The Persistence of History

Cinema, Television and the Modern Event

Vivian Sobchack, Vivian Sobchack

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781135205607
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The Persistence of History examines how the moving image has completely altered traditional modes of historical thought and representation. Exploring a range of film and video texts, from The Ten Commandments to the Rodney King video, from the projected work of documentarian Errol Morris to Oliver Stone's JFK and Spielberg's Schindler's List, the volume questions the appropriate forms of media for making the incoherence and fragmentation of contemporary history intelligible.

part one

the
historical
event

one

the
modernist
event

hayden white

“History does not break down into stories but into images.”

—Walter Benjamin

“The coming extinction of art is prefigured in the increasing impossibility of representing historical events.”

—Theodor Adorno

It is a commonplace of contemporary criticism that modernist literature, and, by extension, modernist art in general, dissolves the trinity of event, character, and plot which provided the staple both of the nineteenth-century realist novel and of the historiography from which nineteenth-century literature derived its model of “realism.” In particular, the tendency of modernist literature to dissolve the event has especially important implications for understanding the ways in which contemporary Western culture construes the relationship between literature and history. The invention of a subject-less and plot-less historiography in the twentieth century has amply demonstrated that modern historical research and writing could get by without the notions of character and plot.¹ But the dissolution of the event as a basic unit of temporal occurrence and building-block of history undermines the very concept of factuality and threatens therewith the distinction between realistic and merely imaginary discourse. This dissolution undermines a founding presupposition of Western realism: the opposition between fact and fiction. Modernism resolves the problems posed by traditional realism, namely, how to represent reality realistically, by simply abandoning the ground on which realism is construed as an opposition between fact and fiction. The denial of the reality of the event undermines the very notion of “fact” informing traditional realism. Therewith, the taboo against mixing fact with fiction, except in manifestly “imaginative” discourse, is abolished. And, as current critical opinion suggests, the very notion of “fiction” is set aside in the conceptualization of “literature” as a mode of writing which abandons both the referential and poetic functions of language use.

It is this aspect of modernism that informs the creation of the new genres, in both written and visual form, of post-modernist, para-historical representation, called variously “docu-drama,” “faction,” “infotainment,” “the fiction of fact,” “historical metafiction,” and the like.² These genres are represented by books such as Capote's In Cold Blood (1965), Mailer's The Executioner's Song (1979), Doctorow's, Ragtime (1975), Thomas' The White Hotel (1981), De Lillo's Libra (1988), and Reed's Flight to Canada (1976); the television versions of Holocaust (1978) and Roots (1977); films such as The Night Porter (Cavani, 1974), The Damned (Visconti, 1969), Our Hitler (Syberberg, 1976-77), The Return of Martin Guerre (Vigne, 1982), and more recently Stone's JFK (1991) and Spielberg's Schindler's List (1993). All deal with historical phenomena, and all of them appear to “fictionalize” to a greater or lesser degree the historical events and characters which serve as their referents in history.

These works, however, differ crucially from those of their generic prototype— the nineteenth-century historical novel. That genre was born of the interference between an “imaginary” tale of romance and a set of “real” historical events. The interference had the effect of endowing the imaginary events with the concreteness of reality, while at the same time endowing the historical events with the “magical” aura peculiar to the romance.³ The relationship between the historical novel and its projected readership was mediated by a distinctive contract: its intended effects depended upon the presumed capacity of the reader to distinguish between real and imaginary events, between “fact” and “fiction,” and therefore between “life” and “literature.” Without this capacity, the affect in which the familiar (the reader's own reveries) was rendered exotic while the exotic (the historical past or the lives of the great) was rendered familiar could not have been produced.

What happens in the postmodernist docu-drama or historical metafiction is not so much the reversal of this relationship (such that real events are given the marks of imaginary ones while imaginary events are endowed with reality) as, rather, the placing in abeyance of the distinction between the real and the imaginary. Everything is presented as if it were of the same ontological order, both real and imaginary—realistically imaginary or imaginarily real, with the result that the referential function of the images of events is etiolated. Thus, the contract that originally mediated the relationship between the nineteenth-century (bourgeois?) reader and the author of the historical novel has been dissolved. And what you get, as Gertrude Himmelfarb tells us, is “History as you like it,” representations of history in which “anything goes” (to the detriment of both truth and moral responsibility, in Himmelfarb's view).⁴ This is exactly the sort of accusation which has been so often directed at Oliver Stone since the appearance of JFK.

Stone was criticized by journalists, historians, politicians, and political pundits for his treatment of the events surrounding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. In part, this was a result of the “content” of his film. He was accused, among other things, of fostering paranoia by suggesting that President Kennedy's assassination was a result of a conspiracy involving highly placed persons in the United States government. But also—and for some critics even more seriously—Stone's film seemed to blur the distinction between fact and fiction by treating an historical event as if there were no limits to what could legitimately be said about it, thereby bringing under question the very principle of objectivity as the basis for which one might discriminate between truth on the one side and myth, ideology, illusion, and lie on the other.

Thus, in a review of JFK which appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, entitled “Movie Madness,” Richard Grenier wrote:

And so Oliver Stone romps through the assassination of John Kennedy, inventing evidence that supports his thesis [of conspiracy], suppressing all evidence that conflicts with it, directing his film in a pummelling style, a left to the jaw, a right to the solar plexus, flashing forward, flashing backward, crosscutting relentlessly, shooting “in tight” (in close), blurring, obfuscating, bludgeoning the viewer until Stone wins, he hopes, by aTKO.⁵

Note that Grenier objects to the ways in which Stone slants evidence concerning the assassination, but he is especially offended by the form of Stone's presentation, his “pummelling” and “bludgeoning” style which apparently distorts even those events whose occurrence can be established on the basis of historical evidence. This style is treated as if it were a violation of the spectator's powers of perception.

Another film critic, David Armstrong, was also as much “irked” by the form as he was by the content of Stone's movie. He excoriated what he called Stone's “appropriation of TV car commercial quick-cutting” and reported that, for him, “watching JFK was like watching three hours of MTV without the music.”⁶ But Armstrong disliked “the film as a film” for other reasons as well, reasons more moral than artistic. “I am troubled,” he says, “by Stone's mix’n’match of recreated scenes and archival footage…” because “young viewers to whom [Stone] dedicates the film could take his far-reaching conjectures as literal truth.” Armstrong suggests, in a word, that Stone's editing techniques might destroy the capacity of “young viewers” to distinguish between a real and a merely imaginary event.⁷ All of the events depicted in the film—whether attested by historical evidence, based on conjecture, or simpy made up in order to help the plot along or to lend credence to Stone's paranoid fantasies—are presented as if they were equally “historical,” which is to say, equally real, or as if they had “really happened.” And this in spite of the fact that Stone is on record as professing not to know the difference between “history” and what people “make up,” in other words, as viewing all events as equally “imaginary,” at least insofar as they are represented.⁸

Issues such as these arise within the context of the experience, memory, or awareness of events which not only could not possibly have occurred before the twentieth century but the nature, scope, and implications of which no prior age could even have imagined. Some of these “holocaustal” events— such as the two World Wars, the Great Depression, a growth in world population hitherto unimaginable, poverty and hunger on a scale never before experienced, pollution of the ecosphere by nuclear explosions and the indiscriminate disposal of contaminants, programs of genocide undertaken by societies utilizing scientific technology and rationalized procedures of governance and warfare (of which the German genocide of 6,000,000 European Jews is paradigmatic)—function in the consciousness of certain social groups exactly as infantile traumas are conceived to function in the psyche of neurotic individuals. This means that they cannot be simply forgotten and put out of mind, but neither can they be adequately remembered; which is to say, clearly and unambiguously identified as to their meaning and contextualized in the group memory in such a way as to reduce the shadow they cast over the group's capacities to go into its present and envision a future free of their debilitating effects.⁹

The suggestion that the meanings of these events, for the groups most immediately affected by or fixated upon them, remain ambiguous and their consignment to “the past” difficult to effectuate should not be taken to imply in any way that such events never happened. On the contrary, not only are their occurrences amply attested to, their continuing effects on current societies and generations which had no direct experience of them are readily documentable. But among those effects must be listed the difficulty felt by present generations of arriving at some agreement as to their meaning—by which I mean, what the facts established about such events can possibly tell us about the nature of our own current social and cultural endowment and what attitude we ought to take with respect to them as we make plans for our own future. In other words, what is at issue here is not the facts of the matter regarding such events but the different possible meanings that such facts can be construed as bearing.

The distinction between facts and meanings is usually taken to be a basis of historical relativism. This is because in conventional historical inquiry, the “facts” established about a specific “event” are taken to be the “meaning” of that event. Facts are supposed to provide the basis for arbitrating among the variety of different meanings that different groups can assign to an event for different ideological or political reasons. But the facts are a function of the meaning assigned to events, not some primitive data that determine what meanings an event can have. It is the anomalous nature of modernist events—their resistance to inherited categories and conventions for assigning them meanings—that undermines not only the status of facts in relation to events but also the status of “the event” in general.

But to consider the issue of historical objectivity in terms of an opposition of “real” and “imaginary” events, on which the opposition of “fact” and “fiction” is in turn based, obscures an important development in Western culture which distinguishes modernism in the arts from all previous...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• acknowledgments
• introduction: history happensvivian sobchack
• part one: the historical event
• part two: historical representation and national identity
• part three: the end(s) of history
• contributors
• index