.

History, Memory, and the Indivisible Present in the Past

History films explore the lived human experience. They show us what we are capable of doing through what we have done, musing about how it all turned out. They offer time travel with the discombobulating problems of physics shunted aside. Historian David Lowenthal notes that our attachment to the past is inescapable and renders the present recognizable. Its traces on the ground and in our minds let us make sense of current scenes. Without past experience, no sight or sound would mean anything; we perceive only what we are accustomed to. Features and patterns become such because we share their history (1985, 86). His reflections on history mirror biological understandings of memory as no less than the glue that holds our mental life together. Without its unifying power, both our conscious and unconscious life would be broken into as many fragments as there are seconds in the day. Our life would be empty and meaningless (Kandel, Dudai, and Mayford 2014, 163).

History is collective memory built from the mechanics of personal memory. Films about the past speak to personal, communal, national, and global identities. They lean into the delights and mysteries of time travel while engaging in the serious business of reinterpreting the present through a reframing of the past. Curiosity and concern about the present propel the pursuit of history, filtering data from the past through the shared knowledge, beliefs, and values of a contemporary environment and culture.

History’s power and allure lie in the attempt to discern our own future by recounting what happened to others, others whose futures we know. As Arthur Danto explains, the future of those chronicled in histories belongs in our past, and therefore historical consciousness is a matter of structuring our present in terms of our future and their past (1982, 17); crucially, then, the historian has to know things his characters, who may be chroniclers to the same events, do not know: he knows how things came out (27). Through this understanding, we grasp that history is not a failed empirical science. The historical method pairs evidence of an irreplicable string of events, often social phenomena, with retrospective inquiry and reasoned analysis. As philosopher and historian R. G. Collingwood suggests, We do not move . . . to a past world; the movement in experience is always a movement within a present world of ideas (1956, 154). The present is why the past matters. The future matters because it will become the present. Interpreting the past is the only way to understand our contemporary moment and conceive what the future present might be. All histories preserve and restore, read through the future of the past (Lowenthal 1985, xvi, 211).

Historiography Begets Historiophoty

Is the historiographical method the business of filmmakers and film scholars? Frank Ankersmit contends that it is the responsibility of historians to design their own methodology and practice and of philosophers of history to consider what is at stake, determining these roles as separate, composed of experts who should not meddle with one another (2012, 118). But ought theory and method not be more intertwined? Could they be in dialogue instead of speaking over and past each other? Each has much to offer the other. Some meddling and friction are necessary to break through methodological barriers and blind spots to spur creativity, scholarship, and praxis.

Other philosophers of history argue that a vigorous exchange between history and philosophy benefits both. Collingwood declares that this intermixing is so crucial that the disciplines of history and philosophy should be bound within the training of one person (1956, 7). I take Collingwood’s view with the caveat that it need not be combined within one person but should be brought into dialogue by a collective, invested in various ways with the product of history via moving images.

Mia E. M. Treacey points out that film is often left out of the conversation in history (2016, 1). Likewise, while historians often pay scant attention to their practice as plied in moving images, dismissing it as mere entertainment, theories and methods of history are equally peripheral to many film practitioners. Rosenstone notes that since we cannot expect filmmakers to engage or propose theories about film, we cannot ask them to engage theories of history (2012, 23). And yet, these historians, professional and popular, are imbricated whether they acknowledge it or not. As Sobchack explains, There is a dynamic, functional, and hardly clear-cut relation that exists between the mythological histories wrought by Hollywood cinema (and other visual arts) and the academic histories written by scholars. They co-exist, compete, and cooperate in a contingent, heteroglossic, and always shifting ratio—thus constituting the ‘rationality’ of contemporary historical consciousness (1997, 4). Moving image media is too cogent and history too formative for either camp to ignore. This calls for historiophoty, as proposed by Hayden White (1988).

The status of the study of history in moving images often seems precarious, suspended between the disciplines of history and film. In 2001, Rosen argued that history in moving images had not been approached as a subdiscipline but only as a topic, which had stunted the evolution of a "historiography of film (xxii). Five years later, Rosenstone referred to the study of history and film as a subfield and elsewhere as a field, (or subfield or sub-sub-field) in search of a methodology" (2006b, 159; 2006a, 165). In the intervening years, Rosenstone has noted a shift as the study has grown into a subfield, perhaps on its way to becoming a field, with the balance of scholarly attention shifting from historians to film theorists (2023). And yet, the search for a methodology seems to be ongoing. It is here that this book aims to contribute.

White’s term has been slow to gain traction as a concept with a clear meaning. He proposed the term as a parallel to historiography, asking how we might compare "‘historiophoty’ (the representation of history and our thought about it in visual images and filmic discourse) to the criteria of truth and accuracy presumed to govern the professional practice of ‘historiography’ (the representation of history in verbal image and written discourse)" (1988, 1193; italics in the original). In the interim, the word has garnered some attention, popping up sporadically in essays and books, but it has evaded a full and standardized definition. Its most frequent function is as a blanket term referring to films about the past or the study of them. But historiophoty is not merely a synonym for history films, just as historiography relates to history but is not interchangeable with it.

The philosophy of history considers the question What is history? It simultaneously addresses why and how. A central concern of historiography is the methodology by which historians access the past. Leopold von Ranke established the historicist approach that values archival research and primary sources, a historical practice whose methods remain in use. Robert Berkhofer explains that historiography refers to (a) hermeneutics, the writing of history with a critical approach to sources; (b) histories of historical writing; and (c) theories of historical writing, pointing out that the third is often willfully ignored by academic history (1998, 227–228).

In his work of historiography, That Noble Dream, Peter Novick laments the confusing, multiple meanings of the term. In a footnote, he explains that the utilitarian word historiology had fallen from favor, replaced by the overladen term historiography, a word forced to supply too many meanings. Historiology signifies the science of history, its theories and its methods. Novick writes that in the same way that biology differs from biography and geology from geography, historiology is useful as a term, demarcated from historiography with a related but distinct focus (1988, 8). At times, it is more economical to refer to all aspects of historicizing subsumed within the word historiography, a catchall for the concerns and contexts of history as a discipline. In other instances, the term historiology is helpful for its precision and attention to the philosophies and practices that organize and direct this vital human impulse. Given this definition of historiography, historiophoty should attend to (a) theories, (b) methods, and (c) histories of the form. While a and b relate to historiology, all three comprise historiography. This book specifically attends to the ways historiophoty reflects historiology.

My goal is to contribute to the concept of historiophoty by translating ideas that inform, guide, inspire, and infuriate historians who work in words. To do this, I carve out the specific subset of historical films that function as audiovisual analogs to traditional history to propose five principles of historiophoty applied to a varied set of works. This book will not address the third branch of historiography by cataloging the history of the history film. That epic project, topic enough for a book-length study in its own right, has been undertaken to great effect by Jonathan Stubbs in Historical Film: A Critical Introduction. Historiophoty includes the history of the reception of historical films, as authored by Treacey in Reframing the Past: History, Film and Television, which focuses on academic circles within the Anglosphere. Nor will I recommend an assortment of formal or aesthetic strategies for filmmakers, an overstep comparable to telling historians how to construct their sentences. I hope to infuse the concept of moving histories with the spirit of cross-disciplinary respect for the expertise of all those in its web: historians, philosophers, film theorists, filmmakers, and spectators. As vital as historiophoty was when White invoked it in the late twentieth century, it is more crucial now in our screen-saturated age, at a moment when our understanding of truth, representation, and the role of narrative in accessing the real is being reappraised in scholarship and popular culture. When history first emerged, it was oral and ephemeral—fleeting. Then history was written and static. Now it moves.

The Capture and Manipulation of History in Sound and Light

The popular history film has always been, and continues to be, a ubiquitous, powerful, and persuasive form of national identity formation and vehicle for propaganda, whether aimed at mythmaking, morale-building, or critique. For this reason, these films are significant as more than artifacts of popular culture. The lines between personal, poetic, and mythic histories have traditionally been drawn in different ways across cultures, forming a historiographical heritage that reveals history’s many purposes and uses, from searches for origins and meaning to tools of political learning, entertainment, social cohesion, and control. The historical impulse begins everywhere in religion and folklore and evolves over time to make assertions about politics and morality. Histories have always embedded their authority somewhere, whether in the divine, the state, or institutions of social and public trust.

Moving histories deliver compelling and mesmerizing multisensory experiences with the capacity to reach broad and mixed audiences. Their power is expressed by Marc Ferro as he writes that with the passage of time, our memory winds up by not distinguishing between, on the one hand, the imaginative memory of Eisenstein or Gance, and, on the other, history such as it really happened. Even though historians seek to make us understand and artists seek to make us participate (1988, 73). This sense of participation leads to the curation of our very identities. As Rasmus Greiner points out, mainstream history films determine which narratives enter popular historical consciousness (2021, 192).

Historical aims, methods, and media have forked several times, from oral storytelling to the agricultural accounting practices of governments to histories of political manipulation to the entertainment of the novel and later to scholarly history. Moving pictures as a medium developed in the wake of the establishment of history departments at universities. They are a technological variant of our ancestral practices of the light-and-shadow play of history by the campfire. Academic texts are a historiographical aberration—and an important one. A profound moment in the history of history was its canonization as a profession. Although history within the academy is the