History in Film

Catalog description

This course will examine films that have an historical content and ask what role fiction films can serve in our understanding of the past, how they can bring to life a period with which we have lost direct contact. Historians have been using paintings and photographs to illustrate events and to penetrate cultures of the past, and the question is how moving pictures add to that repertoire. In this class, we will not focus on film aesthetics but rather on the approaches that historicize film, that seek to understand the context in which films were produced and the historical context that films seek to recreate. Since none of us are Film Studies experts, we will read about the history of film, the development of film techniques, and what kinds of film enrich our knowledge of the past. There are (at least) two ways to approach historical films. The first is to take a film and situate it within the context of its time, whether it deals with an historical subject or not. An example might be the Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night. The second is to analyse a film that addresses an historical event, for example the Civil Rights Movement, the Holocaust, or the Suffragette Movement, and assess its accuracy. A film, being different from an academic study, offers its own version of verisimilitude. It might depict the “spirit of the times” well, while taking liberties with chronology or characters. How far a film can stray from historical fact will be at the core of our discussions.