History and Film

A Tale of Two Disciplines

Eleftheria Thanouli

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781501340796
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

A Choice Outstanding Academic Title History and Film: A Tale of Two Disciplines addresses the representation of history in cinema, a much-argued debate on the need to understand cinematic history in its own terms and develop a certain vocabulary for discussing historical films, their relation to public history, and their impact on public historical consciousness. Eleftheria Thanouli does this by changing the agenda altogether - combining a macro-level perspective with a micro-level one in order to argue that cinematic history is the dominant form of historiography in the 20th century, as it succeeded in remediating and repurposing the key formal, rhetorical, and ideological practices of 19th-century professional historiography. With case studies ranging from The Thin Red Line and Life is Beautiful, to The Fog of War and The Last Bolshevik, Thanouli bridges the gap between history and film studies and lays the foundations for a new visual historiography.

Part I

Historical and Theoretical Questions

1

The Archaeology of the Debate: Cinema and Literature as Analogies for History

It may come as a surprise that a number of key thinkers and practitioners in cinema, visual media, or art in general, should take an interest in the theory and philosophy of history. Yet, it is hardly a coincidence. The study of cultural phenomena, and particularly film, photography, and literature often raised questions regarding the epistemological nature of historical writing. As newer and older media were theorized for the ways they can or cannot communicate the world to us, it was inevitable that similar issues would surface regarding the ways that traditional historical writing could or could not communicate the world of the past. In this chapter, I would like to begin my long exploration into the disciplines of history and cinema by tracking a line of arguments, which surfaced from the 1960s onwards and began investigating the porous boundaries between the two fields. These arguments come from three very diverse, but equally influential, figures: Siegfried Kracauer, Roland Barthes, and Jean-Luc Godard. All three of them were fascinated by history and the idea of mediality, even though they specialized in different areas: Kracauer in film theory, Godard in film practice, and Barthes in literature. What binds them together and what renders them essential for this book is their attempt to develop the notion of analogy between historical writing, on the one hand, and cinema and literature, on the other. The value of analogical thinking, i.e., the attempt to identify correspondences and partial similarities between two distinct practices, was instrumental in their understanding of history. Cinema and literature provided for them a series of concepts and formal devices that seemed to permeate similar processes in written history. This chapter will offer a kaleidoscopic view of their theoretical explorations, as they struggled to address key historiographical problems across diverse media. The dots that connect the ideas of these three intellectuals will be noted along the way, even though the purpose is not to understate their different origins. By walking through the history of the dialogue between cinema, literature, and historical writing, my goal is, first, to formulate a context for debating the multiple ways in which film theory and historiography can intersect and, then, to isolate the questions that will enable me to reconfigure the relation between history and cinema on a fundamentally new basis.

I would like to start the discussion with Kracauer, the German critic and theorist, who is famous for his study on German cinema in From Caligari to Hitler (1947) and, of course, for his Theory of Film (1960). Kracauer was one of the first scholars to formulate a comprehensive theory of film and who, ironically enough, found absolutely no common ground between cinema and the representation of history. As he definitively put it, “as matters stand, the historian’s quest and history on the screen are at cross-purposes” (Kracauer 1960, 80). In his examination of the historical film, Kracauer is consistently dismissive, noting how filmic attempts to portray historical themes go against all the essential features of the cinematic medium, namely its affinities towards unstaged reality, the fortuitous, the endless, and the indeterminate (18–20). Kracauer sees no potential in the historical film whatsoever. The use of décor, costumes and props create such an air of artificiality that it contradicts the real purpose of the camera, which is none other than to reveal and redeem physical reality. Quoting Cavalcanti, Kracauer claims that the camera is so “literal-minded” that when it shows us actors dressed up, we go to great pains to suspend our disbelief and see them as characters (77). Moreover, historical films present a closed diegetic world, which is “radically shut off from the space-time continuum of the living, a closed cosmos which does not admit of extensions” (78). According to the rigorous principles of his cinematic theory, historical fiction films rely on conventions that are “hardly compatible with a medium which gravitates toward the veracious representation of the external world” (79).

Despite the wholesale dismissal of historical fiction expressed in the Theory of Film, Kracauer would go on to write a book on historiography inspired by the very workings of cinema and photography. In History: The Last Things before the Last (1969), a monograph published posthumously, Kracauer explains that he entered the domain of historiography guided by the same drive that had previously led him to the theory of film, notably the need to serve the following purpose: “the rehabilitation of objectives and modes of being which still lack a name and hence are overlooked or misjudged” (Kracauer 1969, 4). He acknowledges that working with the photographic media was significantly easier, but he appears confident enough to make an equally original contribution to the field of historiography.¹ Even though people have been writing about history for centuries, Kracauer argues that it is still a “terra incognita” (ibid.). Thus, he knowingly signs up for this overwhelming task with his film theory as a compass; it is the tool that will guide him to discover new areas of inquiry, while it will also hand him the equipment to shed new light on charted territories. In History, Kracauer consistently develops the analogy between history and photographic media in ways that can benefit both areas. His strategy is explicated by openly posing the question: “But what is the good of indulging in analogies? Why dote on a subject only to jilt it for a similar subject?” (59). His response offers two reasons. Firstly, analogical thinking is fruitful because history and cinema produce works that depend on “identical conditions,” i.e., they both strive to capture “worlds of comparable structure” and in that process they entail similar creative possibilities. Secondly, the photographic media can breath some fresh air in our thinking about history. They can help “defamiliarize habitual aspects in the historical field,” setting it free from the long-standing discourses of science and philosophy, which have burdened it for so long (60).

Kracauer’s analogy between cinema and history is based on the idea that both constitute modes or operations for generating knowledge about the world we live in. While cinema strives to reveal and record physical reality, history strives to reveal and record historical reality. Their parallel quest is characterized by a series of similarities that should not go unnoticed, for they allow us to get to grips with complexities that traditional historians are not willing to face. First and foremost, the realistic and formative tendencies that were identified in the practice of photographic media are equally present in the historical profession.² The historian, like the photographer, is both a recorder and a creator of history; he is required to discover raw data and then figure out a way to present and explain it (47). The goal in both cases, according to Kracauer, is to find the “right balance,” which is achieved with the help of the following “simple, quasi-mathematical formula: Realistic Tendency ≥ Formative Tendency” (56). The prescriptive tone that dominated his Theory of Film remains intact when Kracauer describes what historians should do to attain their craft’s higher aspirations.³ His firm conviction regarding the parallel destinies of history and photographic media stems from his approach to the nature of historical and external reality respectively. As he notes:

Small wonder that camera-reality parallels historical reality in terms of its structure, its general constitution. Exactly as historical reality, it is partly patterned, partly amorphous—a consequence, in both cases, of the half-cooked state of our everyday world. And it shows features which are of a piece with the characteristics of the historian’s universe.

Kracauer 1960, 58

The historical reality and the “Lebenswelt,” a term borrowed from Husserl to signify our everyday world, are endless, open-ended, and susceptible to contingencies; what historians and cinematographers are expected to do is respect these qualities and record them in ways that do not falsify or distort their true nature. To that end, they both need to handle the switch from the micro to macro level using “close-ups” and “long shots.” Kracauer explains that in historical writing the large bulk of micro events risk being damaged when transported to a higher level of generality, as they inevitably lose some of their peculiarities and meanings (126). This is called “the law of levels,” a principle that controls the “traffic” between the micro and macro dimensions. To explicate how a historian should control this traffic, Kracauer refers to D.W. Griffith’s close-up of Mae Marsh’s clasped hands in the trial scene of Intolerance (1916); a close-up that does not merely serve the narrative purposes but reveals a new aspect of physical reality. In the same vein, he argues, the historian’s close-up is apt to suggest possibilities and vistas not conveyed by the identical event in high-magnitude history (ibid.). With this analogy, Kracauer highlights procedural similarities between written history and cinematic language, despite their modal differences.

The comparison is further pursued in the chapter entitled “General History and the Aesthetic Approach,” where he discusses a number of problematic premises in the genre of “general history.” The general historian studies a very broad spectrum of events within a given period, constructing a unity and consistency that is mostly fictional. By striving for wholeness, general history begins to resemble the works of art and thwarts the historical universe’s penchant for openness and indeterminacy. The same “deviation” is illustrated in what Kracauer names “the theatrical film.” Even though truly cinematic works remain porous to the complexities and contingencies of the flow of life, theatrical films sacrifice “porosity to dense composition” (181). They structure their stories upon invented patterns, which close off the possibility of camera-reality to freely unfold. In his words, “The general narrative resembles the theatrical film. In both media compositional exigencies set the tune” (182).

In fact, the similarities between history and cinema run far deeper than Kracauer realizes. The search for unity and cohesion, the construction of temporalit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Introduction: History and Film in Parallel Orbits
• Part I Historical and Theoretical Questions
• 1 The Archaeology of the Debate: Cinema and Literature as Analogies for History
• 2 Media Specificity and the Analogy of the Digital
• 3 The Theory and Practice of History
• Part II History on Film: Narrating and Explaining the Past
• 4 The Poetics of History and the Poetics of the Historical Film
• 5 The Representation of History in the Fiction Film
• 6 The Representation of History in the Documentary
• Conclusion: Filmic History in the Twentieth Century – a Successful Performance of Failure
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright