Historical Films: Scofflaws and the Historian-Cop

Abstract

In attempting to map the limits and boundaries of historical representation in Hollywood feature films based on actual events, Robert Brent Toplin has raised a number of significant questions for historians and others concerned with the ethical and intellectual aspects of historical filmmaking. I am going to quarrel with much that he has to say, so first I want to acknowledge the importance of his furthering the debate on issues that have implications for both the historical discipline and for public understanding of the past. As editor of a scholarly work on American movies, film review editor for the Journal of American History, and himself a participant in making dramatized historical films for public and cable television, Toplin is one of a handful of historians qualified both by study and practice to speak expertly on a subject on which we all have opinions. He writes in a succinct and accessible style that makes the book suitable for adoption in undergraduate courses that use films to explore historical methodologies and interpretations. His own methodology stresses that films as subjects for historical analysis are more than simply moving images on a screen. He speaks of looking behind and around (p. xii) the works themselves, by which he means, first, gathering information about the production history of a film, and second, placing it in the political and social context of its creation and reception. While he supports this emphasis by noting that certain strands of film studies ignore both aspects, one might make clear that it has been a standard in cinema history for some time. Indeed, the historians who contributed to John E. O'Connor and Martin A. Jackson, eds., American History/American Film: Interpreting the Hollywood Image (1979), practiced it nearly two decades ago. After a general introduction, Toplin offers cases studies of eight films paired in four different subsets of historical representation. Mississippi Burning (1988) and JFK (1991) are analyzed as works that mix fact and fiction. Sergeant York (1941) and Missing (1982) are treated as films attempting to draw