The Historical Film as Real History - ROBERT A. ROSENSTONE

KEY QUOTES


"Let's face the facts and admit it: historical films trouble and disturb (most) professional historians. Why? We all know the obvious answers. Because, historians will say, films are inaccurate. They distort the past. They fictionalise, trivialise and romanticise important people, events, and movements. They falsify History.

This quote provides the basis for my argument, it shows the view of film falsifying history, by glamourising it to an extent, and altering it to make the hero look better, and the enemy look worse.



Film is a disturbing symbol of an increasingly post literate world (in which people can read but won't) 

This could be useful to say aid my writing in saying that people mostly take film as fact, and not the facts.


TWO PREDOMINANT CATEGORIES FOR HISTORICAL FILM.

The Explicit approach takes motion pictures to be reflections of the social and political concerns or the era in which they were made. Typical is the anthology American History/American Film, which finds 'history' in such works as:
1. Rocky - problems of blue collar workers,
2. Invasion of the Body Snatchers - conspiracy and conformity in the fifties,
3. Viva Zapata - The Cold War,
4. Drums along the Mohawk - persistence of American ideals.

The Implicit approach essentially sees the motion picture as a book transferred to the screen, subject to the same sorts of judgements about date, verifiability, argument, evidence, and logic that we use for written history. Involved here are two problematic assumptions: first, that the current practice of written history is the only possible way of understanding the relationship of past to present; and, second, that written history mirrors 'reality'. If the first of these assumptions is arguable, the second is not. Certainly by now we all know that history is never a mirror but a construction - that is, large amounts of data pulled together or constituted by some larger project or vision or theory that may not be articulated but is nonetheless embedded in the particular way history is practiced.

Two definitions the would be useful.



The world that standard or mainstream film constructs is so familiar that we rarely think about how it is put together. That, of course, is the point. Films want to make us think they are reality. Yet the reality we see on the screen is neither inevitable nor somehow natural to the camera, but a vision creatively constructed out of bits and pieces of images taken from the surface of a world. Even if we know this already, we conveniently forget it in order to participate in the experience that cinema provides.

Although this quote doesn't prove my point about enemies being altered in film. It admits there are some elements that are altered and film isn't a mirror of society.

Less obvious is the fact that these bits and pieces are stuck together according to certain codes of representation, conventions of film that have been developed to create what may be called cinematic realism - a realism made up  of certain kinds of shots in certain kinds of sequences seamlessly edited together and underscored by a sound track to give the viewer a sense that nothing (rather than everything) is being manipulated to create a world on screen in which we can all feel at home. 

This again supporting the idea that Film as a text and cinema has been mediated to portray the creators views, and supports that historical films show falsely what happens as apposed to reality. And that enemies can falsely been shown to be the enemy. For example,