Book Review: Film Nation: Hollywood Looks at U.S. History (Revised) by Robert Burgoyne

Abstract

Film Nation: Hollywood Looks at U.S. History (Revised). Robert Burgoyne. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. 176 pp. $67.50 hbk. $22.50 pbk.Robert Burgoyne's Film Nation may be regarded as companion to his related work, The Hollywood Historical Film (2008), even though this 2010 volume is a revised version of a 1997 original and may be usefully studied after Historical Film. There is some overlap in the films analyzed-notably, JFK, United 93, and World Trade Center. Burgoyne is professor and chair of film studies at the University of St. Andrews. In the more introductory Historical Film, he discusses different categories of the genre, war, epic, biographical, metahistorical, and topical, focusing on their relationships to understandings of national identity, organized remembering, artistic ambition, and studio prestige. There is some overlap with Film Nation in application of key concepts, such as Bakhtin's memory, and both books invite consideration of the relationship between film and public sphere.In Film Nation, Burgoyne's more specialized purpose is the interrogation of contemporary films that both provide a counternarrative to Ranciere's 1977 concept of the of American history, yet ultimately reinforce social belief by validating the cultural hybridity of American life, binding it to images of nation. These films rearticulate social identities as shaped as much by opposition, antagonism, fear, and hatred of the other, as by more positive traits. They address the fundamental contradiction that fractures notions of nation as social unisonance from race.Foregrounding the fissures and fault lines between national myths and the experiences of those who have been excluded from dominant accounts, they induce an emotional rediscovery of America, drawing on official history as factual discourse while employing fiction to challenge it. Yet these critical films revivify basic tropes such as the image of mystic nationhood that is revealed only on the battlefield, adapting the rhetoric, imagery, and patterning of genre memory and double voicing, whereby genres shape and carry social experience across generations. Burgoyne applies Ignatieff's 1993 distinction between ethnic and civic nationalism, or between inherited, genealogical passions of attachment and attachments to shared sets of political practices and values. He proposes that contemporary films define a new, polycentric nationalism, crystallized through blood argument to be sure, in preference to ethnocentric nationalism. In acknowledging an inclusive multitude of sometimes conflicting, openended histories in any given historical moment, these serve as counterarguments to ideas of globalization based on the presumption of the fading of nation.Burgoyne analyzes the Civil War film Glory from the competing perspectives of national construction and race, recalling West's 1992 identity from above and identity from below, and playing up the failure of social movements to cut across racial identities. Thunderheart illustrates how contemporary film rearticulates Native Americans as the bearers of alternative historical and national consciousness in opposition to the nation state. Born on the Fourth of July links the symbols of nationalism to an iconography of gender that transitions from an ideal of masculinity based on punitive agency to one acquired by the rescue of the nation, figured as a woman. …