Film and History, Foxes and Hedgehogs

Abstract

Maligned for trashing a priceless heritage, condemned for fobbing off hallucinations as documentaries, and damned for trading pure truth for filthy lucre, Hollywood film has long been written off by historians. Hands wring before Patriot (2000), heads shake during Pearl Harbor (2001), and minds boggle at JFK (1991). To teachers and scholars in the history racket, the pre-credit tag line based on actual events is a warning sign that suggests everything that follows is basically made up. Yet the grim truth that Americans absorb more history from the multiplex than from middle school demands that Hollywood's treatment of the past be considered carefully rather than simply avoided. Whether as bearers of past tidings (the purview of biopics and fact-based melodramas) or as archeological artifacts (the trea sure trove of 35 mm material in studio and government archives), the motion picture legacy is too important to leave to the ama teurs. Besides, to study World War II without screening Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will (1934) or Frank Capra's Prelude to War (1943) is to neglect more than audiovisual aids: both films were weapons of war as well as expressions of the ethos of the combatants. Likewise, to deny that Saving Private Ryan (1998) and even Pearl Harbor transmit and transmute that ethos is to ignore the strength of dominant culture in American life. As ever, the question is not whether to use film for historical study, but how to make the best use of it. In a famous formulation, the scholar Erasmus divided thinkers into two categories?foxes and hedgehogs. The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one great thing, he declared, plagiarizing from the Greeks. Adapted slightly, the metaphor offers two enlightening methods to chase down meaning in film and history: the way ofthe peripatetic, microminded fox, scurry ing about the text to check out minutiae, or the way of the deliberate, macrominded hedgehog, taking the long view and biting into one big thing. For the historian-cineaste, the bifocal outlook can also serve as a guide for when to unleash moral outrage and when to not sweat the small stuff. microangle on film and history bewails the dumb mistakes that infest the conceit of cinema and decries the poetic license that streamlines the motion picture experience. focus is on pinpoint accuracy in historical recreation. official film jargon term for fidelity to the known record is verisimilitude, the faithful duplication of period detail in dialogue, set design, costuming, and so on. In a combat film, verisimilitude means the faithful depiction of weaponry, uniforms, insignia, and military bearing; in a costume drama, it means a careful restora tion of the once fashionable clothes, furniture styles, and so cial manners. Nitpickers by na ture, historians delight in fixating on micromistakes in verisimili tude, snickering over the way people from foreign countries and remote epochs all seem to speak colloquial American English and inhabit bodies sculpted by Nauti lus, dressed by Donna Karan, and coiffured by Vidal Sassoon. Of course, the historian who blanches at poetic license in the art of cinema, who demands a scrupulous duplication of the common vernacular and standards of beauty in Salem in 1692, had better just avoid celluloid and video altogether. To be sure, at some point, a cascade of shameless departures from known facts and habits will cause even the most carefree historical epic to collapse under the weight of slipshod scaffolding. Suspension of disbelief is no longer possible if the GIs at Normandy are wearing Nikes or sporting Walkmans. But given that Hollywood cinema traffics in entertainment, the medium can not be expected to surrender the pleasures of spectacle and story for static pageants Yet the grim truth that Americans absorb more history from the multiplex than from middle school demands that Hollywood's treatment of the past be considered carefully rather than simply avoided.