Reframing the Past

History, Film and Television

Mia Treacey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317273202
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Reframing the Past traces what historians have written about film and television from 1898 until the early 2000s. Mia Treacey argues that historical engagement with film and television should be reconceptualised as Screened History: an interdisciplinary, international field of research to incorporate and replace what has been known as 'History and Film'. It draws from the fields of Film, Television and Cultural Studies to critically analyse key works and connect past scholarship with contemporary research.

Reconsidered as Screened History, the works of Pierre Sorlin, Marc Ferro, John O'Connor, Robert Rosenstone and Robert Toplin are explored alongside lesser known but equally important contributions. This book identifies a number of common themes and ideas that have been explored by historians for decades: the use of history on film and television as a way to teach the past; the challenge of filmic and televisual history to more traditional historiography; and an ongoing battle to find an 'appropriate' historical way to engage with Film Studies and Theory. Screened History offers an approach to exploring History, Film and Television that allows room for future developments, while connecting them to a rich and diverse body of past scholarship.

Combining a narrative of historical research on film and television over the past century with a reconceptualisation of the field as Screened History, Reframing the Past is essential reading both for established scholars of History and Film, Film History and other related disciplines, and to students new to the field.

1 A history without a past

DOI: 10.4324/9781315639161-1

Introductory historiography books in the 2000s have placed film and television outside the boundaries of mainstream History, if they mention it at all. ¹ ‘Beyond the academy’ as Lambert and Schofield (2004) have described it in Making History: An Introduction to the History and Practices of a Discipline. Or as the godfather of ‘History and film’ Robert Rosenstone recently described, still a ‘field (or sub-field or sub-sub-field) in search of a methodology’. ² But how can this be possible? Film is over 100 years old. It has been discussed technically, artistically, scientifically, culturally, politically, and socially since its inception. Television may not be as old, but its social, cultural and political impact has been significant. The answer to this question is that the attention paid and value placed upon film or television depends on the definition of History in use. If the definition of History is broadened beyond traditional, stereotypical ideas of books about great men, wars and politics written only by historians, then it becomes clear that there have been historical discussions of film dating back to the late nineteenth century. Similarly, historical discussions of television appeared almost simultaneous to its invention. Some historians have been engaged with both for decades within a variety of historical, and non-historical sub-fields. Historians have even engaged with the recent developments in digital and online technology. Yet, within the hierarchy of established historiography there still exists a clear distinction between what is considered the serious business of History, and the exploration of film and television within a historical context. Questions remain unanswered: why is it that film, television, and multimedia technologies do not have an established position within History? Are they really just something subsumed within the larger auspices of Cultural History? Or should it be a sub-field of its own? Is it really still, as Rosenstone argued, a field still in search of a methodology? In exploring these questions, Reframing the Past proposes a new history of historical engagement with film and television, reconceptualising its boundaries, reconsidering and challenging historical attitudes.

Reframing the past

During the research for this book many different names for the field were encountered. The field has variously been called ‘History and film’, ‘History on film’, ‘historiophoty’, ‘televisual history’, ‘media history’, ‘Film History’, ‘history on film’ and ‘audiovisual history’ (and memorably at one conference, ‘history and/on/in film’). ³ Yet at its most basic, regardless of nomenclature, the scholarship represented in this book explores the intersections between the academic discipline of History, an at times ephemeral concept of ‘the past’, and the artefacts of film and television. Every different name has created different boundaries and divisions, rarely opening up new possibilities. Some have restricted possibilities by focusing on a single medium, while others have aligned themselves with specific disciplines, thus limiting both the publications considered, and the methods utilised. For example, ‘History and film’ has been claimed within the boundaries of History, but Film History belongs to the discipline of Film Studies. Each nomenclature discourages researchers from straying over boundaries and considering ideas, artefacts, or methods beyond their own precisely defined field. What is also clear, is that none of the previous names for the field encompass future forms of media; resulting in another artificial boundary being drawn.

During the research and writing of this book it became clear that if it was going to be possible to understand the history of how historians have engaged with film and television, and the possibilities offered by other disciplines for the future of the field, an adjustment to the field of vision was required. Doing so would mean redefining the field in broader terms: reframing it as Screened History. Screened History is flexible enough to cover the wide variety of past audiovisual forms and also reasonably future-proof. Whatever developments in film, television, telecommunications, computers or personal entertainment devices, there will undoubtedly need to be some kind of screen onto which images are projected, viewed or broadcast: whether real or only in the mind’s eye. Screened History is able to include the thoughts, critiques and writings about film, television or other media by any interested scholar or individual, from historians and film scholars to Cultural Studies theorists, journalists and bloggers. While Screened History can represent the history of a particular form of media, such as Film History, it is not medium specific. Its screen artefacts can include film, television, online streaming, video, DVD, or any other format that carries audiovisual information and that becomes an object of study in the future. Screened History includes all generic forms: comedies, westerns, thrillers, science fiction, drama, melodrama, documentaries, historical dramas, raw footage, compilation films, actuality footage, costume dramas, spoofs and remakes.

Reframed, Screened History encompasses writing about individual screen artefacts and their use for History: cultural, social, artistic, industrial and political. Explorations made in its name can include individual films, national cinemas or thematic and generic groupings. Screened History can be the representation of the past on film, television or any other form of media: the documentary, docudrama, and historical fiction film, even the personal video-diary. It can include historians as filmmakers or filmmakers as historians making productions about the past, about the representation of the past on screen, and all other combinations of History and the audiovisual on screen. Screened History can incorporate the vast bodies of scholarship, theories, ideas and methodologies from a number of different disciplinary areas, including: History, Film Studies, Cultural Studies, Television Studies, Film History, Film Criticism, Media Studies, Mass Communications, and Cinema Studies, as well as non-academic writing about film, television and the past. Screened History is inherently interdisciplinary. Reframing the Past, and the concept of Screened History, proposes a future for a disparate and divided body of work that has, since the late nineteenth century, expressed the thoughts, concerns and ideas of historians, film scholars, cultural theorists and many others about the intersections between the past and all forms of media.

Rewind

Reframing the Past is based on the premise that historical interest in film and television has lost sight of its own past and in doing so it has lost connection to significant past works. These forgotten works may provide the methodological answers it has been searching for, from within History and a number of other disciplines, especially Film and Television Studies. When reading widely on History, film and television a sense of déjà vu develops, of constant proclamations of ‘new beginnings’. Yet, when closely considered, interest by historians in film and television can only be considered new, because much of what was said between the 1890s and the late 1950s has been forgotten. This lack of awareness of its own past has severely limited historians’ theoretical and methodological development when working with film and television. Arguably this disconnection from the past is what has enabled the field to be relegated to the fringes of History. Thus, Reframing the Past reconceptualises the field as Screened History to enable a more comprehensive understanding of historical engagement with film and television.

Another reason for the fragile status of Screened History within History has been due to the development of the academic discipline of History over the last century. The discourses available to historians at different moments in time offered particular opportunities and limited others; this is a truism of all disciplinary discourses. However, without explicitly taking disciplinary development into consideration, it is nearly impossible to appreciate the truly innovative approaches that some have employed within Screened History. It is also impossible to appreciate the breadth and depth of the existing body of scholarship in isolation. Accordingly, a fundamental aim of Reframing the Past is to provide a contextual analysis of Screened History’s publications, individuals, and organisations within the broader frame of the development of History. Simply listing, either briefly in-text, or in bibliographies, what has previously been written, which has been the dominant approach taken in the past, ⁴ does not answer questions about the relevant status of Screened History within the larger field of History or the possibilities for methodology. Nor does it explain why film and television have most often been merged into a single technological form when they are distinctive formats with their own artistic, technical and historical nuances. ⁵

Another issue affecting the development of Screened History has been a difficult relationship with Film and later Television Studies. Historians who have worked in Screened History were originally faced with a lack of any academic discipline that dealt with film, or later, television. As Reframing the Past identifies, historians began engaging with film at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. But at this time there were no disciplines of Film or Television Studies within academia. However, there were industry discussions about film and later television occurring during this early period (discussed in Chapter 2), and there is some evidence of historical involvement. Regrettably most of these engagements focused on the making of film, rather than its analysis. When Film and later Television Studies were established within academia, the difficult relationship continued. As further elaborated in later chapters, some historians ignored these disciplines entirely, preferring traditional historical paradigms, while others were overtly negative about its value for historical analyses. Additionally, some historians utilised theories that they conceptualised as belonging to Film or Television Studies, but which were not actually part of the mainstream paradigms of the disciplines. Accordingly, one of the purposes of this history is to consider how historians’ attitudes toward these other disciplines have changed over time. Nevertheless, there were historians who crossed the disciplinary divide in groundbreaking ways, embracing approaches from both academic and non-academic discussions of film and television, such as the work of Thomas R. Cripps and Karsten Fledelius. Those historians who strayed across these divides demonstrated rich interdisciplinary possibilities for History, and they have produced some of the most groundbreaking work in the field. Thus, Reframing the Past also contextualises Screened History from within the disciplinary development of Film and Television Studies. This allows for an exploration of possible interdisciplinary opportunities to ascertain whether there have been, in the past and the present, other options that historians have not been aware of or considered useful.

When the publications, individuals, and organisations that form Screened History are traced and contextualised in this way something previously obscured becomes clear. What historians have claimed as ‘History and film’ substantially overlaps with the sub-field of Film History within Film Studies. Indeed various writers have been claimed by both disciplines, depending on the publications within which they published or their original disciplinary training. ⁶ Further highlighting the insular nature of History’s approach to Screened History, Film Studies publications that fall within the broader reconceptualisation of the field have, since the 1980s, seriously engaged with History. Yet, historians have been far less inclined to see beyond the boundaries of their own field. In some cases, bibliographic lists by historians that include Film Studies or Television Studies publications at all sometimes separated them out and clearly delineated them as ‘not History’. In comparison, Film History publications since the 1980s have suffered far less from such disciplinary boundary riding. They are more inclusive, more interdisciplinary, and more informed about the theories and methods of fields such as History.

This work has, in a deliberate strategy to break the cycle of insularity, engaged with a number of theories and methods from the fields of Film and Television Studies as well as Cultural Studies. In modelling a more interdisciplinary approach to Screened History, works of contemporary film historians became a significant influence on the narrative constructed in Reframing the Past. Separating the historians from the film or television scholars is ultimately impossible, artificial, and damaging to the ability of Screened History in establishing its identity and status within History. Removing artificial boundaries and embracing the interdisciplinary nature of its objects of inquiry, method, theory, and researchers, resulted in the emergence of a substantial interdisciplinary subfield including two, if not more, disciplines, with over 7,000 publications over 100 years, that have utilised a diversity of methodological approaches. Reframed this way, Screened History cannot possibly be considered a sub-sub field still in search of a methodology.

Screened History – ‘a' history

Recently, there have been a number of publications exploring similar ground to the reconceptualised Screened History, written by historians, film scholars and commentators from a variety of fields and backgrounds. Some, like Kember’s Marketing Modernity: Victorian Popular Shows and Early Cinema (2009), or Dillon’s History on British Television: Constructing Nation, National and Collective Memory (2010) have focused on particular periods of Screened History, or single mediums and their national influence. Others, like Chapman’s Film and History (2013) or Chopra-Gant’s Cinema and History: The Telling of Stories (2008) have taken a more holistic approach to the topic. However, upon closer analysis they are still written from within definable disciplinary perspectives. Historians have also begun discussing the wider implications of the cultural changes of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, in publications like Beck’s Presenting History Past and Present (2012) and De Groot’s Consuming History: Historians, and Heritage in Contemporary Popular Culture (2009), and Remaking History: The Past in Contemporary Historical Films (2015).

Since 2000 there have been publications by historians that have a focus on an approach to film and television that meets the reconceptualisation of Screened History. Two examples in particular reveal the ongoing challenges resulting from the field’s loss of understanding of its own past: Marnie Hughes-Warrington’s The History on Film Reader (2009) and Rosenstone’s History on Film/Film on History (2006 and 2012). The History on Film Reader’s focus was clearly stated as being on film as a medium, and included excellent examples of early writings by historians and an impressive engagement with a number of conceptually difficult works of Film Theory, Film History and Film Criticism. Because of its clearly defined focus its overview of the field was short and includes no analysis, and its further reading list includes only 34 publications, the earliest from 1971. In an earlier publication, History Goes to the Movies: Studying History on Film (2007) Hughes-Warrington stated there was ‘merit’ in ‘drawing together the information on historical films that is currently scattered across specialised and general print and online publications’. ⁷ However, that was not the goal of History Goes to the Movies which clearly established its focus on an analysis of five examples of the ‘prodigious outpouring of publications on historical films’ in recent years. ⁸ While asserting the value in having a history of the field, writing one was not the purpose of either of Hughes-Warrington’s books.

Similarly, Rosenstone’s History on Film/Film on History (2006 and 2012) included a short discussion of the field, which argued serious historical engagement in Screened History began in the ‘late 1960s’. ⁹ Since the late 1980s Rosenstone’s work on film has been groundbreaking and highly influential. However, his interest has always lain with a particular sub-field of Screened History: the idea of film as a way of doing History. In History on Film/Film on History his discussion of the field is very much in the mode of the standard narrative, short and with little detail before moving on to an in-depth discussion of Natalie Zemon Davis’s Slaves on Screen (2000). The ‘Guide to Key Reading’ also displayed the standard narrative of historical interest in film as a contemporary phenomenon stating: ‘it’s difficult to point to many texts as “key” to what ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Preface
• 1 A history without a past
• 2 Lost frames and faded footage: 1898–1949
• 3 History on the large and small screen: 1950–1969
• 4 Final frames and the rise of America: 1970–1979
• 5 Reruns and new releases: 1980–1989
• 6 A tale of two Roberts: 1990–1999
• 7 Screened History in the digital age: 2000 and beyond
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index