Technologies of History: Visual Media and the Eccentricity of the Past (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Technologies of History: Visual Media and the Eccentricity of the Past Terence Wright (bio) Technologies of History: Visual Media and the Eccentricity of the Past.By Steve F. Anderson. Hanover, N.H.: Dartmouth College Press, 2011. Pp. vii+210. $35. We all have a sense of history: an idea of where we come from, where our family comes from, or what makes our social group or country what it is. Some of the information that forms our histories was taught to us at school: such school histories traditionally fit Jean-François Lyotard's notion of the "grand narrative." But our personal historical narratives, together with the information that gives us a sense of place in relation to preceding decades, is gained from a variety of sources. Anecdotes, family stories, local myths and legends, and state propaganda all have a role to play in creating our sense of historical identification. The media also play an important role, though, as Steve F. Anderson argues, they do so less through explicit attempts to teach about the past (as in historical documentaries) than through other, perhaps unexpected, sources. In Technologies of History, Anderson shows how home movies, science fiction, experimental film, and video games all play significant roles in forming our historical consciousness. His central concern throughout is visual history and its dependence on technology for its propagation. We may be aware that televised media and Hollywood are renowned for taking liberties with historical fact, but this is not the main issue for Anderson. As he puts it, "we should not look to media for the truth about the past but instead examine them for clues about the way history is constructed and engaged through cultural products, memories, myths, politics" (p. 2). Thus his book attempts to explore the complex entanglements of historical information with contemporary media technologies. In order to clarify Anderson's approach, we might apply it to a spaghetti Western such as Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars (1964). As a work of fiction, its main intention is to tell a gripping story. Its narrative is not primarily concerned with describing a period of history. After all, the film is a [End Page 717] remake of Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo (1961) in a Japanese setting (in turn inspired by Dashiell Hammett's detective novel Red Harvest set in the United States of the 1920s). Indeed, Leone shows how easily the archetypal storyline transfers from rural Japan to the lawless West. Yet A Fistful of Dollars does contain a number of much more subtle messages about how the particular historical period, nineteenth-century America, is to be regarded (as does Yojimbo convey information and suppositions about the nineteenth-century Japanese culture). But Anderson's argument, that a much wider variety of media forms play an important role in molding our conceptions of history and historical narrativity, is just the starting point. It is his contention that historians have disregarded the role of (what we might call) lateral inferences as making significant contributions to historiography and our historical understanding. One of the more extraordinary examples cited by Anderson, where futuristic fiction encounters History head-on, is an episode of Star Trek in which Kirk and Spock meet the inhabitants of a planet who base their culture on the 1930s/40s Nazi regime. Star Trek often fantasizes history for its "what if" scenarios. In the Nazi episode Anderson finds that "meaningful historiographical discourse takes place in many more places and cultural forms than we habitually acknowledge" (p. 18). The argument can be extended to the historiography of computer games in the controversial online game JFK Reloaded. Here "historical simulation" enables users to put themselves in the position of would-be assassin in order to evaluate how their strategies and responses weigh against the findings of the Warren Commission's official investigation into the Kennedy assassination. In the context of numerous conspiracy theories about the shooting, Anderson points out that the implicit historical goals are not to establish "truth" about events, but to create more or less successful interplays between the facts and "the cultural discourses of history" (p. 152). Technologies of History will be of interest to readers from a...