The Problem with History

As I have mentioned before, I am a History major at Drew University doing six months abroad in England, and it is History, above film, which is my true passion. As a lover of both, it is often difficult to reconcile the two together. Films can be a great teacher of history, as they have explored Rome, Vietnam, both World Wars and the lives of several leaders and events in depth and from multiple angles. On the other hand, history is often inconvenient for filmmakers, so they take great liberties with rewriting it for their benefit. Directors like Oliver Stone and Steven Spielberg are notorious for this. JFK, while undoubtedly a well-constructed film, is an appalling dishonor to American history. Shindler’s List, which the American Film Institute put in its top ten American films of all time list, packages the Holocaust, one of the greatest failures in human history, as a success story, choosing to focus on 6,000 people who are saved rather than the 6,000,000+ people who died.
I simply cannot get over these details. As much as I love film, I think that a historian’s art is much more challenging, and when it is done successfully much more rewarding. Authors such as Peter Fleming and David McCullough are much more limited than a screenwriter who can make a story up on its own merits. They are limited to telling the story that actually happened, in as factual a way as possible, without boring the reader to death. Now, I am not criticizing every film that has gone off of history. Sure, films such as the ones I’ve mentioned and various others (Caligula, Forrest Gump), do bother me, but despite that I actually mostly enjoy historical epics. Nobody actually believes the events that unfold in Inglourious Basterds, it’s liberties make for great story telling and everyone can tell the difference. What bothers me is when people blur the line to have their viewers believe they are telling a true story.

Wait, you mean Hitler wasn't actually killed in a theatre?

I love Kubrick’s histories: Spartacus, Barry Lyndon, and Full Metal Jacket are some of the best in the genre. Spartacus is a story whose only sources we have are Roman, so the story is fabricated around everything Kubrick and the writers could make out about Roman society. Barry Lyndon is what the historical theorist Thomas Macaulay would call portraiture – Lyndon is not about getting the history placed into context, but rather, a picture from what is discernable. All of the costumes in Lyndon come from old portraits, a lot of the props and settings are very faithful replications, and there is no in door lighting throughout the film, making it one of few films to be filmed by candle light. Characters fade in and out as they do in historical sources; when no historian writes about the events of people, they are lost forever. That’s how the film ends; we are told, not shown, that Lyndon returns home to his mother in Ireland, and eventually comes back to Europe as a gambler without much success – he simply fades out of focus. Full Metal Jacket, I think, is the most faithful of the over flooded Vietnam films. Based on the novel The Short Timers, Kubrick made a film that is not pro nor anti war, simply showed the brutality of what the soldiers endured. The cynical dialogue and steady camera work help to give a fuller view of their desperation.

But of course, it should be obvious by now that I have a love affair with Mr. Kubrick. He did the best he could with any genre; he was not preoccupied with history, but when he got to it was very faithful. I suppose I should be happy that history has become so popular in film; half of the films of the past thirty years to win the Best Picture Oscar have been big Hollywood historical epics. It’s possible I am too much of a purist, but I can’t really help it, when it is my job in the work that I do for my major to make sure I am relying heavily on good source material and I get to see others make things up that people are going to readily accept. I’d like to see filmmakers take this issue as a whole a little more seriously.