1917: History and Cinema

Abstract

Historians have not really tried to make use of cinematographic documents as a means of information or a mode of expression. Can this be attributed to an excessive worship of the written document ? Or to scorn for 'audio-visual culture'? Or simply to negligence ? We would suppose, rather, that historians have been so trained, in past centuries, to use certain research techniques that today they sometimes fail to see that they have at their disposal documents of a new type which register contemporary events in an entirely different manner. This is very surprising in view of the fact that these archives and the cinematographic language itself allow for an additional dimension to be given to our knowledge of the past. This paper was written as the result of my work in compiling and writing the commentary for a documentary film record entitled 'I9I7'.1 It gave us the opportunity to make an inventory of a good part of the archives bearing on this period. From these hundreds of projection hours in Paris, London, Moscow, Coblentz, Milan, Los Angeles, etc., we retained about 40 hours of film for the making of a 21 hour film, projected in two sessions of an hour and a quarter each, for French television in November I967. Below, we shall describe both the problems arising in the compilation of an archive film and the contribution of the final product to historical knowledge. The first difficulty is the illustration of the major topics of the description or the narration. Gaps in the film documentation give rise to specific problems since, without the pictures, there can be no film. It is sometimes