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[Michael Curtiz, \u201cThe Adventures of Robin Hood\u201d (1938) – a man who \u201cspeaks treason fluently” to tyrants]<\/p>\n
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[Warren Beatty, \u201cReds\u201d (1981) – a brilliant political film but about the wrong side]<\/p>\n
See also \u201cThe Politics and History of\/in Film\u201d<\/a>.<\/p>\n I have used films in my teaching and lecturing ever since I began teaching at the University of Adelaide in 1986. They were a regular feature in my first year introductory courses on Modern European history, my upper level courses on \u201cGerman Europe\u201d and \u201cThe Holocaust,\u201d and most extensively in my course \u201cResponses to War: An Intellectual and Cultural History\u201d in which, over a period of a decade, I showed about 100 different films. [See \u201cSome Thoughts on how People have \u2018Responded to War\u2019\u201d<\/a>]<\/p>\n The week long Summer Seminars organized by the Institute for Humane Studies during the 1990s on \u201cLiberty in Film and Fiction\u201d gave me an opportunity to show and discuss films with a group of students who were sympathetic to CL\/libertarian ideas and who were in creative writing and film studies programs. These films included:<\/p>\n [Claude Berri, \u201cJean de Florette\u201d (1987) – on property rights in water and what happens when they are violated]<\/p>\n Since war films were a major interest of mine, during 1995 I held a two week long \u201cfilm festival\u201d to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the end of the Second World War, during which I showed two films a day for two weeks. See the full list<\/a>.<\/p>\n The two Honours level subjects I taught on \u201dReel History: History IN Film and Film AS History\u201d (course guide)<\/a> and \u201cFilm and the History of Occupation, Collaboration, and Resistance in WW2\u201d (course guide<\/a>) provided an opportunity to explore in greater depth some of the key questions which an historian must ask about film, such as<\/p>\n Since I was teaching \u201chistory\u201d courses a major question we had to ask and try to answer (if we could) was how historically accurate was the film, and if it was not accurate, to ask the follow up question, why did the filmmaker alter the past or stress certain aspects and ignore or distort others?<\/p>\n A question we kept coming back to was one posed by Robert Rosenstone, who asked:<\/p>\n \nNo matter how serious or honest the filmmakers, and no matter how deeply committed they are to rendering the subject faithfully, the history that finally appears on the screen can never fully satisfy the historian as historian (although it may satisfy the historian as filmgoer). Inevitably, something happens on the way from the page to the screen that changes the meaning of the past as it is understood by those of us who work in words.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n [Robert A. Rosenstone, “History in Images\/History in Words: Reflections on the Possibility of Really Putting History into Film,” American Historical Review<\/em>, December 1988, vol. 93, no. 5, pp. 1173-85. ]<\/p>\n It should be noted that Rosenstone, as an historian, wrote a biography of the American socialist journalist John Reed, Romantic Revolutionary: A Biography of John Reed<\/em> (1975) and then advised Warren Beatty in the making of his Academy award-winning film Reds<\/em> (1981). The film is a brilliant depiction of an immensely important historical event but is is far too sympathetic to the socialist cause, even uncritical. This inspired me to write my own screenplay on a classical liberal on whom I had written a great deal who had also been involved in a revolution – Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Bastiat in the 1848 Revolution in Paris in February 1848. The results, entitled \u201cBroken Windows\u201d screenplay HTML<\/a>, along with an \u201cillustrated essay\u201d<\/a> to help the director \u201cvisualize the past\u201d can be found here. I found some initial interest by a small-time producer in taking it further but that interest soon evaporated when the complexity and the cost of filming an \u201chistorical film\u201d became evident. In the meantime a dreadful \u201cbro\u201d movie about Marx and Engels in Paris at the same time Bastiat was living and working there got made with funding by the EU. [Raoul Peck, \u201cThe Young Karl Marx\u201d (2018) and the review in the New York Times by A.O. Scott (22 Feb. 2018) here<\/a>]<\/p>\n [Raoul Peck, \u201cThe Young Karl Marx\u201d (2018) – yet another account of the life of an obnoxious man and his obnoxious ideas]<\/p>\n Other questions I explored in these classes, with particular reference to war films, were the following. To use films:<\/p>\n (1.) to assist in the visualisation of historical events or historical conditions, thus the film acts as a \u201cwindow on the past\u201d and is an attempt to \u201crestage the past\u201d (Sorlin) or an attempt to create \u201chistorical authenticity\u201d (Zemon Davis) on the screen. Examples include:<\/p>\n [The sensational original release movie poster of a slave revolt in ancient Rome which does not show any inkling of Kubrick\u2019s deeper ideas about the subject.]<\/p>\n (2.) to study the history of prevailing attitudes or mentalit\u00e9s, since sometimes the film tells us more about the time of its making than the events it sets out to depict, that the film reflects the \u201cclimate of opinion\u201d of the society in which it was made, in other words it acts as a \u201cmirror of contemporary society\u201d.<\/p>\n (3.) to study the ideas of individual filmmakers (especially those who were war veterans); in this case, the film is a \u201cpersonal memoir\u201d by someone who had first-hand experience of the events depicted on the screen.<\/p>\n (4.) to reflect on the nature of war, history and the human condition in a general way; in this case, film can function as a philosophical or historical \u201cessay\u201d which attempts to interpret or make sense of the past in some way.<\/p>\n An important question which was often raised in my courses was one articulated by the Romanian film historian Manuela Gheorghiu-Cernat who expressed it this way: is the showing and studying of war films (especially violent ones) \u201ca pedagogy of peace or a school of violence?” [Arms and the Film<\/em>, pp. 303-23]. Perhaps Fritz Lang was correct when he stated in 1958 interview: \u201cCould anything new be possibly said on war?… No. But, it is essential for us to repeat over and over again, the things previously uttered.\u201d (Quoted in Manuela Gheorghiu-Cernat, Arms and the Film<\/em>, p. 304.)<\/p>\n Lang’s unstated assumption is that in the 20th century film would become the medium through which this restatement of the horrors and evil of war can and should be made. We need to ask ourselves whether film, rather than the written word (or perhaps art), is the proper medium for this dialogue. Or perhaps Georges Duhamel is closer to the mark with his prediction: \u201cI shall no longer be able to think what I want. My thoughts will be replaced by mobile images.\u201d (Quoted in Manuela Gheorghiu-Cernat, Arms and the Film, p. 305.) The American soldiers in Vietnam who had watched John Wayne westerns and war movies when they were growing up had such mobile images in their minds – images of heroic actions, self-sacrifice for the state, and glorious death on the battlefield. The great power cinema has is the capacity to offer such \u201cmobile images\u201d, with their associated political and moral meanings, for the purposes of distraction, excitement, amusement, and the political control of audiences. Thus educators have a special responsibility to use this medium carefully.<\/p>\n What I try to do in my use of film in the teaching of history is to make explicit what is implicit in the mobile images on the screen, to place in historical context what might appear at first sight to be timeless and \u201cnormal\u201d to the viewer, to discuss the moral beliefs and the political orientation of filmmakers and the impact these ideas have on their filmmaking, and to examine the reception of the films by the audiences of their day.<\/p>\n [Source: Manuela Gheorghiu-Cernat, Arms and the Film: War and Peace in European films.<\/em> Translated into English by Florin Ionescu and Ecaterina Grundbock (Bucharest : Meridiane, 1983).]<\/p>\n Some additional thoughts on the connections between film and history can be found in the following essays and guides:<\/p>\n \u201cA Guide to the Study of War, History, and Film\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cFurther Thoughts on War Films and the Study of History\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cBastiat goes to the Movies, or \u201cFilming Freddie\u201d: How to Popularise Economic Ideas in Film\u201d (2017) <\/a><\/p>\n \u201cSome Thoughts on an \u2018Austrian Theory of Film\u2019: Ideas and Human Action in a Film about Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Bastiat\u201d (Sept. 2019)<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [Michael Curtiz, \u201cThe Adventures of Robin Hood\u201d (1938) – a man who \u201cspeaks treason fluently” to tyrants] [Warren Beatty, \u201cReds\u201d (1981) – a brilliant political film but about the wrong side] See also \u201cThe Politics and History of\/in Film\u201d. I have used films in my teaching and lecturing ever since I began teaching at the … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_import_markdown_pro_load_document_selector":0,"_import_markdown_pro_submit_text_textarea":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[80,92],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1301","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-film","category-war-and-peace"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/davidmhart.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1301","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/davidmhart.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/davidmhart.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/davidmhart.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/davidmhart.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1301"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/davidmhart.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1301\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/davidmhart.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1301"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/davidmhart.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1301"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/davidmhart.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1301"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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\n[Lewis Milestone, \u201cAll Quiet on the Western Front\u201d (1930) – the classic anti-war movie to which we all keep coming back.]<\/p>\n