F i r s t E d i t i o n

HISTORY AND FILMMOVING PICTURES AND THE

STUDY OF THE PAST

Prentice HallBoston Columbus Indianapolis New York San Francisco

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Maarten PereboomSalisbury University

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Copyright © 2011 Pearson Education, Inc., publishing as Prentice Hall, One Lake St., UpperSaddle River, NJ 07458. All rights reserved. Manufactured in the United States of America. Thispublication is protected by Copyright, and permission should be obtained from the publisherprior to any prohibited reproduction, storage in a retrieval system, or transmission in any formor by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or likewise. To obtainpermission(s) to use material from this work, please submit a written request to PearsonEducation, Inc., Permissions Department, One Lake St., Upper Saddle River, NJ 07458.

Many of the designations by manufacturers and seller to distinguish their products areclaimed as trademarks. Where those designations appear in this book, and the publisher wasaware of a trademark claim, the designations have been printed in initial caps or all caps.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Pereboom, Maarten LHistory and film : moving pictures and the study of the past / Maarten Pereboom. — 1st ed.

p. cm.Includes filmography and webliography.Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN-13: 978-0-13-193846-5ISBN-10: 0-13-193846-0

1. Historical films—History and criticism. 2. Motion pictures and history. I. Title. PN1995.9.H5P45 2010791.43'658—dc22

2009025661

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

ISBN 10: 0-13-193846-0ISBN 13: 978-0-13-193846-5

Editorial Director: Leah JewellExecutive Editor: Charles CavaliereEditorial Assistant: Lauren AylwardDirector of Marketing: Brandy DawsonSenior Marketing Manager: Maureen Prado

RobertsMarketing Assistant: Marissa O’BrienProduction Manager: Fran RusselloManager, Rights and Permissions: Zina

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Movie; The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY

Full-Service Project Management:Aparna Yellai, GGS Higher Education Resources, a Division of Premedia Global Inc.

Printer/Binder: Courier Companies, Inc.Text Font: Palatino

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CONTENTS

Preface vi

About the Author ix

Chapter 1 Moving Pictures as a Historical Resource 1Moving Pictures, History, and Culture 3

Studying History in Film 7

The Allure and Peril of the “Grand Narrative” 11

Chapter 2 The Interaction of Moving Pictures and History 15Fin de Siècle and the Early Twentieth Century 17

The Era of the World Wars, 1914–1945 22

The Cold War and Civil Rights 28

Vietnam and Malaise 31

Movies and Culture Wars 34

Chapter 3 The Sum of Its Parts: Understanding the Medium 39Production and Composition of a Film 42

Genre, Convention, the “Grand Narrative” and theCommercial Imperative 55

Chapter 4 Assessing a Film’s Historical Content 61In Theory 62

Mapping It Out: A Contextual Model for Relating Movies to History 65

Primary or Secondary Source? Film as Evidence Versus Film as Historical Argument 67

Identifying and Categorizing History in Film 70

For Example . . . 73

Mutiny on the Bounty: Eighteenth-Century History asTwentieth-Century Cultural Phenomenon 79

Chapter 5 Documentary Films as Primary and Secondary Sources 83Triumph of the Will (1935) 85

The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936) and The River (1938) 87

Why We Fight (1942–1944) 89

Night and Fog (1955) 90iii

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The Sorrow and the Pity (1969) 91

Hearts and Minds (1974) 92

Harlan County USA (1976) 93

Koyaanisqatsi (1982) 94

Shoah (1985) 95

Public Television and Documentary Series 96

The Thin Blue Line (1988) 97

Roger and Me (1989) 99

The Films of Ken Burns 101

Cold War (1998) 102

Reality Television and the Documentary 102

Chapter 6 “Based on a True Story”: History and Biography in Narrative Film 105Glory (1989) 107

Reds (1981) 108

Matewan (1987) 109

Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima (2006) 111

JFK (1991) 113

The Biopic 115

A mock Biopic : Citizen Kane (1941) 116

The Aviator (2004) 119

Downfall (2004) 120

Malcolm X (1992) 120

The Last King of Scotland (2006) 121

The Queen (2006) 122

Chapter 7 A Sense of Time and Place: Historical Fiction 125Visions of America’s Past 128

The South 129

The Western 136

Other American Historical Narratives 140

Chapter 8 Capturing the Moment: Narrative Movies asHistorical and Cultural Artifacts 145The Birth of a Nation (1915) 146

The Freshman (1925) 148

Cavalcade (1933) 148

Imitation of Life (Two Versions, 1934 and 1959) 149

My Man Godfrey (1936) 150

iv Contents

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The Lady Vanishes (1938) 151

The Real Glory (1939) 152

The Grapes of Wrath (1940) 153

Casablanca (1942) 154

The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) 156

Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) 156

The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) 157

Rebel Without a Cause (1955) 159

The Ugly American (1963) 160

The Graduate (1967) 162

Deliverance (1972) 163

Annie Hall (1977) 164

E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) 165

Do the Right Thing (1989) 166

The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990) 167

Grand Canyon (1991) 168

Chapter 9 Around the World in Eighty (or So) Movies 171Asian Cinema 175

Australia 180

Africa 180

Europe 182

South America 195

North America 198

Chapter 10 Your Turn: Writing About History in Film 201Chapter 11 Your Research Portal: Sources on History

in Film 219History and Historical Context 219

Great Web Sites 220

Film Materials 223

Secondary Sources 224

Reference and Methodology 224

Scholarly Monographs and Collections of Articles on Film in History 226

Film History Series 228

Journals 229

Appendix A: A Quick and Easy Guide to Citation 231Appendix B: Films Discussed 233

Index 237

Contents v

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vi

PREFACE

I hope that you are drawn to read this book, as I was drawn to write it, by alove for both history and film. The exploration of the human experience,whether in words or images, can never fully reconstruct the past with ab-solute accuracy, but it is a vital human endeavor nonetheless. Moving pic-tures, projected images of real or staged activity, have become an integralpart of human life today, as a wonderfully effective means of entertainingand informing. Studying history through film involves much more than sim-ply scrutinizing movies for historical accuracy, though that is an importantpart of the analysis. Moving pictures also offer a vast trove of historical infor-mation and insight, and learning how to work with them will enable you toenjoy and engage moving pictures on multiple levels and to understand thehuman experience with a greater degree of sophistication.

This book presents different ways of thinking about history in film. Forexample, in a history course, or maybe just flipping channels one evening,you may see all or part of War and Peace, a movie about the Napoleonic warsset in Russia. You could assess its historical accuracy if you had studied thescholarship on the subject, whether it dealt with the wars themselves or withRussian society at the time. You could comment on how accurately it recon-structed that world based on what historians have been able to reconstructthemselves. Fair enough.

However, to appreciate and understand the historical merits of the filmfully, you need to consider a number of issues. First of all, as just abouteveryone knows, War and Peace is a famously long novel written by the greatRussian novelist Leo Tolstoy, and published serially between 1865 and 1869.Any film—and there are several, actually—called War and Peace is probablyan adaptation of that novel. Natasha, Andrei, and Pierre are therefore fictional,not historical, characters. Napoleon is in the book, too, obviously a historicalcharacter, but also fictionalized to the extent that Tolstoy imagined many ofthe thoughts and actions portrayed in the book. Tolstoy devoted longpassages in the book to his philosophy of history, but the telling of the storyitself is in many ways more interesting to the historian, rich as it is withinsight into the human condition. So in addition to the accuracy of the battleand drawing room scenes you would also want to discuss how the filmmak-ers adapted the qualities that made the novel so brilliant.

Then there’s the film itself, as a film. The first version of War and Peacewas a silent film made in Russia in 1915, during the First World War. Youprobably weren’t watching that version. The two best-known versions arethe 1956 Hollywood production, directed by King Vidor and starringAudrey Hepburn, and the mammoth 1967 Russian version, directed bySergei Bondarchuk. As you can imagine, these films were made by verydifferent filmmakers for very different audiences. To be able to comment

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Preface vii

effectively on either version as history, you need to explore who made thefilm, where, when, and why. Finally, the impact of the film is another matterof substantial historical interest. Was it or is it considered an artistic success?Did lots of people go to see it? Who has seen it since? Has it stood the test oftime to become a classic? How, and to what extent, has it shaped people’sperceptions of Russian life and history in the early nineteenth century?

Studying history in moving pictures is a complex undertaking, there-fore, and this brief preface does not raise all the issues to be explored in thisbook. For students of history and students of film, it explores the rich poten-tial of the medium as a historical resource. It is not a history of film, thoughChapter 2 aims to promote thinking and discussion of the role movingimages have played in human society since their invention. Subsequentchapters explore the fundamental categories we use in analyzing film as his-tory, though it will also become clear that most movies do not fit in just onecategory. Later the book explores ways in which film can serve as an intro-duction to the diversity of world civilizations and cultures, albeit with limi-tations we must keep in mind. The last part of the book is aimed at launchingyou into your own historical research using moving pictures, with the firmwarning that moving pictures alone cannot support historical research andanalysis. The written work of professional historians remains the most com-mon and reliable source of historical information and insight, but a rich bodyof film work exists to illuminate the extraordinary potential of film as ameans of exploring the past, and one can hope that in the future more profes-sional historians will make it their medium.

I would like to thank those anonymous peer reviewers from across thecountry who evaluated the manuscript or portions of it during the past fewyears. Writing a book is often a solitary exercise, but it is not possible withoutthe help, support, and encouragement of family, friends, and colleagues. Myown teaching experience and my involvement in the Quality inUndergraduate Education (QUE) project in the early 2000s helped convinceme of the need for this book. Charles Cavaliere, my editor at Pearson, hasprovided invaluable assistance throughout the process. Diane Kunz read sev-eral chapters early on, and the following reviewers assisted at various pointsin the writing process: Eleanor Alexander, Georgia Institute of Technology;Scott Beekman, Ohio State University; Jesse Berrett, University of California,Berkeley; Martin B. Cohen, George Mason University; Andrew Feffer, UnionCollege; Juan R. Garcia, University of Arizona; William B. Hart, MiddleburyCollege; Caryn E. Neumann, Ohio State University; Molly Patterson,University of Wisconsin, Whitewater; S. Mike Pavelec, Ohio StateUniversity; Dona Reaser, Columbus State Community College; Dan Smith,University of Kentucky; Rosemary Stanfield-Johnson, University ofMinnesota, Duluth; John Matthew Stockhausen, Ohio State University;Carolyn Williams, University of North Florida; Daryle Williams, Universityof Maryland. A sabbatical from Salisbury University in the spring of 2007allowed me to get most of the manuscript drafted, and I thank all my

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viii Preface

colleagues who make that academic community a great place to work. JamesBurton, Cynthia Miller, and John O’Connor provided very detailed andhelpful feedback on the completed manuscript. Finally, I would like to thankmy wife Ruth and sons Max and Ben for their love and support throughoutthis process, and it is to them that I dedicate this book.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Maarten Pereboom is professor of history and dean of the Fulton School ofLiberal Arts at Salisbury University. He earned his doctorate at YaleUniversity, and his first book, Democracies at the Turning Point: Britain, Franceand the End of the Postwar Order, 1928–1933, earned Choice Magazine’sOutstanding Academic Book Award in 1996. In 1998 he won SalisburyUniversity’s Distinguished Faculty Award. He lives in Salisbury, Maryland,with his wife and their two sons.

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