The Reel Joan of Arc: Reflections on the Theory and Practice of the Historical Film
Author(s): Robert A. Rosenstone
Source: The Public Historian, Vol. 25, No. 3 (Summer 2003), pp. 61-77
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The Reel Joan of Arc:
Reflections on the Theory and
Practice of the Historical Film
R OBERT A. R OSENSTONE
Although historians in recent years have become interested in evaluating the contributions of historical film to our understanding of the past, they have so far evolved
no criteria for doing so. This essay moves toward doing just that by suggesting and
examining some of the ways in which the dramatic historical film creates the world of
the past on the screen. Operating metaphorically and poetically, the film set in the
past becomes a work of history when it engages the ongoing discourse surrounding
its subject, asking the kinds of questions historians ask, but answering them in a
dramatic and semifictional way.
ON THE WORLD WIDE WEB there is a site, centered at Fordham University,
named Medieval History in the Movies.1 It is quite a substantial site. Printed
out, it comes to forty-one pages. With approximately ten or more entries a
page, this comes to a total of more than four hundred entries on individual
films. True, some films are mentioned more than once. And true, its notion
of “medieval” is rather broad, since it includes at one chronological end films
ROBERT A. R OSENSTONE, professor of history at the California Institute of Technology, is
author of a number of works of history, biography, and criticism, including Romantic Revolutionary: A Biography of John Reed (1975), Mirror in the Shrine: American Encounters
with Meiji Japan (1988), Visions of the Past: The Challenge of Film to Our Idea of History
(1995), and the recent fictional biography of Soviet writer Isaac Babel, entitled King of
Odessa.
1. http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/medfilms.html
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The Public Historian, Vol. 25, No. 3, pp. 61–77 (Summer 2003). ISSN: 0272-3433
© 2003 by the Regents of the University of California and the
National Council on Public History. All rights reserved.
Send requests for permission to reprint to Rights and Permissions, University of
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set in what would normally be called antiquity (such as the 1980 drama
Caligula or Federico Fellini’s Satyricon) and at the other end, biographical
films set in the late sixteenth and seventeenth century, such as Derek
Jarman’s Caravaggio (1986) and Alexander Korda’s Rembrandt (1936). But
I don’t wish to quibble over boundaries and periods. Whatever the parameters, it is still an impressive list.
I found this site after being asked to deliver a lecture on film and history
at the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. I went to the
web because, though I have for twenty years been thinking about history and
film, I am trained as a historian of the modern world, and my investigations
have convinced me that we can’t get very far with this subject unless we
focus on movies set in periods which we have seriously studied, researched,
and taught. Indeed, when I was asked to speak at the Center, I tried to beg
off. What do I know about medieval or Renaissance periods? But after some
back and forth with the director, I agreed to give a general talk about
historical films, with some medieval and Renaissance history. That decision
led me to search out references to films about those periods—and let me
find, if nothing more, a way to get into the talk.
Unlike the twentieth century, the medieval and Renaissance periods are
not popular eras in which to set historical films. Were we to leave aside
works about Shakespeare and Joan of Arc, we would rarely in recent years
have seen something set in those eras. And yet here is a web site annotating
some four hundred such films. For me this underscores what I have been
observing since I began writing about film—historians are increasingly
interested in the visual media as both a competitor and a collaborator in our
attempt to convey the past to our students and the culture at large. This
interest is also shown by the changing attitudes reflected in our conferences
and journals towards film. When I was a graduate student at UCLA some
thirty-five years ago, historical journals never deigned to mention film, and
our doctoral advisers would have tossed us out of the program and directly
into the neuropsychiatric institute were we to have suggested a dissertation
on a film topic or claim a film might successfully “do history.” Pretty much
the same attitudes still prevailed in the early eighties. Yet two decades later,
major journals regularly publish reviews and essays on film, panels on film
are held at scholarly meetings, and whole conferences are devoted to the
topic—in the United States, Europe, Latin America, and Africa.
Toward the end of the web site Medieval History in Movies there are
three fascinating lists: Worst Medieval Movies; Best Medieval Movies—by
historical accuracy; and Best Medieval Movies—as films. Taken together,
these provide a good deal of insight into the issue of historians and film. One
can gather a good deal by looking at the criteria for judging “the worst.” Mel
Gibson’s 1995 Braveheart, is, for example, characterized as a “massively
inaccurate portrayal of the life of the 13th-century hero William Wallace,”
although without those inaccuracies being characterized. The Adventures of
Marco Polo (1938) also falls short; for one thing, Gary Cooper does not make
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a very convincing Italian, and for another, there is something ludicrous
about the scene in which he stuffs “dry pasta in his pocket to take back to
Italy.” The Vikings (1958), with Kirk Douglas and Tony Curtis, fails because
in the rowing scenes you can clearly see one Viking with a vaccination scar
and another with a gold wristwatch. Franco Zeffirelli’s Brother Sun, Sister
Moon (1973), based on the life of St. Francis of Assisi, makes the list because
of its inappropriate “do your own thing” soundtrack by 1960s pop singer,
Donovan. Finally, The Conqueror (1956) is a failure because John Wayne
just does not make it as the great Mongol leader, Ghengis Khan.
The best list “by historical accuracy” contains only eight films; the best “as
films” contains seventeen. Four works manage to make it on both of these
lists: Becket (1964) with Peter O’Toole and Richard Burton; The Return of
Martin Guerre (1982), directed by Daniel Vigne and starring Gerard
Depardieu and Natalie Baye; the Carl Dreyer classic, The Passion of Joan of
Arc (1928); and Roland Joffe’s drama, The Mission (1986), starring Robert
DeNiro and Jeremy Irons. The comments as to why they are “best” are, if
possible, less revealing than those on the worst list. Becket, based on a play
by Jean Anouilh, is called a “superb film,” even though the review decries its
central interpretation, for “there is no historical data to support the suggestion” that there was a homosexual relationship between Thomas a Becket
and Henry II. The Return of Martin Guerre is “excellent” because it is
“based on trial records” and its director received “solid historical advice”
from Natalie Davis, who served as consultant. The Passion of Joan of Arc is
also “based on actual trial transcripts”; besides, the actress Jeanne Falconetti
gives “the greatest performance ever captured on film.” For The Mission no
reason is offered as to why it is included among “the best.”
These quotations point to something that occurs regularly when historians write about film. Judgments are made about historical value on wildly
divergent grounds—accuracy of detail, the use of original documents,
appropriateness of music, the looks or apparent suitability of an actor to play
someone whose body language, voice, and gestures we can never know from
the historical record—all of these may be invoked as a way of praising or
damning a film in the pages of journals like the American Historical Review
and the Journal of American History.
It also happens in the book, Past Imperfect: History According to the
Movies, where, in short essays, some sixty specialists assess one or more films as
to their historical content. (Few come off very well as contributions to our
understanding of the past.) Not untypical is Gerda Lerner’s essay on three films
devoted to the life of Joan of Arc—Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc
(mentioned above); Victor Fleming’s Joan of Arc (1948), written by Maxwell
Anderson and starring Ingrid Bergman; and Otto Preminger’s Saint Joan
(1957), based on the play by Bernard Shaw and starring Jean Seberg.2 Profes2. Gerda Lerner, “Joan of Arc: Three Films.” In Mark C. Carnes (ed.), Past Imperfect:
History According to the Movies (New York: Henry Holt, 1995), 54–59.
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sor Lerner does her best to be fair to the films, but the essay keeps veering
back and forth between different sorts of judgments and criteria. The
Fleming and Preminger works, she says, “adhere closely to the main
historical facts.” Both “succeed in creating a sense of historical veracity by
getting superficial details right, such as the weapons and costumes of the
time.” Ingrid Bergman gives a “luminous performance,” and during the
burning at the stake, her “pain and terror” are wholly believable. But
unfortunately the “miraculous” ending, with a cross set against a golden sky,
underscored by “typical Hollywood music designed to signify exaltation—
shatters the illusion.” The Preminger production, in following the Shaw
play, gives us “long, prescient monologues” by Joan which are totally
“ahistorical.” A framing device, telling the audience of events after Joan’s
death, is clumsy, and distances the audience from the main events: “It is as
though we are seeing a film about the historiography of Joan of Arc rather
than about her life and death.” Jean Seberg’s performance is “occasionally
stirring but mostly unconvincing.” She plays the maid as a teenage waif and
fails to convey her “strength, drive, force.”
Dreyer gets the highest marks—as well he should. He has created,
Lerner says, mostly through closeups, an atmosphere of “horror and ravaged
innocence.” The intertitles of his silent film consist “almost entirely of lines
from the actual record of Joan’s interrogation, which gives the work a spare
and appropriately medieval tone.” (It is not clear if this is meant to indicate
that there was something “spare” about medieval times, nor, indeed, what
this could mean.) Ultimately this film comes closest “to conveying the
historical truth.” For while the two Hollywood films “imitate the life and
times of Joan of Arc with varying degrees of success and some moments of
verisimilitude,” Dreyer, by using film poetically and metaphorically (my
emphasis), makes us suffer the agony of the peasant girl Joan and makes us
feel “the radiance of the presence of a saint.”3
These quotations from Lerner’s essay are chosen to highlight the jumble
of evidence she uses to make judgments. Adhering to facts, especially
details, gets pretty high historical marks. But facts alone do not in her view
necessarily make for good history. Other elements are also at work. One is
believability of performance, but against what do we measure performance
other than some prefigured notion of a historical figure? Who really knows
how the actual Joan looked, sounded, or gestured? How can we be sure she
did not act like a waif during the trial? For Lerner, a framing device which
takes us into the realm of historiography (and which some of us might wish
to judge a good technique, at least insofar as it broadens our view and makes
us aware that history does not tell itself) is judged to be clumsy and
distancing. The work that she finds closest to portraying historical truth
certainly uses “facts,” but draws its historical power largely from elsewhere—from what she labels as poetry and metaphor.
3. All quotations ibid., 56–59.
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Such apparent contradictions do not belong only to Lerner, who has
written an interesting enough essay. But they are common to the historian’s
approach. When we consider historical films, it is easy to be critical of what
we see. But ask what we expect a film to be or do, and basically we historians
don’t know, other than to insist that it adhere to “the facts.” This is because
most of our notions come directly out of our training and practice as
academics. Our first reaction is to think a film is really a book somehow
transferred to the screen, and that it should do what we expect a book to do:
get things right. This viewpoint does not belong to academics alone, but is
shared by reviewers and critics. Yet as moviegoers or anyone who lives in
our media-soaked culture has to know, a historical film has always been
something more than a collection of “facts.” It is a drama, a performance,
a work that stages and constructs a past in images and sounds. The power
of the history on the screen emanates from the unique qualities of the
medium, its abilities to communicate not just literally (as if any historical
communication is entirely literal), and not just realistically (as if we can
define historical realism) but also, in Lerner’s words, “poetically and
metaphorically.” In thinking about films and trying to assess how well they
construct the past, we have to stop expecting them to be books and begin
to see and judge them as dramatic works on a screen—and even, I would
argue, as visual metaphors.
The idea that works of history speak as metaphors is not unfamiliar.
Frank R. Ankersmit has long argued that the metaphorical dimension in
historiography is ultimately more powerful (and more interesting?) than the
literal or factual dimensions. We already know, he says, far too much about
the past ever to absorb what has been published. In the future, our
relationship to the past should focus less on the acquisition of new data and
more on the language we use for speaking about the past.4 Though
Ankersmit does not say so, it seems clear that one of the languages for talking
about the past can be the language of film. It is a language we should (must?)
learn how to read, a language which consists (at the very least) of both the
possibilities inherent in the visual media and the practices (drama is one of
them) which those who utilize the media have created.
In approaching film, we might follow the sensible suggestion that
Ankersmit has made with regard to philosophers who study written history.
Their task should not be, he argues, to prescribe for historians the right and
wrong way to write history. Instead, they should derive theory from practice
by analyzing the development of how the past has been and is written. The
same should apply to film. Rather than focusing on how film gets the past
wrong, or theorizing about what film should do to or for the past, or how it
should construct history, we had better first study the way in which historical
filmmakers have been working for the last century. This will help us to
4. F. R. Ankersmit, “Historiography and Postmodernism.” In History and Tropology
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), 162–81.
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understand the rules of engagement by which history can be rendered on
the screen.
To give just a taste of some of these rules, and to suggest how they differ
from history on the page, I will examine sequences from three very different
films: one set in the 1960s, another in the nineteenth century, and a third in
the medieval period.
The first sequence comes from an obscure but for me important work
entitled Walker, devoted to the life of William Walker, an American
adventurer who, at the head of an army of fifty-eight men, invaded Nicaragua in 1856, lent his forces to one side of an ongoing civil war, and within a
year had been elected president of that country, which he ruled as a dictator.
This film taught me a great deal about the normal rules, practices, and
expectations we have for a historical film—and it did so by breaking those
rules. Walker’s story, which falls somewhere between the history of free
booting and that of American imperialism, is treated in the film as a piece of
outrageous black humor, one that includes many deliberate anachronisms—computer monitors, Mercedes automobiles, and Time magazine all
are briefly part of this mid-nineteenth-century world. Yet the film’s portrait
of the Democrat as imperialist rings true. Reading everything written about
the man since the 1850s—a dozen books in three languages, numerous
chapters, essays, newspaper, and magazine articles—I found that although
the facts of the matter did not change (virtually everything we know about
the historic Walker was known during his life), interpretations of his life and
career have varied greatly over 150 years. Overtly fictional and absurdist in
some of its moments, the film provides a powerful interpretation of the
man—as well as the relationship between democracy and that kind of
imperialism which nineteenth-century Americans called Manifest Destiny.5
The sequence takes place somewhere beside a train track being laid by
Chinese workers in what seems to be Arizona. Here Walker meets with the
tycoon, Cornelius Vanderbilt. This hugely rich entrepreneur tells Walker
that he owns the lucrative shipping route from New York to California, a
route that runs across Nicaragua. But there is a civil war in Nicaragua, and
Vanderbilt wants stability there. He asks Walker, who previously had led an
invasion of Mexico, to go and take over the country, insinuating it will be a
lucrative venture. Walker demurs, claiming that his goals are higher than
the pursuit of personal profit. Vanderbilt then changes his tune and asks if
Walker doesn’t believe in the ideals of the Founding Fathers, in democracy
and universal suffrage? “More than in my own life,” comes the reply.
5. Robert A. Rosenstone, “Walker: The Dramatic Film as (Postmodern) History.” In
Rosenstone (ed.), Revisioning History: Contemporary Filmmakers and the Construction of the
Past (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995), 202–13. Reprinted in Rosenstone,
Visions of the Past: The Challenge of Film to Our Idea of History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1995), 132–51.
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“Nicaragua needs democracy,” Vanderbilt says. “It also needs a canal. I’m
interested in Nicaragua, and so are you, whether you know it or not.”6
The first thing to say about this sequence is that it never happened. It is
a “fiction,” the invention of a screenwriter. For though they ended up as
antagonists, with Walker the Nicaraguan president expropriating
Vanderbilt’s ships and other holdings, the two men never met face to face.
Yet this encounter is crucial to the meaning of the film. Here is a clash
between two powerful individuals, emblematic of two sorts of American
imperialisms—economic and democratic. These two men stake out the
terms of an ongoing debate with each other and with the larger world. Their
exchange reveals the clash of greed and self-interest, the fervent if misplaced idealism, and the hidden complicities which have fueled American
expansionism for a hundred and fifty years. To portray this same conflict, the
historian who works in words might have created their encounter on the
page, by outlining the ideology or belief system of each. The notion that
ideas compete in paragraphs on a page is, I would argue, as much a “fiction”
(but a “fiction” we accept) as the encounter we have seen between Walker
and Vanderbilt. The film actually signals its fictiveness by setting the
meeting in an obviously mythic space—a railroad track in Arizona decades
before trains came to the West. So while the incident depicted is not
verifiable, I would argue that it is historically true. True as a filmic way of
turning an ideological conflict into a dramatic one.
The second sequence is from Oliver Stone’s acclaimed work, Born on the
Fourth of July. The setting is Syracuse University in May, 1970, a few days
after the American “incursion” into Cambodia, and the day after the
shooting of four students at Kent State University. For anyone who lived
through the 1960s on a campus, there has to be a shock of recognition on
viewing this sequence. My own feeling on first seeing it was that I had been
present at this very scene, saw these very students on the steps of a university
hall, with their long hair, Afros, beards, Levis, bandanas; witnessed these
very gestures—the raised arms, the clenched fists—heard this very speechifying by Blacks and Whites, the denunciations of war, the shouted words
“Nixon, On strike, Shut it down, Right on”; saw these very police wade into
the crowd and break up the demonstration with tear gas and clubs. Even
that middle-aged figure on the steps, wearing a dashiki and calling for a
March on Washington, looks strangely familiar—but at the same time
somehow too old and out of place. Before the tear gas bombs explode and
the cops descend with swinging clubs, we may realize: that is Abbie
Hoffman, King of the Yippies, saying precisely the kind of things he had said
at such demonstrations thirty-five years before.
6. Rudy Wurlitzer, “Walker,” Witness 1, no. 4 (Winter, 1987): 11–77. The encounter
between Walker and Vanderbilt can be found on pp. 22–24. This screenplay differs somewhat
from the shooting script of the film.
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The sequence is based upon a real event. Syracuse was one of hundreds
of universities and high schools whose students went on strike the day after
Kent State. But the demonstration at Syracuse was different from the one
we see. The words may have been violent, but there was no confrontation
with police. Nor was the demonstration attended by either Ron Kovic, the
hero of the film (played by Tom Cruise), and author of the book on which it
is based, or by his girlfriend, for he did not have a girlfriend. Nor was it
addressed by Abbie Hoffman. Yet though the sequence was created by the
director, it is not a complete invention, but instead, a cunning mixture of
diverse elements—fact, near fact, displaced fact, invention. It refers to the
past, it prods the memory, but it does not reproduce a specific, documentable moment of the past. Yet for all that, it is a historical moment, one that
claims its truth by standing in for many such moments. Like other elements
in historical films, it serves to open out the story of one man to encompass
those of others like him. It tells the truth that such demonstrations were
common in the late sixties. The truth of the chaos, confusion, and violence
of such encounters between students and police. The truth of the historical
questions the sequence forces viewers to confront: Why are these students
gathered here? What are they protesting? Why are they so critical of
national leaders? Why do the police break up the rally with such gusto?
What is at stake here for our understanding of the 1960s?7
Two final sequences come from the recent film, A Knight’s Tale. The first
takes place only a couple of minutes into the story. A knight has been killed
at a jousting match and one of his three attendants decides to take his place
for the next turn in the lists. As he rides onto the field, secure that the armor
disguises his humble origins, we hear people in the viewing stands singing
over and over the MTV refrain, “We will, we will rock you” as they extend
their arms and move back and forth in that contemporary gesture of fans
that we call “The Wave.” At the top of the stands, a girl dances solo, doing
what very much looks like contemporary steps and movements. Below her,
groups of guys, long hair pulled back in bandanas, slam beer steins together
and roar as if at the Super Bowl—or at least in a commercial shown during
a football game. Then the jousting starts and we are back to more traditional
sights—armor gleams, eyes peer through slitted visors, hoofs pound, enormous
lances are raised, a huge metallic clash occurs, and a knight falls off a horse and
clangs to the ground. Or at least this is what we take to be tradition, and we
assume it bears some proximate reality to historical jousting, though in truth all
most of us know of jousting comes from other films.
The questions forced upon us by this sequence obviously concern the
blatant anachronisms: Don’t they violate what we know about tournaments
in the fourteenth century? Yes and no. It depends upon what you wish to say
7. For a fuller discussion of Stone, see Robert A. Rosenstone, “Oliver Stone as Historian.” In
Robert Brent Toplin (ed.), Oliver Stone’s USA (Lawrence, Kans.: University Press of Kansas,
2000), 26–39.
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about such tournaments. The film, after all, is made for a twenty-first
century audience, for people to whom such a tournament, however exciting,
seems no more than a distant, exotic, and bizarre spectacle. To normalize it,
to show that in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries such tournaments
were wildly popular spectator sports—much like, for Americans, football
today—the filmmaker utilizes anachronisms that are so blatant (the MTV
reference, the Wave) that nobody could mistake them for an actual historical reference. Yet they do help communicate something that would be
otherwise difficult for that audience to comprehend, and they do so precisely by using contemporary imagery and language.
A second sequence in the film does much the same thing. A formal court
dance that begins to staid recorder music, a kind of dance we know from
other period films, a dance that looks slow, stately, and not very much fun to
our modern eyes, speeds up and then segues into a modern rock dance to the
music of electric guitars. Here again the filmmaker translates an experience
(or an imagined experience) into a visual, aural, and dramatic vocabulary
that we can more readily appreciate. The shift in mid-dance is clear enough
that nobody will really think people danced this way, or that rock music was
popular in that period. It is quite clearly only a way of communicating in a
modern vocabulary not some literal reality (do we know the literal reality of
the dances then?) but the spirit or feeling of fun and eroticism that
participants might have felt in such a dance in that era.
Maybe you are tempted to say: Alright. So at the level of the sequence, a
historical film has license to transcend the literal. But a film is more than
individual clips or brief visual quotations. What about the larger sense of the
past? Aren’t these sequences just part of the way in which historical films
always fictionalize and violate the people and events of the past? Don’t they
do precisely the opposite of what we who write history do?
Okay. It is, of course, possible to admit that films do something different.
But as David Harlan has argued in a recent essay, we must understand that
there is a sharp difference between academic history and what Harlan calls
popular history, a category that includes film. Academic history is, at least in
theory, a disciplined way of getting outside ourselves, of seeing the past on
its own terms, of trying to look through the eyes of people long dead. Films,
for the most part, make the past accessible by collapsing it into the present.
In popular history we don’t get to know earlier people in their strangeness,
but get rid of the strangeness by making people in the past similar to us. For
the most part it is not the difference between the dead and the living that
interests filmmakers, but the similarities, what the living share with the
dead.8
8. David Harlan, “Ken Burns and the Coming Crisis of Academic History,” unpublished
manuscript. For a published version of the essay that, because it has been shortened, lacks the
quotations used here, see “Ken Burns and the Coming Crisis of Academic History,” Rethinking
History: The Journal of Theory and Practice, 7, no. 2 (Summer 2003):167–94.
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Harlan’s essay, which provocatively calls documentary director Ken
Burns “the most famous historian in America today,” argues that the very
purpose of popular history is different from academic history. Film, in
particular, gives us the past not as a site we turn to for critical understanding,
but “a past we turn to for healing purposes—the past as a source of reflection
and recuperation.” This is a past which “offers up modes of perception,
habits of thought, and ways of being that, could we but recover them and
hold them in memory, might help us become the kind of people we have
always wished to be.” If this aim characterizes the work of Burns as well as
most big budget Hollywood historical films, it does not apply to a kind of film
which Harlan ignores, a more critical or intellectual kind of work that is
often produced in other parts of the world. But he is surely right when he
characterizes popular history not “as an incomplete or degraded form of
academic history; it is a legitimate and compelling genre in its own right,
with its own aims and objectives, its own rules and requirements, its own
criteria of evaluation.”
It is just such objectives, requirements, and criteria which I have been
thinking about for the last few years—what you might call the dramatic
film’s Rules of Engagement with the past. These are not easy to locate, nor
are they easy to accept. For starters, there is our general notion that such
films are just too simple in the characters they portray and the stories they
tell, which means that they inevitably oversimplify the complexities of the
past. But I am tempted to argue the reverse. Films seem simple because on
a surface level they are so easy to watch. If we are to understand the way they
engage the past, however, we must learn to read what is on the screen more
deeply and widely. We must look at historical films not for literal truths but
for more symbolic or metaphoric interpretations. To do so, we must pay
close attention and learn something about film language, the way the
medium tells the past. In other words, we must work to find and unpack the
historical content and argument.
Films can speak in different tongues. Let me point to two different kinds
of dramatic films from the medieval/Renaissance periods. One is the traditional work which purports to be a window onto past events—The Return of
Martin Guerre. Another is the work which plays with the past, winks at you
as if to say “this really is only a film”—A Knight’s Tale. The overwhelming
majority of historical films are of the former sort, but one should not dismiss
the latter. For precisely by its winking, A Knight’s Tale signals that it is not
meant to be some exact rendition of the past, some window onto a vanished
world, but rather a kind of conversation about that past, and a commentary
on it. In this case the conversation speaks in broad tones, with a clear villain
who must get his come-uppance, a sappy love story that doesn’t pretend to
be anything but sappy, and a comic book hero. The film is, in short, a riff on
a certain type of film and a certain period of history. Yet it is a riff that speaks
to and comments upon the issues of the age in which it is set, the fourteenth
century—or so colleagues who specialize in the Middle Ages tell me. The
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question at issue for our hero in the film, the son of a thatcher who begins to
impersonate a knight, is this: just what is it that makes a person noble? Is it
simply a matter of letters of patent attesting to four generations of nobility?
Or does nobility have something to do with qualities of heart and spirit?
During the period in which the film is set, real debates were going on
precisely around this point—was nobility inherited or something that has to
do with character? Many commentators opted for the latter—which is, of
course, what the film concludes. Our honest thatcher defeats the villain,
gets the girl, and is officially knighted.
The Return of Martin Guerre is the more common type of historical film,
one that uses the sober tones we take as appropriate when speaking of the
dead. When it was first released, there was some debate over the extent to
which it accurately represented not only the mysterious case of Martin
Guerre, but village life in Languedoc in the sixteenth century. Complaints
were voiced that the village of Artigat was too neat, that there was not
enough refuse and swill in the streets, that the peasants looked rather too
scrubbed. But such judgments are in part a matter of perspective—and
audience. My students who see the film today find the village to be
oppressively filthy and primitive.
Like all such works, the film indulges in invention that adds to or violates
the historical record.9 Take, as but two examples, the fictional scene in which
the false Martin returns to Artigat and the Perry Mason–like confrontation
before a packed courtroom in Toulouse (where trials were held without
spectators). Despite such inventions, the central story—who in the village
knew or suspected that the man who returned was a false Martin; to what
extent was the wife, Bertrande de Rols, a willing co-conspirator in his
longtime impersonation; how important the case was to the famed jurist,
Jean de Coras—all this remains intact. So does a portrait of a sixteenthcentury French village, with its perpetual and collective work, lack of
privacy, dimly lit rooms, illiteracy, rude manners, charivari, and wise old
women who could lift curses. The central question—is Bertrande a sharp,
even rational peasant, a woman maneuvering for some individual space, or
simply a victim of a charming charlatan?—also comes through. The former
interpretation, suggested by Natalie Davis in her book by the same name,
itself became a matter of some historical debate. Davis was taken to task in
the pages of the American Historical Review by Robert Finlay for her
supposed “feminist” rereading and rewriting of the past.10 Here the issue
became that old one for historians: how much do the sources speak for
themselves, and how much can (do?) we read into sources, or use context to
9. Robert A. Rosenstone, “Like Writing History With Lightning,” Contention 2, no. 3
(Spring, 1993): 191–204. Reprinted as “The Historical Film: Looking at the Past in a
Postliterate Age.” In Rosenstone, Visions of the Past, 45–81.
10. Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1983); Robert Finlay, “The Refashioning of Martin Guerre,” and Natalie
Zemon Davis, “On the Lame,” The American Historical Review 93, no. 3 (June 1988): 553–603.
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amplify their meaning. (And if we can’t ever finally settle such disputes
within our field, how can we hope to with regard to film?)
As a traditional “historical” film, Martin Guerre, unlike A Knight’s Tale,
communicates in traditional “historical” film language and form. Yet such
language is subtler about history than we normally allow. Near the opening,
there is a sequence which exemplifies how such language alone tells us a
good deal about meaning of the past. The wedding of the young couple,
Martin Guerre and Bertrande de Rols, begins with an overhead shot from
high up in the back of the church, a shot which shows the whole community
but no individuals. The second image is of the priest, the third of the parents
of the groom, the fourth of the parents of the bride, the fifth of the ring being
put on the bride’s finger, the sixth of the groom, and the seventh of the bride.
Here, in this carefully constructed sequence, we are (if we care to read it)
presented with the hierarchy of human relationships in Artigat, a hierarchy
that controls the personal and property relationships in a sixteenth-century
village. Clearly the language is telling us that this is no modern town in which
the wedding couple are the center of attention, and letting us know that in
this period of history, marriage is not about personal desire but about social
cohesion and property. From the end of the wedding, we go directly to the
notary who draws up the marriage contract and calls it “un bon affaire.”
Good business.
It is just this kind of reading we must do if we are to more fully understand
the meaning embedded in and conveyed by historical films—a reading
which shows how filmmakers encode messages not just in the characters or
story, but in the very visual language in which they choose to speak of the
past.
You may ask: is this History? It is a question I ask myself. Maybe one
should not insist upon the word—at least not in its capitalized form. Call it
Popular History. Or History on Film. Perhaps we need to invent a new word
for it. What I want to insist is that the historical film can do “history” —that
is, recount, explain, interpret, and make meaning out of the people and
events in the past. Like written history, it utilizes traces of that past, but its
rules of engagement with them are structured by the possibilities of the
medium and the practices it has evolved. So its claims on us will inevitably
be far different from those of written history.
Perhaps a few more examples will help. The basic element, the camera,
is a greedy mechanism which must show more precise details—arrangements of furniture, the way tools are handled, stances or gestures, the exact
locations of peasants in a landscape—than historical research could ever
fully provide. The dramatic structure, which means the need for plausible
characters and psychic tension, and the limitations on screen time, ensures
that events and characters will be condensed, compressed, altered—even
invented, along with invented dialogue. What we see on the screen is—and
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in this sense precisely like written history—not a window onto the past but
a construction of a simulated past, not a literal reality, but a symbolic or
metaphoric one.
Written history works the same way. It too does not recreate the past but,
instead, enfolds its trace elements, into a verbal construction, creating a text
that attempts to explain vanished people, events, moments, and movements
to us in the present. Even the most scholarly works are, in the words of
Robert Berkhofer, “more structures of interpretation than the structures of
factuality they purport to be.” Indeed, the literary job of historical realism,
the only mode of writing historians recognize as legitimate—and one to
which most filmmakers adhere—is to “make the structure of interpretation
appear to be (the same as) the structure of factuality.”11 Both written history
and films invoke the authenticity (or reality) that comes from using those
traces, that documentary evidence we call “facts,” and then go on to employ
a literary or filmic vocabulary to create “History.”
Let me emphasize this point: both films and books are more than the sum
of their parts. A written work is based upon data, but the totality of its words
finally adds up to a text that transcends the data and launches into a realm of
metaphor and moral argument. Film also utilizes data, if in a rather more
casual way. Then it too launches into the same realm. Vision, metaphor,
argument, or moral is precisely the point at which film and written history
come the closest to each other. One might stipulate that the details of the
past, what we call facts, are more than interesting—they are absolutely
crucial for history. But ultimately what we really want to know is how to
think about them, what they mean. Like the printed page, film is ready to tell
us—in its own forms and language.
If they share interpretive structure, a shifting relationship of what we
might call data to discourse, books and films divide on one crucial issue:
invention. One may talk, as Hayden White has long done, of the fictive
qualities of narrative, but historical narrative is always built on blocks of
verifiable data. The dramatic film, by contrast, indulges in the invention of
characters, dialogue, incidents, and events. Indeed, some historical films are
made up of wholly invented characters placed into a documented setting or
situation. Yet this practice of invention still allows for historical “thinking.”
At least if by that term we mean coming to grips with the issues from the past
that trouble and challenge us in the present—questions of social change,
gender relations, individual and group identity, class, ethnicity, war, colonialism, revolution, ideology, and nationalism.
These kinds of social and cultural issues have long been explored in
historical films. In the 1920s, Sergei Eisenstein’s October created an interpretation of the Bolshevik Revolution which still can stand alongside those of
11. Robert Berkhofer, Beyond the Great Story: History as Text and Discourse (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 57, 60.
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academic historians writing then and today (as my recent essay argues).12 Oliver
Stone’s Born on the Fourth of July is, it seems to me, a brilliant portrait of the
way America was being torn apart during the Vietnam war; in this case, the
symbol of the war within the hero’s family clearly stands for the larger war
within the family of the United States. The Return of Martin Guerre addresses
issues of women, individualism, social control, property rights, and the nature
of true marriage in early modern, rural France. Dreyer’s Joan of Arc, according
to all commentators, creates a powerful and convincing portrait of the anguish
and pain of the maiden on trial and at the stake.
Films which grapple with such significant historical questions have been
made all over the world, though they are not always in fashion everywhere.
Instead they tend to appear in clusters of two sorts: as either several works
by a single director who seems haunted by the past (Andrzej Wajda, Poland;
Oliver Stone, U.S.; Theo Angelopolous, Greece; Ousemane Sembene,
Senegal; Carlos Diegues, Brazil) or as several films in a single country in a
brief period of time (Cuban film in the 1960s, the New German Cinema or
the Cinema Nuovo of Brazil, both in the 1970s). Such clusters seem to
appear when nations are undergoing some kind of cultural or political stress,
change or upheaval—the attempt to come to grips with the trauma of
Vietnam (Stone); the corruption and internal conflicts that presaged the end
of Communism (Wajda); Nazism and the legacy of the Third Reich (New
German Cinema); the breakup of a nation (the cinema of the former
Yugoslavia in the 1990s and today); the desire to find (or create) a heritage
for a postcolonial country (Sembene, Cinema Nuovo); or to justify a revolutionary change of regimes (Cuba).
My own studies of historical film in the last decade have attempted to
answer the question: how do certain films work as history? How do they
make meaning of the past? My focus has been films that are based on
verifiable incidents, events, or texts that themselves deal with the past.
These include films such as Born on the Fourth of July, Glory, October,
Walker, works that recount, explain, interpret the past by selecting trace
elements and turning them into “facts,” using them—along with other
material—to comment on social, political, moral, and personal issues of
both the past and present. Historical writing does the same thing—except
perhaps for that “other material,” which includes the inevitable inventions
that are mixed in with the verifiable facts, invented elements which are used
to fill up the frame, or to condense, symbolize, or displace things too
complex or lengthy to fit into the dramatic structure or the standard twohour time frame of the film.
Inventions hardly constitute the entire difference between written and
screen history. Important as well are the elements of telling inherent in the
medium. These include elements of color, sound, and movement and of
12. Robert A. Rosenstone, “October as History,” Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory
and Practice 5, no. 2 (Summer 2001): 255–74.
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drama that heightens emotional states and creates an intense and intimate
relationship with characters; of spectacle, bodies, faces, costumes, and
landscapes. The “facts” delivered in films include such elements, along with
the very visual surfaces of the past that film creates—the settings, landscapes, sounds, costumes—everything that comes under the heading of
what Roland Barthes once called the “reality effect.” For Barthes, such
effects were mere notations and not part of the meaning of History.13 In film
they achieve a sense of being facts under description, an integral part of the
world of the past and thus important elements of meaning. Such “reality
effects” can often tell us much about the people, processes, and eras.
A striking example of this occurs in Roberto Rossellini’s three-part Age of
the Medici, a highly undramatic work based on a materialist notion of
history, where Renaissance Florence is conveyed through the surface of
physical objects, buildings, furniture, and long speeches that seem like
recitations from textbooks. In one superb sequence, the camera takes us
into a small room, where a few humble assistants are at work on the walls of
an unfinished Brancacci Chapel, which we recognize because there are the
familiar figures by Masaccio, but only in a sketchy outline. Today, this room
has disappeared behind a (literal and figurative) wall of enormous proportions and expectations. A wall which proclaims: Here begins the Heroic
Renaissance, and the way we view the world will never be the same again.
But what we see in the film is something physical that recaptures a lost
moment. The images take us back in a way no book can, into that chapel long
before anyone could know what this work would come to symbolize. All we
see are some men working slowly on unfinished walls while their efforts are
subject to blistering commentary by a British visitor, certain he knows what
good art is and that, whatever it is, it’s not what is being painted here.
How to read this scene? Certainly our understanding will depend upon
what we already know of Renaissance Florence. If we know nothing of the
Brancacci Chapel, the sequence will have little meaning. This is typical in
films; they are constructions which ultimately will be read in different ways.
But is this not the same for our written histories? The more you bring to the
past, the more you get out of it. Some historians have argued that meaning
can be and is fixed in the text. In plain language. Immutable. Verifiable or
refutable. But the history of historiography refutes this. Such an argument
is part of a much larger struggle: between those who believe words mean
what they say and those who know that words always mean much more than
what they say.
Given its roots in drama and the visual media, the historical film cannot
possibly be about facts. Yet it must be about them at least to the extent that
facts are an integral part of the discourse of history. To be judged a
13. Roland Barthes, “Le discours de l’histoire,” (1967), in Barthes, Le Bruissement de la
Langue (Paris: Seuil, 1984), 153–66.
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“historical” film, as opposed to a “costume drama,” a film must somehow
engage the discourse of history, the already existing body of writing, arguments, debates, memories, images, moral positions, and data surrounding
the topic with which it deals. The film’s metaphors, compressions, alterations, and inventions must grow out of that discourse and add something to
it. The historical film does not, any more than the written word, aim to deny
or even alter a larger sense of history—its aim rather is to evoke and
comment upon the past.
Film is, as David Harlan suggests, a kind of popular history. To attend the
cinema (or to watch a television screen) is to undergo an experience far
different from that of reading words on a page. That difference lies at the
heart of the historical film. However we define, measure, and analyze that
difference—and none of this has yet been undertaken very convincingly,
perhaps because of the great slippage involved in translating a multi-media
experience into linear words—it is at least clear that the experience is
different enough to return us to basic questions: what do we want from the
past? Why do we want to know it? What else might we want to know that we
don’t already know? Do we wish to learn by example? To feel (or think we
feel) what others (may have) felt in given situations? To experience, if only
distantly, what others experienced in war, revolution, political crisis, times
of trouble, and times of plenty? Or perhaps, as in the history once practiced
by the Greeks, to be inspired into ethical or aesthetic contemplation of the
human condition?
In theorizing and supporting postmodern history, Frank Ankersmit has
called for new ways of representing the past. Unlike other theorists, he does
not want, he insists, to reject scientific historiography—only to draw attention to its limitations, its implicit claim that nothing of the past exists outside
historical texts. Yet for Ankersmit, outside the texts of history lies the most
important part of the past: “the whole domain of historical purpose and
meaning.”14 This is a realm that does not so much deny facts as cut loose
from them. Surround them. Exist before and after them. It is the precise
realm into which the historical film can enter, not by ignoring data but by
using facts or playing with them in its own way. Which is to say: the historical
film engages much of the same stuff that scientific history engages, but does
so on its own filmic and dramatic terms.
Fifteen years of thinking about historical film have left me believing that
the visual media provide an entirely new realm for examining, telling,
explaining, and interpreting the past—a realm which is not history as we
know it but something adjacent to history, which builds upon the same
materials as history and serves as a commentary upon it. It is a realm whose
location and dimensions exist at coordinates yet to be determined. The
charting of those coordinates, or standards by which to think about the past
14. Ankersmit, “Historiography and Postmodernism,” 181.
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in historical films, can only grow out of a wide effort on the part of historical
practitioners. A few of us have already begun this process, but we need help,
critique, and assent from others in the field. Just as the boundaries of the
game we call history are altered over the years by the collectivity of
historians (including academics, public historians, museum curators, filmmakers, etc.), so must it be with films. Only in this way will we be able to
reach a point where we can think more systematically about, say, the Reel
Joan of Arc. Only in this way will we be able to choose among and decide which
of the many versions of her life (there are at least forty) present us with
interesting, provocative, important depictions of the maiden and her times.
Let us not forget that we in the West have been writing history for 2500
years and putting it onto the screen for just about a century. Today the
culture still privileges what we historians have to say, but increasingly the
messages about the past are told upon the screen, large and small, and in
forms such as the documentary and the docudrama which, for lack of space,
I haven’t even mentioned here. In an age increasingly saturated with visual
media, it is more than mere speculation to wonder how much longer we
academics who turn out essays and books will be seen as the locus of
historical explanation and wisdom. Film has been making major changes in
our notions of the past, but historians are still too enmeshed in the old ways
to understand precisely what they are, or—heretical idea—to see if there
are lessons in the practices of the visual media (montage, flashback, condensation, apposite invention) which might serve to expand the vocabulary with
which we think and write history upon the page.
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