The Routledge Companion to History and the Moving Image (Routledge Companions) 1032203315, 9781032203317

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THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO HISTORY AND THE MOVING IMAGE

The Routledge Companion to History and the Moving Image takes an interdisciplinary approach to understanding history in moving images. It engages this popular and dynamic field that has evolved rapidly from film and television to digital streaming into the age of user-​created content. The volume addresses moving image history through a theoretical lens; modes and genres; representation, race, and identity; and evolving forms and formats. It brings together a range of scholars from across the globe who specialize in film and media studies, cultural studies, history, philosophy of history, and education. Together, the chapters provide a necessary contemporary analysis that covers new developments and questions that arise from the shift to digital screen culture. The book examines technological and ethical concerns stemming from today’s media landscape, but it also considers the artificial construction of the boundaries between professional expertise and amateur production. Each contributor’s unique approach highlights the necessity of engaging with moving images for the academic discipline of history. The collection, written for a global audience, offers accessible discussions of historiography and a compelling resource for advanced undergraduates and postgraduates in history, film and media studies, and communications. Marnie Hughes-​Warrington is Deputy Vice Chancellor Research and Enterprise at the University of South Australia, and Honorary Professor of History at the Australian National University. She is the author of multiple books in historiography, including History Goes to the Movies (2007) and History from Loss (edited with Daniel Woolf, 2023). Kim Nelson is the Director of the Humanities Research Group and an Associate Professor at the University of Windsor in Canada. Her work has been screened internationally by film festivals and broadcasters. She is the author of Making History Move: Five Principles of the Historical Film (2024). Mia E.M. Treacey researches and writes in the interdisciplinary field of Screened History, exploring the relationship between History, the past, and moving images. Her publications include Reframing the Past: History, Film and Television (2016). A university educator for over 15 years, she now teaches secondary school History and English.

THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO HISTORY AND THE MOVING IMAGE

Edited by Marnie Hughes-​Warrington, Kim Nelson, and Mia E.M. Treacey

Designed cover image: © Getty Images First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 selection and editorial matter, Marnie Hughes-​Warrington, Kim Nelson, and Mia E.M. Treacey; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Marnie Hughes-​Warrington, Kim Nelson, and Mia E.M. Treacey to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. With the exception of Chapter 17, no part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Chapter 17 of this book is available for free in PDF format as Open Access at www.taylorfrancis.com. It has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 International license Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data Names: Hughes-Warrington, Marnie, editor. | Nelson, Kim (Documentary filmmaker), editor. | Treacey, Mia E.M., editor. Title: The Routledge companion to history and the moving image / edited by Marnie Hughes-Warrington, Kim Nelson, and Mia E.M. Treacey. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2024. | Series: Routledge companions | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023022225 (print) | LCCN 2023022226 (ebook) | ISBN 9781032203317 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032203324 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003263234 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: History in motion pictures. | History on television. | Historical films–History and criticism. | History–Computer network resources. | Motion pictures and history. Classification: LCC PN1995.2 .R68 2024 (print) | LCC PN1995.2 (ebook) | DDC 791.43/658–dc23/eng/20230613 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023022225 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023022226 ISBN: 978-​1-​032-​20331-​7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-​1-​032-​20332-​4 (pbk) ISBN: 978-​1-​003-​26323-​4 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/​9781003263234 Typeset in Times New Roman by Newgen Publishing UK The Open Access version of Chapter 17 was funded by SSHRC (Canada).

This book is supported by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and the Government of Canada.

CONTENTS

List of contributors Acknowledgements

x xiv

Introduction: history is a moving image PART I

1

Understanding history and the moving image

5

1 From “history and film” to “screened history” Mia E.M. Treacey

7

2 Actuality is not enough: on historiography and cinema Philip Rosen

30

3 Moving image histories and ethics Marnie Hughes-​Warrington

46

PART II

Genres and modes

55

4 Patterns of reality Ernesto Peña and Claire Ahn

57

5 Remediation, trauma, and “preposterous history” in documentary film Robert Burgoyne

74

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Contents

6 The hero myth and the cutting room floor Nick Hector

83

7 Dramatizing film history in the historical film Jonathan Stubbs

99

8 Mirroring the 1980s in contemporary horror Chera Kee

114

9 Fantastic histories: medievalism in fantasy film and television Avery Lafortune

129

10 Satire and realism in the historical film Eleftheria Thanouli

144

PART III

Representation, race, and identity

161

11 Counter-​temporalities and dialectical images in the mass cultural rewriting of US racial histories Alison Landsberg

163

12 History and Hindi film William R. Pinch

176

13 Horrific history and Black aliveness: travel and liberatory loopholes in Lovecraft Country Lisa Woolfork

194

14 Pasts refracted: indigenous histories on film beyond the cinema Christine Sprengler

209

15 The new Civil War cinema John Trafton

225

PART IV

Evolving forms and formats

241

16 Public history on screen: from broadcast and network TV to the Internet era, an evolutionary approach Ann Gray

243

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17 Live documentary: social cinema and the cinepoetics of doubt Kim Nelson

258

18 Process, pedagogy, prefiguration, and the promised land Sara Joan MacLean

276

19 Teaching difficult history with YouTube videos James Miles and Eve Herold

298

20 What if? Experimental history on television Rebecca Weeks

314

Afterword: history with images: a conversation with Robert A. Rosenstone Robert A. Rosenstone and Kim Nelson Index

330

344

ix

CONTRIBUTORS

Ahn, Claire—​Queens University, Canada Claire Ahn is an Assistant Professor of Multiliteracies at Queen’s University, Canada. She researches on information sharing across platforms and its effects on people’s understanding of events, issues, and groups. She has published in Language and Literacy, Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies, and London Review of Education. Burgoyne, Robert—​University of St Andrews, Scotland Robert Burgoyne’s writing centres on the representation of history in film. He is the author/​editor of seven books, including the forthcoming The New Hollywood War Film. He was formerly Chair in Film Studies at the University of St Andrews, and Professor of English at Wayne State University. Gray, Ann—​University of Lincoln, United Kingdom Ann Gray is Emerita Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Lincoln, UK and was Principal Investigator on the AHRC funded Televising History 1995–​2010 project. A co-​founding editor of the European Journal of Cultural Studies she’s published widely on media, audiences, cultural theory, and methods. From 1989 to 2002 she was based in the Department of Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham, UK. Hector, Nick—​University of Windsor, Canada Nick Hector is an Associate Professor at the University of Windsor, Canada. He has edited or produced over 160 documentary films and programmes. His work explores constructed narrative in observational documentary and actuality-​drama, and he is a long-​term collaborator with filmmakers Sturla Gunnarsson and Allan King. Nick’s project has screened at major international festivals and won 13 national awards including the Canadian Academy Awards. Herold, Eve—​Teachers College, Columbia University, United States Eve Herold is a fourth-​year doctoral student in Social Studies Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. Her research is primarily focused on history curriculum, master narratives, and racial capitalism. She teaches middle school and has done curriculum work with current and preservice teachers. x

List of contributors

Hughes-​Warrington, Marnie—​University of South Australia, Australia Marnie Hughes-​Warrington is Deputy Vice Chancellor Research and Enterprise at the University of South Australia, and Honorary Professor of History at the Australian National University. She is the author of multiple books in historiography, including History Goes to the Movies (2007) and History from Loss (edited with Daniel Woolf, 2023). Kee, Chera—​Wayne State University, United States Chera Kee is an Associate Professor of Film & Media Studies at Wayne State University. Her work focuses on zombie media, horror, and transmedia fandoms and her book Not Your Average Zombie: Rehumanizing the Undead from Voodoo to Zombie Walks was published in 2017. Lafortune, Avery—​Western University, Canada Avery Lafortune holds an MA in Art History and Curatorial Studies from Western University. Her research interests include fashion history, medieval art, and the intersections of film, art, and history. Avery is gaining hands-​on experience in the film industry working in costume and set decorating departments of Vancouver-​based productions. Landsberg, Alison—​George Mason University, United States Alison Landsberg is Professor of History and Cultural Studies at George Mason University. Her numerous publications focus on the modes of engagement museums, film, and television solicit from individuals and its possibilities for the production and acquisition of memory, historical knowledge, and political subjectivity in the public sphere. MacLean, Sara Joan—​Centennial College, Canada Sara Joan MacLean teaches film at Centennial College, Canada. A PhD candidate in Curriculum & Pedagogy at OISE/​University of Toronto. Her research explores radical approaches to film curriculum and pedagogy found within collaborative experimental practices. Her internationally exhibited experimental films and installations engage with embodiment, crisis, and film materiality. Miles, James—​Teachers College, Columbia University, United States James Miles is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Teachers College, Columbia University and previously taught social studies and history in Vancouver. His research examines the teaching and learning of historical injustices in classrooms, museums, and at historic sites, and has been published in multiple educational research journals. Nelson, Kim—​University of Windsor, Canada Kim Nelson is the Director of the Humanities Research Group and an Associate Professor at the University of Windsor in Canada. International film festivals and broadcasters have shown her work, and she has received provincial and federal funding, including from SSHRC and the Canadian Ministry of Heritage. She is the author of Making History Move (Rutgers, 2024). Peña, Ernesto—​University of British Columbia, Canada Ernesto Peña’s PhD is in Language and Literacy Education from the University of British Columbia, and he previously worked internationally as a designer and design educator. His research is on the

xi

List of contributors

mobilization and evolution of Visual Literacy across disciplines and has been published in journals such as Visible Language, Design Issues, and Leonardo. Pinch, William R.—​Wesleyan University, United States William R. Pinch is Professor of History at Wesleyan University and Consulting Editor of History and Theory. His publications include Peasants and Monks in British India (1996) and Warrior Ascetics and Indian Empires (2006). Pinch is currently working on a microhistory of the military revolt at Meerut in May of 1857 and a joint translation of two long bardic poems. Rosen, Philip—​Brown University, United States Philip Rosen is Professor Emeritus of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University, where he is also affiliated Professor Emeritus of American Studies and of English. He has written extensively on various topics related to film and media theory and history. His publications include Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory. Rosenstone, Robert A.—​California Institute of Technology, United States Robert A. Rosenstone, Professor Emeritus of History at the California Institute of Technology, is a leading scholar of visual history. The author of multiple books, essays, and reviews, the editor and co-​editor of two volumes on the topic, he has also written three narrative histories, two memoirs, and two novels. His works have been translated into 13 languages. Sprengler, Christine—​Western University, Canada Christine Sprengler is Professor of Art History at Western University. The author of Screening Nostalgia (2009), Hitchcock and Contemporary Art (2014), and Fractured Fifties: The Cinematic Periodization and Evolution of a Decade (2023), she has multiple publications on cultural memory and nostalgia in film and television, contemporary cinematic art, and the relationship between cinema and the visual arts. Stubbs, Jonathan—​Cyprus International University, Cyprus Jonathan Stubbs is Professor in the Faculty of Communication at Cyprus International University. His research is on the representation of history in film, economic, and cultural relationships between Hollywood and the British film industry. He is the author of Hollywood and the Invention of England: Projecting the English Past in American Cinema, 1930–​2017 (2019) and Historical Film: A Critical Introduction (2013). Thanouli, Eleftheria—​Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece Eleftheria Thanouli is Professor in Film Theory at the School of Film at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. Her publications include Post-​classical Cinema: An International Poetics of Film Narration (2009), Wag the Dog: A Study on Film and Reality in the Digital Age (2015), History and Film: A Tale of Two Disciplines (2019), and the forthcoming A Guide to Post-​classical Narration: The Future of Film Storytelling. Trafton, John—​Seattle University, United States John Trafton, PhD teaches film studies at Seattle University. He specializes in teaching history on film, contemporary film culture, and horror cinema. His publications include The American Civil

xii

List of contributors

War and the Hollywood War Film (2016) and the forthcoming Movie-​Made Los Angeles: The City of Angels and the Rise of American Film. Treacey, Mia E.M.—​Historian, Australia Mia Treacey researches and writes in the interdisciplinary field of Screened History, exploring the relationship between History, the past, and moving images. Her publications include Reframing the Past: History, Film and Relevision (2016). A university educator for over 15 years, she now teaches secondary school History and English. Weeks, Rebecca—​Media Design School, New Zealand Rebecca Weeks is a Senior Lecturer in the Bachelor of Art and Design Programme at Media Design School in Auckland. Rebecca was the recipient of the Dame Joan Metge Post-​Doctoral Research Award in 2018. She is the author of History by HBO: Televising the American Past (2022) and the films reviews editor for the journal Film & History. Woolfork, Lisa—​University of Virginia, United States Lisa Woolfork is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Virginia, where she specializes in African American literature and culture. Her numerous publications include Embodying American Slavery in Contemporary Culture (2008). In the summer of 2017, Professor Woolfork became a founding member of Black Lives Matter Charlottesville.

xiii

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

It has been a great privilege to work with such a global and esteemed group of contributors on this major project on the world’s most popular forms of histories. We would like to thank the contributors for their innovative insights and for managing our requests and revisions so patiently. You have taught us much, and we are grateful for your leadership. Warm thanks to the staff at Routledge, and in particular Eve Setch, who commissioned the book. The proposal referees offered advice on coverage and structure, which we found invaluable. Publishers and media creators, and distributors have been gracious in their provision of permission or license to reprint extracts from works under copyright. Ron Leary played an invaluable role in helping us to edit the submitted chapters, keep track of the workflow, and assemble the finished product on time. We would like to thank two universities for their support: The University of Windsor in Ontario, Canada, and the University of South Australia for permitting Marnie the time to undertake this project, and the Australian National University, where she is honorary professor of history. We appreciate the generous support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Canadian Ministry of Heritage to this project, including the Moving Histories Symposium, which allowed the contributors the opportunity to assemble to exchange ideas, test their draft chapters, and explore topics of common interest. Finally, as always, we thank our families for their love and support through this and other projects: Kim sends her gratitude to Rob, Mia thanks John for his unwavering support, and Marnie thanks B and A, as always.

xiv

INTRODUCTION History is a moving image

While technological changes may suggest that we are on a fast track to change through a series of numbered industrial revolutions, moving image histories abide as the public’s go to source for connecting with the past.1 Two surveys nearly 25 years apart reinforce this: Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen’s Presence of the Past project (1998), and Peter Burkholder and Dana Schaffer’s History, the Past, and Public Culture (2021). Their results show us that although particular platforms may have come and gone, film and television have been joined by streaming, internet, phone films, and large-​scale online games to extend and reinforce the reach of the idea of history as shown, rather than as written. Their insights show us that we are beyond the time of questioning whether moving-​image histories deserve attention in conferences and journals, or whether they need their own term of analysis, like Hayden White’s “historiophoty” (1998). You can write about the past in words, or in light. More and more, moving-​image histories define history. Yet the worry persists that moving image-​history ought not be considered history. Burkholder and Schaffer’s survey highlights that many viewers trust documentaries more than university professors, and more than non-​fiction books, but less than unmediated objects found in museums and historic sights. They also highlight that many viewers find moving image histories easier to learn from than other formats (2021). There is the concern that the work of professional historians is less and less understood in a world of digital access, and that opting for easy entertainment over intellectual effort will leave people susceptible to extremist and even hate histories. Moving image histories will not evaporate because some chose to ignore them and prefer other formats. Cue this Companion, which crosses and connects multiple disciplines and approaches central to advancing our understanding of the most popular and preferred form of history. To do so, it brings together scholars from film and media studies, cultural studies, history, philosophy of history, and education alongside filmmakers who have made works about the past. It examines processes and methods of creation, forms of viewer reception, and the ethics and consequences of thinking historically with light. The global group of authors collected here investigate the forms, contexts, and implications of historicizing through time-​based audiovisuals now that Matuszewski’s resurrection of the dead, once requiring the orchestration of “a light source and a white sheet,” is as simple as turning to one of the ubiquitous screens that surround us at almost every moment (Matuszewski [1898] 1995, 323). DOI: 10.4324/9781003263234-1

1

Introduction

This volume is a necessary update on many fine works of scholarship on various moving​ image formats, for we are now a generation into filmmaking’s most profound historical transition since its invention, the shift from analogue to digital. As the ecosystem of film includes its creation through to its consumption, the shift to digital screen culture has transformed everything involved in the making, receiving, and analysis of moving images. The traditional questions of truth in history, vexing as they were before the shift from analogue to digital, now provoke further challenges, including newfound digital capabilities to seamlessly manipulate images. In response to the fracturing of authority and authorship dispersed through networks of digital media and global connection, this volume takes stock of many of the technological, philosophical, and cultural concerns of wresting meaning from the past through moving images from this moment on. History in this volume can refer to the past, its events and individuals, our perceptions of it, and the ways we communicate about it. It can also signify a specific disciplinary discourse, history with a capital H, as it is often called. The term moving image is also used as a technological umbrella term, reflecting the multiple formats that have developed since the invention of film at the end of the nineteenth century. Film, television, on-​demand streaming, social media, and other online digital media platforms are all represented in this collection. Each is understood as examples within a complex media ecosystem that has developed—​and continues to develop—​as new technologies are invented and become embedded within cultural practices worldwide. The complexity of the relationship between the production and consumption of moving images requires understanding the differences and similarities between various mediums as industries, technologies, artforms, and consumer products. Screen content and its audience are both implicated in the meaning making process. Understanding of this relationship can, as these chapters demonstrate, be facilitated through a variety of complex, historical, culturally specific, and nuanced analyses, as our volume word cloud shows (Fig. 0.1). A key editorial principle underpinning The Routledge Companion to History and the Moving Image has been to highlight the diversity of ideas at play in moving image history, and its global reach. Our contributors come from around the Globe, and from varied disciplinary and

Figure 0.1 Genres, disciplines, theories, and modes—​an interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary field. Word cloud produced using WordArt.com (2023).

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Introduction

professional backgrounds. Additionally, each contributor brings diverse professional experiences to their explorations of individual case studies and themes. As such, every chapter exemplifies the value of interdisciplinarity when working with History and the Moving Image and the nearly limitless possibilities for combining relevant theoretical and methodological frameworks. Consequently, the volume demonstrates that an understanding of more than one discipline is required if we are to successfully engage with the multiple—​and multiplying—​forms of moving​ image history, now and into the future. Therefore, each chapter is an act of interdisciplinary research with no two authors combining the same approach. You may think of other possibilities. The variety of approaches go beyond persuasively establishing the interdisciplinarity of the field, it reveals History and the Moving Image as being multidisciplinary. The chapters in this Companion thus work together to demonstrate a topic that disrupts discourses from within individual disciplines and between multiple disciplines. It also creates connections within and between the same disciplines that it disrupts. History in our time comes with few boundaries. Another way of understanding the consequences of the interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary nature of History and the Moving Image is to conceptualize it as a connection point, a nexus. It links a multiplicity of disciplines and concepts, and just how many disciplines pass through the nexus is limited only by our preconceived notions about what constitutes the past, how it should be communicated, and by whom. This is a critical point: disliking or worrying about moving image history serves as an obstacle to understanding how it may inform approaches to research, dissemination, and reception with other forms of history. Moving image history is significant for the academic discipline of History. Some historians have embraced it, while others have decried it as an existential threat. Since the invention of film, moving image technology has rapidly evolved, from television to digital streaming on-​demand, and into the age of user-​created content. The sense of threat is because all these representations of the past on screen are not controlled by historians. But history has never been the sole domain of historians. The interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary nature of History and the Moving Image reveals with great effect that boundaries are hierarchical, artificial, institutional constructions. Furthermore, moving image histories are increasingly made by the public. Thus, the divisions between academic expertise, professional experience, and amateur production are blurring beyond recognition. Smart phones mean that we—​the public—​can carry a video camera with us everywhere we go. We—​as history makers—​can distribute what we capture via multiple online platforms. No expert status or institutional validation is required. For historians, this challenges the idea of experts writing about the past as the dominant medium mode and production of history. Furthermore, the evidence and artefacts accumulating for future historians is increasingly in moving-​image format, requiring knowledge not always included within traditional historical training. The volume ranges across the broad parameters of moving image history in four parts. The first part, “Understanding history and the moving image,” looks at moving image history with an historical and theoretical lens. The chapters in this part address the history of historians’ engagements with the past as film tells it and appraises contemporary ethical and philosophical concerns for the field. Part II, “Genres and Modes” tackles form. Chapters in this part consider the meanings and repercussions that derive from a work’s mode of address, non-​fictional or fictional, and its processes of production, post-​production, and narrative structure. Topics range from the politics of the selection of characters and events to the structuring logic of genre, from horror to fantasy to satire to how Hollywood historicizes and mythologizes itself. Part III, “Representation, race, and identity,” shows moving image histories as anything but the unmediated presentation of the past. Histories are positioned in their making and through their reception, and the visibility of this to 3

Introduction

makers and audiences alike in moving image formats makes them powerful educators for our age. Part IV, “Evolving forms and formats,” considers variations in the orchestration and venue of moving-​image histories, from what if counterfactuals to platforms reappropriated and emergent. Robert A. Rosenstone provides the last word. His commentary on the nexus of history and moving images demonstrates the historian’s natural interest and curiosity about what the future might offer and invites you to be part of that future in the same generous way that he has worked with so many scholars across the Globe. If moving image history has taught us anything in recent times, though, it is that content does not need to be received in the order of presentation. Just as a viewer can mix episodes of a series, and platforms, so too we invite you to dip across the Companion in a way that makes sense to you. Multiple connections can be made across this collection. Perhaps History and the Moving Image might be better understood as a wormhole between past and present, connecting points that are vastly separated in space and time. This wormhole is not hypothetical as it is in physics. Every question the contributors to this volume ask means we pass through the nexus of History and the Moving Image, creating a wormhole between past and present. These wormholes offer us moments of connection, where we can examine the mode, the content, and its multiplicity of meanings. We ought not worry about moving image history, but enjoy where we might take it, and where it might take us. History is a moving image.

Note 1 On the rapid movement of industrial revolutions, see World Economic Forum, “Fourth Industrial Revolution” [n.d.], accessed February 23, 2023, www.wefo​rum.org/​focus/​fou​rth-​ind​ustr​ial-​rev​olut​ion.

Reference list Burkholder, Peter, and Dana Schaffer. 2021. History, the Past, and Public Culture: Results from a National Survey. Accessed February 23, 2023. www.his​tori​ans.org/​hist​ory-​cult​ure-​sur​vey. Matuszewski, Boleslas, Laura U. Marks, and Diane Koszarski. [1898] 1995. “A New Source of History.” Film History 7, no. 3 (Autumn): 322–​324. www.jstor.org/​sta​ble/​3815​097. Rosenzweig, Roy, and David Thelen. 1998. The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life. New York: Columbia University Press. White, Hayden. 1998. “Historiography and Historiophoty.” American Historical Review 93, no. 5 (December): 1193–​1199. https://​doi.org/​10.2307/​1873​534.

4

PART I

Understanding history and the moving image

1 FROM “HISTORY AND FILM” TO “SCREENED HISTORY” 1 Mia E.M. Treacey

This chapter explores the relationship between History, the past, and the moving ​image. Engaging with several bodies of related scholarship, it develops a narrative about how historians have understood and responded to moving i​mage media. It contextualizes more than a century of technological, commercial, and artistic developments in film and television alongside the evolution of the discourses of History, Film, Television, and Cultural Studies. The research for this narrative was an act of bibliographic archaeology, tracing the past through books, conference proceedings, magazines, and newspaper articles. Beginning with the footnotes and bibliographical references of well-​known “History and film” scholarship, a much broader field of relevant publications encompassing a collection of lesser-​known and all-​but-​forgotten contributions was revealed. My research followed the connections between a variety of disciplines including History, Film, Television, and Cultural Studies. Ultimately, relevance was defined by a publication’s focus, its exploration of the relationship between History, the past, and moving images. The resulting body of scholarship spanned multiple disciplines, building into an intricate narrative of interconnections and disconnections. Crossing disciplinary boundaries means terms, concepts, and theories become unstable. Interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research results in opportunities for miscommunication due to the complexity of the diverse discourses involved. The research field most historians call “History and film” has been called many things: history on film, film on history, historiophoty (White 1988), televisual history, media history, history in film, Film History, audiovisual history, and—​memorably—​at one conference, “history and/​on/​in film” (O’Regan and Shoesmith 1987). Yet, regardless of terminology, all the related publications and organizations focused on the same thing: exploring the relationship between History, the past, and moving images. However, the problem with the existence of multiple names for overlapping bodies of scholarship is that each sets boundaries or creates divisions, limiting or obscuring the examples or methods utilized. Some create restrictions by focusing on a single medium (e.g., “History and film”), others by aligning with individual disciplines (e.g., Film History as a sub-​field of Film Studies). Each designation discourages contributors from considering discourses, artefacts, or methods beyond a pre-​defined field. Over time unclear terminology leads to connections and opportunities being missed or forgotten. Furthermore, most names have not allowed for future moving i​ mage technologies, drawing a boundary before new mediums have even evolved. DOI: 10.4324/9781003263234-3

7

Mia E.M. Treacey

In response to these issues and to include as many relevant disciplinary perspectives as possible, I have proposed elsewhere the value of reconceptualizing all scholarship and commentary relating to History, the past, and moving images as Screened History (Treacey 2016). Significantly, Screened History is not medium specific. It includes all forms of moving-​image media: from film to television, video, the digital, and beyond. It includes any explorations of the past on screen, screen artefacts as historical sources, the histories of individual mediums, or representations of the past on screen by historians or non-​historians. Screened History is, therefore, reasonably future-​ proof. Screened History, so defined, originated at the end of the nineteenth century as a response to the invention of film. It evolved during the twentieth century, reflecting the invention of television, video, DVDs, and the rise of computing technology and the internet. In the new millennium, Screened History continued to reflect technological growth, particularly in digital production, and the proliferation of on-​demand streaming services via the internet, smart phones, and other portable devices. Screened History encompasses international contributions from multiple disciplinary perspectives, including publications by academics and non-​academics. It did not develop linearly; no research field does. However, by contextualizing relevant publications within broader technological, cultural, and disciplinary developments, six distinct phases of Screened History are discernible. Tracing of defining characteristics and the identification of moments of transition, these six phases function as the framework of this chapter. While “History and film” is most often identified as beginning in the late 1980s, reconceptualized as Screened History, Phase 1 began in 1898 and finished around 1949, with Phase 2 starting in 1950 and ending in 1969. The subsequent three phases match specific decades: Phase 3 from 1970 to 1979, Phase 4 from 1980 to 1989, and Phase 5 from 1990 to 1999. Reflecting the exponential growth in screen technology since the turn of the millennium, I suspect Phase 6 has already ended, with Phase 7 marked by the rise of user-​content creation on platforms such as YouTube or TikTok. However, there is not yet enough distance or clarity surrounding the last 20 years of Screened History to establish a precise end or transition point for Phase 6. All narrative structures are artificial, and no doubt others will (and should) be explored. The value of this chapter’s thematic and chronological structure is it focuses on establishing connections between previously disparate and disconnected bodies of scholarship. In doing so, it highlights the complexity of the scholarship first called “History and film,” which has undeniably evolved into the broader, interdisciplinary, and multidisciplinary field of “Screened History.”

Phase 1: 1898–​1949 Multiple technological developments led to the invention of the motion picture at the end of the nineteenth century, with competing claims about who “invented” it (Dixon and Foster 2018). From experimental forms like the Zoetrope and Kinetoscope, the history of motion pictures includes overlapping and interconnected inventions developed in Britain, Europe, and America at the turn of the nineteenth century (Dixon and Foster 2018). Simultaneously, publications about History, the past, and film began to appear predominantly in Britain and Europe. These early publications were unaligned with any established academic discipline, lacking any sense of interconnection. However, considered together they mark the beginning of Screened History. The first publication generally acknowledged as exploring the relationship between History, the past, and film was an article in the French newspaper Le Figaro by Polish photographer Boleslas Matuszewski’s in 1898 ([1898] 1995; [1898] 1975). In it, Matuszewski argued for the need to establish and fund a French film archive. Significantly, he emphasized film’s historical importance, linking it to its educational 8

From “history and film” to “screened history”

value ([1898] 1995, 322). Thus, it was in 1898 that Screened History’s first phase began, continuing until the arrival of a new medium: television. Like film, there are competing claims about who invented television (Hilmes 2003), with experimental broadcasting beginning as early as the 1930s. The UK and other countries suspended such early, limited broadcasting due to the outbreak of the Second World War, only resuming at its end. Accordingly, Phase 1 of Screened History can be identified as ending in 1949, shaped by two correlated events: (1) the invention of television and (2) the end of the Second World War. During this first phase only a small number of academic articles were written that would be considered relevant to Screened History. Instead, it was the filmmakers, journalists, and film groups who wrote most of the media commentaries and publications that appeared after the invention of film. Thus, Screened History’s first phase is characterized by its highly fragmentary nature, a debate existing without any sense of a group identity. However, significant connections become clear in hindsight. A shared focus—​the exploration of the relationship between History, the past, and film—​creates the links between contributions, establishing the beginning of Screened History. Almost all the field’s significant and enduring themes emerged during this phase. Even more significantly, it is the only period when the object of study could be accurately referred to as “History and film.” Emphasizing the importance of this first phase for understanding Screened History’s development is that, since its invention, the film industry has told historical stories. The world’s first feature-​length, silent film—​The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906)—​depicted the recent life and death of the notorious Australian bushranger Ned Kelly (1854–​1880). The Story of the Kelly Gang is one of many early films demonstrating the significance of the historical film as one of the first filmic genres. In the first half of the twentieth century, film technology and national production industries grew exponentially on an international scale. Film transitioned from silent to sound, from black and white to colour, and Screened History’s first phase coincided with the Golden Age of Hollywood studio films (Bordwell and Thompson 2003). The widespread appeal of cinema in America and beyond prompted political and social debates reflecting several “moral panics” (Crary 1992; 2001). In what became an enduring theme, official inquiries were held, centring on concerns about the use of film in education and its possible influence on behaviour (e.g., National Council of Public Morals 1917; Committee of the Victorian Council for Public Education 1921). The disconnection between this first phase of Screened History and later works of “History and film” can largely be explained by the fact that very few historians were interested in film during the period. Yet historians wrote the vast majority of early overviews of “History and film.” Nonetheless it was actually the entrepreneurs of the early industry who first wrote about film and the past, people like Matuszewski ([1898] 1995) or Edison’s colleague Dickson (1895). In addition to industry figures, sociologists, psychologists, art theorists, journalists, and filmmakers also began discussing and writing about the relationship between film and History. In this period these publications debated film’s function and form, its perceived ability to reproduce reality, explored its cultural and political dimensions, and argued for film’s status as a new artform (e.g., Lindsay 1915; Munsterburg 1916; Delluc 1920; Vertov [1922] 2014; Ramsaye 1926; Arnheim [1933] 1957; Astruc [1948] 1968). Thus, film was discussed scientifically, philosophically, and artistically from the moment of its invention. During this period, filmmaking was established as a collaborative, creative endeavour and international film movements, including the French and German Impressionists, Russian Formalists, and Soviet Montage Theorists, or the British Documentary Film Movement (Stam 2000). These film movements, theories, and debates were the foundations of the academic discipline of Film Studies in the 1950s. However, despite its nearly complete absence from later overviews of “History and film,” this body of diverse publications, debates, and filmmaking movements represent the beginning of Screened History. 9

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Attempting to explain historian’s early disinterest in film, British historian Anthony Aldgate argued it was due to a distrust of the commercial nature of filmmaking. As much a device of illusion and trickery as it was of science, the problem was that “faking was at hand and money was to be made” (Aldgate 1979, 4). This distrust of film due to its commerciality became a dominant theme in Screened History’s first—​and later—​phases. Nevertheless, Aldgate clarified that not all historians were uninterested in film during its earliest years. In the 1920s, at the International Congresses of the International Committee of Historical Sciences (ICHS), a small group of British and European historians considered film’s historical implications (5–​6). As with the public inquiries into film in this era, these historians were particularly interested in the influence of film on public understanding of the past. However, they were not motivated by concepts of morality, instead they were expressing concerns shaped by the dominant disciplinary discourse within History. At multiple ICHSs, the International Iconographical Commission (IIC) convened to discuss systems of film archiving and established a definition for the historical film (5–​6). The IIC declared that “historical film” could only refer to films “which record a person or period from the time after the invention of cinematography and without dramaturgical or ‘artistic’ purposes” (5–​6). In doing so, the IIC established a hierarchy of film sources, preferencing those “which present a visual record of a definite event, person or locality,” and demonstrated “a clearly recognizable historical interest inherent in the subject matter” over anything with creative purpose (5–​6). This preference for film forms that overtly represented reality reflected History’s dominant statist, scientific paradigm in the early twentieth century (Fulbrook 2002; Lambert and Schofield 2004). This preference was evident in the rare early publications by historians, which focused on newsreels, propaganda films, and training footage created during the First and Second World Wars (e.g., Philip 1912; Demeter 1925; Johnston 1935; see also Rosen, Chapter 2, in this collection). The turmoil of the early twentieth century resulted in the accumulation of millions and millions of feet of reality film footage. Yet, it was also the same era in which film industries—​as commercial entertainment enterprises—​ spread throughout the world. The IIC’s definition demonstrated the inherent challenge of film for historians: its (perceived) ability to reproduce reality versus its capacity for illusion. Just as Matuszewski’s response to invention of film established the beginning of Screened History’s first phase, its end can be identified as coinciding with another publication. While the invention of television is significant in delineating Phase 1 of Screened History, it was a response to the Second World War that best embodies its end. In 1947, German architect, sociologist, and journalist Siegfried Kracauer published From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film ([1947] 2004), demonstrating a sophisticated exploration of film again written by someone outside the discipline of History. One of the earliest explorations of film as a social and cultural artefact, Kracauer combined his diverse knowledge of aesthetics, Art History, architecture, and Sociology, to psychoanalyze non-​historical fiction films like The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920). Its central argument was that the films of Germany’s inter-​war years revealed—​ in hindsight—​a nation predisposed to the rise of Hitler and Nazism. Rich with visual detail, Kracauer drew connections between films and other artistic movements, exploring their symbolic, iconic, and metaphorical meanings. Since its publication, there have been mixed critiques of From Caligari to Hitler’s underpinning arguments and logic (Koch 2000, 76–​77; Quaresima 2004). Despite its complex critical reception, From Caligari to Hitler became an important early example of film analysis and an influential text within Film Studies. Yet in “History and film,” despite its obvious relevance to analyzing film’s relationship with the past, it was most often ignored or barely mentioned in passing. Regardless of the reasons given by historians, the real underlying problem of From Caligari to Hitler was its use of non-​historical fiction films as historical evidence. Just as the IIC had declared non-​historical fiction films as unfit for historical study, 10

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Kracauer was using them to analyze the past. However, as later historical explorations of screen artefacts as sources for social and cultural history have demonstrated, From Caligari to Hitler is an excellent example of the value of taking a multidisciplinary approach to better appreciate and analyze film’s visual complexity. Screened History’s first phase between 1898 and 1949 reveals how the privileging of certain film forms—​in this case, those most realistic—​occurred due to the dominance of a specific Historical discourse during the period. However, this phase also demonstrates the value of integrating early works of film analysis, criticism, and history for understanding the more complex, interdisciplinary field of Screened History. It establishes the value of including diverse conceptual, theoretical, and methodological frameworks to create a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between History, the past, and film. Including this first phase in the narrative about Screened History’s evolution pinpoints a much earlier starting point for historical interest in film than established narratives about “History and film” have conventionally suggested.

Phase 2: 1950–​1969 While History was an established profession during Screened History’s first phase, no academic disciplines were devoted to studying film to which historians could turn to understand the new medium. It was during Screened History’s second phase (1950–​1969) that Film Studies became an established academic discipline, and another new field—​Cultural Studies—​emerged and set the groundwork for the emergence of Television Studies in the 1970s. From the 1950s onward, more homes had televisions, and broadcasters needed new content to fill expanding hours of screen time. Like film, from its beginning television engaged with the past, re-​purposing archival footage and making commercial deals with studios to broadcast studios’ back catalogues. Ultimately, using and re-​using reality film footage in television programs provoked historians to genuinely engage with the past on screen. The end point of this second, 20-​year phase is created by the establishment within academia of both Film and Cultural Studies, and the significance of the 1960s (especially 1968) in the evolution of intellectual and political movements worldwide (Stam 2000). Earlier themes continued to be explored, but the field also broadened its scope to include new research topics in response to the intellectual, academic, political, and cultural developments of the period. Changes in the dominant discourse of History created room for new questions to be considered, including: what is an appropriate representation of the past on screen? Who is authorized—​socially and academically—​to create history on screen? What influence does the past on screen have on public knowledge about History? During this phase, contributions continued to be published internationally, but a distinct centre of activity coalesced around British and European universities. Compared to Screened History’s fragmentary first phase, the 1950s and 1960s saw the emergence of a consistent focus by this group of historians on what was beginning to be thought of as the field of “History and film.” While the dominant, statist, scientific paradigm of History continued, in the 1950s and 1960s, multiple intellectual and cultural movements began to influence the discipline, gradually broadening its approaches, topics, and even participants. These shifts in historical discourse were necessary for the gradual, ongoing growth in acceptance of film and television within History. During these two decades, Screened History’s interdisciplinary network grew to engage increasingly with non-​ historical scholars and individuals working in the film and television industries. Significantly, historians were not just talking about film, with discussions about television indicating the awareness that both mediums influenced public knowledge about the past. However, only a tiny fraction of Screened History’s second phase can be found in the footnotes and reading lists of later 11

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publications (e.g., Smith 1976; Aldgate 1979; Rosenstone 2006; Hughes-​Warrington 2007). While this phase of Screened History is slightly more well-​known than its first phase, the question arises, why did this second phase and its earlier topics and debates fade from view? The themes that first drew the ICHS’s interest in the 1920s and 1930s—​archiving, actuality footage, newsreels, and teaching History with film—​continued within Screened History’s second phase. Building on these topics, British and European historians started experimenting with creating their own educational, historical films, called compilation films (for a more in-​depth discussion of these, see Philip Rosen’s chapter in this volume, Chapter 2). Compilation films were constructed from archival footage and intended as supplementary teaching materials. They were fundamentally different from what Grierson and others defined as the documentary (Nichols 1994). The conference proceedings of the 1968 The Historian and Film conference run by the British Universities Film Council (BUFC) (1969) provides an excellent example of the main characteristics of British and European Screened History’s second phase. Its participants included historians from British, German, and Dutch universities, newsreel company representatives (e.g., AB-​Pathé Ltd.), and staff from local and international film libraries, archives, and several museums (1969, 52–​54). Many participants became key figures in British and European Screened History and went on to shape the field internationally in later phases. Reflecting the IIC’s definition of historical films, The Historian and Film conference proceedings reveal a preference for filmic forms perceived as having the most substantial connection to reality: archiving, the use and re-​use of war footage, and the use of film for teaching History (1969). Along with the papers presented, the special edition of University Vision included transcriptions of debates that occurred after the screening of a selection of compilation films during the conference (1969). The discussions reveal how unhappy the academic historians were with the historical film and television made by non-​historians, mainly what they saw as a lack of “serious standards of scholarship” (Taylor in 1969, 55). After one compilation film screening, British historian AJP Taylor called the use of archival footage in the BBC’s recent documentary series The Great War (1964) “monstrous” (1969, 55).2 The post-​screening discussions demonstrate the degree to which historians believed that History on screen must meet the standards of academic, written History. The only way to ensure this, they argued, was for historians to be in control of historical screen productions. In discussing the costs and technical requirements for making compilation films, Sir Arthur Elton acknowledged that “the application of film and picture to communication is a discipline of its own” (1969, 95). However, his concerns—​and those of others—​reflect a limited understanding of screen production, reducing editing to something a subordinate “technician” does. His attitude—​and the agreement of others—​toward technical staff was evident when he exclaimed, “you can’t order a technician to do your history for you, historians must learn to handle pictures in the way they now handle a pen (hear, hear)” (95). The existential fear of the historians as represented in the transcripts is nearly palpable. They know History on screen—​whether film or television—​is entertaining and engaging audiences, shaping their historical knowledge in ways with which they fear traditional History cannot compete. It is also clear from comments made by industry figures during post-​screening debates that there was a degree of frustration with historians regarding their attitudes and expectations. These discussions revealed, according to documentary researcher, writer, and producer Jerry Kuehl, that, “what lies behind this mutual unease is, I think, a serious failure in communication between the two professions” (in Smith 1976, 177). In the 1968 conference discussions it was apparent that there was a fundamental conflict between academic expectations and the reality of film and television production practices. Other historians during Screened History’s second phase responded to television documentaries increasing prevalence and popularity. Television producers’ use of archival footage and 12

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the promotion of established historians working as production advisers prompted concerns from historians throughout the 1950s and 1960s. The challenge for historians of the popularity of particularly television documentaries continued, with later responses to documentaries like Ken Burns’ The Civil War (1990) mirroring similar concerns (Toplin 1996a). But, in Screened History’s second phase, only a few historians wrote critiques of documentaries, with the majority written by archivists, museum directors, and film scholars (Roads 1966; Houston 1967). Even so, concerns centred on how documentaries shape narratives around what can be visually represented, as well as the lack of an audiovisual equivalent for referencing sources (Leyda 1964; Roads 1966). Conceptualizations of realism, truth, and evidence like those found in Screened History’s first phase continued to shape History’s hierarchy of acceptable screen sources. Matuszewski’s vision of a filmic Frankenstein’s monster where the “dead and gone get up and walk” ([1898] 1995, 323) continued to haunt historians. Film was the ultimate temptation for some (Rosenstone 1995a), while for others, it was “the historian’s dangerous friend” (Cripps 1975). In its second phase, the division between acceptable and unacceptable screen forms that emerged in Screened History’s first phase continued to develop. The screen forms deemed appropriate, and the domain of History, were overtly historical and factual. This left every other screen form to the filmmakers, film critics, film scholars, and public to discuss. In what was to remain a characteristic of Screened History well into the next decade, discussions of film or television’s social, cultural, or artistic significance were had outside of History. Ideas from Linguistics, Semiotics, and Psychology influenced filmmakers and theorists like Truffaut (1954), Oudart (1960), or Comolli and Narboi (1969). They proposed explanations of the language of film to explain how its artistic form, technical processes, and cultural contexts created meaning. These discussions included explorations of historical contexts and the representation of the past on screen. These discussions have long been considered part of the evolution of Film Studies (Stam 2000). However, it is only by taking the perspective of Screened History that they are reconnected to the scholarship on “History and film.” In turn, their inclusion emphasizes the degree to which most historians failed to engage with the new disciplines of Film and (later) Cultural Studies in this period. In doing so, opportunities for historians to develop far more nuanced and intellectually robust approaches to film and television were missed. It would not be until later phases that several prominent historians would turn to these disciplines, to develop more complex frameworks for working within Screened History. The 1950s had seen a waning of the influence of the Frankfurt School in many disciplines, but it continued to influence Film and Cultural Studies into the 1960s, especially in relation to the analysis of film’s relationship to politics and culture. Furthermore, the work of Benjamin, Horkheimer, Adorno, and others emphasized the role of audiences and mass culture, which had lasting consequences for Film, Television, and Cultural Studies (Stam 2000). During the period, influential publications like Bazin’s “The Ontology of the Photographic Image” (1967) and Kracauer’s Theory of Film (1960) were part of a philosophical debate about film’s relationship to the real world and the medium’s ability to represent or reproduce it (Stam 2000; Cook 2007). Film Studies’ discussion of reality and film’s relationship to it should have resonated with historians. Yet, there is little evidence this debate about filmic realism influenced historians during Screened History’s second phase. Film’s relationship to realism, reality, and the representation of the past was discussed in detail by historians, but rarely (until recently) with any engagement with ideas from Film or Cultural Studies. Similarly, during Screened History’s second phase, Film and Cultural Studies scholarship began explorations of the role of the audience in the complex process of meaning-​making in film or television, utilizing multiple theories and methodologies (Stam 2000). As with the debates 13

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around realism, the importance of audiences was largely ignored by historians during this period. However, from the perspective of Screened History the interconnection of various intellectual and political movements in the 1950s and 1960s can be seen as influencing the analyses of film—​ historical and non-​historical—​as sources for political, cultural, social, and historical analysis. It was a body of scholarship that later historians would eventually begin to explore (e.g., O’Connor 1990; Hughes-​Warrington 2009).

Phase 3: 1970–​1979 British and European Screened History continued into a third phase lasting from 1970 to 1979. A period marked by significant interaction between historians, film, and television scholars, as well as cultural theorists, it was also a moment of transition. By the decade’s end, Screened History’s momentum would shift to American historians. Shaping how the field evolved in this period were developments in film and television technology and various intellectual and political movements that were in response to the ongoing Cold War, Postcolonialism, the repercussions of the American Civil Rights Movement, and Feminism’s Second Wave. Television brought the Vietnam War into people’s homes, demonstrating the power of the “idiot box” to influence public opinion and political decision-​making (Anderegg 1991).3 New Hollywood ushered in the age of the blockbuster, and other national film and television industries continued developing (Bordwell and Thompson 2003). Film and Cultural Studies, and the new discipline of Television Studies, were all influenced by Linguistics, Marxism, Psychoanalysis, and Feminism (among other theories). This resulted in a more nuanced exploration of the role of the spectator, and the significance of the act of viewing in meaning-​making, for all three disciplines (Fulbrook 2002; Lambert and Schofield 2004). Historical Studies also responded to the same events and intellectual movements, resulting in the rise of Social and later Cultural History. New theories proliferated in the humanities and social sciences: dominant paradigms were in flux. Postcolonialism, Structuralism, Poststructuralism, and Postmodernism all challenged older dominant paradigms, creating increasing space for historians interested in Screened History. However, while paradigms were gradually shifting, for historians interested in film and television it did not result in a consistent engagement with the disciplines of Film, Television, or Cultural Studies. Nor was there any widespread acknowledgement by historians of the significance of the technical and commercial differences between film and television production. It was also in this period that “film” was firmly established as an inadequate—​misleading— shorthand for both film and television. Old themes continued, and new ones emerged in 1970s Screened History, including growing discussions of methodology, which did engage with theories from disciplines such as Sociology and Political Science (e.g., Jarvie 1970; Clark 1979). Television’s worldwide growth inspired research in Film, Television, and Cultural Studies, utilizing various theoretical frameworks from diverse perspectives, such as Marxist analyses (McArthur 1978) and others focusing on television as a social, political, and cultural artefact (e.g., Gerber 1977; Barta 1979). Still, historians continued to wrestle with concepts of screen realism, verisimilitude, and authenticity, often in connection with debates about the role historians had—​or should have—​in making historical film and television (e.g., Grenville 1971; Hornshøj-​Møller 1979; Kuehl 1976). British, European, American, and some Australian publications continued to explore the challenges of archiving, using film and television for teaching History, and the representation of the past in documentaries (e.g., O’Connor 1972; Dickinson 1973).

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Journals produced by historical organizations increasingly included film or television reviews, emphasizing historical content and interpretation. It was during Screened History’s third phase that the American journal Film and History was first published. Several new research areas began to grow around screen representations of the Holocaust, Nazism, and war in general (e.g., Hull 1973; Isenberg 1975; Lanzmann 1979). Prominent British and European contributors of the period were from various disciplines. They included many who had participated in The Historian and Film conference in 1968: Marc Ferro, Pierre Sorlin, Karsten Fledelius, JAS Grenville, Jerry Kuehl, Arthur Marwick, Nicholas Pronay, Lisa Pontecorvo, Jeffery Richards, Anthony Aldgate, Ian Jarvie, and Paul Smith. American contributions increased during the 1970s, many by individuals who became prominent figures in 1980s American Screened History. Notable contributors included Thomas R Cripps, Martin Jackson, Garth Jowett, John E O’Connor, RC Raack, Michael T Isenberg, Daniel J Leab, Peter C Rollins, and Stuart Samuels. Reprints appeared of Kracauer’s From Caligari to Hitler (1971) and Matuszewski’s article ([1898] 1975), indicating publishers were aware of renewed interest in History on screen. Two of the most significant—​yet largely forgotten—​British and European Screened History publications were released in Screened History’s third phase: Paul Smith’s The Historian and Film (1976) and the three-​part Studies in History, Film and Society series (Fledelius et al. 1979; Short and Fledelius 1980; Reimers and Friedrich 1982). Growing out of the 1968 The Historian and film conference, including many of the same contributors, Smith’s collection (1976) provided the first international and interdisciplinary overview of “History and film,” making it a formative text for Screened History. Contributors were from Britain, America, France, and the Netherlands, with chapters written by historians, film scholars, archivists, museum directors, and individuals from the film and television industries. Its extraordinary “select bibliography” lists over 300 sources based on thematic interests, not disciplinary boundaries. The Historian and Film identifies a significant body of scholarship produced in languages other than English (70 entries) that mostly disappeared from later English-​language “History and film” overviews and bibliographies. Smith’s collection demonstrates the degree to which Screened History’s first three phases did engage with theories and methods from Film, Television, and Cultural Studies. It reveals a continuing dialogue occurring between some historians and individuals from outside of academia. The Historian and Film also reflects the continuation of earlier, rarer approaches to the subject. Contributions by William Hughes and Ferro both discuss the historical fiction film, with Hughes going as far as to mention non-​historical films as sources for social and cultural history. However, while some later Screened History overviews include The Historian and Film (mostly in bibliographies), discussions of it lacked detail, despite how well it demonstrated the benefits of an interdisciplinary approach to film and television. Screened History’s internationality and interdisciplinarity were further evident in three conferences run at the end of the 1970s by the newly founded International Association for Audio-​ visual Media in Historical Research and Education (later IAMHIST). The proceedings were published in the three-​part Studies in History, Film and Society (Fledelius et al. 1979; Short and Fledelius 1980; Reimers and Friedrich 1982).4 Together the three collections provide rare examples of English translations of research from the Netherlands, West Germany, the USSR, Italy, Sweden, Poland, Belgium, Austria, and Finland. Reflecting its highly interdisciplinary approach, Studies in History, Film and Society includes historical analyses using Semiotics, Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, Spectatorship Theory, theories of Mass Communications, and examples of Film History. It reveals the substantial engagement with theories and methods from Film, Television, Cultural Studies, and other disciplines, by some historians. Contributors in all three collections include

15

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references to Kracauer, Houston, Christian Metz, and Marshall McLuhan, and several participants demonstrated an understanding of the differences between television and film (although many did not). The three collections also include analyses of compilation films, amateur films, documentaries, television programmes, political screen propaganda, and historical fiction films, including the biopic, the epic, the use of fictional characters in historical settings, and the use of film and television in education. Together all three publications in the Studies in History, Film and Society series embraced an even more interdisciplinary approach than Smith’s collection and included some of the earliest historical discussions of audiences. However, in later phases of Screened History, mentions of the Studies in History, Film and Society series largely disappeared. One reason may be the prevalence of Semiotic analyses within all three publications. While a highly influential methodology within 1970s Film Studies, Semiotics ultimately fell from favour due to an inability to successfully demonstrate the transferability of a Linguistic theory to the audiovisual (Cook 2007; Stam 2000). Additionally, the few mentions of the series in later works were often inaccurate, conflating the three collections into a single volume or only listing the first collection.5 Nevertheless, the series marks a significant moment in Screened History. Its contributors and themes highlight the continuation of earlier scholarship, and (in retrospect) numerous connections to later phases of Screened History. Along with Smith, it shows that 1970s British and European Screened History had developed into an expanding network of scholars—​from multiple disciplines, institutions, and nations—​building on each other’s work and ideas. While British and European scholars and institutions were behind the momentum of Screened History in the 1970s, interest was also growing in America. Evidence of this can be seen not only in publications by American historians, but also in the presence of American historians at several British and European conferences and their contributions to several edited collections (e.g., Sklar 1975; Jackson 1970; Leab 1975). One of these early and prolific American Screened Historians was Thomas R Cripps. Cripps began publishing articles about representations of race in American cinema in the 1960s and continued well into the 1990s (e.g., 1963; 1975; 1993; 1995). His Slow Fade to Black: The Negro in American Film, 1900–​1942 (1977) exemplified an emerging theme in American Screened History: film as a historical and cultural artifact. Similarly, other early American contributors included John E O’Connor and Martin A Jackson, who co-​edited American History/​American Film: Interpreting the Hollywood Image (1979) as well as publishing individually (Jackson 1970; 1975). Cripps, O’Connor, and Jackson all included in their research analyses of historical film, and the historical analysis of non-​historical films such as Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), Rocky (1976) and The Public Enemy (1931). It was with these early American publications that the coming transition of Screened History’s momentum across the Atlantic began.

Phase 4: 1980–​1989 By the 1980s, television had evolved from an expensive rarity to the ubiquitous idiot box in the corner of most loungerooms (Hilmes 2003). Progressing from black and white to colour, television went from limited broadcasting periods to all-​day programming. Furthermore, the invention of videotape and home video recorders (VCRs) revolutionized television and film consumption, ushering in the age of flexible viewing (Hilmes 2003). The 1980s was a period of continued evolution, not just in History but also Film, Television, and Cultural Studies, as they all continued to respond to the ongoing challenges of Poststructuralism, Postcolonialism, and Postmodernism. Sub-​fields such as Cultural, Oral, and Feminist History (among others) were gaining acceptance within History, broadening the scope of the discipline (Fulbrook 2002; Lambert and Schofield 16

From “history and film” to “screened history”

2004). It was within this changing disciplinary landscape that American historians began to dominate Screened History. “History and film” is often misidentified as starting in America in the 1980s. However, by then explorations of the relationship between History, the past, and the screen had been occurring for over 90 years. Earlier themes and topics continued, but in Screened History’s fourth phase, its origins in Britain and Europe began to fade from memory. Multiple factors caused the gradual disconnection of American Screened History from its British and European roots. Partly, it was due to a thematic shift from the earlier emphasis on historical non-​fiction film and television that so characterized British and European Screened History, to the American interest in History on screen, especially in Hollywood. During Screened History’s fourth phase, a growing interest in the historical exploration of the cultural contexts of audiences and spectatorship evolved along with the development of more complex theoretical frameworks in Film, Television, and Cultural Studies (Stam 2000; Williams 1997). Additionally, several earlier themes continued to be researched, but shifted into the domains of Film, Television, and Cultural Studies, Mass Communications, or Media Studies. Film organizations launched specialist journals such as Film History and The Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television. Archiving of screen artefacts was a specialty related to libraries and museums. Significantly, in the 1980s, most of what was previously historical research relating to film and television in Britain and Europe shifted, with several scholars becoming (institutionally) part of other disciplines, such as Film, Television, and Cultural Studies. Unfortunately, the disconnection of Screened History’s fourth phase from its earlier phases resulted in very few historians engaging with what this body of scholarship offered in the way of more nuanced approaches to what has remained one of the most challenging questions for Screened History: what role do audiences play in meaning-​making? The link between the four earlier phases of Screened History is demonstrated in Pierre Sorlin’s The Film in History (1980) and Marc Ferro’s Cinema and History (1988). Sorlin and Ferro are particularly significant due to the interdisciplinarity of their approaches. The two French historians published Screened History articles in French and English before their two best-​known books and wrote about other, more traditional historical topics. Sorlin and Ferro’s works of Screened History are examples of the historical analysis of film as a social artefact, reflecting the influence of The Annales School on 1970s and 1980s French historiography. Exploring film as a social artefact, Sorlin and Ferro’s approaches actively engaged with questions of methodology and theory to the degree that was—​and has frequently remained—​uncommon for the field. Film historians Chapman, Glancy, and Harper (2007) argue that Sorlin and Ferro are significant because they were “concerned less with the question of historical accuracy and focused on the structural and ideological features of the historical film” (11). Moving well beyond arguments about good/​ bad History on screen, both Sorlin and Ferro utilized theories from Film Studies to identify and develop a stable method for historically analyzing film. Demonstrating the influence of Sorlin’s methodological discussion are the frequent reprints of sections from The Film in History (usually the first chapter) in later works of Screened History (e.g., Hughes-​Warrington 2009; Rosenstone 2018; Landy 2001). Ferro’s exploration of historical and non-​historical fiction films (originally published as Cinéma et Histoire, 1977) was—​like Sorlin’s—​grounded in the continental philosophical traditions of 1960s and 1970s French historiography. Ferro applied a more political (largely Marxist-​inspired), Structuralist, and Semiotic analysis of film, whereas Sorlin was less strict in his methodological approach. Like Sorlin, Ferro’s influence is demonstrated in the numerous references to Cinema and History in later Screened Histories (e.g., Rosenstone 1995a; 1995b; O’Connor 1990; Landy 17

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1996; 2001; Guynn 2006; Toplin 1996a; Hughes-​Warrington 2007; 2009). Sorlin and Ferro were an ideal fit for 1980s American historians interested in film. As well as their focus on historical films (including those with fictional characters set within historical settings) they argued for the need to establish a specific methodology for the historical analysis of film. Arguably this, along with their established reputations as historians, writing about more traditional topics, made their work on film more accessible for American historians interested in representations of historical events on screen. While Film, Television, and Cultural Studies all moved on from the specific theories utilized by Sorlin and Ferro (particularly their emphasis on Semiotics and Structuralism), their publications continued to influence later phases of Screened History in America and beyond. There is ample evidence of American historians interested in Screened History well before the 1980s. Still, it was the 1988 American Historical Review (AHR) Forum on “Film and History” that came to symbolize the start of American “History and film.” The AHR Forum explored topics that became ongoing themes within American Screened History, featuring articles by Robert A Rosenstone, John E O’Connor, David Herlihy, Hayden White, and Robert Brent Toplin (1988). While most often acclaimed for introducing a new field of research for historians, the AHR Forum also embodied interests found in earlier phases of Screened History in Britain, Europe, and elsewhere. Ultimately, it was both elements—​the old and new—​that established the AHR Forum as a moment of transition for American Screened History. It demonstrated an awareness of earlier phases of Screened History (O’Connor 1988), established the American emphasis on historical film, and put forward Rosenstone’s argument for filmmakers as historians, raising the question of History on screen as the audiovisual equivalent to written History. Supporting Rosenstone’s idea, Hayden White embraced and expanded on his concept, proposing “historiophoty” as the equivalent of historiography (White 1988). Rosenstone and White both exemplified a fundamentally postmodern approach to History, one that challenged the authority of historians as the gatekeepers of the past. However, while White’s Metahistory (1973) became a formative historiographical text, his argument for historiophoty did not gain the same traction. Instead, it was Rosenstone’s exploration of historical films and filmmakers as historians that were to have the most significant influence on Screened History. Despite the AHR Forum’s significance for Screened History, not all historians—​American or otherwise—​considered film or television relevant to History in the 1980s or beyond. Nonetheless, it was a crucial moment in Rosenstone’s development as a Screened Historian, one that other American historians noticed. Again, like the work of Sorlin and Ferro, it also demonstrated how much historiographical discourses shape historians’ approaches to film and television. O’Connor, Rosenstone, and White’s articles reflected the influence of Poststructuralism and Postmodernism on the dominant discourses of 1980s History in America. In comparison, Herlihy and Toplin’s articles represented the tenacity of earlier, more conservative, historical discourses and methods. The AHR Forum also marked the emergence of two distinct schools of American Screened History. The first school was represented by Rosenstone, White, and O’Connor, positioning Screened History as a legitimate area of historical research, and arguing for the acceptance of History on screen as equivalent to written History. The second school, represented by Herlihy and Toplin, was not as coherent, engaging with multiple kinds of History on screen to varying degrees of enthusiasm. It was a diverse school that continued to debate the value of film and television for History and proposed different methodologies more in line with older historical discourses. Both schools substantially influenced American Screened History from the 1980s onward. Irrespective of the originality of, or status awarded to, the AHR Forum, it symbolizes the moment when Screened History’s momentum shifted from Britain and Europe to America, where it was to remain in the decades to come. 18

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Phase 5: 1990–​1999 Screened History’s fifth phase coincided with the rise of DVDs and developments in digital technologies. The American cable television network The History Channel (later History) launched in 1995, and historical films remained lucrative as blockbuster releases, including Schindler’s List (1993) and Titanic (1997). Film History continued developing its methods and theories, producing nuanced, historiographically informed Screened Histories. Film, Television, and Cultural Studies all continued exploring new ways of analyzing audiences and spectatorship. They also revisited and revised analytical frameworks like Cognitive Theory, Semiotics, and explorations of Deleuze (Stam 2000). However, despite its undeniable prominence, American Screened History continued to explore other topics and approaches during its fifth phase. Image as Artifact: The Historical Analysis of Film and Television, released in 1990, reveals the complex connections between American Screened History and earlier international phases. Edited by John E O’Connor it grew out of a larger National Endowment for the Humanities funded project, and it confirmed the breadth and depth of American Screened History (O’Connor 1988). Since the early 1970s, O’Connor was active within American Screened History, co-​editing American History/​American Film: Interpreting the Hollywood Image (O’Connor and Jackson 1979), editing American History/​American Television: Interpreting the Video Past (1983), and authoring several other publications (1972; 1987; Rollins and O’Connor 1997). Together, O’Connor’s publications demonstrate the interdisciplinarity and international engagement of American Screened History since the 1970s, particularly its ongoing focus on how to use History on screen for teaching about the past. Furthermore, Image as Artifact demonstrated another ongoing theme in American Screened History, the need to identify a method for historians to use when working with screen artefacts. The question of methodology was not new, it was central to Sorlin’s work in the 1980s, and continues to be debated. However, while some searched for a single “best” method, Image as Artifact embodied the other approach to this question within American Screened History: engaging with multiple methodologies. O’Connor argued for the relevance of methodologies from a variety of disciplines. The factor that should shape the choice of method, he argued, was the historical topic being researched. An edited collection including international contributors from multiple disciplines, Image as Artifact also creates an overview of the field at a particular moment in time. At the beginning of Screened History’s fifth phase, O’Connor’s collection as overview is similar in scope to what could be seen in Smith’s The Historian and Film (1976). The various chapters and the broad range of references they provide challenge any notion of “History and film” being a “new” field of research, and emphasize the connections between earlier phases of British and European scholarship and Screened History’s fifth phase in America. Contributors included the likes of Sorlin and Aldgate, prominent figures in earlier international phases of Screened History. Image as Artifact also highlights the continuity of other ongoing research themes from earlier phases, such as documentaries, actuality footage, and the historical film. Furthermore, Image as Artifact challenged the continued use of the problematic “History and film,” title for the field. Instead, it avoided medium specificity, referring to “moving image documents” and “the moving image” or (as in its sub-​title) it referred to film and television. O’Connor did propose a two-​stage approach for working historically with film and television, but in doing so he was demonstrating the need for multiple methodologies. The first stage, “gathering information on the content, production, and reception,” highlighted the importance of understanding the artistic, industrial, and viewing practices of all screen productions, and how these goals could be addressed by utilizing the familiar principles of historical research. His second 19

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stage outlined “four frameworks” that identified the four main reasons historians turn to film or television, each reflecting themes within Screened History, some of which originated in its first phase: (1) “the moving image as representation of history”; (2) “the moving image as evidence for social and cultural history”; (3) “actuality footage as evidence for historical fact”; and (4) “the history of the moving image as industry and art form” (1990, ix). In each framework section O’Connor included four to five chapters written by contributors from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds including Film Studies, Reception Studies, Film History, Mass Communications, and History. However, despite its complexity and interdisciplinary approach, Image as Artifact did not make a lasting impact on the field of “History and film.” Out of print for decades, it is infrequently mentioned in later reading lists or bibliographies. Even though many of its contributors were prominent figures in, before, and after Screened History’s fifth phase, O’Connor’s collection was affected by most likely two factors: the ongoing marginalization of film and television within History, and the prominence of the more Postmodern ideas of Rosenstone. Chapters in Image as Artifact included those focused on chasing the “paper trails” (the written documentation) as central for historically analyzing film and television (Cripps), the historical analysis of newsreels (e.g., Herzstein or Herman), or discussed teaching History with film or television (e.g., Lee or Cortés). While all valid historical research topics for Screened History, much of Image as Artifact simply did not resonate with the broader cultural and historiographical interests of the 1990s. In comparison, Rosenstone’s arguments about film as a way of making History in the “post-​literate age” captured the imagination—​and sparked the ire—​of American historians (1995a, 45). Nonetheless, O’Connor’s collection is an important example of the first school of American Screened History, one that also establishes a stronger connection between earlier and later phases of Screened History on an international and interdisciplinary level. The proposal that filmmakers could be historians saw Rosenstone tackling head-​on one of History’s central concerns in the twentieth century: the perception that History on screens challenged historians’ control over the past. While Rosenstone is most often identified with the debate regarding the historical film as a form of History, it is essential to note that the idea was not new. Since at least the early 1970s, various historians and others had proposed the possibility of film as a way of communicating about the past (e.g., Sorlin 1980; Ferro 1988; Hughes and Kuehl (in Smith 1976); O’Connor and Martin 1979; O’Connor 1983). However, it was not until the ideas of Poststructuralism, New Historicism, and Postmodernism sufficiently influenced History’s dominant discourses that History on screen, as a legitimate medium of History, could gain traction within Historical Studies. Whether historians embraced the first school of American Screened History, and Rosenstone’s idea of the filmmaker as historian, depended upon their pre-​existing historiographical paradigm. At the time of writing, Rosenstone has written over 50 books and articles exploring History and film, with History on Film /​Film on History (2006) about to go into its fourth edition. After the 1988 AHR Forum, Rosenstone published his two best-​known and influential books. Visions of the Past (1995a) brought together a collection of earlier articles all exploring the concept of the filmmaker as historian, including several case studies of specific films. In the same year Rosenstone edited Revisioning the Past (1995b), a collection of international and interdisciplinary explorations of film as History. Most commentaries on Visions of the Past and Revisioning History emphasize their formative status and a broader sense of the timeliness of his idea of History in a “post-​literate” age being audiovisual (1995a). In the 1990s Rosenstone’s work explored the form and function of audiovisual History, and challenged previous hierarchies of acceptable filmic sources, and historical authority. Like 20

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O’Connor, he also engaged with a network of international scholars from a variety of disciplines, including analyses of non-​American, non-​Hollywood cinema. Analysis of his reference lists and “guides to key reading” reveal the influence of earlier, international, and interdisciplinary phases in Screened History on Rosenstone (1995a; 1995b; 2006). There were some limitations of his approach, specifically with the films he chose as examples of History on film. In Visions of the Past and Revisioning the Past most of the films chosen for analysis were examples of non-​mainstream, alternative, or arthouse cinema, genres that attract limited audiences. This raises the question of how influential such examples might be on public understandings of the past. In later publications Rosenstone’s ideas and film choices broadened, developing into a more nuanced exploration of History on screen. Rosenstone’s work in the 1990s and beyond has consistently demonstrated the influence of his experiences in filmmaking on his technical and artistic understanding of film. His engagement with evolving historiographical theory has also resulted in his development of a complex, distinctly postmodern, understanding of History’s forms and functions, whether written or audiovisual. Since the 1990s, Rosenstone has consistently championed the ability of film to develop a historical argument that—​while different from written History—​is a valid way of communicating about the past. Despite Rosenstone’s prominence, it is important to appreciate that even in the 1990s, American Screened History engaged with more than just debates about filmmakers as historians. The second school of American Screened History included many historians who embraced and analyzed historical film and television but did not consider History on screen as being equivalent to written History. Whether explicitly discussed or an underlying assumption, American historians all sat along a continuum. At one end was Rosenstone, championing History on screen as the equivalent of written History, deprivileging the position of historians as arbiters of the past. At the other end, there were those like Marshall Poe who questioned why the American Historical Association would “devote an entire issue to film when there are serious issues to discuss” and argued that film was only “a bit of fun” (Poe 1999). Between these two extremes of the American Screened History continuum lay a wide variety of works, including those of Toplin (1996a; 1996b; 1999a), Rollins and O’Connor (1997), Cripps (1993; 1995), Rollins (1997), and Davis and Walkowitz (1992) to name only a few. O’Connor demonstrated a positive attitude toward Screened History, arguing that historians must participate in the broader public debates and critiques of the past on screen and, when opportunities arose, be involved in creating History on screen. In comparison, the position of others, such as Toplin, reflected historians’ earlier suspicious attitudes about film’s appeal and influence. While agreeing that its commercial success and public influence meant historians needed to engage with the past on screen, Toplin and those like him never saw it as meeting the same standards of written History. Despite O’Connor’s argument for methodological plurality, 1990s American Screened History continued to debate about methods for engaging with film and television. This included whether traditional historical methodologies could be sufficient, or if other disciplines might offer useful theories and methods. Some within American Screened History embraced interdisciplinarity in the tradition of Smith (1976), Sorlin (1980), or Ferro (1988). O’Connor and Rosenstone provided examples of the benefits of engagement with other disciplines, especially Film Studies. During its fifth phase, American Screened History included examples that demonstrated a limited familiarity with Film Studies, including applications of Auteur Theory or Semiotics, as well as theories of psychology, gender, genre, and identity. However, in many of these examples, historians like Toplin often revealed only fleeting references to other disciplines as part of a discussion more focused on historical methods and theories. A limited understanding of disciplinary discourses outside of History was also an ongoing issue. For example, Toplin’s discussions of Film Studies revealed a 21

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limited—​at times inaccurate—​understanding of the discipline and its significant contributors (e.g., 1996b; 2002). Central to understanding Screened History’s growth in its fifth phase, Toplin’s work provides an example of what became a characteristic conflict for historians regarding Film Studies. Toplin (and others like him) frequently decried what they considered film scholars’ unwillingness “to develop sensitivity to the issues that concern historians” (1999b). However, such criticism entirely overlooked the sub-​field of Film History, which continued to develop an increasingly nuanced, historiographically informed methodology (Allen and Gomery 1985). Toplin’s work also expressed what was by the 1990s a narrative cliché: that “History and film” was a new field of research. This narrative of a “new start” created a strong sense of déjà vu in much of American Screened History in its fifth phase, with many historians claiming to be exploring new ground. This claim was only possible if earlier phases of Screened History were forgotten. The “History and film” narrative cliché highlights how, when a discipline is disconnected from its past, we risk repeating old approaches and missing genuinely new opportunities (Treacey 2016). For Screened History, the disconnection of its fifth from earlier phases was largely the consequence of continuing to conceptualize the field as “History and film.” This restricted perspective severely limited historians’ ability to understand and explore the consequences of evolving technologies and industries, as well as the theories and methods that developed in response to these within other disciplines. Nonetheless, there are examples of research occurring in other disciplines in this period that were relevant to historians working with moving images. In comparison, taking the perspective of Screened History connects the work of critical and cultural theorist Janet Staiger, who researched historical audiences and how their meaning-​making processes can change over time (1992). Other relevant work by Film Historians and Cultural Studies scholars included explorations of the impact that film and television were having on historical thinking at higher social and cultural levels (e.g., Sobchack 1996; Sklar and Musser 1990; Landy 1996). Also, relevant but overlooked by historians at the time were examinations of the documentary form (Nichols 1994) and the rise of the docudrama (Rosenthal 1995; 1999). These examples, and the diversity of articles in journals like Film and History, the Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television (IAMHIST), Film history, or Screening the Past, all emphasize a significant body of relevant research occurring in Film, Television, and Cultural Studies during Screened History’s fifth phase. If the field remains conceptualized as “History and film,” this scholarship is set outside the boundaries of History. Yet using the broader perspective of Screened History, such scholarship becomes part of a much larger, more diverse exploration of the relationship between History, the past, and moving images.

Phase 6: 2000 and beyond Screened History is still full of contradictions and disconnections in the twenty-​first century. Conceptualized as Screened History, it is an international, interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary research field with over a century of contributions. Nonetheless, it is still most often referred to as “History and film,” and its status within History as an academic discipline remains uncertain. In 2006, Rosenstone described “History and film” as a “field (or sub-​field, or sub-​sub-​field) in search of a methodology” (165), a judgement which has remained un-​revised in later editions (2012 and 2018). Contradicting this claim, O’Connor argued nearly 20 years prior that there is no single method for Screened History. Instead, the historical questions should shape the choice of method made from multiple interdisciplinary options (O’Connor 1990).

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During the first decade of the 2000s, several introductions to history and historiography included sections on film and (much less often) television (Munslow 2000; Lambert and Schofield 2004; Kramer and Maza 2002; Treacey 2021). However, most of these sections characterized this area of research as existing outside the boundaries of mainstream History. Furthermore, most introductory texts published in the same period included no reference to moving images or the audiovisual (Bentley 1997; Schneider and Woolf 2011). The ongoing struggle for acceptance of Screened History within History was also demonstrated when, in February of 2006, the American Historical Association’s journal, the AHR, announced a “temporary suspension of film reviews” (Schneider 2006a). The decision became permanent in May of the same year (Schneider 2006b). The journal that had published the 1988 special forum on “History and film” was discontinuing its film review section. Its reasoning? Historians lacked a sophisticated theoretical understanding of film to appropriately engage with it, and the frequent focus on pedagogical issues was not appropriate for the AHR (Schneider 2006a; 2006b). This decision marked the moment when Screened History lost guaranteed space within the journal of any historical organization. Currently, all journals focusing on Screened History are published by organizations related to non-​historical disciplines. Other interdisciplinary fields have found acceptance within History, yet something about Screened History has continued to challenge and disrupt the broader disciplinary discourse of History. Another contradiction. Demonstrating the growing acceptance of Screened History by some within History, several collections have been edited by historians, including Rosenstone and Parvulescu’s A Companion to the Historical Film (2013) and Hughes-​Warrington’s The History on Film Reader (2009). Recent Screened History publications have included historian Jill Julius Matthews’ investigation of cinema and social practices in Dance Hall & Picture Palace: Sydney’s Romance with Modernity (2005) and several books by Jerome De Groot exploring heritage and popular culture, including History on screen (2009; 2016). There have been interdisciplinary explorations of television’s influence on national identity, especially in Britain (Bell and Gray 2010; Gray and Bell 2013; Dillon 2010), and reflecting new modes of viewing, research is being published on the popularity of nostalgia and streaming platforms (Pallister 2019). Outside of History, ongoing explorations of the relationship between moving images and the past are occurring in Film, Television, and Cultural Studies. Cultural and Film scholar, Janet Staiger, has continued to publish on forms of historical spectatorship (2000), and Annette Kuhn has published extensively on issues of gender and representation in cinema (1987; 1988; 1999; 2002). Even the exploration of Hollywood representations of History has evolved into a more nuanced cultural, artistic, and industrially informed field, as demonstrated by the work of Robert Burgoyne (1997; 2008). In Cultural Studies, the relationship between representation, memory, and the past has been continuously scrutinized by Marcia Landy (1996; 2001; 2015) and Alison Landsberg (2004; 2015). Recent research exploring the philosophical dimension of historical thinking in moving images has included contributions by Guynn (2006), Chopra-​Gant (2008), Stubbs (2013), and Thanouli (2019). Furthermore, historiographical research techniques have continued to influence Film History, with the emergence of the “new film history” movement, including The New Film History: Sources, Methods, Approaches (Chapman, Glancy, and Harper 2007), Cinemas of the World: Film and Society from 1895 to the Present (Chapman 2003) and Film and History (Chapman 2013). Additionally, edited collections by Film, Television, and Cultural Studies scholars have added to our understanding of Screened History, including Edgerton’s The Columbia History of American Television (2007) and Rollins’ The Columbia Companion to American History on Film: How the Movies Have Portrayed the American Past (2004).

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Thematically the 2000s have seen the continuation of earlier Screened History research interests. The relationship between moving images and the teaching of History has been a topic of interest since the invention of film, and continues to this day (e.g., the special edition on teaching in the Magazine of History (2002); Marcus, 2007). Similarly, reflecting some of the earliest phases of Screened History, filmmakers and television producers are increasingly engaged in scholarly debates about the kinds of History they create (Ali and Stone 2011; Ward and Burns 2018; Sagal and Mazin 2019). Research on representations of the Holocaust has grown into a sub-​field of its own, with contributions from scholars of History, Genocide Studies, Holocaust Studies, Memory Studies, Trauma Studies, as well as Film, Television, and Cultural Studies (e.g., Haggith and Newman 2005; Baron 2005; Bartov 2005). Other continuing topics of interest include representations of race (e.g., Davis 2000), the construction of identity in national cinemas and television (e.g., Burgoyne 2008; Hanna 2009), and investigations of the relationship between public memory and television (e.g., Landy 2001; Edgerton and Rollins 2001). If there is a new element to Screened History in its sixth phase, it is perhaps the challenges it faces in the digital age. The viewer is now mobile—​device in hand—​watching film, television, YouTube videos, and user-​created content, wherever and whenever we want. We live in a world where moving images can be altered at the level of individual pixels, and new technology is resulting in the emergence of deepfakes and AI-​created imagery (Filimowicz 2022; Rini and Cohen 2022). Transmedia storytelling (Jenkins 2006, 20), multi-​platform, and multimedia narratives offer possibilities for History on screen that go far beyond what even Genette suggested with his concept of literary paratexts (1997). All this fundamentally challenges the importance History has traditionally placed on notions of evidence and authenticity. While Film, Television, and Cultural Studies, and other disciplines (old and new) are all responding to the challenges of the digital age, it remains to be seen just how Screened History will adjust. Conceivably, Screened History’s seventh phase has already begun. However, more time must pass before an in-​depth analysis can be undertaken to fully appreciate the digital era’s cultural, social, technological, political, and artistic ramifications, as well as identifying any catalysts that delineate a new phase of Screened History. Nonetheless, reconnecting Screened History’s first and second phases to the better-​known contributions from its third, fourth, and fifth phases is an essential step in preparing historians for the future. New modes of communication, and newer forms of historical evidence require History to let go of the outdated concept of “History and film” and to move on and embrace the interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary perspective of Screened History.

Notes 1 This chapter is a shortened adaptation of the research and ideas previously published in Reframing the Past: History, Film and Television (Treacey 2016). 2 AJP Taylor mentions a series called the First World War (55) but the only documentary made by the BBC in this period, on that topic, was The Great War. 3 Calling television the “idiot box” is broadly agreed to have occurred sometime in the 1950s, but its origins are unattributed. It is used as a disparaging name for television, inferring its negative, soporific effect on audiences. This resonates with early theories of reception, which conceptualized the viewer as a passive receiver of information. While theories of reception and spectatorship have moved to understand viewers as active meaning makers since the late 1960s, the idea of television as the “idiot box” has continued within popular culture. 4 I am treating all three publications in the series as a singular example because many of its contributors appeared in all three publications, and if mentioned at all in later Screened History publications it is usually only the first of the three collections that is acknowledged. 5 It is also exceptionally difficult to locate copies of the second and third collections.

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Reference list 1969. “Film and the Historian: A combined reprint of University Vision No. 1 February 1968 and monograph ‘Film and the Historian’, April 1968.” University Vision: The Journal of the British Universities Film Council 1. 1988. “Forum on Film and History.” American Historical Review 93, no. 5: 1173-​1226. 2002. “Film and History.” Magazine of History (for Teachers of History) 16, no. 4. Aldgate, Anthony. 1979. Cinema and History: British Newsreels and the Spanish Civil War. London: Scholar Press. Ali, Tariq, and Oliver Stone. 2011. On History. London: Haymarket Books. Allen, Robert C., and Douglas Gomery. 1985. Film History: Theory and Practice. New York: Knopf. Anderegg, Michael, ed. 1991. Inventing Vietnam: The War in Film and Television. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Arnheim, Rudolf. [1933] 1957. Film as Art. Berkeley: University of California Press. Astruc, Alexandre. [1948] 1968. “The Birth of a New Avant-​Garde: La Camera-​Stylo.” In The New Wave: Critical Landmarks, edited by Peter Graham, 31–​37. New York: Doubleday. Barta, Tony. 1979. “Television Drama: Against the Wind.” Historical Studies 18 (April): 507–​509. Bazin, André. 1967. “The Ontology of the Photographic Image.” In What is Cinema? edited by H. Gray. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California. Bell, E., and A. Gray, eds. 2010. Televising History: Mediating the Past in Postwar Europe. London: Palgrave MacMillan. Baron, Lawrence. 2005. Projecting the Holocaust into the Present: The Changing Focus of Holocaust Feature Films Since 1990. Oxford: Rowan and Littlefield. Bartov, Omer. 2005. The “Jew” in Cinema: From ‘The Golem’ to ‘Don’t Touch my Holocaust’. Bloomington and Indiana: Indiana University Press. Bentley, Michael, ed. 1997. Companion to Historiography. London and New York: Routledge. Bordwell, David, and Kristin Thompson. 2003. Film History: An Introduction, 3rd International ed. Boston: McGraw Hill. Burgoyne, Robert. 1997. Film Nation: Hollywood Looks at U.S. History. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Burgoyne, Robert. 2008. The Hollywood Historical Film. Malden: Blackwell Publishing. Chapman, James. 2003. Cinemas of the World: Film and Society from 1895 to the Present. London: Reaktion. Chapman, James. 2013. Film and History. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Chapman, James, Mark H. Glancy, and Sue Harper, eds. 2007. The New Film History: Sources, Methods, Approaches. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Chopra-​Grant, Mike. 2008. Cinema and History: The Telling of Stories, Short Cuts. London and New York: Wallflower Press. Clark, M.J., ed. 1979. Politics and the Media: Film and Television for the Political Scientist and Historian, Audio-​Visual Media for Education and Research, Volume 1. Oxford, New York, Toronto, Sydney, Paris, Frankfurt: Pergamon Press (for the British Universities Film Council). Committee of the Victorian Council for Public Education. 1921. The Moving Picture in its Relation to the Child. Victorian Council for Public Education. Comolli, Jean-​Louis, and Paul Narboni. 1969. “Cinéma/​Idéology/​Critique.” Cahiers du Cinéma 216 (October). Cook, Pam, ed. 2007. The Cinema Book, 3rd ed. London: BFI. Crary, Jonathan. 1992. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. Massachusetts and London: MIT Press, October Books. Crary, Jonathan. 2001. Suspension of Perception: Attention, Spectacle and Modern Culture. Massachusetts and London: MIT Press, October Books. Cripps, Thomas R. 1963. “The Reaction of the Negro to the Motion Picture Birth of a Nation.” The Historian 25: 244–​262. Cripps, Thomas R. 1975. “Film: The Historian’s Dangerous Friend.” Film and History 5, no. 4: 6–​9. Cripps, Thomas R. 1977. Slow Fade to Black: The Negro in American Film, 1900–​1942. New York: Oxford University Press. Cripps, Thomas R. 1993. Making Movies Black: The Hollywood Message Movie from World War II to the Civil Rights Era. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Mia E.M. Treacey Cripps, Thomas R. 1995. “Historical Truth: An Interview with Ken Burns.” American Historical Review 100, no. 3 (June): 741–​764. https://​doi.org/​10.2307/​2168​603. Davis, Natalie Zemon. 2000. Slaves on Screen: Film and Historical Vision. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Davis, Natalie Zemon, and Daniel Walkowitz. 1992. “The Rights and Responsibilities of Historians in Regard to Historical Films and Video.” Perspectives on History 30, no. 6 (September). www.his​tori​ans.org/​resea​ rch-​and-​publi​cati​ons/​persp​ecti​ves-​on-​hist​ory/​septem​ber-​1992/​the-​rig​hts-​and-​respo​nsib​ilit​ies-​of-​his​tori​ ans-​in-​reg​ard-​to-​his​tori​cal-​films-​and-​video. de Groot, Jerome. 2009. Consuming History: Historians, and Heritage in Contemporary Popular Culture. London and New York: Routledge. de Groot, Jerome. 2016. Remaking History: The Past in Contemporary Historical Fictions. London and New York: Routledge. Delluc, Louis. 1920. Photogénie. Paris. Demeter, K. 1925. “Die Filmpropaganda der Entente im Weltkriege (The Film Propaganda of the Entente in World Wars).” Archiv für Politik und Geschichte 3, no. 8: 214–​231. Dickinson, T. 1973. “Inside View: Film and the Historian.” Screen Digest: 135–​137. Dickson, William Kennedy-​Laurie, and Antonia Dickson. 1895. History of the Kinetograph, Kinetoscope and Kineto-​phonograph. New York: Museum of Modern Art Dillon, R. 2010. History on British Television: Constructing Nation, National and Collective Memory. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Dixon, Wheeler Winston, and Audrey Foster. 2018. A Short History of Film. New Brunswick, Newark, Camden, New Jersey, and London: Rutgers University Press. Edgerton, Gary R., 2007. The Columbia History of American Television. New York: Columbia University Press. Edgerton, Gary R., and Peter C. Rollins, eds. 2001. Television Histories: Shaping Collective Memory in the Media Age. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Ferro, M. 1977. Cinéma et Histoire. Original edition. Paris: Denoel. Ferro, M. 1988. Cinema and History. Translated by Naomi Greene. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Filimowicz, Michael, ed. 2022. Democratic Frontiers: Algorithms and Society. Abingdon: Routledge. Fledelius, Karsten, Kaare Rubner Jorgenson, Niels Skyum-​Nielson, and Erik H. Swiatek, eds. 1979. Studies in History, Film and Society 1: History and the Audio-​Visual Media. Copenhagen: Eventus. Fulbrook, Mary. 2002. Historical Theory. London and New York: Routledge. Genette, Gérard. 1997. Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree. Translated by Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press Gerber, David A. 1977. “Haley’s Roots and Our Own: An Inquiry Into the Nature of a Popular Phenomenon.” Journal of Ethnic Studies 5, no. 3 (Fall): 87–​111. Gray, A., and Erin Bell. 2013. History on Television. London and New York: Routledge. Grenville, John A.S. 1971. Film as History: The Nature of Film Evidence. Birmingham: University of Birmingham. Guynn, William. 2006. Writing History in Film. London and New York: Routledge. Haggith, Toby, and Joanna Newman, eds. 2005. Holocaust and the Moving Image: Representations in Film and Television Since 1933. London and New York: Wallflower Press. Hanna, E. 2009. The Great War on the Small Screen: Representing the First World War in Contemporary Britain. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Herlihy, David. 1988. “Am I a Camera? Other Reflections on Films and History.” American Historical Review 93, no. 5 (December): 1173–​1226. https://​doi.org/​10.2307/​1873​533. Hilmes, Michele, ed. 2003. The Television History Book. London: BFI. Hornshøj-​Møller, Stig. 1979. “The Political Scientist as Film-​Maker: Some Reflections Concerning a German Filmic Documentation Project on Election Campaigning.” In Politics and the Media: Film and Television for the political scientist and historian, edited by M.J. Clark, 59–​69. Oxford, New York, Toronto, Sydney, Paris, Frankfurt: Pergamon Press (for the British Universities Film Council). Houston, Penelope. 1967. “The Nature of Evidence.” Sight and Sound 36: 88–​92. Hughes-​Warrington, Marnie. 2007. History Goes to the Movies: Studying History on Film. London and New York: Routledge. Hughes-​Warrington, Marnie. ed. 2009. The History on Film Reader, Routledge Readers in History. London and New York: Routledge.

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From “history and film” to “screened history” Hull, David Stewart. 1973. Film in the Third Reich: Art and Propaganda in Nazi Germany. New York: Simon and Schuster. Isenberg, Michael T. 1975. “World War One Film Comedies and American Society: The Concern with Authoritarianism.” Film and History 5, no. 3: 7. Jackson, Martin A. 1970. “The Future Role of Films in History.” The History Teacher 3, no. 3 (March): 10–​ 22. https://​doi.org/​10.2307/​3054​422. Jackson, Martin A. 1975. “Film and the Historian.” Cultures 2 ([Special Issue] Flashback: Films and History): 219–​222. Jarvie, Ian C. 1970. Movies and Society. New York: Basic Books Inc. Jenkins, Henry. 2006. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York and London: New York University Press. Johnston, W. 1935. Memo on the Movies: War Propaganda 1914–​1939. Norman, Oklahoma: Cooperative Books. Koch, Gertrud. 2000. Siegfried Kracauer: An Introduction. Translated by Jeremy Gaines. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kracauer, Siegfried. [1947] 2004. From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film. Revised and Expanded Edition, edited by Leonardo Quarisma. Princeton: University of Princeton Press. Kracauer, Siegfried. 1960. Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality. London: Oxford University Press. Kracauer, Siegfried. 1971. From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film. London: Oxford University Press. Kramer, Lloyd, and Sarah Maza, eds. 2002. A Companion to Western Historical Thought. Malden: Blackwell Publishing. Kuehl, Jerry. 1976. “History on the Public Screen II.” In The Historian and Film, edited by Paul Smith, 177–​ 185. Cambridge, London, New York, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. Kuhn, A. 1987. “Women’s Genres.” Screen 25, no. 1 (January/​February): 18–​28. https://​doi.org/​10.1093/​scr​ een/​25.1.18. Kuhn, A. 1988. Cinema, Censorship and Sexuality, 1909–​1925. London and New York: Routledge. Kuhn, A. 1999. “Cinema-​going in Britain in the 1930s: Report of a Questionnaire Survey.” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 19, no. 4: 531–​543. https://​doi.org/​10.1080/​0143​9689​9100​163. Kuhn, A. 2002. Dreaming of Fred and Ginger: Cinema and Cultural Memory. Washington: New York University Press. Lambert, Peter, and Phillip Schofield, eds. 2004. Making History: An Introduction to the History and Practices of a Discipline. London and New York: Routledge. Landsberg, Alison. 2004. Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture. New York: Columbia University Press. Landsberg, Alison. 2015. Engaging the Past: Mass Culture and the Production of Historical Knowledge. New York: Columbia University Press. Landy, Marcia. 1996. Cinematic Uses of the Past. Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press. Landy, Marcia. 2001. The Historical Film: History and Memory in Media. Edited by Charles Affron, Mirella Jona Affron and Robert Lyons. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Landy, Marcia. 2015. Cinema and Counter-​History. Bloomington and Indiana: Indiana University Press. Lanzmann, Claude. 1979. “From the Holocaust to Holocaust.” Telos 42 (Winter): 137–​143. Leab, Daniel J. 1975. From Sambo to Superspade: The Black Motion Picture Experience. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Leyda, J. 1964. Films Beget Films: Compilation Films from Propaganda to Drama. London: George Allen and Unwin. Lindsay, Vachel. 1915. The Art of the Moving Picture. New York: Macmillan. McArthur, Colin. 1978. Television and History. London: British Film Institute. Marcus, Alan S., ed. 2007. Celluloid Blackboard: Teaching History with Film, A Volume in Contemporary Research in Education. Charlotte: IAP. Matthews, Jill Julius. 2005. Dance Hall & Picture Palace: Sydney’s Romance with Modernity. Strawberry Hills: Currency Press. Matuszewski, Boleslas. [1898] 1975. “Cinema and History: A Document from 1898. A New Source of History: The Creation of a Depository for Historical Cinematography.” Cultures 2 ([Special Issue]) Flashback: Films and History): 217–​218. Matuszewski, Boleslas. [1898] 1995. “A New Source of History.” Film History 7, no 3 (Autumn): 322–​324.

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Mia E.M. Treacey Munslow, Alun. 2000. “Film and History.” In The Routledge Companion to Historical Studies, edited by Alun Munslow. London and New York: Routledge. Munsterberg, Hugo. 1916. The Photoplay: A Psychological Study. New York: Appleton and Company. National Council of Public Morals. 1917. The Cinema: Its Present Position and Future Possibilities. London: NCPM. Nichols, Bill. 1994. Blurred Boundaries: Questions of Meaning in Contemporary Culture. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. O’Connor, John E., 1972. “Documentary Film for Historians: An Appreciation of Public Television.” Film and History 2, no. 1: 6–​11. O’Connor, John E., 1983. American History/​ American Television: Interpreting the Video Past. New York: Ungar. O’Connor, John E., 1987. Teaching History with Film and Television. Washington, DC: American Historical Association. O’Connor, John E., 1988. “History in Images/​Images in History: Reflections on the Importance of Film and Television for Understanding of the Past.” American Historical Review 93, no. 5 (December): 1173–​1226. https://​doi.org/​10.2307/​1873​535. O’Connor, John E., ed. 1990. Image As Artifact: The Historical Analysis of Film and Television. 1st ed. Malabar: Robert E. Krieger Publishing Co. Inc. O’Connor, John E., and Martin A. Jackson, eds. 1979. American History/​American Film: Interpreting the Hollywood Image. New York: Ungar. O’Regan, Tom, and Brian Shoesmith, eds. 1987. History on/​and/​in Film: Selected Papers from the 3rd Australian History and Film Conference. Perth, Western Australia: History and Film Association of Australia (WA). Oudart, Jean-​Pierre. 1960. “La suture.” Cahiers du Cinéma 211 (April). Pallister, Kathryn, ed. 2019. Netflix Nostalgia. Lanham: Lexington Books. Philip, A.J. 1912. “Cinematograph Films: Their National Value and Preservation.” Librarian 2: 367–​370, 406–​409, 447–​449. Poe, Marshall. 1999. “Is ‘Reel History’ Too Much Fun?” Perspectives 37, no. 5 (May). www.his​tori​ans. org/​resea​rch-​and-​publi​cati​ons/​persp​ecti​ves-​on-​hist​ory/​may-​1999/​lett​ers-​to-​the-​edi​tor-​is-​reel-​hist​ ory-​too-​much-​fun. Quaresima, Leonardo. 2004. “Introduction to the 2004 Edition: Rereading Kracauer.” In From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film, Siegfried Kracauer, 1947, xv–​xlix. Princeton and Oxford: University of Princeton Press. Ramsaye, Terry. 1926. A Million and One Nights: A History of the Motion Picture. New York: Simon and Schuster. Reimers, K.F., and H. Friedrich, eds. 1982. Studies in History, Film and Society 3: Contemporary History in Film and Television. Munich: Verlag ölschläger. Rini, Regina, and Leah Cohen. 2022. “Deepfakes, Deep Harms.” Journal of Ethics & Social Philosophy 22, no. 2: 143. https://​doi.org/​10.26556/​jesp.v22i2.1628. Roads, C.H. 1966. “Film as Historical Evidence.” Journal of the Society of Archivists 4. Rollins, Peter, ed. 1997. Hollywood as Historian: American Film in a Cultural Context. 2nd ed. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky. Rollins, Peter, ed. 2004. The Columbia Companion to American History on Film: How the Movies Have Portrayed the American Past. New York: Columbia University Press. Rollins, Peter C., and John E. O’Connor, eds. 1997. Hollywood’s World War I: Motion Picture Images. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press. Rosenstone, Robert A. 1988. “History in Images/​History in Words: Reflections on the Possibility of Really Putting History onto Film.” American Historical Review 93, no. 5 (December): 1173–​1226. https://​doi. org/​10.2307/​1873​532. Rosenstone, Robert A. 1995a. Visions of the Past: The Challenge of Film to Our Idea of History. Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England: Harvard University Press. Rosenstone, Robert A., ed. 1995b. Revisioning History: Film and the Construction of a New Past. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Rosenstone, Robert A. 2006. History on Film /​Film on History. London and New York: Routledge. Rosenstone, Robert A. 2012. History on Film /​Film on History, 2nd ed. London and New York: Routledge. Rosenstone, Robert A. 2018. History on Film /​Film on History, 3rd ed. London and New York: Routledge.

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From “history and film” to “screened history” Rosenstone, Robert, and Constantin Parvulescu, eds. 2013. A Companion to the Historical Film. Malden: Wiley-​Blackwell. Rosenthal, Alan. 1995. Writing Docudrama: Dramatizing Reality for Film and Television. Boston: Focal Press. Rosenthal, Alan, ed. 1999. Why Docudrama? Fact-​Fiction on Film and TV. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Sagal, Peter, and Craig Mazin. 2019. The Chernobyl Podcast. www.hbo.com/​cherno​byl/​podc​ast. Schneider, Robert A. 2006a. “In This Issue.” American Historical Review 111, no. 1 (February): xiii–​xvii. https://​doi.org/​10.1086/​ahr.111.1.xiii. Schneider, Robert A. 2006b. “On Film Reviews in the AHR.” Perspectives 44, no. 5 (May). www.his​tori​ans. org/​publi​cati​ons-​and-​dire​ctor​ies/​persp​ecti​ves-​on-​hist​ory/​list-​of-​past-​iss​ues. Schneider, Axel, and Daniel Woolf, eds. 2011. Historical Writing since 1945, The Oxford History of Historical Writing. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Short, K.R.M., and Karsten Fledelius, eds. 1980. Studies in History, Film and Society 2: History and Film: Methodology, Research, Education. Copenhagen: Eventus. Sklar, Robert. 1975. Movie-​made America: A Cultural History of American Movies. New York: Random House. Sklar, Robert, and Charles Musser, eds. 1990. Resisting Images: Essays on Cinema and History. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Sobchack, Vivian, ed. 1996. The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television and the Modern Event. London and New York: Routledge. Sorlin, Pierre. 1980. The Film in History: Restaging the Past. Oxford: Basil Blackwell Publisher. Smith, Paul, ed. 1976. The Historian and Film. Cambridge, London, New York, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. Staiger, Janet. 1992. Interpreting Films: Studies in the Historical Representation of American Cinema. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Staiger, Janet. 2000. Perverse Spectators: The Practices of Film Reception. New York: New York University Press. Stam, Robert. 2000. Film Theory: An Introduction, 9th ed. Malden: Blackwell Publishing. Stubbs, Jonathan. 2013. Historical Film: A Critical Introduction. New York: Bloomsbury. Thanouli, Eleftheria. 2019. History and Film: A Tale of Two Disciplines. New York: Bloomsbury. Toplin, Robert Brent. 1988. “The Filmmaker as Historian.” American Historical Review 93, no. 5 (December): 1173–​1226. https://​doi.org/​10.2307/​1873​536. Toplin, Robert Brent, ed. 1996a. History by Hollywood: The Use and Abuse of the American Past. Urbana and Chicago: The University of Illinois Press. Toplin, Robert Brent, ed. 1996b. Ken Burns’ The Civil War: Historians Respond. New York: Oxford University Press. Toplin, Robert Brent. 1999a. “Film and History: The State of the Union.” Perspectives 37, no. 4 (April). www. his​tori​ans.org/​resea​rch-​and-​publi​cati​ons/​persp​ecti​ves-​on-​hist​ory/​april-​1999. Toplin, Robert Brent. 1999b. “Needed: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue.” Perspectives 37 (November). Accessed August 19, 2008. Toplin, Robert Brent, ed. 2000. Oliver Stone’s USA: Film, History and Controversy. Lawrence: University of Kansas. Toplin, Robert Brent. 2002. Reel History: In Defense of Hollywood. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. Treacey, M. 2016. Reframing the Past: History, Film and Television. London: Routledge. Treacey, M. 2021 “Film (Using Primary Sources).” Bloomsbury History: Theory and Method (online). Bloomsbury Publishing. http://​dx.doi.org/​10.5040/​978135​0970​847.045. Truffaut, François. 1954. “Une Certaine Tendance du Cinéma Français.” Cahiers du Cinéma 32 (January). Vertov, Dziga. [1922] 2014. “WE: Variant of a Manifesto (USSR, 1922).” In Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures: A Critical Anthology, edited by Scott MacKenzie, 23–​26. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ward, Geoffrey C., and Ken Burns. 2018. Vietnam: An Intimate History. London: Ebury Press. White, Hayden. 1973. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-​century Europe. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. White, Hayden. 1988. “Historiography and Historiophoty.” American Historical Review 93, no. 5 (December): 1173–​1226. https://​doi.org/​10.2307/​1873​534. Williams, Linda, ed. 1997. Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film, Depth of Field. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

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2 ACTUALITY IS NOT ENOUGH On historiography and cinema Philip Rosen

Over the past two centuries, historiography as a professional discipline has developed many schools, methods, modes of evidence, types of topics, and debates. Cinema has manifested many strategies of its own for undertaking historical representation, and in multiple registers, ranging from background settings and costuming for fictions, to mythifications and “true stories,” all the way to documentaries, essay films, and hybrid non-​mainstream forms (cf. Rosenstone 2012). Perhaps comparing disciplinary and cinematic historiography may tell us something not only about historical representation in films, but something about cinema. But such a comparison presents its own problems, starting from the extreme generality of the question. These are two complex regimes, diverse in themselves, with their own specific histories. One way to address the question is to ask about first principles, hypothesizing them from selected accounts of each. This would engage theories of history and theories of cinema, with broad awareness of how both developed historically. It would lead to some ideas about common terrains, which might help us think about cinematic historiographies. That is the idea of this chapter. A central theme will be relations between past actualities and how they are conveyed in a present, something that seems implicit in any definition of historiography. Any conclusions will have to be general, provisionally speculative, and conceptual proposals.

1. Here is a principle about the writing of history (historio-​graphy): its object is not available for direct examination in the historian’s present because, as some segment or aspect of the past, it no longer exists as it did. This seems to be a trivial statement, trivial both in the everyday sense of being too obvious to have to say and in the logical sense of being merely definitional. But extending from this triviality is one foundational premise of modern historiography. It is the idea of a separation of past from present, because being in the present can be fundamentally or at least consequentially different than being in the past. This difference is likely one kind of impetus or rationale that provokes a quest for knowledge about a then, precisely because it is distinct from, or other to, a now. Nevertheless, this premise is not necessary to write about or represent the past. After all, other influential possibilities that weigh against difference over historical time have been conceived: for example, that history is repetitive or cyclic; or that historical knowledge can be 30

DOI: 10.4324/9781003263234-4

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based on commonalities rather than differences between the past and present (see the comments on verstehen approaches in Section 4 of this chapter); or that traumatic recollection—​where the past disturbingly and unexpectedly erupts in the present—​provides a model of temporality applicable in historical analysis. In that case, what might we make of the seeming obviousness of the differentiating historiographic distinction between past and present? One possibility is that it is itself historical, for it has not seemed obvious at all times and places. That is, historiography has a history, within which at some points it became common to encounter the present’s relation to the past as a kind of barrier. I signalled this idea in the previous paragraph where I smuggled in the term modern as a modifier for historiography. Modernity is a concept that is sometimes invoked in imprecise ways, but still, it can be helpful as a background notion for connecting issues of historiography to cinema. For one characteristic of modernity has been the constant emergence of new media technologies, along with their ever-​expanding social, cultural, and aesthetic disseminations. Any putative history of such emergences would likely find cinema, the first global mass medium of moving images and synchronized sound, as a key threshold. And another characteristic of modernity is the establishment of certain ideas as endemic to historical thinking. For a baseline, I turn to influential studies of the history of historiography in writings of Reinhart Koselleck. Koselleck holds that dominant constructions of historical temporality in the West underwent a major transformation that began gaining traction during the Reformation and culminated during the later Enlightenment. Achieving normalized status between about 1750 and 1850, essential elements of a new understanding of history could be integrated into disciplinary, professional (academic) historiography, which developed in the nineteenth century.1 Here are a few pertinent big-​picture points asserted by Koselleck. One major characteristic distinguishing earlier from modern Western historiography had to do with positing not just a past, but a future. Up to the Reformation, dominant Western historical discourses could assume an assured future, thanks to the metaphysical certainty of Christian eschatology. All of history anticipated the end of the world, hence the end of history and, indeed, of time itself. Since this universalized future served as an eternal standard for historical comprehension, everything of interest to a historian had a sort of common denominator. Historical analyses and rhetorics, whether linguistic or pictorial, would emphasize repetitions, foreshadowings, parallelisms, analogies, comparisons, and so forth, across time. This precluded radical differences between the past as object of study and the historian’s present, for both would be conceived within this same framework. Past and present were always analogous, always in contact, as it were. An illustration is the well-​known anachronisms of detail and costume in Renaissance paintings depicting biblical and other ancient events through elements of the artist’s contemporary world, including dress and even faces.2 Against this, Koselleck finds that the advent of modern historiography in the West is marked by the onset of a temporality encompassing uncertain futures. He traces this in part to contentiousness over predicting end times during the Reformation, but it developed in tandem with politics and political structures. These ranged from the rise of the absolute state with its rational balance-​of-​ power calculations of possible strategic outcomes, to revolutions of all sorts—​French, industrial, geographic, etc. Once the ultimate future had become uncertain, the possibility of fundamental differences throughout historical time became not only thinkable, but unavoidable. A secularized idea of progress, with its directional temporality, might seem to substitute for an eschatological common denominator. But this could not forestall the proliferation of differences into history. One sign of this modern attitude for Koselleck is historical periodization. Periodization differentiates a selected chronological span from others, with each period supposedly unified by its own dominant attributes, factors, forces, types of agencies, subjective configurations, etc. In 31

Philip Rosen

short, periodization entails the idea of multiple historical contexts. It is therefore inseparable from a temporality manifesting a perpetual potential for differences over time, which Koselleck calls a “temporalization of history” (see Koselleck 1985, Chapters 2 and 13). The temporalization of history is intertwined with another defining characteristic of modernity (neuzeit), an emphasis on the possibility of the new: “Not only the changeability of all things…but change itself became the great theme of history” (Koselleck 2002, 80). Historiography would always have to allow for the possibility of change, whether gradual or sudden, and whether slight or radical and revolutionary. The temporalization of history made for a modern historiographic dialectic between polar opposites of continuity and correlation on the one hand, and change and rupture on the other. Hence, relations of present and past become a problem for historiography. Periodization and contextualization mandated by a dynamic temporality erect a sort of barrier between objects of knowledge in the past and the historian—​or a historiographic culture or institution—​as subject in the present. That barrier may be defined as epistemological, methodological, evidentiary, or more. Knowledge claims about the actuality of a disappeared past would have to be made in the face of that barrier. Furthermore, contextualization raises the prospect that principles of change and difference apply to historiographic subject as well as historical object, which is another way of saying there is a history of historiography. All this leaves historiography with the need to establish grounds on which the past-​present barrier could be bridged, lessened, or undermined. But what of cinematic historiography? What responses might it have to the problem of bringing past and present together?

2. Indexicality has been regarded by some as a candidate for one basic characteristic of cinema, at least as films have so often been made throughout the history of the medium. Its general definition in film theory is well-​known as descending from an element of Peircean semiotics: a sign is indexical to the extent that its referent in some way participated in making the signifier. If that production was prior to the reception of the sign, we can call such signs indexical traces. For cinema, this seems applicable insofar as film images and sounds are produced with the past participation of objects presently perceived in those images and sounds. That is, the concept of the indexical trace applies in studies and arguments emphasizing cinema as moving photography and recorded sound. (Of course, there are other aspects and manipulations of such images and sounds.) I add that, in my view, the indexical trace is not solely a technological characteristic, but also a function, which operates at a social, cultural, epistemological, and technical crossroads. This function itself has a history, such that its configurations and significance may change over time. This is why the concept of indexicality can remain pertinent across different technologies, such as both photographic and digital cinemas. Some notion of film as indexical traces undergirds the idea that cinema is a medium suitable for documenting, recording, and/​or archiving elements of the past, and so of historical actuality itself. This also makes cinema part of another history, that of modern technical media providing perceptions of a past for apprehension in a present. Within this other history, cinema bestrides nineteenth-​century media of photography and sound recording (phonography) on the one hand, and on the other later technologies such as video, including digital video along with its convergent affiliate digital cinema. The indexical function remains applicable, as long as a recording operation has been assumed or certified. In significant ways, cinema has held a pivotal position in this other history of interacting technologies. This is because it was the first global mass medium of 32

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two-​dimensional moving images with appeal as indexical traces, and relatively early in its history it incorporated mechanically synchronized sounds functioning as sonic indexical traces. But if we focus on cinema’s registration of events and actions that were culturally, socially, and/​or politically recognizable to makers and audiences as “historical,” filmic recording in itself has most often not seemed to be enough. This is a crucial point, discernible almost from cinema’s beginnings. Take the preclassical actuality film, one of the earliest popular film genres. Actualities captured quotidian actions and activities and also current events. Sometimes these were occurrences that contemporaries would regard not only as news, but as historical in some public sense, ranging from coronations to wars. But it seems that the recording, indexical function as applied to such events was felt as inadequate to the sights given and perhaps to history itself. To convey actuality, indexicality required what I will call supplementation. Good examples are provided by a kind of film that was popular between 1898 and 1910, namely scenes of imperialist wars, such as the Spanish–​American War, the Boer War, and the Philippine–​American War. The ambition to film these wars generated not only actualities, but also performed reproductions or representations of war scenes that could employ actual military personnel, even participants in those battles. Some of these seem presented as actualities, and the lines between actualities and reenactments were fluid. This is a well-​researched topic. Scholars have variously employed labels such as fake newsreels, fake actualities, and battle reenactments. In one useful study of American examples, Kristen Whissel (2002b) has shown that they drew on already existing, familiar representational models in live-​performance culture that were overt reenactments. We can also add that there was a backlog of visual and narrative representations of war and battles in other media and genres. These provided a conventionalized inventory of credible reality-​effects in Roland Barthes’ sense of excessive descriptive detail that bestows verisimilitude on fictional forms. A selection of these reality-​effects might be replicated in film, arranged in the profilmic field for the camera. Both reenactment and arranged reality-​effects remind us that there is a mixture of two orders of indexicality possible in such films: not just recording an actual event, but also recording a performance of an event being constructed as a likeness of historical actuality. Indexical registration underpinned not only film as document but also film as diegesis. This also makes possible the potential conflation of the two levels, something strategies of reenactment could exploit with varying degrees of credibility. Mentioning reality-​effects as a matter of pre-​existing expectations leads to another factor militating toward reenactment. Some desired or expected visual details serving as reality-​effects were difficult to capture under real battle conditions with extant cameras, film stocks, and stylistic norms. This could provoke another level supplementing indexicality in the name of history, in the sphere of cinematic style. Sometimes within these early reenactments there were innovations in shot scale or camera position to give the impression of a closer view. This meant emplacing the camera viewpoint “within” the action, that is, penetrating “into” the longshot frontal tableau that was a norm of this era’s fictional filmmaking. For example, Whissel points to the 1899 film Advance of the Kansas Volunteers at Caloocan (Edison). It staged a Filipino retreat and American advance by positioning the camera such that the two forces move toward and away from a viewpoint initially between them. This was a brief one-​shot film, typical of most actualities, but staged for what was, at the time, an unusual camera position at the interior of the scene of action. Such interiorization not only made such details more legible, but, Whissel argues, “undoubtedly provided audiences with a familiarizing format for consuming ‘authentic’ re-​presentations of history as spectacle seen from the (imaginary) position of a participant-​observer on-​the-​scene” (Whissel 2002b, 233; cf. Whissel 2002a). Her findings cohere with other analyses about camera positioning in battle reenactments. In a pioneering article, David Levy suggested that some of the earliest examples of 33

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shifts of camera position—​that is, film editing—​were strategies devised in battle reenactments, and he even finds a reverse angle cut as early as 1899’s The Early Morning Attack (Levy 1982, 246). Conveying past actuality could motivate stylistic experiments seeking viewpoints that would seem in some way more advantageous, more dynamic, and more “interior” to the scene of action. This could facilitate, in Whissel’s hypothesis, a certain kind of “fantasy of presence,” one “placing the spectator on the scene of history” (Whissel 2002b, 233). Such putative fantasies—​“seeing the past” in Robert Rosenstone’s succinct phrase (Rosenstone 2012, 13)—​can be regarded as imagined relations of past and present through cinema. That is, they propose a present witness of past events, thus overcoming the past-​present barrier. Obviously, seeing (soon combined with hearing) things that have already occurred is implicit in the indexical trace, so relations between past and present were in operation from the beginnings of film exhibition. The actuality film, grounded in a notion of visual recording, was only a very direct and explicit mode. But just as obviously, a filmed scene that has already taken place in reality is never in the same time as a spectator, just as the historical past is always absent from the present. There is still a barrier between past and present, embodied in a first, perceptual instance by the screen itself. Furthermore, the very supplements to actuality that may promote any fantasy of witnessing the past add layers of artifice to the rendering of actuality. This is why the lines between actualities and reenactments could be fluid, wavering, and oscillating. Whissel finds evidence that early battle reenactments were not necessarily addressed to naïve spectators, duped into belief in any uncomplicated way. Some could be addressed to those who might appreciate such artifices, primed by live performance reenactments of the period. Some supplementary strategies reinforcing an impression of witness—​such as a view from a camera perfectly and thrillingly positioned between the two sides of a modern battle—​could well have been markers of reenactment to spectators. Yet, simultaneously, indexicality required such supplementation to activate a fantasy of being “on the scene of history.” And supplements could already include reenactment, constructed reality-​effects, and early modifications of standard camera positioning. Levy shows how these early actualities, reenactments, and mixtures between them can today be treated as one early point in the history of film style. As the global film industry and mainstream forms of cinema crystallized a few years later, the actuality film disappeared as a popular genre. Some of its ambitions were folded into later filmmaking modes. One of its most obvious descendants, documentary cinema, was defined as such by the 1920s (Musser 2013), and has its own long-​lasting presence in media culture. In documentary cinema, reenactment in the service of conveying actuality did not disappear. In fact, various modes of reenactment have been standard practice throughout documentary film history. As Bill Nichols points out, even the period dominated by observational/​direct cinema in the late 1950s and 1960s, which tabooed reenactment, was at best an interregnum in the history of documentary. By the twenty-​first century, when Nichols published an article on documentary reenactment, it had clearly returned as a major strategy, and he points to several then-​recent examples (Nichols 2008). Since then, if anything, documentary reenactment has become even more plentiful and even more overt, with innovative developments such as the spread of documentary animation or other non-​ literal imaging, sometimes counterposed to indexicality (two quick well-​known examples: Waltz with Bashir [Ari Folman, 2008], The Missing Picture [Rithy Panh, 2013]). Ruminating on reenactment in documentary cinema, Nichols resorts to a word used by Whissel: fantasy. Nichols draws on an authoritative explication of fantasy as a psychoanalytic concept by Laplanche and Pontalis (1968). Such fantasy would, in this view, operate in disjunctions and conjunctions of past and present. Nichols elegantly argues that the lost, irreplaceable object of fantasy for documentaries is ultimately the past. We are in the realm of historiography (Nichols 2008). 34

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3. Dissolve from the preclassical era, through the entire history of cinema, to the twenty-​first century. The year 2018 saw the release of a documentary that has probably drawn as much commentary as any other recent cinematic representation of history. The film is They Shall Not Grow Old, Peter Jackson’s centennial tribute to British soldiers of the First World War. (On these commentaries, see Allison 2021; Burgoyne 2023; Watkins 2021.) A found footage film, its images mostly consist of excerpts from actuality and news films held in the Imperial War Museum. This selection of surviving footage is synchronized with excerpts from interviews with British veterans, recorded decades later. So, the film certainly presents itself as built from indexical traces. (It also includes a few other period survivals such as recruiting posters, wartime magazine illustrations drawn by soldiers, and stereotypically popular period songs.) These materials are presented according to a linear progression of stages in the typical trajectory of the British soldier: prewar civilian life, news of war’s outbreak, recruitment, training, shipping to France, arrival at the front, trench life, leaves, battle, the armistice, and the return home to civilian life. As some commentators have noted, many aspects of the film seem quite conventional, formally as well as ideologically. The structuring soldier’s trajectory is familiar from decades of prior films dealing with the First World War from the 1920s to the present—​documentaries, fictional war films, and other fiction genres with wartime scenes. Also, the recollections of veterans on the soundtrack often seem to determine the selection of images that illustrate them. So while the interviews might seem to resonate with cinematic “history from below” (see Cuevas 2022), they could also be formally analyzed as a variant of the omniscient voice-​over narrator so familiar in the history of documentary cinema. But the recollections transcend individual experiences because they are married to archival visual materials selected, processed, and ordered as typical. And Nichols lists typification as one of the long-​established modes of reenactment in documentaries (2008, 84–​85). However, They Shall Not Grow Old has provoked so much discussion not for its conventional qualities and its research into archival sources, but rather for its striking digital manipulations of the original analog footage. In this it utilized one of the film industry’s most storied state-​of-​the-​art digital facilities at WETA FX, one of whose founders was Peter Jackson. As an emblem for the operation of these modifications, consider one of its most cited segments. About one-​third into the film’s running time, as disembarked soldiers arrive at the front, there is a transformation of image and sound characteristics. Up to then, archival black-​and-​white actuality footage is shown in its original 1.33:​1 aspect ratio but masked as a smaller frame within an overall widescreen frame characteristic of twenty-​first-​century commercial cinema.3 Now, as troops trek through a war-​torn landscape, a cluster of alterations occur in the course of one panning shot. The archival aspect ratio progressively expands to fill the widescreen, and the image surface smooths out, as scratches and flecks associated with aged archival film disappear. Likeness to a recent film is further reinforced by gradual colourization of the image, with colour values stabilized as a palette aimed at corresponding with current standards of film naturalism and pictorialism. In some theatrical screenings, the image even converts from flat to 3-​D, recalling recent blockbuster films. But even viewed flat, as it probably is for most viewers, a change in shot scales and other factors give the impression of moving “into” the original images, making the film more “immersive.” In fact, the impression of closer camera viewpoint is necessitated by expansion of the 1.33 mise-​ en-​scène to fill the widescreen frame; this imposes an explicit visual selectivity on the archival profilmic field, because it modifies the original pictorial composition, excluding elements included within the original shot and enlarging others, much like a zoom-​in shot. The visual selectivity for this and many other subsequent widescreen compositions is often handled with more emphasis on 35

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facial detail, something sharpened by the choices made in colourization. Following this transformational moment, shot changes between distant and closer views become one of the film’s norms, resembling contemporary editing. As for the soundtrack, spatially deepening diegetic sound is post-​synchronized, including foleyed noise effects and even occasional post-​dubbed vocalizations, sometimes synched to a soldier’s lip movements. These image–​sound parameters govern much of the rest of the film, until its last few minutes. As the war ends and the troops leave the battleground, the transformations are reversed, and the film returns to its initial archival mode—​1.33 aspect ratio masked within the larger frame, black-​ and-​white, flecked film surface, nondiegetic soundtrack, etc. So the transformational shot just described triggers an overall A-​B-​A structure. The “A” sections present source materials as primary and original, and the intervening “B” section subjects them to overt digital overwriting. Now strictly speaking, as in standard production and exhibition practices nowadays, all the images and sounds are digitized, including those presented as archival sources. But the film establishes a distinction by flaunting the digital transformations of the “B” section in comparison to the “A” sections. The “B” section transfigures footage from the First World War era, with its putative technological limitations evinced in the “A” sections, to look like cinema of the present, with its putative technological advances. This opposition is hinted from the beginning, because the “A” sections already contrast the older 1.33 aspect ratio and the contemporary widescreen ratio that enframes it. But the difference is hyperbolically spectacularized in the “B” section. All such transformations of archival source materials throughout the B section, being presented as such, make the distinction between “A” and “B” sections a relation between present and past cinemas. Taken together they make up a representation of historical differences in every image and sound. This means that while the A-​B-​A structure at once signifies a virtuoso conjoining of media past and media present, it also signifies the difference between media past and media present. There is, of course, a second, more familiar level of past-​present relations. The film’s explicit subject-​matter is the typical experiences of British soldiers, so it aims at an encounter between experiences and knowledges of audiences in the present with experiences of soldiers from the past. The latter is a recognizably conventional object of historical representation, and the soundtrack centres it through voices of individual human agents in the past. But since these are enveloped in a typifying narrative, this constructs the soldiers’ experiences as collectively national rather than individual—​something ideologically reinforced by suppressing any diversity or segmentation by gender, race, ethnicity, or class (Allison 2021; Burgoyne 2023; Watkins 2021). Nevertheless, at this second level, a key attribute is not just the representation of past persons along with contextual objects and actions but that they are attested, because they are conveyed for the present through indexical traces—​images from the First World War period and recorded voices of veterans. Cinematic indexicality bridges the barrier between past and present, but it is not enough. They Shall Not Grow Old still generates familiar kinds of supplementation. For example, the film predictably employs reality-​effects, often accentuated by reframings and pictorial and sonic diegeticization such as post-​dubbed sound effects. But also, and most provocatively, it supplements indexicality by brandishing newer technological capabilities. Again, these simultaneously flaunt the radical separation of past media and present media while presenting those capabilities as bringing contemporary audiences “closer” to the past, to the point of penetrating historical, archivally available cinematic spaces. Such penetration may well recall interiorization in battle reenactments of preclassical cinema, as supplements to actuality. (After all, in1899 cinema was also a new technology.) 36

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Further indications about the functioning of such technologically flamboyant supplements may be gleaned from non-​academic responses to They Shall Not Grow Old. Here are two. Cinematographer and documentary producer David Leitner enthusiastically praises the digital overwriting as a reenactment, but of filmmaking itself, to the end of improved indexicality. He finds that these digital manipulations memorialize not only the soldiers, but long dead filmmakers who seem just as intrepid: “What cameraperson, then or now, risking their life on a treacherous battlefield to capture history in the making would forgo colour and sound and dimensionality if these were possible? Jackson has simply returned these traces of verisimilitude to 100-​year-​old recorded images, denied to them by the technological constraints of their day” (Leitner 2018). Compare cultural critic Adam Gopnick, who expresses unease about the fate of historical authenticity when archival footage is so digitally manipulated. But this leads him to meditate on the benefits of unimpeded indexicality: “The vocal witnessing, beautifully vivid, is straightforward. The only narration we hear are the voices of the men who fought the war, so the film is blessedly free of the sapient sounds of experts and academic historians” (Gopnick 2019). For Leitner, the film is a specific kind of digital mimicry in the service of a certain “as if”: as if technologies of the present were available in the past to improve its indexicality. The archival footage is inadequate because the recording media used was inadequate, and the film supplements that footage with yet more mediation to convey the past as it should have been recorded. But Gopnick seeks a past that can speak—​literally—​for itself in the present, through a purified, unsupplemented indexicality. Conjunction across the gulf between past and present is imagined as more perfect technological mediation on the one hand, and as unmediated on the other. These two remarks—​one demanding more mediation and one demanding less mediation—​ echo the two levels of past-​present relations in the film, but could also apply to early actualities and documentary. Such contradictions and ambivalences led Whissel and Nichols to the term fantasy. Discussing fantasy in documentary reenactment, Nichols concludes with an idea of vivification: “Reenactments vivify the sense of the lived experience, the vécu of others…reenactments effect a temporal vivification in which past and present coexist in the impossible space of a fantasmatic. This form of coexistence revolves around a lost object…” (Nichols 2008, 88). That lost object is the living actuality of the past, the referent of historiography. For modern historicity, this object is always receding, lost by definition. This would help explain why, when films aim at past actuality, the task generates supplements in order to convey it as vivified. In a different context, Comolli has an aphorism that might apply to the past-​present barrier: “The Cinema breathes new life into the exhausted world” (Comolli 1998, 23). Two more points about They Shall Not Grow Old suggest more hypotheses about supplements, fantasy, and Nichols’ notion of vivification. First, vivification may be associated with a strong tendency toward constructions of the human and history as human life. Thus, in Leitner, technologically supplemented indexicality highlights the valour of filmmakers, and in Gopnick, a rhetoric of non-​mediation is anchored in the purportedly human actuality of recorded voices. For all its technological exhibitionism, the film does often seem driven by qualities it constructs as human. Vocal recollections of veterans cue shot selection; image composition and colourization frequently emphasize faces and facial emotions; a conventional heroism is imputed to British soldiers, to the point that an over-​the-​top assault becomes the story of a British victory, as opposed to the stalemated, meat-​grinding slaughter that was the Western Front. As media machine, cinema is in many ways inhuman and impersonal. If the past becomes available through the cinema-​machine, the machine can be bent toward making history human through 37

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the vivification it promotes over and above its mechanical imprint of actuality. This requires supplementing indexicality. Second, one way to understand such fantasy is as a co-​presence or oscillation between two poles: the desire for the pure, living presence of the past as lost object versus its availability to perception and/​or knowledge only as self-​aware mediation. This recalls the relation between the impression of actuality and artifice in the preclassical battle reenactment. It also seems reminiscent of Comolli’s old argument about personages in historical narrative films, probably inspired by the theory of fetishism. He discerned an oscillation or co-​presence between desire for and belief in the reality of the imagined object (here a vivified past) and awareness of the artifice and excesses—​ that is supplements—​necessary to representing it (Comolli 1978). Reenactment, reality-​effects, and penetration of the mise-​en-​scène do not compose an exclusive list of strategies we might find throughout film history for supplementing indexical traces at the service of vivification. Such supplementation may inflect many elements and aspects of film forms, styles, and contents, establishing various balances between cinema as document and cinema as diegesis. Considering how such balances operate in both early actualities and They Will Not Grow Old, it seems useful to compare its use of archival footage to primary sources of disciplinary historiography.

4. For disciplinary historiography, the modern barrier between past and present shadows knowledge claims about the past. So, the history of historiography includes a variety of practices, conventions, and innovations, as well as methodological and theoretical discussions. One privileged tool for addressing the past-​present barrier was institutionalized early in the nineteenth-​century emergence of academic historiography, namely what are called primary sources. Accounts of the disappeared past were to be grounded in a hierarchy of types of evidence, with primary source documents as the most reliable foundation for historiography.4 A primary source is produced with the participation of past persons, actions, events, and/​or processes being depicted in the historical account. In many respects, then, primary sources can be characterized as indexical traces. Surviving from the past, they are perceivable and readable in the historian’s present. This is why the primary source can assume the status of an evidentiary bridge over or conduit through the barrier between past and present. This also suggests lines of kinship or analogies with cinematic indexicality (Rosen 2001). (I used this same metaphor of bridging past and present earlier, while discussing indexicality in cinema.) But primary sources also raise issues for disciplinary historiography. Despite their high evidentiary value, it has long been clear that primary sources alone are insufficient to warrant assured answers to most questions historians might conceive. Among their limitations are: the unbalanced, sometimes random selectivity and partiality of which remnants of the past do and do not survive into the present; the logical leap entailed in arguing from surviving, often fragmentary remnants of the past to the totality of a historical process being covered; that primary sources may be subject to interpretation and divergent readings; disagreements over what should count as the most reliable primary sources for a given historical question or account; and more. So historical discourse is pervaded by inferential proposals, probabilistic and conditional statements, and narrative or rhetorical suturing—​hence the ongoing nature of historiographic debate. The past-​present barrier is never completely or absolutely annealed by appeal to primary sources alone (cf. Koselleck 1985, 141).

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Given such issues, not only historians but some philosophers developed theoretical positions on historiography. Some even argued that historiography should be central to addressing canonical philosophical issues, such as the problem of other minds and language-​reference relations. Inevitably, this led them to the past-​present barrier. Three pertinent types of responses to that problem have been: (1) positing commonalities between past and present, such that something of the disappeared past becomes more available to current experience and understanding; (2) embracing the past-​present barrier; and (3) somehow eliminating the barrier. I will briefly mention examples of the first two but concentrate on an example of the last, because it connects suggestively back to cinematic indexicality, actuality, and fantasy. An example of the first is verstehen approaches, canonically formulated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and aimed at validating methods of the human sciences as opposed to natural sciences. For historiography, verstehen proposes that a historian can achieve some level of affinity and/​or equivalent consciousness with human agents of the past. It has been elaborated with notions such as re-​experiencing, as in Wilhelm Dilthey, and intuitive or empathetic understanding, as in Max Weber. A related variant is R.G. Collingwood’s less intuitionist idea of historiography as the mental re-​enactment of past rationales.5 Verstehen approaches conjoin historical research with an assumption that there are common elements of humanity, or at least human mental processes, across time. Shared humanity paves a pathway through the past-​present barrier, providing grounds for comprehension of the historical past. A second kind of position sees the past-​present barrier as enabling, rather than as a methodological or epistemological difficulty to be overcome. An example is in Arthur Danto’s philosophy of history. He argues for the cognitive superiority of the historian over those in the historical era being investigated. Essentially, the more time that has elapsed since then, the more extensive the historian’s knowledge of subsequent occurrences and consequences following (from) events, actions, and processes of that era; therefore, goes the reasoning, the better the comprehension of their significance and import. Here the chronological separation between past and present becomes an advantage specific to historical investigation. This makes Danto doubtful of verstehen approaches, insofar as they define the historian’s goal as achieving consciousness like that of historical agents. It evokes G.W.F. Hegel’s much-​quoted aphorism for historical knowledge, “The owl of Minerva takes flight at dusk,” but also Koselleck’s thesis that modern historiography thematizes change, including of itself (Danto 1985, Chapters 8, 9).6 These two kinds of positions set off a third possibility, which will receive more extended attention here. It aims at neither working around or across the past-​present barrier, nor arguing for its historiographic benefits. Rather, it conceives of erasing the barrier. A stimulating version has been worked out at length by Frank Ankersmit, through his concept of sublime historical experience. In Ankersmit’s view, too many theories of history and historiography assume a characteristic bedrock of epistemology, the subject-​object opposition: the historian as subject in the present produces language and/​or representations that treat chunks or aspects of the past as referential objects of knowledge. Note that this intertwines the subject-​object opposition with the present-​past barrier. But Ankersmit envisions a dissolution of that barrier, hence the subject-​object opposition, in a special type of mental state, which he calls sublime historical experience. Sublime historical experience is the momentary, forceful impression or consciousness of direct contact with elements of the past in the present. As experience rather than discourse, it is not reducible to linguistic or representational modes. Ankersmit asserts that it is kindled by an awareness or deep feeling that some radical historical change has occurred. Such awareness can foment

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a special sense of loss of a bygone past, mythical or not. It may be associated with feelings of trauma, or perhaps nostalgia. He even attributes the inception of modern Western historical consciousness to something like collective trauma in sixteenth-​century Italy (Ankersmit 2005, 350–​ 363). For Koselleck, apprehension of radical change led to modern historiography marked by periodization, including the past-​present barrier. For Ankersmit, consciousness of the difference of a past can generate an impulsion to repress or collapse that separation from it. Ankersmit describes sublime historical experience as operating through immediate feelings and impressions. This would make it quite different than addressing the present-​past relationship through the mediation of disciplinary procedures and modes. The concept appeals to an idea of perceptual and mental processes logically and sensually prior to language and the separation of subject and object, hence present and past. Philosophically, this is a self-​avowedly Romantic conception, but in Ankersmit’s hands it is not simple. He has much to say about theories of experience as well as theories of history and pastness, often in relation to art and aesthetics. But at its most basic, sublime historical experience is the forceful, often sudden impression of special contact, which takes past and present out of their separate chronological compartments and into an experiential simultaneity. It leads Ankersmit to some bracingly counter-​intuitive positions. With great consistency, for example, he promotes the benefits of decontextualization for certain purposes. As we have seen, contextualization is implicated with the modern premise of period differences, therefore the past-​present barrier that sublime historical experience is supposed to denegate. So sublime historical experience could only happen by suspending methodologies and rationales of modern disciplinary historiography as a practice producing knowledge claims about a disappeared past. In fact, Ankersmit has even said that his concept has “no cognitive import” (Ankersmit 2005; Molven 2007, 3). Yet, there is another side to it. As he works through his ideas, Ankersmit sketches not only oppositions but interrelations between sublime historical experience and disciplinary historiography. Notably, he has expressed admiration for accomplishments of the latter, arguing that it does produce a type of truth, though one not accounted for by standard positions in epistemology such as correspondence and coherence theories (Ankersmit 2010; cf. Jay 2022, 189). Sometimes, he indicates that sublime historical experience requires awareness of disciplinary historiography—​to rebound against it, to be stimulated by it, or to stimulate it. For example, one of his key inspirations is Johan Huizinga, whose exposure to an exhibition of late Medieval Flemish engravings and paintings supposedly engendered an experience of co-​presence with the past that catalyzed his innovations in historiography (Ankersmit 2005, Chapter 4; on Huizinga see Chapter 3). This suggests the following. If sublime historical experience is motivated by a sense of loss, this entails a sense of separation from whatever is lost, hence difference between present and past. Any postulated experience that erases the past-​present barrier could only be on the heels of recognizing it, so there must remain some degree of interchange with the contextualizing premises of modern historiography. As Ankersmit writes, “without contextualization there is no decontextualization and thus no historical experience.” Even granting his descriptions of sublime historical experience, it must relate to disciplined knowledge in ways that are not simply oppositional, but also mutually constitutive, even dialectical. The concept is caught in a relation, perhaps a co-​presence or oscillation, between claims for an immediacy of “experience” that dissolves the past-​present barrier, and “knowledge” grounded in modern disciplinary historiography with its past-​present separations (Ankersmit 2005, 155–​156, 172–​173, 188–​189). This helps explain why Paul and Van Veldhuizen (2018) are able to position Ankersmit with, rather than against, the heritage of German historicism. Among other things, German historicism led to verstehen approaches, which sought humanistic passage across the past-​present barrier 40

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rather than a level where it is erased. When Ankersmit argues that historiography produces its own type of truth, perhaps he continues that defense of the human sciences. Note also the respect with which Ankersmit has discussed Danto, who defends the past-​present division as enabling knowledge specific to historiography. (Ankersmit 2007; cf. Ankersmit 2005, 340–​350, 112–​114). For present purposes, we should also note that indexical traces are one of Ankersmit’s inspirations, but not in primary source documents which, he argues, cannot resolve the past-​ present barrier because they are always read by a historian in the present (2005, 113–​118). Instead, he turns to still photography. He glosses Walter Benjamin’s notion of aura, but with less emphasis on Benjamin’s artwork essay than his “Little History of Photography,” where aura is enveloped with loss. This undergirds Benjamin’s experience of bygone Parisian actuality through Eugène Atget’s photographs. Unlike prior imaging arts such as painting, Atget’s photographs are said to convey something of a contingent here-​and-​now, or better, there-​and-​then (Ankersmit 2005, 180–​ 187). Perhaps such photographs are to painting as sublime historical experience is to disciplinary history. In one commentary, Martin Jay also emphasizes Ankersmit’s references to Barthes’ photographic punctum and Georges Didi-​Huberman on death camp photographs. Jay’s sometimes critical discussion spotlights relations between indexicality and sublime historical experience as direct contact with a past grasped over and through loss, trauma, nostalgia (Jay 2022, esp. Chapter 9). This can lead back to concluding remarks on cinematic historiography, and the paradoxical quest for immediacy through media.

5. This essay began with the idea that comparing disciplinary and cinematic historiography might tell us something about historical representation in films. Whatever distinctions may be made, I have looked for possible similarities or kinships by hypothesizing a few first principles from selected accounts of historiography in each. A starting point was modern historiography’s past-​present barrier, and consequently, past-​present relations in claims to convey past actualities. Three central concepts have emerged: 1) Indexicality: To the extent that a film is treated as recording, archiving, and/​or documenting past actualities for the present, its images and sounds are presumed to operate as indexical traces. For disciplinary historiography, there are ways that primary sources, a professionally privileged type of evidence, may be considered indexical traces. 2) Supplementation: In general, it appears that indexically traced actuality is not enough to convey past actualities. For cinematic historiographies, it most often seems to provoke technical and aesthetic, along with ideological, supplementation. For disciplinary historiography, primary sources are inadequate for full verification of many kinds of claims about the past; consequently, it also mobilizes supplementary strategies and devices (other kinds of evidence, hypothetical and conditional languages, rhetorical and narrative forms, etc.). 3) Loss/​compensation: Some theorists of both disciplinary and cinematic historiographies understand the absence of the historical past—​that is, the past-​present barrier—​in connection with a sense of loss, which is said to stimulate compensatory modes and processes. In my argument, such compensation is associated with supplementation. Thus, a summary thesis is that interrelations of indexicality, supplementation, and loss/​compensation operate in both disciplinary and cinematic historiographies. The concrete forms each takes 41

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in practice are variable, as are relations and balances among them. This constitutes a fundamental constellation or problematic configuring past-​present relations. Both Ankersmit’s sublime historical experience and fantasy in Whissel and Nichols postulate a compensatory drive seeking immediate perception and/​or experience of the lost past routed through some measure of indexicality and supplementation. An antinomy or paradox emerges: the drive to immediacy generates mediation (in more than one sense) between past and present. Ankersmit’s philosophical considerations focus on dissolving the barrier between present and past, hence subject and object, as a special kind of experience. But he still finds it necessary to connect this to knowledge claims of disciplinary historiography, with its evidentiary procedures and supplementary strategies that mediate between present and past, subject and object. From this I inferred a co-​ presence or simultaneity or oscillation of opposites between (disciplinary, mediated) knowledge and (sublime historical, immediate) experience. Discussing They Shall Not Grow Old and extrapolating from Whissel and Nichols on fantasy, I inferred another such opposition, this one for cinematic historiography: “the desire for the pure, living presence of the past as lost object versus its availability to perception and/​or knowledge [through a film] only as self-​aware mediation.” Here the term mediation deliberately conflates its dialectical sense with operations of media—​media as technology and as style and aesthetic form, which I correlated with supplementation. Each of these oscillations is between overcoming and acknowledging the past-​present barrier. Whether comparing them means that sublime historical experience must include some measure of fantasy in Nichols’ or Whissel’s sense and vice-​versa is another question. But psychoanalytic theory as invoked by Nichols would surely see the merging of present subject and past object described by Ankersmit as desire of the subject.7 This might lead to a large speculation by way of inversion: that an imaginary of seamless contact with the past subtends disciplinary historiography itself. That said, it is time to interject a proviso: none of this makes disciplinary historiography or historical thinking less necessary or less valuable, intellectually, culturally, or politically. Nor does it follow that cinematic historiography, including recording actuality, can be reduced to being “only” fantasy. That is why, instead of mutually exclusive terms, it is preferable to conceive of interacting polar terms, such as knowledge and experience, or mediation and non-​mediation, in relations of co-​presence, oscillation, and/​or dialectic. But to focus on cinema: in psychoanalytic theory, desire pursues fantasmatic hence unattainable objects, and this pursuit motivates processes attempting to counter their loss. The past-​present barrier means that historical actuality is definitionally lost. Nichols concludes that reenactment in documentaries counters the loss of past actuality by vivification, engendering fantasy in a technical psychoanalytical sense. Conveying the lost past as living suggests it is susceptible to direct apprehension in the present, but in oscillation with the fact that it is mediated precisely because it is a reenactment. Whissel is not overtly psychoanalytic; however, Nichols’ conclusion corresponds with the type of fantasy she discerns in early war actualities and battle reenactments. Present and past conjoin because, as she writes, a spectator in the present is (impossibly) figured as “a participant-​observer on the scene of history” (Whissel 2002b, 233). This is also in line with my passing suggestion that such vivification may humanize technology (i.e., mediation) and hence history. These two studies of filmed reenactment can point toward some closing suggestions. Filmed reenactment has been useful in my argument as a straightforward illustration of the idea of supplementing indexicality, and because it enabled extrapolation from Whissel and Nichols on fantasy to a general notion of cinematic supplementation. For another example of a supplementary strategy, I emphasized cinematic constructions that propose re-​presentation as if from the interior of a past actuality. Such interiorization has long been important in other ways for film and 42

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media scholars. Considered as one long-​lasting approach to supplementation, interiorization has its own multifaceted historical variations, right up to the present. The currently trendy sociolect “immersion” reverberates throughout film history. One can imagine a history of interiorization, a constantly developing interaction of conventionalized devices and innovations, encompassing narrational systems, camera position, film chemistry, editing, vocal functions, sound design, screen/​projector technologies (widescreen, 3-​D), digital manipulations, and more. For my argument, nineteenth-​century battle reenactments and twenty-​first-​century digital remoldings of archival footage in They Shall Not Grow Old served as heuristic chronological bookends for such an imagined history. But interiorization could also suggest more general implications, or speculations, stemming from cinematic historiography. Interiorization may be treated as resistance to, or deflection of, the fact that the screen is a barrier between spectator and the world of the film. As literal barrier, it is one of the most unavoidable reminders of the fact of mediation, and so of the need for supplementation to vivify that world in the service of a desire for immediacy. And if indexicality bestows on that filmed world the aura of past actuality, then the screen is not only a spatial, but a temporal barrier. The past-​present barrier fundamental to modern historiography becomes embodied in the screen as such. Now consider the following small selection of snippets from the history of film theory (many comparable ones could be cited): • Maxim Gorky in 1896, reviewing a program of earliest Lumière actualities: “It’s terrifying to see, but it is a movement of shadows, only of shadows” (Gorky 1960, 408). • Munsterberg in 1916, on perceiving films: “Depth and movement alike come to us in the moving picture world, not as hard facts but as a mixture of fact and symbol. They are present and yet they are not in the things” (Munsterberg 1970, 30). • Adorno and Eisler in 1947, on film as an artificial, ideological humanization of technology associated with social alienation: “The pure [silent] cinema must have had a ghostly effect like that of the shadow play –​shadows and ghosts have always been associated… Music was introduced as a kind of antidote against the picture. The characters [in sound films] are not speaking people but speaking effigies, endowed with all the features of the pictorial, the photographic two-​ dimensionality, the lack of spatial depth” (Adorno, Eisler, and McCann 2007, 50, 51). • Metz in 1975: “…the activity of perception which [a film] involves is real (the cinema is not a phantasy), but the perceived is not really the object, it is its shade, its phantom, its double, its replica…” (Metz 1982, 45). • Doane in 2021 writes of cinema’s “production of a space that resides nowhere else but in the cinema (hence its characterization as ‘atopia’)—​a space that could, perhaps, be characterized as both unreadable and overly readable, illusorily navigable and fundamentally disorienting.” And “Immersion is always about the provision of an elsewhere designed as a lure, so much so that it is often portrayed as an inevitable end point of media history” (Doane 2021, 18, 22). Fact yet symbol, presence infused by absence, navigable yet disorienting: much as indexically attested actuality is never enough in historiography, different kinds of theorists across the extent of film history have found constitutive ambiguities in the apprehension of a screened world. Some figure these ambiguities with supernatural, immaterial figures of a lost, inaccessible past crossing into the present (ghosts, shadows, phantoms), connoting that the lost, inaccessible past provokes anxiety. Some identify supplementary devices—​such as music and immersion as lure—​as attempts to counter this loss and anxiety. 43

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Such descriptions are often attributed to “the cinema,” as the conceptual object of classical film theory. Yet they could be mapped with the constellation that cinematic historiography foregrounds for theory and engages in practice: indexicality, supplementation, compensation/​loss. I have mentioned philosophers who believe historiography should be central for addressing canonical questions in philosophy. Given these considerations, there is a final question as conclusion: might cinematic historiography be so treated for many canonical questions in the study of film and media? All of this begins from disjunctions and conjunctions between past and present. A possible objection: surely there have been filmmakers and kinds of filmmaking that embrace rather than resist and deflect the resulting separations, differences, barriers, antinomies. If so, we also need accounts of them, that is, of different and divergent kinds of histories, knowledges, experiences, and perhaps fantasies.

Notes 1 This timeline is not unusual among historians of historiography. For example, cf. Lowenthal 2015, 351–​352. 2 Koselleck begins one essay on this transition from conflations of past and present in Altdorfer’s 1529 historical painting The Battle of Alexander at Issus (Koselleck 1985, 9–​12). 3 Different sources mention 1.85 and 2.39 widescreen formats. Perhaps this discrepancy is due to variations between the theatrical premiere version and other exhibition modes. 4 See von Ranke’s seminal 1824 statement on sources (1972, 56). 5 For comparison of Dilthey and Collingwood see Jay 2005, 229–​241. 6 Danto cites Hegel’s sentence on 284, and during a resumé of these arguments on 292–​297. See also Chapter 8, on Danto’s key concept of narrative sentences. 7 Ankersmit himself draws on Sigmund Freud in a pivotal chapter on sublime historical experience (Ankersmit 2005, Chapter 8). But he focuses on traumatic memory as the psychoanalytic concept useful for understanding historiography, not fantasy. Incidentally, he complements his reading of Freud with Danto’s conception of a dual consciousness operating in both the now and the then. Once again, antinomies of historiography are referred to a master opposition defined by the past-​present barrier.

Reference list Adorno, Theodor W. and Hanns Eisler 2007. Composing for the Films. New York: Oxford University Press. Allison, Tanine. 2021. “Digital Film Restoration and the Politics of Whiteness in Peter Jackson’s They Shall Not Grow Old.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 39, no. 15 (May): 1–​26. Ankersmit, Frank. 2005. Sublime Historical Experience. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Ankersmit, Frank R. 2007. “Danto, History, and the Tragedy of Human Existence.” In Action, Art, History: Interactions with Arthur C. Danto, edited by Daniel Herwitz and Michael Kelly, 175–​190. New York: Columbia University Press. Ankersmit, Frank. 2010. “Truth in History and Literature.” Narrative 18, no. 1 (January): 29–​50. http://​ dx.doi.org/​10.1353/​nar.0.0039. Burgoyne, Robert. 2023. “Remediation, Trauma, and ‘Preposterous History’ in Documentary Film.” In The Routledge Companion to History and the Moving Image, edited by Marnie Hughes-Warrington, Kim Nelson, and Mia E. M. Treacey. Chapter 5. London; New York: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group. Comolli, Jean-​Louis. 1978. “Historical Fiction: A Body too Much.” Screen 19, no. 2 (Summer): 41–​54. Reprinted in The History on Film Reader, 2009, edited by Marnie Hughes-​Warrington, 64–​74. New York: Routledge. Comolli, Jean-​Louis. 1998. “Mechanical Bodies, Ever More Heavenly,” translated by Annette Michelson. October 83 (Winter): 19–​24. Cuevas, Efrén. 2022. Filming History from Below: Microhistorical Documentaries. New York: Columbia University Press. Danto, Arthur. 1985. Narration and Knowledge: Including the Integral Text of Narration and Knowledge. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Actuality is not enough Doane, Mary Ann. 2021. Bigger than Life: The Close-​ Up and Scale in the Cinema. Durham: Duke University Press. Gopnick, Adam. 2019. “A Few Thoughts on the Authenticity of Peter Jackson’s They Shall Not Grow Old.” New Yorker Newsletter, January 14. www.newyor​ker.com/​news/​daily-​comm​ent/​a-​few-​thoug​hts-​on-​the-​ authe​ntic​ity-​of-​peter-​jacks​ons-​they-​shall-​not-​grow-​old. Gorky, Maxim. 1960. “A review of the Lumière programme at the Nizhni-Novogorod Fair, as printed in the Nizhegorodshi Lisrok, newspaper, July 4, 1896,” translated by Leda Swan. In Jay Leyda.1983. Kino: a History of the Russian and Soviet Film. 3rd ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 407–409. Jay, Martin. 2005. Songs of Experience: Modern European and American Variations on a Universal Theme. Berkeley: University of California Press. Jay, Martin. 2022. Genesis and Validity: The Theory and Practice of Intellectual History. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Koselleck, Reinhart. 1985. Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, translated by Keith Tribe. Cambridge: MIT Press. Koselleck, Reinhart. 2002. The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts, translated by Todd Samuel Presner et al. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Laplanche, Jean, and Pontalis, J.-​B. 1968. “Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality.” The International Journal of Psycho-​Analysis 49, no. 1: 1–​18. Leitner, David. 2018. “The Documentary Masterpiece that is Peter Jackson’s They Shall Not Grow Old.” Filmmaker Magazine, December 27. https://​filmma​kerm​agaz​ine.com/​?s=​they+​shall+​not+​grow+​old#. YrC​vcS-​B2Ho. Levy, David. 1982. “Re-​Constituted Newsreels, Re-​Enactments and the American Narrative Film.” In Cinema 1900/​1906: An Analytical Study, edited by Roger Holman, 243–​260. Paris: FIAF. Lowenthal, David. 2015. The Past is a Foreign Country: Revisited. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. Metz, Christian. 1982. The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema, translated by Celia Britton, Annwyl Williams, Ben Brewster, and Alfred Guzzetto. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Molven, Frode. 2007. “A Proposal for How to Look at the Past: Interview with Frank Ankersmit.” Gröningen (December). www.scr​ibd.com/​docum​ent/​199536​733/​Interv​iew-​Frank-​Ankers​mit. Munsterberg, Hugo.1970. The Film: A Psychological Study. Mineola: Dover Publications. Musser, Charles. 2013. “Problems in Historiography: The Documentary Tradition Before Nanook of The North.” In The Documentary Film Book, edited by Brian Winston, 119–​128. London: BFI. Nichols, Bill. 2008. “Documentary Reenactment and the Fantasmatic Subject.” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 1 (Autumn): 72–​89. https://​doi.org/​10.1086/​595​629. Paul, Herman, and Van Veldhuizen, Adriaan. 2018. “A Retrieval of Historicism: Frank Ankersmit’s Philosophy of History and Politics.” History and Theory 57, no. 1 (March): 33–​55. https://​doi.org/​ 10.1111/​hith.12045. Rosen, Philip. 2001. Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Rosenstone, Robert A. 2012. History on Film/​Film on History, 2nd ed. New York: Pearson. von Ranke, Leopold. 1972. “Preface: Histories of the Latin and German Nations from 1494–​1514.” In The Varieties of History: From Voltaire to the Present, edited by Fritz Stern, 54–​62. New York: Vintage. Watkins, Liz. 2021. “The Politics of Nostalgia: Colorization, Spectatorship and the Archive.” Comparative Cinema 9, no. 17: 123–​145. https://​doi.org/​10.31009/​cc.2021.v9.i17.07. Whissel, Kristen. 2002a. “The Gender of Empire: American Modernity, Masculinity, and Edison’s War Actualities.” In A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema, edited by Jennifer M. Bean and Diane Nagra, 141–​ 165. Durham: Duke University Press. Whissel, Kristen. 2002b. “Placing the Spectator at the Scene of History: The Battle-​Reenactment at the Turn of the Century, from Buffalo Bill’s Wild West to the Early Cinema.” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 22: 225–​243. https://​doi.org/​10.1080/​014396​8022​0148​679.

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3 MOVING IMAGE HISTORIES AND ETHICS Marnie Hughes-​Warrington

“Are they going to let us win this time?” David Desser and Gaylyn Studlar’s argument that moving image histories rewrite and rehabilitate painful histories through small-​scale hero stories like Rambo is ingenious (Desser and Studlar 1988, 13). For every Rambo flexing their way through the jungle to rescue soldiers missing in action, we can come up with multiple filmic examples where an apparent focus on individuals and small groups seems to render large, complex, and painful larger contexts out of focus. Babylon (2022) foregrounds the stories of five people who exit filmmaking in 1920s North America in such detail that we might be forgiven for missing larger questions about racial, gender, and class inclusion during those times. Stephen Spielberg as filmmaker tunnels through complex 1950s social dynamics in The Fabelmans (2021). Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down (2001) flies over the reasons for US military operations in Somalia in 1992. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2011) draws a picture of the death of over 3000 people on September 11, 2001 through the life of a single child, and Pearl Harbor (2001) balances an account of the 1941 attack with a fictitious love triangle. Easy Company seems to win the Second World War in Band of Brothers (2001), love is the focus of Rookie Historian Goo Hae-​ ryung (2019)—​rather than the rarity of a woman contributing to the official history of the Korean Joseon Dynasty—​and Regency England is all sexual sizzle in Bridgerton (2020). Desser and Studlar have a point, but is it the right one? Are small-​scale stories easily commandeered vehicles for evasion and rehabilitation? Perhaps, but is there another way to look at scale in films. This way of looking highlights that challenges with scale can be traced back to ethical theories themselves, and that what we see in moving image histories is not a fault with the medium. Conversely, moving image histories have a powerful role to play in reminding us about what Aristotle called ethos, or the effort of ethics.

Showing and seeing One of the most important things we need to know about moving image histories is that they are seen by people other than ourselves. It is tempting to universalize audience responses from our own views, or to argue that moving image history makers dupe viewers and deprive society of critical historical knowledge. The best remedy for these arguments is to look at what viewers say about moving image histories. We can study viewers historically, looking for evidence of 46

DOI: 10.4324/9781003263234-5

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their responses through a variety of artefacts. A quick glance at the website Rotten Tomatoes, for example, shows that viewers from around the world are quick to spot anachronisms, continuity problems, and ill-​fitting fictional flourishes. These help us to build up a sense of the reception of films by those who have access to, and interest in, digital sites. More systematic sources on how people think about histories of all kinds are the surveys conducted in North America by Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen in 1989 and repeated in broad approach by the American Historical Association in 2021 (Rosenzweig and Thelen n.d.a; Rosenzweig and Thelen 1998; Burkholder and Schaffer n.d.a). I have also been fortunate to be part of a study which looked at over 1500 tertiary students’ understandings of history in Australia (Nye et al. 2011). These are worth looking at in detail. While the most recent survey of public understandings of histories charts the rise of do-​ityourself DNA kits, there is broad consistency of findings about the forms of history over 30 years. Most people learn about history through moving image formats. Of just under 1500 people, 69% associated history with moving image formats in the American Historical Association’s 2021 survey, including film, television, and streaming and internet platforms like YouTube in their responses. Of just over 800 people, 81% associated history with film or television in 1989. Moving​ image history was second only to photographs in 1989 (91%). Documentary, moving-​image historical fiction, and television occupy the top three positions in the 2021 survey (69%, 66%, and 62% respectively). The exclusion of photographs in the later survey makes it difficult to assert whether moving image histories are top of the mind for most people, but the results emphasize just how accessible moving image histories are in North America, at least. These results are hardly surprising. Where we do have the opportunity to learn something significant, though, is in the trustworthiness ratings included in both the 1989 and 2021 surveys. In 1989, museums were rated as the most trustworthy source for information about the past, university professors and teachers came in at fourth and fifth respectively, and moving image histories were last. If you dig a little deeper, you see lower ratings of trustworthiness for museums by people of colour, but broadly consistent lower ratings across all groups for moving image histories (Rosenzwieg and Thelen n.d.b.). Museums again topped the poll for trustworthiness in 2021, with documentaries coming in third, and television and fictional moving image histories coming in fifth and third from the bottom. Social media and history-​related video games were rated least trustworthy. University professors were rated fourth again, with history teachers moving down to eighth. People of colour again had consistently lower trustworthiness ratings for museums. Driving the results for moving image histories across both surveys were a significant number of people expressing ambivalence rather than strong approval or disapproval. It is all too easy to read these results as saying that moving image histories are a problematic and even unethical way to learn about the past. What Peter Burkholder and Dana Schaffer—​the authors of the 2021 survey—​ask us to think about though is the idea of museum objects not as representing history, but as being history (Burkholder and Schaffer, n.d.b.). Museum objects are perceived to be unmediated, social media and games are all talk and images and little unmediated material. Moving image histories are seen as mediated. Another way to put it is that people know that moving image histories are histories.

Moving image histories as entertainment Moving ​image histories are histories in the broad. They can take a variety of formats, and audience preferences for those formats may vary. Burkholder and Schaffer call out in their 2021 survey, for example, the perception by 73% of respondents that history is easier to learn when it 47

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is entertaining. These results are skewed somewhat by the 18–​49 age groups, who have a 10–​11% higher preference for histories as entertainment than those over 50 years of age. Burkholder and Schaffer, like Desser and Studlar before them, move to judgement on these results in a way that is worth quoting: … we note that it is easy to conflate entertainment with learning, especially in the minds of nonexperts. Cognitive psychologists have shown that the act of learning is actually quite difficult and is not “fun” or some cognate thereof. Finally, we note that sources of the past geared toward entertainment, such as fictional films/​TV and video games, garnered little trust in the public’s mind… . A certain amount of cognitive dissonance seems to be on display. Readers should thus exercise considerable caution when drawing conclusions from these data. Learning preferences and actual results are not necessarily congruent. Even the public’s own survey responses hint at this, as when the sources respondents reported turning to most frequently were often not the same ones perceived as conveying reliable information about the past. (Burkholder and Schaffer, n.d.c.)1 It is worth summarizing their argument. Learning, they argue, is hard. Moving image histories evoke cognitive dissonance because they are fun, and we know fun is not the best way to learn. What kind of learning, however, are the viewers of moving image histories meant to be engaged in? Are they opting out of painful histories, as Desser and Studlar, and Burkholder and Schaffer suggest? I think not. With thanks to the legacy of Hayden White, we appreciate that histories are stories (1990). In Metahistory, he drew upon nineteenth-​century examples to show that histories have many different plots, including tragedies or romances (1975). He also sketched out combinatory tables showing dozens of possible plots for writing about the past. Moreover, he understood that stories might be told differently in different forms of histories. He coined the term “historiophoty” in a short paper for The American Historical Review to emphasize that moving image histories ought to be understood on their own terms, both in relation to what they show, and how they show them (1988). White’s work has been remarkably influential in studies of histories, with titles such as The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (1990) garnering close to 8500 citations to date, and his paper on historiophoty recording just over 800 citations.2 White never accepted, though, that narratives alone explain the forms of histories. Story, or plot, is never the place to stop to explain moving image histories, or the responses of viewers. He took two further steps, as we can too. White argued that narratives point to ideology, and that ideology points to ethics. As he wrote in Metahistory in 1975: In my view, there are no extra-​ideological grounds on which to arbitrate among the conflicting conceptions of the historical process and of historical knowledge appealed to by the different ideologies. For, since these conceptions have their origins in ethical considerations, the assumption of a given epistemological position by which to judge their cognitive adequacy would itself represent only another ethical choice. (White 1975, 26; see also White 2022) If we want to understand historical narratives, then we need to grapple with the politics and then the ethics of history. The ethics of history, in his view, begins with selection decisions (White 1975, 48

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27). When we select, we indicate what ought to be said about the past. How the ethics of decision works in White’s theories is for us to tease out. This is where his well-​cited runway of thought peters out, and our opportunity to think about the ethics of moving-​image histories kicks in.

Ethical effort in moving image histories To understand the ethics of moving image histories, you need to go a long way back in time, to some of the first written philosophies that we know about. The beginnings of moving image histories matter too. As Anne Martin and I argued in Big and Little Histories (2022), it helps to know about Aristotle’s idea of ethos—​the effort of ethics—​because we see it at play in all kinds of histories today. To explain the idea of ethos, Aristotle argued that ethics should be understood as a practical activity. We can think about ethics in theoretical ways, and we can do so without any particular end in mind. Aristotle insisted, though, that ethics ought to help us with everyday life, and help us to live well (Aristotle 2013, 1241a; Aristotle 2014, 1139a26-​8, 1149b29-​32).3 This view can be seen in claims that history is philosophy teaching by examples, that we ought not forget the lessons of the past, or that watching histories is looking and learning from a safe distance. Moving image histories present the fortunes or misfortunes of others in the practical manner of lights guiding us to a cinema exit. These views of histories as practical help have been present since ancient times and can be seen around the world (Hughes-​Warrington and Martin 2022). Aristotle also saw ethics as an imprecise activity. His Eudemian Ethics and Nicomachean Ethics present specific examples of virtues and vices, but he was clear that ethics is not like following a checklist or punching in a list of inputs in the expectation of a simple output. Wealth, for example, can be a good or a bad thing. It depends on your situation in life. Ethics is not possible without effort, and effort over time. Think of the process of becoming a wise, better, or well person as akin to following the lights to a cinema exit, but as bumping into things—​and others—​along the way. This is not a mistake or a problem, Aristotle reassures us, but the best way to steer toward a life of virtuous moderation. As he explains in Eudemian Ethics: This much then is clear, that it is the middle disposition in each department of conduct that is to be praised, but that each should lean sometimes to the side of excess and sometimes to that of deficiency, since this is the easiest way of hitting the mean and the right course. (Aristotle 2013, 1109b) Let us apply Aristotle’s idea of ethics as imprecise to the making and viewing of moving image histories. History is never just shown once. We expect moving image history makers to turn out at least slightly different works every time, and over time. Think of them as hand-​crafting different lights guiding you to that cinema exit, or indeed exits. These differences are not just due to deficiencies. The makers of moving image histories can evade or rehabilitate painful pasts as Desser and Studlar have argued, or they can evade the effort of learning, as Burkholder and Schaffer note. Moving ​image history makers, though, can also prompt us to face up to things we would rather avoid or to act in ways that we did not think previously possible. The point is that moving​ image history is not made once, and it is not seen once. There are moving ​image histories (plural) and audiences (plural), and we do not expect them all to be the same. We should be worried if someone claims to have got their moving ​image history right, or that it is the definitive or the only way to show or to see a past. Another way of saying this is that a world without criticisms of moving ​image histories, or websites like Rotten Tomatoes, is not our world of practical and inexact ethics.4 49

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The important consequence of this line of thinking is that when we consider moving image histories, we should do so over time, and over the globe. The ethics of moving image histories encompasses historical and global examples. This is reflected in the decision to include different kinds of moving image histories from the past and present, and from around the world, in this book. This ethics of moving image history cannot be described as a simple act of tipping in or taking out evidence, or the sum of right and wrong details. This is because dynamic approaches to editing, soundtrack and foley sound, mise-​en-​scène, costumes and hair, marketing, screening, and so on, have repeatedly challenged the idea of a story told once. These challenges and their driver—​the expectation that ethics is of our own making—​ensure that moving image history is never at rest, and never effectively agreed. The recent rise of streaming and internet services, and the potential to binge watch alone, remind us of this. So too do the history makers who use their phones and personal devices to record events in the hope that their experiences will be seen by others. These challenges keep the ethics of moving image histories historical, and open to change in the future. Asking whether people who use their phones as cameras are history makers is not a destabilizing, destructive question, but a sign of the ethical health of history making. When you see a collection of histories, and none of them are the same, you are not seeing a replication crisis. You are seeing ethics at work.

Moving ​image history’s scale problem is a trolley problem I will admit that it is hard, though, to see the ethical potential of Rambo winning the Vietnam War second time around, or in the love triangle of Pearl Harbor (2001). One of the things people like to do by contrast is to celebrate the visibility of moving image history techniques as the way to convey the potential of the ethics of moving image histories. The argument here is that if you show people how something is made, they will understand it as a representation of history, rather than being history in the sense of an unmediated museum piece. The logical conclusion is that if I see something as a representation, I will know that other representations are possible. This idea is at play in historical treatments of the earliest films. Responding to the commonplace story of audiences ducking at the sight of the Lumieres’ filmic train in The Arrival of a Train at Le Ciotat Station (1896), for example, Tom Gunning makes a powerful case for what he calls “the cinema of attractions.” Gunning has done much to remind us of the importance of the first films in understanding the ethical potential of moving image histories. In works such as “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator” (1989) and “The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-​Garde” (1986), he notes that cinema prior to the end of the first decade of the twentieth century was not dominated by narrative. Rather, this was the time of the “cinema of attractions,” or of technique, when the presentation of the “magical” properties of film technologies dominated what we call actuality films. If you are a fan of Georges Méliès, as I am, it is easy to accept Gunning’s point. Méliès loved using jump cuts—​a break created by cutting and re-​splicing footage—​to facilitate costume changes and the movement of characters. You can see them, and that’s the point, and the magic of moving images. Gunning holds that people went to see films by people like Méliès as much to admire the equipment used to project them, and the forms of editing used to structure them, as to see the images shown. They were just as interested in the form and context of films as what they showed. Indeed, as Gunning shows, film was often itself a fairgound or variety show attraction, with tours of the screening apparatus or the enclosure of a film within an amusement ride both being possibilities.

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These ways of presenting films, Gunning asserts, make it difficult to sustain the argument that all of the first film audiences were stupified, terrified, or credulous about what they saw. Rather, Gunning characterizes them as “sophisticated urban pleasure seekers,” who kept abreast of trends in stagecraft. In short, they were in on the act (1989, 35). The idea of viewer as enabled agent persists in any argument that the best moving image histories are the ones which bring the craft of making them to the forefront in a deliberate way. We expect viewers to be in on the act with these kinds of histories, more than they are with films which work to render their making invisible and which evoke a sense of unmediated realism. Roland Barthes codified this distinction in his ideas of “writerly” and “readerly” texts, and in “vertical” and “horizontal” reading respectively (Barthes 1975a; 1975b). Horizontal or readerly engagement with a moving image history is engagement with content—​the details of the past—​rather than the techniques of presenting that past. We might also celebrate documentary formats for the same reason, particularly when moving image history makers place themselves in their works and emphasize their acts of mediation. We might, however, be missing a trick here. The ethics of moving ​image histories is not just about what is shown—​the details of the past—​and cinematic techniques that we can celebrate in White’s idea of historiophoty. The ethics of moving ​image histories is also about selection and use of spatio-​temporal scales. I argued in History Goes to the Movies: Studying History on Film that no moving ​image history is seamless or transparent to its viewers, and that we ought to give credit to them for the ways that they respond to films. They find mistakes, but they also change plot types in fan fiction, and take elements of moving ​image histories into their contexts, as with Titanic-​themed weddings (Hughes-​ Warrington 2007). Ironically, reviewers of the book on sites like Amazon complained that I did not tell readers that moving ​image histories that get the details wrong are bad. As the example of these reviewers attests, I think, though, that they have figured it out for themselves.5 Here I would like to make a new point, that the ethics of moving ​image histories has an uncomfortable relationship with scale. To explain this point, I would like us to think about trolley problems. Trolley problems are exercises in thinking through the dilemma of what we might do if we cannot avoid harming one or more people through our choice of actions. They are called trolley problems because one of the most famous scenarios is that of a runaway trolley or tram that will kill five people unless you switch it to another track. If you do switch it, you will kill one person (Kamm 2015). Trolley problems highlight just how uncomfortable we can be in making ethical decisions that prioritize groups over individuals, particularly if we know those individuals. Choosing to tell the story of a small number of people in a movie about the Second World War—​or any combat situation—​can make us feel similarly uncomfortable. If we focus on Rambo, do we lose sight of the reasons why the Vietnam War happened, or the global context in which it took place? If we focus on Nellie La Roy’s failure to make the translation from silent to talking film actor and Manny Torres’ success in adapting to technical change in Babylon (2022), do we miss the history of movie makers and cinema staff who lost their jobs after the debut of the first talking film, The Jazz Singer (1927)? Conversely, does Oskar Schell’s story in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2011) help us to see in sharp focus the harms done to relatives of those killed in the 9/​11 attacks? What these examples highlight are the practical difficulties we might have in accepting the “most good” arguments of utilitarian approaches to ethics. It does not always seem right, fair, or good to prioritize larger groups of people or larger contexts over smaller ones in ethics. Conversely, it does not always seem right, fair, or good, to focus on small stories, moments, or contexts over large ones in ethics. Moreover, these questions of scale can become acute when we do not know whose past we are grappling with. They are rendered in a painfully sharp way in

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Henry Singer’s 9/​11: The Falling Man (2006). An individual is captured in a series of photographs on the morning of 9/​11, one of close to 3000 who died. Even with painstaking research, Singer cannot establish who it was and why they were mid-​air. It is disturbing to think that we cannot identify someone’s child, parent, or sibling in an age of so much information. And is painful to see them mid-​air, knowing they are one of close to 3000 deaths about to happen. We cannot stop it. DNA techniques cannot help in the way that they have for the idea of an unknown soldier. The thousands of pages that also fell on that morning cannot tell us who it is. We cannot get any more detail out of the photographs we have. We cannot go any smaller in this case, and we have so little to say. The ethics of moving image history is seen in these painful gaps. We hope that one day they will be filled, but we cannot be sure. This is the unending work of ethics. The comments accompanying the YouTube file of 9/​11: The Falling Man highlight the work of over 2200 people to understand what they have seen over time. Some commentators call the pictures tranquil images, some talk of courage. Others congratulate the person for taking control of their destiny, and others call out the shaming of those who jumped. There are reminders that thousands died, and that this was a person with a history. Chills. Crying. Anger. Sorrow. Grief. Describing what it must have been like to be that person, and having no idea what it was like to be that person. Remembering where you were on that day, and being too young to know. These comments, and moving image histories in the broad, show us that there is not a simple correlation between scale and what is good, fair, or right. Nor is there a simple correlation between scale and ethical effort. Small things can be hard work, and so can large things. Also on YouTube is Bonni Cohen, Jon Shenk, and Davis Guggenheim’s documentary series about the former US Vice President Al Gore’s work to highlight global warming in the Anthropocene. An Inconvenient Truth was released the same year as 9/​11: The Falling Man: 2006. It has over 900 comments, positioning the work as scary, funny, or fake. There is no sense in which one man narrating large-​scale changes in climate achieves consensus in reception. We cannot go any bigger in this case, and climate change remains a crisis of the commons. It is everyone’s and no one’s problem. Viewer engagement with movies we might more readily dismiss as wrong or fun—​like Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985) and Pearl Harbor—​also reveals awareness of the dynamics of scale. Over 100,000 Rotten Tomatoes reviews of Rambo: First Blood Part II show both an appreciation of the fun of the film’s particular action sequences, and its work to highlight the plight of Vietnam veterans. Over 250,000 Rotten Tomatoes reviews of Pearl Harbor navigate between commendations for Michael Bay for his patriotism, and for his love of a good explosion sequence. Some even thought that the love triangle provided an opportunity to learn about the personal impacts of the attack.6 I consider myself told. It is easy to show that the audiences of moving image histories are not of one mind, and that they are not always duped or suggestible. Of the respondents to Burkholder and Schaffer’s American Historical Association survey from 2021, 62% expect knowledge of history to change; 61% thought that new knowledge would prompt such a change; but 39% also acknowledged the role of politics, historians asking new questions, and values (Burkholder and Schaffer, n.d.d.). These responses also show us, though, that the trolley problem is an unrealistic thought experiment. Moving image histories are never really made on one scale, and we are never restricted to one answer for why histories shift. Moving image history makers home in on details, points in time, and individuals to represent the past. They also move out to show the passing of time, global and large-​scale trends, and abstract ideas. Rambo is an unheard returned veteran and entertaining. Pearl Harbor is about an attack, and love. Bonds of friendship can matter in the theatre of war. Children were orphaned in 9/​11, and not all of them know exactly what happened to their parents. 52

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Moving-​history makers switch scales with virtuosity, and viewers do so too in their responses. They leap over times, slow down, zoom in and zoom out again. Their responses reinforce that the ethics of moving image histories is not precise, simple, or of someone else’s making. The trolleys of the ethics of moving image history are plural, dynamic, divertible, powerful in helping us to think about the good, the fair, and the just.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5

In support for their claim that learning is difficult, they cite Burkholder (2017). Results as per Google search, January 18, 2023. I have used Bekker’s numbers for ease of navigation through the various editions of Aristotle’s works. Rotten Tomatoes, accessed January 18, 2023, www.rot​tent​omat​oes.com/​. See for example, www.ama​zon.com.au/​Hist​ory-​Goes-​Mov​ies-​Study​ing-​Film/​dp/​041​5328​284, accessed January 19, 2023. 6 Rotten Tomatoes Viewer Reviews of Rambo: First Blood Part II, accessed January 19, 2023, www.rot​ tent​omat​oes.com/​m/​rambo-​first-​blood-​part-​ii/​revi​ews?type=​user&int​cmp=​rt-​sco​reca​rd_​a​udie​nce-​score-​ revi​ews; and Rotten Tomatoes Viewer Reviews of Pearl Harbor, accessed January 19, 2023, www.rot​ tent​omat​oes.com/​m/​1108​389-​pearl​_​har​bor/​revi​ews?type=​user&int​cmp=​rt-​sco​reca​rd_​a​udie​nce-​score-​ revi​ews.

Reference list Aristotle. 2013. Eudemian Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Aristotle. 2014. Nicomachean Ethics, 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University. Barthes, Roland. 1975a. S/​Z: An Essay. Translated by Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang. Barthes, Roland. 1975b. “An Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative.” New Literary History 6, no. 2 (Winter): 237–​272. https://​doi.org/​10.2307/​468​419. Burkholder, Peter. 2017. “Lessons from Expertise, Decoding, and a Quest for the Five-​Minute Mile.” The Teaching Professor, May 1. Accessed January 18, 2023. www.teachi​ngpr​ofes​sor.com/​top​ics/​prepar​ing-​to-​ teach/​cou​rse-​des​ign/​less​ons-​expert​ise-​decod​ing-​quest-​five-​min​ute-​mile/​. Burkholder, Peter, and Dana Schaffer. n.d.a. “History, The Past, and Public Culture: Results from a National Survey.” Accessed January 18, 2023. www.his​tori​ans.org/​hist​ory-​cult​ure-​sur​vey. Burkholder, Peter, and Dana Schaffer. n.d.b. “History, The Past, and Public Culture: Which Sources of the Past are Viewed as Most Trustworthy?” Accessed January 18, 2023. www.his​tori​ans.org/​resea​rch-​and-​ publi​cati​ons/​hist​ory-​the-​past-​and-​pub​lic-​cult​ure-​resu​lts-​from-​a-​natio​nal-​sur​vey/​4-​which-​sour​ces-​of-​the-​ past-​are-​vie​wed-​as-​trus​twor​thy. Burkholder, Peter, and Dana Schaffer. n.d.c. “History, The Past, and Public Culture: How Does the Public want to Learn about the Past?” Accessed January 18, 2023. www.his​tori​ans.org/​resea​rch-​and-​publi​ cati​o ns/​h ist​o ry-​t he-​p ast-​a nd-​p ub​l ic-​c ult​u re-​r esu​l ts-​f rom-​a -​n atio​n al-​s ur​v ey/​5 -​h ow-​d oes-​t he-​p ub​ lic-​want-​to-​learn-​about-​the-​past. Burkholder, Peter, and Dana Schaffer. n.d.d. “History, The Past, and Public Culture: What are the Public’s Attitude toward a Changing and Uncomfortable Past?” www.his​tori​ans.org/​resea​rch-​and-​publi​cati​ons/​ hist​ory-​the-​past-​and-​pub​lic-​cult​ure-​resu​lts-​from-​a-​natio​nal-​sur​vey/​9-​what-​are-​the-​publ​ics-​attitu​des-​tow​ ard-​a-​chang​ing-​and-​uncomf​orta​ble-​past. Desser, David, and Gaylyn Studlar. 1988. “Never Having to Say You’re Sorry: Rambo’s Rewriting of the Vietnam War.” Film Quarterly 42, no. 1 (Autumn): 9–​16. https://​doi.org/​10.2307/​1212​431. Gunning, Tom. 1986. “The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-​Garde.” Wide Angle 8, no. 3–​4: 56–​63. Gunning, Tom. 1989. “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator.” Art and Text 34: 31–​45. Hughes-​Warrington, Marnie. 2007. History Goes to the Movies: Studying History on Film. London: Routledge. Hughes-​Warrington, Marnie, and Anne Martin. 2022. Big and Little Histories: Sizing Up the Ethics of Historiography. Abingdon: Routledge.

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Marnie Hughes-Warrington Kamm, Frances. 2015. The Trolley Problem Mysteries. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nye, Adele, Marnie Hughes-​Warrington, Jill Roe, Penny Russell, Desley Deacon, and Paul Kiem. 2011. “Exploring Historical Thinking and Agency with Undergraduate History Students.” Studies in Higher Education 36, no. 7: 763–​780. https://​doi.org/​10.1080/​030750​7100​3759​045. Rosenzwieg, Roy, and David Thelen. n.d.a. “The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life.” Accessed January 18, 2023. https://​chnm.gmu.edu/​sur​vey/​. Rosenzwieg, Roy, and David Thelen. n.d.b. “The Presence of the Past: Table 1.2, Trustworthiness of Sources about the Past.” Accessed January 18, 2023. https://​chnm.gmu.edu/​sur​vey/​1_​2g​nrlt​rst.html. Rosenzwieg, Roy, and David Thelen. 1998. The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life. New York: Columbia University Press. White, Hayden. 1975. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-​ Century Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. White, Hayden. 1988. “Historiography and Historiophoty.” The American Historical Review 93, no. 5 (December): 1193–​1199. https://​doi.org/​10.2307/​1873​534. White, Hayden. 1990. The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. White, Hayden. 2022. The Ethics of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory 1998–​2007, edited by Robert Doran. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

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PART II

Genres and modes

4 PATTERNS OF REALITY Ernesto Peña and Claire Ahn

Introduction In October of 2016, the topic “Fake News” started trending in Google searches worldwide. The interest in the term peaked in February 2017, then again in January 2018 and October 2018, reaching its highest point of interest so far in March of 2020, which coincided with the first recorded cases of COVID-​19 in the United States. Besides these specific spikes, the interest in fake news, as inferred by Google searches, has remained fairly stable (“Google Trends” n.d.b.). For some, this is a sign that the Western media-​sphere has been irreparably damaged (Brooks 2019; Ripley 2021), with social media often viewed as either the single culprit, or at least as a considerable contributing factor (Brown 2021; Escalante 2020). However, this narrative of “blaming social media” provides the wrong impression that social media (and not media in general) has issues with reliability (Allcott and Gentzkow 2017). The focus on finding a solution for what is perceived to be exclusively a social media problem could distract from the historical relationship that media has had with deception, including deception-​for-​profit, an alleged feature of the current fake news crisis. Could it be instead that the state of the modern mediatic landscape is just the current manifestation of an ongoing relationship between deception and mass media? The 1830s saw the emergence of the penny press in the US as a tool for reaching broader readership than the regular newspapers, and became a popular, more preferred mode of communication. Soon after, the penny press became a common outlet for hoaxes. One of the better known is the “Great Moon hoax,” an elaborate six-​part series of articles published in The New York Sun in 1835 that reported the discovery of life on the moon (Museum of hoaxes n.d.). The Sun allegedly resorted to publishing these kinds of stories to draw attention in an increasingly competitive market, a practice that seemed to prove itself fairly effective. Less than ten years later, The New York Sun, considered a reputable newspaper, would publish another hoax, this time perpetrated by author Edgar Allan Poe. The story was about a transatlantic crossing in a hot air balloon. Poe allegedly enjoyed producing fake accounts that resembled actual news simply to prove how easy it was to deceive the public (Bryant 1996; Fash 2020). Some decades later, in the late 1890s, the competition between New York World and New York Journal resulted in producing the term Yellow Journalism (Frisken 2020), yet another manifestation of using deception as a tool

DOI: 10.4324/9781003263234-7

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for driving profit. The purpose of these historic examples is to draw attention to and invite serious reflection as to how deception has played and continues to play a historical role in the media. In this chapter, we engage in this reflection in two ways. First, we discuss the effect that realism (or the perception thereof) has on our relationship with media. We explore the correlation between perceived realism and profit and the way realism has become more a matter of genre than a portrayal of factuality. To do this, we relate the history of the “based on a true story” disclaimer and the effect it has had on viewers and audiences. Second, we discuss the way genre is effectively used to deceive. To do so, we bring the case of a series of television shows and the reaction that such shows elicited in their audience.

Takako’s stories November 2021 marked the 20th anniversary of Takako Konishi’s death. One could argue that the account of the last days of Takako is as unusual as the fictional story that emerged after the tragic events that surrounded her demise. In 2001, Takako flew from Tokyo to Minneapolis, a city that she had visited a few times before. From there, she travelled to a couple of cities within the United States before her final destination at Detroit Lakes, Minnesota, where she committed suicide. Her itinerary included the cities of Bismarck and Fargo, in North Dakota. While in Bismarck, a trucker offered to drive Takako to the local police station assuming she needed help. Once at the station, communication between officers and Takako was impossible because she did not speak English and no one in the police station spoke Japanese. The officers later reported that Takako did mention Fargo (located 315 km from Bismarck) and showed a hand-​drawn map that one of the officers interpreted as an attempt to depict the location of a suitcase with one million dollars that would have been buried in the area by Jerry Lundegaard, Steve Buscemi’s character from Fargo (1996), a film released five years prior. The officers reportedly tried to explain to Takako that the suitcase was not really there, but she did not seem to care. Takako was then taken to Fargo’s police station, and was able to continue her journey. Her body was later discovered by a hunter at Detroit Lakes. The interpretation that Bismarck’s police station personnel gave to Takako’s actions made its way to the pages of the Daily Telegraph (Fenton 2001), from where it spread to other outlets, becoming an urban legend. Over the next 20 years, Takako’s stories (both real and fictional) have been revisited several times. To name a few: a year and a half after her death, The Guardian published a follow-​up, shedding light on the real events surrounding Takako’s death (Berczeller 2003). Ten years later, the reporter from The Guardian who corrected the record on Takako’s final days released an independent documentary about her tragic story (Berczeller 2013). A year after, in 2014, an award winning film titled Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter was released at the Sundance Festival. The plot of this film is based on the urban legend that arose after Takako’s death. In October of 2021 (a month short of the 20th anniversary of her death), the aptly titled podcast Cautionary Tales used Takako’s stories to reflect on the speed with which we accept certain narratives as true, depending on how they are presented (Halford n.d.).

A true story It is not a coincidence that the story of Takako was featured in a podcast called Cautionary Tales. Among other things, that is exactly what it is. It is just not immediately clear what it is cautionary about or for whom. For those unfamiliar with the film Fargo, the suggested explanation for Takako’s actions provided by the police officers from Bismarck might seem casually racist or 58

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sexist. Why would anyone think that the most logical reason for a Japanese woman to visit Fargo, North Dakota was naivete when no other explanation was really at hand? The reason—​if not a reasonable justification—​might lie within the film itself. The opening scene of Fargo includes the following lines: THIS IS A TRUE STORY. The events depicted in this film took place in Minnesota in 1987. At the request of the survivors, the names have been changed. Out of respect for the dead, the rest has been told exactly as it occurred. (Coen and Coen 1996) Fargo borrowed from a few real-​life narrative details, but the film in its entirety is certainly not based on a true story (Bradley 2016). However, this disclaimer could have aided in its impact on popular culture. A study conducted by Valsesia, Diehl, and Nunez in 2017 demonstrates that although these kinds of disclaimers have no impact when typical, more “traditional” stories are being told, they tend to improve the overall evaluation and perceived plausibility in atypical stories (Valsesia, Diehl, and Nunez 2017); stories such as Fargo and Takako’s. The disclaimer in Fargo might have failed in convincing the aforementioned police officer that the story was true, but it could have made it easier for him to assume it was plausible enough to convince others. Is Takako’s story then a cautionary tale about credulity? Is this a lesson for the Bismarck Police Department? Maybe for the press who took the story from the officers at face value? Could it be a cautionary reminder for moviegoers? Like many other films, the end credits of Fargo include the following sentence: “The persons and events portrayed in this production are fictitious, no similarity to actual persons, living or dead, is intended or should be inferred.” This paragraph, a protection measure against libel established after the 1934 film Rasputin and the Empress, is a staple of realistic yet fictional works of cinematography (Davis 1988). Alternatively, the true story disclaimer is merely a narrative ploy. Common sense could suggest that such a device was initially used in documentary works just to be eventually co-​opted by works of fiction. This would explain the increased plausibility effect reported by Valsesia, Diehl, and Nunez. And yet, it seems that “based on a true story” was born from and has always been part of the tool-​kit of fiction storytelling. Author Jim Knipfel suggests that the “based on a true story” trope might have had its early origins in the American TV series from 1959, The Untouchables (Knipfel 2019), based on the book with the same title by Eliot Ness with Oscar Fraley (Ness and Fraley 1957). The credits of the broadcast included the line “Based on the novel The Untouchables by Eliot Ness and Oscar Fraley.” One could argue that because the novel was introduced as a first-​hand account by Eliot Ness himself, the idea that the work was based on a true story (although heavily embellished) was implied throughout the book. It seems that the phrase “a true story” was explicitly used for the first time in The Legend of Boggy Creek (1972), a low-​budget independent film by Charles B. Pierce that became a blockbuster and eventually reached a cult film status. The Legend of Boggy Creek is a faux-​documentary (defined as a work of fiction presented with the narrative and visual conventions of a documentary) about the Fouke Monster, a mythical creature that reportedly attacked inhabitants of the city of Fouke, Arkansas in 1971 (Thompson 2017). The film consists mostly of interviews with eye-​witnesses and reenactments, a format that allegedly inspired the creators of The Blair Witch Project (1999). When asked in an interview about the late Charles B. Pierce’s decision to include the true story disclaimer, his daughter responded: “He really did believe that the Fouke monster existed, so he thought that the documentary form best 59

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suited it. I think he also knew it would be scarier if people had to consider the possible truth of everything” (Kremer 2017). The box-​office success of the film (US$25 million from a budget of $160,000) encouraged some filmmakers to embrace the creature feature sub-​genre and, for some others, to adopt the true story disclaimer for fictional works. Subsequent projects, both by Pierce and others, reaffirmed the effectiveness of the phrase true story to boost viewership and its status as an artefact of fiction, as a phrase used to convey genre as opposed to content. Perhaps the Coen brothers said it better when questioned about the use of the phrase “a true story” in Fargo: “We wanted to make a movie just in the genre of a true story movie. You don’t have to have a true story to make a true story movie” (Bradley 2016). Roughly a year after The Legend of Boggy Creek, the allegedly semi-​autobiographical film Walking Tall (1973) was released to the public. While the opening credits of the film include the phrase “A motion picture suggested by certain events in the life of Bufford Pusser…”, advertisers ramped up this claim in print media campaigns to: “the powerful and true story of sheriff Bufford Pusser…” This production was also considered a huge financial success. A year later, Macon County Line (1974) was released. Macon County Line was an interesting case for the effectiveness of the true story claim in cinema. Allegedly, the film was first released with little success only to be taken out of circulation and then re-​released with the following line in the opening scene: “This story is true, only the names and places have been changed.” After being re-​released, the film became the most profitable film of that year (Nash Information Services n.d.). These examples and available research suggest that for stories “low in typicality,” the perception of truth sells (e.g., Valsesia, Diehl, and Nunez 2017).

Real and true But what made Takako’s urban legend realistic enough to be perceived as true? Various studies conducted during the early 2000s shed some light on the tools and constructs that many individuals used to assess how realistic a story can be. In 2003, Hall conducted a qualitative study with young adults that aimed to identify realism in media text through different means of evaluation (Hall 2003). Although all the factors studied by Hall could be considered subjective, it could also be argued that some of them, such as plausibility, typicality, and factuality, are seemingly closer to the characteristics of the event being portrayed in media than to the individual interpretation, such as emotional involvement, narrative consistency, and perceptual persuasiveness. There is, of course, a difference between realistic stories and true, factual stories. Fictional stories can be more or less realistic depending on how they are delivered. Alternatively, the perceived realism of a true story could be affected by an unrealistic animation technique or a poor casting decision, for instance. Yet, we could argue that true stories are factual whether they are presented realistically or unrealistically. Based on this understanding, the statement that a story is true in the opening credits of a film is merely an overt and explicit attempt to instil realism into a story, even (or maybe particularly) if such a story is fictional. We would argue that more often than not the attempts to instil realism in fictional narratives tend to be more discreet and subtle but still recognizable. Research has shown that by the age of seven, children can infer factuality from cues derived from the format of the media. In a study conducted by Huston and a group of researchers in 1995 (Huston et al. 1995), a total of 97 children between the ages of eight and almost ten years old were asked to watch and assess factuality between three versions of the same story. The original, “Love, Susan” was the 15th of a 30-​episode series titled Inside/​Out, produced by National Instructional Television. The episode in question is a realistic dramatization of an emotional event involving a child and their parents (National Instructional Television Center 1973). This story was 60

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then adapted to resemble both a documentary and a drama. Using the original story as a control, the researchers asked the children participants to assess the factuality of the three stories using a 4-​point Likert scale. The children found the documentary version to be more factual than the original and the dramatic version. If the only difference between the three versions was the way the story was presented, it seemed as though the children drew their conclusions about the factuality of the story from the formal aspects of each version. A purported reason for this phenomenon would be shared in 2007 via a study conducted at the Université du Québec à Montréal. In their study, Pouliot and Cowen start by defining and contrasting common formal features in documentary genres and fiction films (Pouliot and Cowen 2007). These formal differences included visual features such as an observed prominence of close shots for narrative fiction and long shots for documentaries. The researchers also listed auditory features, such as the prominence of studio-​ created sounds in narrative genres, in contrast with location sounds more commonly found in documentary genres. These factors, among others, would have played a crucial role in convincing the children in Huston’s study of either the factuality or the fictionality of the media presented to them. In their study, Pouliot and Cowen explain that both genres (documentaries and fiction) demand a certain kind of mindset from the spectators: “Fiction calls for suspension of disbelief about the reality status of the information; documentaries call for activation of belief in the reality of what is presented…” (255). Suspension of disbelief and activation of belief do not seem very different from each other; in fact, Worth questions the idea of suspending disbelief, which gives a misplaced sense of agency to the viewer by going against their instincts. Worth clarifies: “When engaging with fiction, I do not suspend a critical faculty, but rather I exercise a creative faculty. I do not actively suspend disbelief—​I actively create belief” (Worth 2004, 447). In How Mental Systems Believe, Gilbert concludes that we tend to believe what we see because “it would be expensive, even foolhardy” to constantly question what our eyes present to us; we believe unless something suggests to us otherwise (Gilbert 1991, 117). And that something seems to come from our own experience of the world and the models we create about it. In the words of Busselle and Bilandzic: Realism judgments can be thought of as a judgment of the consistency between the mental models representing a narrative that are constructed as part of a narrative experience (i.e., story world, character models, and situation models) and a viewer’s appropriate, counterpart real life and media experiences as reflected in schemas and stereotypes. (Busselle and Bilandzic 2008, 267) What this means is that, from as early as seven years old, we are constantly comparing the models that we built from our own experience of the world against new experiences. Our first instinct is to believe these new experiences are real unless there is an indication that such experiences do not fit in our models. It could be the case that, when presented with fiction, our ability to create belief allows us to enjoy it without becoming overly critical and, when presented with documentaries, our ability to create belief allows us to accept the early signals of realism as conclusive. Takako’s urban legend could have become viral because if our experience with the mainstream press and police have been positive, our models tell us that these institutions are trustworthy and there is no indication of the contrary. This would be a typical case of an ethos-​based appeal in Aristotelian rhetoric (Aristotle 1964), a persuasive line of thought based mostly or exclusively on the character of a subject; what Booth calls “the entertainer’s (rhetorical) stance” (Booth 1963, 144). Fargo fits with the models of fictional stories until that model was disrupted by the true story disclaimer. This disruption might have not been enough to instil realism, but it could have been enough to instil 61

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doubt in the ability of others to identify such disruption. Of course, one could rightfully argue that mental models are personal and individual and, therefore, not generalizable. However, the character of genres as conventional models certainly mediates our response to certain kinds of media. Now, if the only condition for us to believe a media event to be real (whether such event is real or not) is for that event to fit our mental or conventional models of what is real or, rather, for those models to remain undisturbed in the face of other events, it seems imperative to reflect on the role of genre and the underlying patterns that make such events realistic for us.

Mermaids: a case study The case of Mermaids: The Body Found (2012; hereinafter Mermaids) and Mermaids: The New Evidence (2013; hereinafter The New Evidence) might be one of the most compelling for the effect that genre can have on perceived realism and belief. Mermaids is a faux-​documentary released in 2012 that introduces the idea of the mythological mermaid (half-​human, half-​fish hybrid creatures) as real and currently living in the oceans. The New Evidence is a follow-​up to the original. The plot of Mermaids revolves around the discovery of the body of a mermaid, washed up on a shoreline in the United States. The body is then examined to determine its morphological features and evolutionary traits and an alleged cover-​up by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is unearthed in the process. The release of Mermaids and The New Evidence were riddled with controversy and criticism. Critics pointed to the lack of clarity around the fictional nature of the content. Yet, the two faux-​documentaries still appeared to convince so many viewers that Snopes.com and NOAA deemed it necessary to debunk the existence of mermaids (Mikkelson 2012; National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration 2012). Some of the harsher criticism included denouncing the shows as becoming exemplars of the declining quality of science television content and that by engaging in deception, the shows contributed to the erosion of trust in the authority of government and scientific institutions (Switek 2012; Thaler 2016). Despite the criticism, these shows were a massive financial success for the Animal Planet Channel incentivizing the release of similar productions over the upcoming years (Glover 2013; Hibberd 2013). The formula that Mermaids and The New Evidence followed was not serendipitous. It was the product of the evolution between two identifiable genres that occurred in front of the audience of scientific television shows over a span of ten years prior to the production of Mermaids. After Man: A Zoology of the Future is the first of a trilogy of books about speculative evolution (Dixon 1981). The author, Dougal Dixon, is considered the founder of the modern speculative evolution movement, which has gained momentum among writers and illustrators since the early 1980s when the book After Man was published (e.g., “Speculative Evolution Wiki” n.d.). The general notion of speculative evolution is certainly not new, Dixon himself refers to H.G. Wells’ Time Machine as the inspiration for his early work but his perceived authority in the field is certainly undeniable (Naish 2014). In 2003, Animal Planet and Discovery Channel released The Future is Wild, a 13-​episode series that imagines a post-​human future after 5, 100, and 200 million years. Dougal was a consultant for the show and the design and development of the CGI creatures and habitats were heavily informed by many other experts and scientists. The Future is Wild was highly successful. The show sparked a whole platform of educational content in which Joanna Adams, who was the original creator and producer of the show, holds the position of Creative Director and Founder (“The FUTURE Is WILD” n.d.). The Future is Wild became the best-​selling “documentary” for production partner ZDF and still remains popular to this day (Denilauler 2003). The Future is Wild could have proven that speculative evolution was not only entertaining but popular and, therefore, profitable. Understandably, Animal Planet tried to replicate the formula 62

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with similar shows in the following years. For instance, Alien Planet, released in 2005, imagines not the future of the Earth but the zoology of Darwin IV, a planet conceptualized for the 1990 book Expedition by Wayne Barlowe (Barlowe 1990). In 2004, Animal Planet broadcast a show from Channel Four UK titled The Last Dragon, also known as Dragons: A Fantasy Made Real (2005) in the United States (hereinafter Dragons). On the surface, Dragons is simply an exercise of speculative evolution based on mythological zoology, possibly trying to harness the success that the book series Dragonology started to gain around the time (Drake 2003). This exercise includes a relatively reasonable origin (a flying sauropod from the Cretaceous period), a set of morphological features that would allow for flight and fire breathing (hydrogen-​producing bacteria, occasional consumption of platinum and specialized internal organs), an evolutionary timeline that would account for diversity in the species (an aquatic stage and return to land), a reproductive cycle and mating rituals (cartwheel courtship flight), etc. Just as with The Future is Wild, the dragons were created using advanced CGI techniques. However, unlike The Future is Wild, the part of the story that pertains to speculative zoology is wrapped around a seemingly plausible narrative about a rogue palaeontologist who believes in the existence of dragons, fighting a sceptical scientific community. This complementary narrative as well as other parts of the production includes human actors and follows the genre conventions of fictional storytelling outlined by Pouliot and Cowen (2007; Drake 2003). The narrator seems to leave clear the fictional nature of the account by stating almost exactly at the first-​minute mark: “This is the natural history of the most extraordinary creature that never existed” (Hardy 2005). Dragons held the viewership record for any show on Animal Planet for almost eight years, until Mermaids.

A matter of genre We would venture to say that up to the release of Mermaids, there was a consensus on the naturalistic, scientific nature of Animal Planet’s programmes. This would be the first and most obvious pattern to identify. There would be no need to maintain a critical stance toward a network known for not just realistic but overall real content. The Future is Wild was undoubtedly a project about speculative evolution. Its fictional nature was evident just by the merit of being placed in a futuristic timeline. We would argue that the appeal of speculative evolution lies in its feasibility within the boundaries of fiction. Speculation is, after all, a creative expression that uses the rules of reality, but it does not pretend to be real. It stays well within the realm of the what if? which can be translated as an interesting way of engaging in evolutionary science. In Dragons, the threshold between speculative evolution and documentary remained somehow clear. However, by offering a plausible context for the speculation in a fictional narrative format, Dragons upped the ante, making this speculation more realistic. For some, Dragons could have already been too much for the network, but we would argue that the intent was not to convince that the events presented were real, in fact, in the epilogue of the show the narrator refers to Dragons as “genre-​busting.” This is a major difference between Dragons and Mermaids. In Mermaids, whether intentional or not, the threshold between speculative fiction and documentary was overtly and arguably purposely crossed. Those familiar with both works will notice many commonalities between them. This is understandable, given that both shows were created by the same individual and broadcast by the same network. The differences, however, are convincing enough to have resulted in persuading many people of the existence of aquatic humanoids and a conspiracy to keep them hidden from humans (Iaconangelo 2013). Identifying these differences can shed light on the patterns or combinations thereof that were used to move from realism to persuasion, from realistic to real. 63

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Among the commonalities between Dragons and Mermaids, it is worth noting that, although not intentionally, both shows could have benefited from popular phenomena that brought the creatures around which the faux-​documentaries revolve to collective awareness. In the case of Dragons, the phenomenon could have been the first book of the Dragonology series. In the case of Mermaids, it could have been a scene from the fourth instalment of the Pirates of the Caribbean movie series On Stranger Tides (2011) that features a group of mermaids attacking a small contingent of pirates on a boat. A simple search of the term mermaids in Google Trends between the years 2010 and 2012 worldwide shows a spike in the week of May 22 to May 28 of 2011, at the time of the release of the film (“Google Trends” n.d.a.). After the spike, the interest in the topic, based on Google searches, remained relatively high until the release of Mermaids almost exactly one year after, in May of 2012. Although this is not a persuasive pattern in itself, it could have contributed to perceived plausibility via reiteration effect, a psychological phenomenon in which confidence in an event is boosted through repetition whether the event is true or not (Hasher, Goldstein, and Toppino 1977; Hertwig, Gigerenzer, and Hoffrage 1997). Both works feature mythological creatures that are allegedly common to the folklore of several cultures. This argument, a fallacy commonly known as appeal to tradition, is explicitly presented in both works as anecdotal evidence of the historical existence of the creatures. In both shows, there is a morphological analysis enabled by the discovery of a well-​preserved body. In the case of Dragons, the frozen full body of a juvenile dragon is discovered in Romania. In the case of Mermaids, the body is found in Washington state. The first notable difference is that although both shows introduce an explanation for the origin of each creature, they differ greatly in terms of level of detail and the possibility of external verification. Dragons provides a blend of fictional and real, verifiable information, all presented in the same scientific-​like context. For instance, Dragons introduces the premise of physical evidence of aerial attacks on a hypothetical tyrannosaurus rex fossilized skull exhibited in a non-​existent museum located in London. This is important because it shows that the producers of the show, which was co-​produced in the UK, could have considered potential repercussions for an existing museum in case it was named in the faux-​documentary. They might have done it to avoid litigation. In any case, the use of a fictional museum is a potential giveaway. The protagonist (one Dr. Jack Tanner, played by British actor Paul Hilton) mentions that the skull was found in Montana, which could be very plausible given that various well-​preserved fossils of tyrannosaurus rex dinosaurs have been found in the area. But none of these skulls have marks of talons in the skull as the faux-​ documentary claims, which is the basic premise of the speculative component. Mermaids, on the other hand, based the speculative component on a well-​documented hypothesis with little to no support from the academic community now known as the Aquatic Ape Hypothesis. Originally credited to marine biologist Alister Hardy more than 60 years ago (Hardy 1960), and despite the almost absolute lack of scientific recognition, the Aquatic Ape Hypothesis gained international attention in good part due to the work of writer Elaine Morgan (n.d.), who published several books on the topic. The Aquatic Ape Hypothesis entertains the idea that several morphological features in humans that are not common to apes (lack of body hair, diving reflex at birth, etc.) can be explained as vestigial evidence of a more aquatic lifestyle. The faux-​documentary also discusses a previously unidentified subaquatic acoustic phenomenon known as “the bloop” (US Department of Commerce n.d.). In Mermaids, the bloop becomes a semio-​linguistic signature of the mermaids. Moreover, the producers of Mermaids did not shy away from mentioning accredited institutions as participants in a fictional cover-​up (i.e., NOAA). This is also a matter of secondary verification. Some may believe that if the claim is that an existing institution is not discussing a controversial finding and there is no mention of such a finding on the institution’s website, it would be incorrect 64

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but possible to assume that the lack of information is evidence of a cover-​up. Evidently, shifting the burden of proof from the producers of the faux-​documentary to a scientific institution is a powerful persuasive move. In itself, the possibility of secondary verification could have conveyed a sense of realism that Dragons never did. For many, the mental models of what a real documentary is would have remained undisturbed. Although it is impossible to know for sure exactly what factors persuaded viewers to believe Mermaids to be real, we argue it is in large part because of the genre patterns employed in the faux-​ documentaries. As mentioned earlier, the format used for the narrative component of Dragons follows the conventions of a fictional work. In Mermaids, the story is presented using all the conventions of documentaries mentioned by Pouliot and Cowen (2007) but also many others observed in other formats that tend to be associated with real content such as newscasts and reality TV. Mermaids starts with a cold open portraying a high-​intensity sequence with an omniscient, male voice-​over. The voice-​over provides a statement from one of the protagonists about how they never believed in conspiracy theories before. This is a clear example of a discursive device known as stake inoculation, commonly used to pre-​emptively downplay or dismiss a perception of bias in the speaker (Wiggins 2017). The statement is stated while disconnected and short clips of unstable and chaotic footage are being shown. The content of the clips is important because it speaks directly to the idea that there is a conspiracy taking place but the technique of the footage, known colloquially as shaky cam, is supposed to convey a lack of preparation and post-​production, and therefore authenticity. This is one of the main features of the sub-​genre known as “found footage” which relies heavily on specific genre conventions to persuade viewers of the authenticity of mostly fictional content (“Found Footage Film Genre” n.d.). Shaky cam was undoubtedly one of the main tools for instilling realism in The Blair Witch Project (1999), for example. The same technique is sometimes accompanied by video ageing filters to place the action at a particular time. A few seconds into the faux-​documentary, a disclaimer shows on the screen: “The scientists in this film are speaking on camera for the first time,” and these kinds of categorical disclaimers (white text over black background) that appear at different moments during the whole faux-​documentary. After the disclaimer, the main protagonist (Dr. Paul Robertson, played by actor David Evans) is then shown at the filming location in a behind-​the-​scenes-​like format. Maybe in an attempt to convey amateurishness (and therefore authenticity), certain elements that are usually off-​camera, such as the clap-​board and the lighting equipment, are visible in the shot. By the time the title card appears, the viewer has been informed that a team of scientists uncovered a conspiracy theory that involves mermaids and that the scientists will be telling the story themselves. The first scene after the title card is authentic footage from an incident with beached whales. A narrator places the events on the April 4, 2004 as “the greatest whale beaching in U.S. history” which is actually false. The plot introduces a link between beached whales and “sonar weapons” used by the navy. This claim is partially legitimate as there had been legal action taken against the US navy for unintendedly harming whales with mid-​frequency sonar (NRDC 2005). To illustrate this part of the plot, Mermaids uses a subtle but remarkably persuasive technique: presenting a fictional event as a reenactment (hereinafter reenactment), using a different actor than the one allegedly re-​telling the story (hereinafter confessional). This required casting two different sets of actors for the roles of Dr. Paul Richardson and Dr. Rebecca Davis, two of the main protagonists, as well as a couple of other actors, one set for the confessional scenes and one for the reenactments. Understandably, the reenactment follows the conventions of fictional narratives. The most obvious of these conventions is the lack of engagement with the camera, a stark difference from the confessional interviews with the “real” scientists, who always face the camera and address the viewer directly, a common pattern in presenting survival accounts in documentaries. During the 65

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confessional sections, the actors project an unrehearsed, hesitant voice, reinforcing the sense of authenticity. Around the ten-​minute mark, an individual is shown facing the camera. Their face and voice have been anonymized through lighting effects and a pitch-​altering audio filter, a pattern commonly used in TV shows and documentaries to protect the identity of those who agree to speak under conditions of anonymity. A few minutes later, a group of images are presented as evidence of spear-​like objects found in marine fauna across different periods of times. The images are doctored to show the spear-​like objects encrusted in fish and some of them have further visual treatment to simulate being taken in different historical moments. This is achieved by adding colour patterns common to older photographic technology, for instance, some of the images are colourized in sepia, and some others present the colour signature of 1970s Instamatic cameras (high contrast, visible grain, etc.). The same approach is used to introduce drawings of a mermaid skull, allegedly from the sixteenth century, presented along with authentic depictions of mermaids from various cultures and times. Assumedly fake ancient cave drawings from undisclosed locations in Egypt are also woven into the story as prehistoric evidence of human–​mermaid contact and closer to the end, video footage is intervened to resemble that from security cameras (black and white, low frame-​rate, low-​resolution video); all carefully treated to appear authentic. Mermaids also fabricates the account of a German fisherman that alleges to have witnessed a strange creature on one of their trips. The actor playing the German fisherman also produces a photograph that seems to portray the silhouette of a mermaid. Finally, many of the reenactment scenes are supported by relatively convincing audio analysis and medical equipment, including computerized tomography (CT) scans, which would contribute to instilling realism by mimicking scientific shows. The New Evidence was released roughly a year after Mermaids. Whether intentionally or not, this release capitalized on the public attention that Mermaids received, shattering the already impressive record viewership established by the latter (Hibberd 2013). One could argue that in the case of The New Evidence, the release of a follow-​up was in itself a genre pattern, for it would conform with the idea of an investigative report after a major event. It would be impossible to know with certainty if Mermaids and The New Evidence were planned together or if the latter was a product of opportunity, but it has been reported that Mermaids had been in the making shortly after the release of Dragons (Little 2012). The New Evidence explores a few patterns not seen in Mermaids, many of which are worth discussing. For starters, The New Evidence is introduced as a journalistic show. The anchor of this show is news correspondent Jon Frankel, a public figure known for his work in news content, who days before the release of Mermaids won a Sports Emmy Award in the category of Outstanding Long Feature. It is interesting to note that the public profile of Jon Frankel does not reflect his participation in The New Evidence (HBO n.d.). The participation of an individual usually associated with hard news in a show staged to mimic a journalistic show, whether the content is fictional or not, could be very effective in disrupting already existing mental models. The show starts with Frankel reporting on the international response to the faux-​ documentary and recapitulating its plot. While describing the effect that the show had, he mentions specific public figures before introducing the name of Dr. Paul Robertson, the fictional marine biologist played by actor David Evans in Mermaids. Frankel proceeds to interview the character of Dr. Paul Robertson; Frankel is an actual journalist acting as himself interviewing a fictional character, a fictional marine biologist and a former employee of an actual organization (NOAA). Just as in Mermaids, the voice of the actor portraying Dr. Robertson conveys amateurishness. During the interview, footage of beached whales in Florida that occurred after the broadcast of Mermaids is shown. This event is intended to serve as evidence of the narrative of the US Navy sonar that accompanied the speculative section of Mermaids (Reuters 2012). 66

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The New Evidence revisits all the tropes of Mermaids. The Aquatic Ape Hypothesis is mentioned again, and Dr. Robertson revisits its main contentions while showing new related footage. The New Evidence also brings Shmuel Sisso, the actual mayor of the Israeli town of Kiryat Yam, to give a short interview about a US$ 1 million reward to anyone capable of producing evidence of the existence of a mermaid. This reward, an effort to bring tourism to Kiryat Yam, was established in 2009 and gained enough popularity to be covered by several media outlets (McGregor-​Wood 2009; Radford 2009). The discussion about the prize and the presence of Sisso in the show, among other references, would serve as resources of secondary verification for it only takes a simple web search to find information about the event. The next interview is with an actor playing the role of a spokesperson of the British navy denying that a video with all the features of a surveillance camera shows a mermaid which is followed by another interview with an actor playing an expert on P.T. Barnum and lastly, an interview with an actor playing Dr. Torsten Schmidt. The last scene introduces a new “never seen footage” of a mermaid. In the show, this footage allegedly proves the existence of mermaids, provoking a moratorium on all drilling licences in the area of the discovery. The news is true, the secondary evidence presented is from an article published in The Guardian on March 27, 2013. The actual article explains that the reason behind this ban was the inability of the parties to ensure safe operations given recent interventions of activist groups, Greenpeace among them (Macalister 2013). Dragons, Mermaids, and The New Evidence are only three shows in a vast number of productions that demonstrate how their real relevance can very easily be questioned. However, we would argue that these three shows represent the evolution of a formula used by a network for maximizing audiences (and ultimately profit) by using realism as a tool for deception. Some argued that this formula became inconvenient after the release of Megalodon: The Monster Shark Lives (hereinafter Megalodon, Glover 2013), a special broadcast released the same year as The New Evidence. Megalodon, just like the preceding faux-​documentaries produced by the Discovery Channel, which now includes Animal Planet, became the highest-​earning show in the history of Shark Week (Ulaby 2015). After the release of Megalodon, Discovery Channel committed to focusing on science-​based content for Shark Week (Epstein 2015). While the discussion of whether or not Discovery Channel committed to focusing on factual content is beyond the scope of this chapter; the point here is to highlight the ways in which genre patterns were used to deceive the audience.

Patterns of reality In analyzing the evolution between Dragons, Mermaids, and The New Evidence, we found patterns that are consistently used to convey realism by obfuscating or disrupting our ability as viewers to recognize fictional from non-​fictional content. Although we do not know exactly the mechanisms for which perceived realism in media has historically led to profit, we could speculate that this kind of content attracts both genuine interests from those who are persuaded by it and curiosity from those who are not. In the end, both of these motivations could lead to consumption and profit. In the following sections, we list and describe the patterns that we have identified in our analysis.

Awareness More than a pattern in itself, awareness of mediatic events could be understood as a condition. Although it is almost impossible to account for all the potential factors that could have an effect on the way audiences interact with or react to a particular mediatic event, it is not far-​fetched to 67

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assume that audiences will be more reactive to media that alludes to a recent event, either directly or indirectly. For instance, when discussing the effect of the infamous radio broadcast of Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds in the US, Heyer notes: The most frequently cited reason is that Welles’ clever use of late-​breaking news bulletins capitalized on the radio audience’s familiarity with similar updates regarding Nazi aggression in Europe. With the world on the threshold of war, anxiety regarding such bulletins was laced with a fear that the next one might indicate the start of hostilities. (Heyer 2018, 163) Awareness, in this case, could play a role in pre-​emptively amplifying the persuasive effect that some aspects of a mediatic phenomenon could have on the audiences by either fleshing out the topic of the mediatic event and contributing to the previously mentioned reiteration effect (Hertwig, Gigerenzer, and Hoffrage 1997), or by creating an association between a specific genre pattern and either fictional or non-​fictional content, in case this association was not present before.

Contextual genre patterns We also identify two different kinds of genre patterns we call contextual and content-​based, or what we will refer to as “contentual” patterns. Contextual genre patterns relate to the media format in which the event (broadcast, TV show, movie, etc.) occurs. Contextual patterns aid and support the content patterns in their persuasive purpose but do not necessarily affect the content. Probably the most important of these contextual patterns relate to the genres and reputation associated with the production company, broadcasting channel, and even physical venue where the media event in question is made public. Contemporary theories of consumerism such as the Persuasion Knowledge Model (PKM) make clear distinctions between the target of the persuasive effort (Friestad and Wright 1994), the agent, and the persuasive attempt, and tries to account for potential interplays between these three. Recent studies into the effects that deceptive communication about well-​known brands have in terms of persuasive appeal and brand trust suggest the efficacy of the PKM in representing such interplay (Chen and Cheng 2019). Contextual patterns would apply to the agent more than to the message, based on the assumption that the persuasive power of the message and the effect it has on the audience varies depending on the agent that emits such a message. If a channel has built a reputation or has associated its brand with non-​fictional content, it is more likely for audiences to use this knowledge to independently assess its nature. This sentiment and the role that contextual genre patterns play is clearly expressed by Brian Switek from Wired magazine when discussing the use of the Aquatic Ape Hypothesis (AAH) in Mermaids: “Using the AAH to explain the existence of mermaids would be a clever twist for a Star Trek episode or SyFy original movie. But this was on a self-​styled educational network” (Switek 2012). Another contextual pattern we identify is the deceptive use of references to other events and sources foreign to the content itself as resources for secondary verification. This pattern can be controlled directly by the production, as in the case of The Blair Witch Project where the producers/​actors described their own deaths on the official movie website but also listed themselves as deceased on the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) so that viewers would encounter secondary validation to these claims (Hoad 2018). Alternatively, the use of deceptive references can either allude or blatantly lead to already existing content, replicating the role that spurious correlations between unrelated events (also called illusory patterns) play in promoting belief in conspiracy theories and supernatural phenomena (van Prooijen 2018). For instance, the use of a widely reported yet 68

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discredited hypothesis such as the AAH invited viewers of Mermaids who were curious enough to conduct an online search on the term to find a wealth of information, providing a false impression that there was enough validity to make the contentions of the show credible.

Contentual genre patterns Understandably, most of the genre patterns used to obfuscate the delimitations between fiction and non-​fiction identified between Dragons, Mermaids, and The New Evidence occur within the content of the three works. These works contain several specific patterns that reinforce the idea that the stories being presented are factual. Some of these patterns focus on mimicking elements of genres that we already associate with factual information. Besides the aforementioned formal features of documentaries listed by Pouliot and Cowen (2007), there are some stable, formal genres such as newscasts or investigative reports but there are also informal ones, such as surveillance camera or phone video. Each one of these genres has its own patterns and these patterns include narrative and technical aspects that could have already been observed and assimilated by audiences. Many of these details would be obvious, such as the subject facing the camera in documentary and newscast formats and the slightly panned interview shot. Some others might be more subtle, such as the position and even the warmth and colour of the lighting. These patterns can also include camera movements customary to such genres, but they would also include the particular and often overlooked features of the cameras themselves, such as their frame rate, resolution, or grain. Some of these patterns would involve the use of known entities and individuals to convey a sense of authority but a similar effect could be acquired by using titles that convey affiliation with scientific knowledge such as “Dr.” or “Ph.D.” The use of a particular kind of language (e.g., scientific jargon) or linguistic patterns (e.g., news broadcast cadence) are tools to convey expertise but certain foreign accents can also have persuasive effects depending on the audience (Shah 2019). It would be impossible to cover all the patterns customary to genres associated to real or factual information used in the aforementioned works. It might also be pointless because media genres are in constant evolution, however, bringing attention to the level of detail that can be found in these patterns might aid in their identification and analysis.

Nested genres There is a particular feature of at least one of these works that is worth highlighting due to its novelty and potential persuasive power. Most of the research into realism and media tends to typify works in two categories: fiction and non-​fiction. At some level, the distinction between what is factual and what is not is definitely important and should leave little to no room for uncertainty. As we have discussed here, the way some of the works mentioned in this chapter circumvent this dichotomy is through using genre patterns customary to non-​fictional content to deliver fictional content. One could argue that the exercise of consciously separating genre from content would allow for a relatively straightforward analysis of both. In these works, however, the separation of genre and content is made more difficult by containing genre patterns within others. This practice, which we call here “nested genres,” is easily recognizable in Dragons, where a supposedly non-​ fictional story is told using fiction genre patterns nested in a fictional story. However, in Mermaids, these nested genres become more sophisticated and complex. For instance, while Mermaids is a fictional story told using non-​fictional genre patterns, within those patterns, there are instances of reenactments, which are commonly used to convey non-​fictional content in genre patterns customary of fiction. Although it would be impossible to know without a proper study, one could 69

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argue that these practices might have contributed, if not to persuade audiences about the scientific evidence of the existence of mermaids and a global conspiracy to hide this fact, at least to seed doubt and spark and maintain interest.

Final remarks As public perception about the reliability of media has been negatively affected over the last few years and calls for solutions become more common (Edmonds 2022; Marsh 2017), it is worth taking the time to reflect on the integral role that deception seems to have played in the moving history of media. One could argue that deception has led us to push boundaries and greatly contributed to innovating the way we tell stories. As we look for solutions to prevent the nefarious effects that deception has, it is worth discussing where we can draw the line or if we can even see the line to draw between its positive and negative effects and, even further, if it is even worth preserving the aesthetic and creative aspects of the role deception has played and currently plays in media. In this chapter, we propose studying deception from the perspective of genre, an idea that the authors have engaged with by not only drawing attention to the need to be more critical but also proposing that the production of deceptive material can serve to develop active critical analysis (Ahn and Peña 2021). We also realize and celebrate that these discussions are far from over.

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Ernesto Peña and Claire Ahn Hoad, Phil. 2018. “How We Made The Blair Witch Project.” The Guardian, May 21. www.theg​uard​ian.com/​ cult​ure/​2018/​may/​21/​how-​we-​made-​the-​blair-​witch-​proj​ect. Huston, Aletha C., John C. Wright, Mildred Alvarez, Rosemarie Truglio, Marguerite Fitch, and Suwatchara Piemyat. 1995. “Perceived Television Reality and Children’s Emotional and Cognitive Responses to Its Social Content.” Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology 16, no. 2: 231–​251. https://​doi.org/​ 10.1016/​0193-​3973(95)90034-​9. Iaconangelo, David. 2013. “Mermaid Hoax? Animal Planet Fake Documentary Angers Duped Viewers [REACTION TWEETS].” Latin Times, May 30. www.lat​inti​mes.com/​merm​aid-​hoax-​ani​mal-​pla​net-​fake-​ docu​ment​ary-​ang​ers-​duped-​view​ers-​react​ion-​twe​ets-​127​845. Knipfel, Jim. 2019. “ ‘Based on a True Story’: A History.” News-​to-​Table (blog), March 31. https://​med​ium. com/​news-​to-​table/​based-​on-​a-​true-​story-​a-​hist​ory-​f9e20​92f9​e5a. Kremer, Daniel. 2017. “The Art of the Possible: Charles B. Pierce’s Arkansas Cinema.” Filmmaker Magazine (blog), April 17. https://​filmma​kerm​agaz​ine.com/​102​185-​the-​art-​of-​the-​possi​ble-​char​les-​b-​pier​ces-​arkan​ sas-​cin​ema/​. Little, Debbie. 2012. “Mermaids: The Body Found Q&A.” New York Post, May 25. https://​nyp​ost.com/​2012/​ 05/​25/​merma​ids-​the-​body-​found-​qa/​. Macalister, Terry. 2013. “Greenland Halts New Oil Drilling Licences.” The Guardian, March 27. https://​www. theg​uard​ian.com/​world/​2013/​mar/​27/​greenl​and-​halts-​oil-​drill​ing-​licen​ces. Marsh, Hannah. 2017. “Nine Ways the Media Broke the News–​and How to Fix It.” Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, February 13. https://​reute​rsin​stit​ute.polit​ics.ox.ac.uk/​news/​nine-waysmedia-​broke-​news-​and-​how-​fix-​it. McGregor-​Wood, Simon. 2009. “Photograph Israeli Mermaid, Win $1 Million.” ABC News, August 12. https://​abcn​ews.go.com/​Tra​vel/​story?id=​8310​324&page=​1. Mikkelson, David. 2012. “FALSE: Mermaids: The Body Found.” Snopes.Com, May 29. www.sno​pes.com/​ fact-​check/​merma​ids-​the-​body-​found/​. Morgan, Elaine. n.d. “Elaine Morgan.” Accessed March 4, 2022. http://​elain​emor​gan.org/​. Museum of hoaxes. n.d. “The Great Moon Hoax.” Museum of Hoaxes. Accessed March 27, 2022. http://​hoa​ xes.org/​arch​ive/​permal​ink/​the_​grea​t_​mo​on_​h​oax. Naish, Darren. 2014. “Of After Man, The New Dinosaurs and Greenworld: An Interview with Dougal Dixon.” Scientific American Blog Network, April 4. https://​blogs.sci​enti​fica​meri​can.com/​tetra​pod-​zool​ ogy/​of-​after-​man-​the-​new-​dinosa​urs-​and-​gre​enwo​rld-​an-​interv​iew-​with-​dou​gal-​dixon/​. Nash Information Services. n.d. “Macon County Line (1974)–​Financial Information.” The Numbers. Accessed January 11, 2022. www.the-​numb​ers.com/​movie/​Macon-​Cou​nty-​Line. National Instructional Television Center. 1973. “Love, Susan.” National Instructional Television. www.yout​ ube.com/​watch?v=​uJJM​SUFl​bTo. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. 2012. “Are Mermaids Real?” NOAA, June 30. https://​ ocean​serv​ice.noaa.gov/​facts/​merma​ids.html. Ness, Eliot, and Oscar Fraley. 1957. The Untouchables. New, York: Messner. NRDC. 2005. “Navy Sued over Harm to Whales from Mid-​Frequency Sonar.” NRDC, October 19. www. nrdc.org/​media/​2005/​051​019. Pouliot, Louise, and Paul S. Cowen. 2007. “Does Perceived Realism Really Matter in Media Effects?” Media Psychology 9, no. 2: 241–​259. https://​doi.org/​10.1080/​152132​6070​1285​819. Radford, Benjamin. 2009. “Mermaid Sightings Claimed in Israel.” Livescience.Com, August 13. www.live​ scie​nce.com/​5642-​merm​aid-​sighti​ngs-​clai​med-​isr​ael.html. Reuters. 2012. “21 Whales Beach Selves in Florida, at Least Two Die.” NBC News, September 1. www.nbcn​ ews.com/​id/​wbna4​8872​555. Ripley, Amanda. 2021. “Can the News Be Fixed?” The Atlantic, May 18. www.thea​tlan​tic.com/​ideas/​arch​ive/​ 2021/​05/​local-​news-​media-​trust-​americ​ans/​618​895/​. Shah, Amee P. 2019. “Why Are Certain Accents Judged the Way They Are? Decoding Qualitative Patterns of Accent Bias.” Advances in Language and Literary Studies 10, no. 3: 128. https://​doi.org/​10.7575/​aiac. alls.v.10n.3p.128. “Speculative Evolution Wiki.” n.d. Accessed February 28, 2022. https://​spec-​evo.fan​dom.com/​wiki/​Spe​cula​ tive​_​Evo​luti​on_​W​iki. Switek, Brian. 2012. “Mermaids Embodies the Rotting Carcass of Science TV.” Wired, May 31. www.wired. com/​2012/​05/​merma​ids-​embod​ies-​the-​rott​ing-​carc​ass-​of-​scie​nce-​tv/​.

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Patterns of reality Thaler, Andrew David. 2016. “The Politics of Fake Documentaries.” Slate, August 31. https://​slate.com/​tec​ hnol​ogy/​2016/​08/​the-​last​ing-​dam​age-​of-​fake-​docume​ntar​ies-​like-​merma​ids-​the-​body-​found.html. “The FUTURE Is WILD.” n.d. Accessed February 28, 2022. www.thef​utur​eisw​ild.com/​. Thompson, Amy Michelle. 2017. “Fouke Monster.” Encyclopedia of Arkansas, February 28. https://​enc​yclo​ pedi​aofa​rkan​sas.net/​entr​ies/​fouke-​mons​ter-​2212/​. Ulaby, Neda. 2015. “After Sketchy Science, Shark Week Promises to Turn Over a New Fin.” NPR, July 6. www.npr.org/​2015/​07/​06/​420326​546/​after-​sket​chy-​scie​nce-​shark-​week-​promi​ses-​to-​turn-​over-​a-​new-​fin. US Department of Commerce, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. n.d. “What Is the Bloop?” Accessed March 8, 2022. https://​ocean​serv​ice.noaa.gov/​facts/​bloop.html. Valsesia, Francesca, Kristin Diehl, and Joseph C. Nunes. 2017. “Based on a True Story: Making People Believe the Unbelievable.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 71 (July): 105–​110. https://​doi. org/​10.1016/​j.jesp.2017.03.001. van Prooijen, Jan-​Willem van, Karen M. Douglas, and Clara De Inocencio. 2018. “Connecting the Dots: Illusory Pattern Perception Predicts Belief in Conspiracies and the Supernatural.” European Journal of Social Psychology 48, no. 3: 320–​335 (April). https://​doi.org/​10.1002/​ejsp.2331. Wiggins, Sally. 2017. Discursive Psychology: Theory, Method and Applications. London: SAGE Publications Ltd. https://​doi.org/​10.4135/​978147​3983​335. Worth, Sarah E. 2004. “Fictional Spaces.” The Philosophical Forum 35, no. 4 (December): 439–​455. https://​ doi.org/​10.1111/​j.0031-​806X.2004.00184.x.

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5 REMEDIATION, TRAUMA, AND “PREPOSTEROUS HISTORY” IN DOCUMENTARY FILM Robert Burgoyne

They Shall Not Grow Old (2018) has been lavishly praised for its spectacular remediation of archival footage from the First World War—​its conversion of scratched, faded, and deteriorating celluloid into a digital pastiche of period-​accurate colours, sounds, and life-​like movement. It has also, however, been roundly criticized both for its exclusive focus on the Western Front, depicting a fighting force consisting solely of White male British soldiers, as well as for its frequent, imaginative interpolations of digital elements, including the substitution of background scenery and the painting in of colours, such as a red and gold sunset, that were not suggested in the original film footage. These two critical objections apparently follow from very different premises. On the one hand, the film has been faulted for not representing the larger, global story of the First World War—​for being too narrow in its perspective. On the other hand, They Shall Not Grow Old has been criticized for being too imaginative, too free with its digital artistry. Both critical objections, however, stem from a similar orientation: both see the film as falling short of the goal of accurately re-​presenting a past reality, a reality that is imagined to be preserved, in all its testamentary force, in the archives of the Imperial War Museum. In this chapter, I will attempt to frame They Shall Not Grow Old in a different way. Francesco Casetti, in an online discussion of First World War film footage, offered a striking observation concerning early documentary film that I feel provides a good starting place for analysis. Once a camera is in an environment, he argued, the environment becomes cinematic. The presence of the camera on the battlefield changes the field itself. The First World War battlefield, he further maintained, ought to be thought of as a mediascape (Casetti 2020). Casetti’s insight, in my view, provides a suggestive way of approaching the textual and historical questions raised by the complex reframing that They Shall Not Grow Old conducts. I will begin by summarizing the two lines of critical response I have adumbrated in the previous paragraphs, arguing that they are both based on a particular concept of the archive and its ostensibly veridical relation to historical representation. Both lines of critique assume that archival images are foundational, and that they have primacy in terms of how we can accurately understand the past. The first objection, that the film is too narrow in its orientation, concerns the fact that They Shall Not Grow Old reinforces and preserves the dominant cultural memory of the First World War in its most sacrosanct form. With its limited focus on the fighting on the Western Front, and

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DOI: 10.4324/9781003263234-8

Remediation, trauma, and “preposterous history”

its almost exclusive concentration on White British soldiers, Jackson’s film, the argument goes, simply brackets out the experience of hundreds of thousands of colonial troops—​Indian, African, and Chinese soldiers who contributed to the fighting on the Western Front, and who fought in other theatres of war around the world. Moreover, Jackson has all but eliminated the contribution of women to the war, whose role as nurses, munitions workers, cryptographers, truck drivers, and messengers has recently been the subject of extensive historical recovery. Jackson has said that he wished to paint a picture of war that would be universal, “generic,” and where the contributions of different races, ethnicities, and genders in different battlefronts could be subsumed into the one story (Jackson 2018a). For Jackson, evidently, the universal representation of The Great War is crystallized in the image of the White male British soldier. In the words of historian Santanu Das, the filmmaker thus erases “the macabre cosmopolitanism of the trenches” (Das 2019, 1776). The technical wizardry of the film, Das writes, was used: to reinforce a narrative that had dominated and distorted our view of the war for decades… these [non-​white] men and the extra-​European theatres were gradually airbrushed out of history as war memory crystallized around the Western Front in a skewed Eurocentric narrative of global conflict. Jackson’s film is symptomatic of “the wider sea of amnesia that still surrounds these islands of Eurocentric memory in popular culture” (1773). Das’ critique, echoed by several others, faults Jackson for not looking harder into the archives of the Imperial War Museum, the source for all the film’s images, where ample visual material detailing the contributions of a wide population of colonial subjects and where an abundant visual history of women’s contributions to the war can be found. A much more representative history, which takes notice of the impressive new scholarship focusing on the global nature of The Great War and on the importance of highly skilled colonial troops and women to its success, could have been produced from the holdings of the Museum. On the face of it, Das’ argument is unassailable. If we accept his avowal that the Imperial War Museum has an extensive visual record of the efforts of colonial troops in the First World War, as well as the contributions of women on the various war fronts and on the home front, his objections hit home. I am sympathetic to this line of criticism. But what I would like to highlight here is something else: the phrase, “airbrushed out of history,” a phrase that reveals more than might be initially apparent. For one, it communicates an undertone of anxiety concerning visual media in relation to the past, as if the referent—​history itself—​were vulnerable to erasure—​not only by way of the dominant culture’s mythmaking concerning the Western Front, but even more so, by the overwhelming visual authority, the technical wizardry of contemporary film. If we unpack the metaphor a bit, it suggests that the past now exists mainly in its visual representations, or at least, that visual representation now controls what we know of the past, a level of authority, control—​ and threat—​that has been augmented and amplified by digital media. Where D.N. Rodowick once argued that “the primary sense of the [celluloid] photograph is not to represent objects, but rather to transcribe historical events,” the role of transcription has given way, in Das’ revealing metaphor, to digital manipulation (Rodowick 2007, 55). To “airbrush out of history” implies that the visual record and the historical past are not only deeply entwined, but that they are coterminous. Despite his evident intentions, Das’ metaphor of airbrushing, almost like a slip of the tongue that reveals more than was intended, echoes the conjecture set forth by Casetti—​that the presence of the camera changes the battlefield, that the battlefield may best be thought of as a mediascape.

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The second line of critical objection, that Peter Jackson, for all the research and care he gave the project, was too free and inventive with the digital transformation of the film, hinges on the question of what some feel are the proper limits of restoration. While the goals of restoration are generally understood as the attempt to bring the film to a condition that replicates the quality of the original release prints, with the rise of digital technology that goal has sometimes been exceeded. As one archivist states, with digital technology, it is now possible to restore a film to imitate not only what the first, contemporaneous spectators of the work saw, but what the cinematographer or camera operator saw as they were shooting the film (Bonnard 2016, 140). Jackson apparently endorses this view; They Shall Not Grow Old, he has frequently said in interviews, conveys trench warfare in the colours and three dimensions that the soldiers themselves would have seen it. Some critics, however, feel differently. As Jan-​Christopher Horak writes about the film—​and about the argument of many restoration specialists who claim that they are only doing what the original filmmakers would have tried if they had the tools available—​“such efforts take a work out of history, and into an a-​historical no-​man’s-​land” (Horak 2019). He continues: many of these changes –​ including 3-​D, colorization, grain reduction, sharpening of the image, cropping the image, and conforming the film to sound speed –​are a matter of public record and have been commented upon favourably… . More troubling, given that Jackson is insisting on calling his film a restored documentary, is the outright falsification of images… whole parts of images were removed and then repainted, e.g., in one scene houses were removed and replaced with green trees to make one composite more pleasing. According to David Walsh [head of restoration for the project] virtually every scene includes some redesigning of the actual image. The colour compositing supervisor for the film, Russell McCoy confides that “There were giant holes where there would literally be frames missing, where we would have to rebuild them… by recreating anything we had to or basically painting” (quoted in O’Falt 2018). And as Tanine Allison points out, in a forceful critique, the vibrant red blood covering dead or injured bodies and the colorful red, yellow, and blue wildflowers visible in many shots were almost certainly painted-​in additions that have little or no presence in the original footage… . Modern-​day filmmakers become the ones in control of the archival image, rather than relying on it to speak the truth of the past on its own. (Allison 2021, 12) While I am sympathetic to both these arguments, they each derive their authority from what I think is a limiting and somewhat questionable perspective, the notion of archival materials as a type of testamentary document, the baseline for representation, the foundational and unerring truth of the past that predicates all later symbolic expression. Archival images, in both critical arguments, are seen to possess both a temporal and an epistemological priority. Thus, Jackson’s film deviates from the “truth” of the archive both in its selective focus on White British soldiers on the Western Front, as well as in its digital manipulation of what is seen as an originary visual transcription of historical events. As Allison writes, contemporary filmmakers choose to control the archival images, rather than relying on the archive “to speak the truth of the past on its own” (12). Although the archive, as she details elsewhere in her study, is already a highly selective 76

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assemblage of materials, shaped by specific historical narratives suffused with cultural hierarchies and bias, it is nevertheless still regarded, at some level, as holding the veridical records of the past. The difficulty I have with these critiques of the film, notwithstanding the important historical and technical knowledge they provide, is that they ignore much of the film’s semiotic richness. Tethered to an idea of the archive as the source of image-​truth, both arguments—​that the work is too constrained in its narrow rehearsal of the “primal scenes” of First World War memory, and that it is too inventive with its digital interpolations—​set the film’s textuality to the side, as if its use of close-​up, repetition, slow-​motion, and visual–​sonic counterpoint were unimportant to its larger project of historical representation, its project of historical thinking. In hopes of expanding the discussion of the film, I would like to consider They Shall Not Grow Old in an entirely different light. What if we consider the film not as re-​presenting, accurately or not, a past reality, nor as restoring and reanimating the images of the past, but as a form of quotation? What if we think of the film not primarily in terms of original sources, which it embellishes or deviates from, but in terms of mimesis? Not as offering an actual past reality to our eyes but as producing a reality effect, along the lines discussed by Roland Barthes? If we take Casetti’s suggestion that the presence of the camera changes the battlefield, that the field itself becomes cinematic, it may be possible to set to one side the ideal of historical veridiction as a property of archival images and substitute instead the terms of textual analysis in reading the film, a move that opens a number of new perspectives. The work of Mieke Bal on quotation in painting is instructive. One of her fundamental points in Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History is that quoting the past changes the past—​or at least changes how we know it. The first sentence of her book puts it plainly: “Quoting Caravaggio changes his work forever.” She continues, Like any form of representation, art is inevitably engaged with what came before it, and that engagement is an active reworking. It specifies what and how our gaze sees. Hence the work performed by later stages obliterates the older images as they were before that intervention and creates new versions of old images instead. (Bal 1999, 1) Bal’s idea of quotation as an “active reworking,” and as the obliteration of older images as they appeared in their earlier iterations, provides a powerful description of Jackson’s project in They Shall Not Grow Old. His recasting of archival images—​adding colour, three dimensions, smoothed movement, and more—​changes our ways of viewing that past. Moreover, the archival images Jackson worked with can no longer be seen as they were before; we must take the new intervention into account. There is more, however. The act of quotation, of reframing, does not simply obliterate older ways of seeing, it also brings the past into a dynamic dialogue with the present. The act of reframing in the present multiplies the meanings and the contexts that are brought into view. As Bal further writes, Historians of art and literature have long been aware of the inevitable screen that later art puts between the historian’s gaze and the older works. But instead of considering this a problem, a liability of history, I have decided to explore this inevitability as an enrichment of our cultural habitat as a whole. (7) In her view, the customary idea that the earlier, more ancient works of the past are primary, and have a defining influence on the present, should be reversed: it is the temporally later quotations 77

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and appropriations of the works of the past that have primacy; what is chronologically “first” comes to us as an after-​effect of more recent, later work. This reversal of the sense of the “pre” and the “post” is captured in the subtitle of her work, “preposterous history.” Reorienting our approach to the past, and in particular to the archive, can have a salutary effect: as Bal writes, it “makes historical art more important because it keeps it alive and does not isolate it in a remote past, buried under concerns we do not share” (14). Parts of this argument, of course, are already incorporated in certain genres of film and contemporary critical practice. As Ian Christie argues in his review of They Shall Not Grow Old, the pseudo-​technical criticism of the film is misguided. Lamenting commentary on the film that concentrates on things like the “wrong colours” for blood, flesh, and grass, he writes: “Few filmmakers consider archival material a sacred text. Instead they treat it as a ‘second nature’, material traces of the past that are available for contemporary renegotiation” (Christie 2018). Christie cites various types of filmmaking as example—​the compilation film, the found footage film, and the essay film. I would add the videographic essay to this list of moving-​image works where archival footage is freely used as an artistic and critical resource. The film scholar Catherine Russell, similarly, emphasizes the major reconceptualization of the archive that has occurred with the advent of digital sampling, writing: The technologies of film stocks, video grain, and other signs of media history are often recorded within the imagery of archival film practices, inscribing a materiality into this practice; just as often, though, digital effects can alter the image and obfuscate both the original ‘support’ material as well as its indexical link to an original reality. Nevertheless, film and media artists are transforming cinema into an archival language, helping us to rethink film history as a source of rich insight into historical experience. (Russell 2018, 12) And in the work of the art scholar Ernst Van Alphen, the increasing prevalence of archival extraction as a mode of practice for visual artists illustrates a larger cultural turn, as the archive has replaced narrative as a cultural dominant, as a mode for apprehending the world (Van Alphen 2014). In the work of Bal, however, we find a theoretical argument that goes quite a bit further, asserting that the contemporary “renegotiation” of the traces of the past changes our understanding of the past, “obliterating” older images as they were beforehand. The more recent work becomes primary, she argues, and the older, “original,” archival work becomes secondary in our approach to reading. Her points go well beyond the critical discourse that has emerged around the videographic essay, the compilation film, or the essay film, raising both the theoretical and historical stakes of these forms of practice. I would now like to look more closely at They Shall Not Grow Old as an example of quotation, in which the act of reframing the past, creating new versions of old images, gives them a particular relevance for the present. As Van Alphen says, “It is because discursive frameworks belong to the present, and framing acts take place in the present, that memory of the past—​knowledge of history—​can have consequences for our contemporary and future world” (1997, 67). I will isolate two sequences from the film, which are repeated multiple times—​sequences that immediately precede the harrowing full frontal assault that serves as the climax of the film. First, however, I would like to provide some context for my reading, and bring to the surface a theme that has not yet been discussed, to my knowledge, in the critical literature on the film. 78

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In a major interview with the BBC on the occasion of the premiere of They Shall Not Grow Old (Jackson 2018b), Peter Jackson stated that the narrative of the First World War that has shaped cultural memory for over a century is misconceived, that it distorts the emotional colouration of the conflict and its aftermath, particularly in the case of British soldiers who fought on the Western Front. Far from embodying the stereotype of a “lost generation,” stunned into silence by the extraordinary intensity and gruesomeness of prolonged trench combat, the soldiers whose voices we hear in They Shall Not Grow Old appear happy to recall their lives at war and in the trenches, which they narrate with a certain ebullience and zest. As Jackson says, there was a “surprising lack of self pity among the soldiers.” Expanding on this point, he reflects: “We look on these soldiers with a sense of pity now,” but among them, “there was no feeling sorry for themselves; most had a positive view of their experience…like one big extended boy scout camp.” He then qualifies his own disorienting counter-​narrative of the War, reminding us of the voices that we are not hearing—​the voices of those who were killed, maimed, and horribly injured. “They probably wouldn’t feel the same way. What we’re getting are the voices of the survivors” (Jackson 2018b). What is even more surprising and somewhat troubling, however, is an entire register of war experience seems to be missing from the film: psychological trauma appears to almost be eliminated from the pictorial, auditory, and narrative frame. The bracketing of psychological injury is puzzling. A prominent motif in literature, film, and drama set in the First World War, psychological trauma informs the cultural imaginary of the trenches in an explicit way. What Samuel Hynes calls the “battlefield gothic,” the strange and uncanny appearance of the trenches and of No Man’s Land, the constant din of bombardment, and the inescapable smell of death, has made the trenches a privileged setting for the depiction of psychic wounding in war. Hynes writes powerfully about the trenches and No Man’s Land, emphasizing the psychological impact of fighting in a physical environment he describes as the “death of landscape,” the “annihilation of nature,” and the “monstrous appearance of anti-​landscape” (Hynes 1991). Dramatic fiction films, of course, are replete with examples of psychic trauma as a figure and a consequence of trench warfare, going back at least to J’accuse (1919) and including such well-​known works as The Big Parade (1925), All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), and Paths of Glory (1957). And as psychological injury has increasingly come into relief as a defining feature of war, as cases of PTSD multiply in contemporary society, the visibility of psychic injury as a consequence of war’s violence has also cast other representations of the past in a new light. The spectre of psychological trauma during First World War trench warfare is well documented. According to the BBC, by 1916 “over 40% of the casualties in fighting zones were victims of the condition.” During the Battle of the Somme, which forms a major part of the image track of They Shall Not Grow Old, 16,000 of the men serving were thought to be victims of shell shock. By the end of the war, some 80,000 men had been treated for shell shock or “war neurosis,” as it was also called (BBC 2014). The nearly complete absence of any explicit reference to shell shock or war neurosis in the words of the interviewed veterans is troubling, but perhaps understandable, given the stigma that was attached to it at the time, when soldiers were sometimes shot after being charged, in mock trials, with cowardice or desertion. Only a single shot in the film, a haunting shot of a man, his hands twitching, being escorted from the battlefront, serves to represent a condition that was prevalent—​a shot that unfolds without comment. Jackson’s silence on the subject in interviews is surprising, and raises several questions. Rather than exploring the filmmaker’s intent, however, I would like to offer a different way of seeing this subject in the film. The nearly complete absence of explicit representation of shell shock, I argue, does not mean that it has been wholly erased from 79

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the work. In certain key scenes, psychic injury is evoked not through explicit imagery or commentary but rather intertextually, in the memory of other films and photographs that the film summons. In other words, the vast intertextual universe of images of psychic trauma in representations of the First World War and in depictions of other wars—​images that were made long after the original archival images were filmed—​now shape our reading of specific scenes in the film. Mieke Bal’s notion of preposterous history helps illuminate the particular historical and representational questions posed here. If we view They Shall Not Grow Old as a work of quotation, rather than of restoration, then our reading strategy changes as well—​intertextuality and interdiscusivity become valid, even necessary frames for reading the film—​interpretive frames that would not have been available if our focus had remained on the primacy of the archive. Moreover, as Bal insists, quotation changes the archival images upon which the film is based: the scratched, faded, black-​and-​white images in irregular speeds, when quoted and remediated in the present, emit different messages than they did before, messages that are shaped and reoriented by an entire history of war film imagery. These scenes begin to signify in ways that link directly to the present. And one of the central themes of our present day reading of war cinema, whose history extends over the course of more than one hundred years, is the tragic preponderance of psychological injury in war. Certain formal emphases function as cues or signals in the film—​the oddly obsessive repetition of certain shots and images, the radical slowing down of the film, the direct address to the camera. Almost as if the work were restaging a haunted return, certain scenes are repeated again and again, rehearsed with an insistence that seems to call out for recognition—​scenes that speak to us not so much as illustrations of the memories of the interviewees, now settled into late middle age or older, but rather through a different mode of expression. One shot of a group of men waiting to be ordered “over the top”—​several looking directly into the camera, their faces filled with apprehension and dread—​is returned to six times. Another shot depicting three soldiers turning to look over their shoulders toward the camera as they march through the trenches, appears twice. In both sets of shots, the image track of the film slows down, arresting itself, at times appearing almost to slow to freeze frame. For a film that had relentlessly striven to smooth out the speed of the archival footage, a technique that Jackson claimed “made the soldiers come alive again,” the sudden appearance of images that are slowed, halting, barely animated, is striking. The repeated shot of men waiting to be ordered over the top is, in my view, the unacknowledged centre of the film, the place where the trauma of war is fully concentrated, forcing the spectator to see, with all the indexical power that film can provide, with the eyes of the soldiers who exist, for this brief moment, on the crease between life and death. The shot is repeated six times in the space of four minutes, often showing the same soldiers, occasionally emphasizing different soldiers in the group. With each repetition, the film speed slows, finally arriving at a point where movement is almost stopped. Similarly, the close-​up shot of the soldiers turning around to look at the camera as they march through the trenches is repeated twice. The first iteration of the “looking back” scene, taken in medium shot at regular speed, occurs before the fighting has commenced. Its second iteration is given just before the gruesome assault sequences begin. Here, the camera holds on the gazes of the soldiers, in close-​up, as the film slows to a crawl. The shot echoes a strikingly similar pair of shots in All Quiet on the Western Front, where several soldiers turn, one at a time, to face the camera directly. In the first instance, they are about to embark on their first night patrol; in the second, at the very end of the film, they have each been killed. The background of the closing shot of All Quiet

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on the Western Front is a dark graveyard: the soldiers are marching to their graves, or perhaps marching from their graves to fight and die again. As Elisabeth Bronfen has it, the montage suspends the soldiers between life and death. They are neither fully gone nor fully returned…yet with their gaze, they take possession of us, calling upon us to acknowledge an experience of war we share only by proxy, in the darkness of the movie theater. Milestone’s closure holds no redemption [for us] from their history. (Bronfen 2012, 2) These charged moments of direct address in They Shall Not Grow Old, in which natural life-​ like movement is sacrificed for the symbolic power of extreme slow-​motion, have a different sense and meaning than the many shots of soldiers mugging or staring into the camera. Here, at a point of mortal reckoning, the figures look into the camera and communicate a very different set of emotions than in earlier shots. The fraught nature of these looks recalls the long photographic tradition of images of soldiers stunned by fear and the sense of imminent death. They recall as well the many cinematic representations of psychic distress in films of war, where direct address to the camera has become almost a signature trope of the genre. Examples of prolonged direct address at moments of crisis can be found in films such as Apocalypse Now (1979), Saving Private Ryan (1998), Flags of Our Fathers (2006) and others.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have argued that the reframing of the past that They Shall Not Grow Old conducts on multiple levels, including the interpolation of digital elements, the addition of colour, widescreen, and 3D, need not be seen as an ahistorical substitution of a modern way of seeing for an older mode of representation, but as something else entirely. If viewed as a work of quotation, rather than as a questionable restoration, the film can be understood through multiple frameworks that enrich perception rather than narrowing to the single lens of its fidelity, or not, to the past. By focusing on the film as a textual system, we can view its additions and enhancements in terms of mimesis, rather than recovery, in terms of the creation of a reality effect, rather than its adherence to the real. Where the work was at first surprising and challenging for me, however, was in its apparent bracketing out of the experience of psychic injury, its seeming elision of shell shock from the narrative it presents. The experience and the reality of psychopathology, so prominent in the wider cultural narrative of the First World War, appeared to be elided from representation in the film. It was this surprising absence that spurred me to consider a different way of reading the work, neither as a bravura digital remediation nor as a brazen flouting of the codes and ethics of restoration, but rather through the relays its images establish with other films and photographs. Here, Bal’s idea of “preposterous history” provided a way in. If the work that comes chronologically after reshapes the work that came before, if it “changes the work forever,” as Bal writes, the film can be read not as a modern distortion, a bow to contemporary tastes, but rather as a rethinking, making visible theoretical and historical issues that can only be perceived through what she calls “the detour of the present” (Bal 1999, 7). It is this insight that I have tried to address in my reading of the film. In the repeated scenes of direct address to the camera, in the slowing down of critical sequences just before the major battle scene, in the powerful, repeated close-​ups that Jackson employs, almost as interpellations of the spectator, we come to see an entire history of war representation, a history that brings together documentary and dramatic fiction film, still photography and moving

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images to provide a sharpened image of soldiers at a psychological tipping point. The film, quite unexpectedly, moves us away from the idea of the archive as sacred repository. The newer work brings certain signals into relief that are comprehensible to us now, in a way that may not have been apparent in the original images. Rather than a recovery of a buried past, the film makes visible, through the detour of the present, a sense of what images of the First World War can mean in today’s war saturated image culture. The history of that past is here no longer isolated and buried “under concerns we do not share,” but joined to a vital and developing lexicon of war representations, where psychic injury has assumed an increasingly prominent role. Finally, the film provides a kind of object lesson in the way we approach the historical past, reminding us that history, for all its significance in our culture, cannot speak for itself, that it “has no mouthpiece of its own” (Phillips, 2021). It can speak only through interpretation and symbolic expression.

Reference list Allison, Tanine. 2021. “Digital Film Restoration and the Politics of Whiteness in Peter Jackson’s They Shall Not Grow Old.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 39, no. 15 (May): 1–​26. https://​doi.org/​10.1080/​ 10509​208.2021.1908​106. Bal, Mieke. 1999. Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. BBC. 2014. “Shell Shock:” Inside Out Extra, September 24. Bonnard, Martin. 2016. “Méliès’s Voyage Restoration: Or, the Risk of Being Stuck in the Digital Reconstruction.” The Moving Image: The Journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists 16, no. 1 (Spring): 139–​147. https://​doi.org/​10.5749/​movi​ngim​age.16.1.0139. Bronfen, Elisabeth. 2012. Specters of War: Hollywood’s Engagement with Military Conflict. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Cassetti, Francesco. 2020. “Mapping the Sensible: Distribution, Inscription, Cinematic Thinking.” Virtual workshop, Cinepoetics, Berlin, November 11. Christie, Ian. 2018. “They Shall Not Grow Old review: Peter Jackson brings Controversial Colour to WWI Footage.” Sight and Sound, November 11. www2.bfi.org.uk/​news-​opin​ion/​sight-​sound-​magaz​ine/​revi​ ews-​reco​mmen​dati​ons/​they-​shall-​not-​grow-​old-​peter-​jack​son-​imper​ial-​war-​mus​eum-​world-​war-​one-​arch​ ive-​foot​age-​revi​ved. Das, Santanu. 2019. “Colors of the Past: Archive, Art and Amnesia in a Digital Age.” AHR Roundtable, American Historical Review 124, no. 5 (December): 1771–​1781. https://​doi.org/​10.1093/​ahr/​rhz1​021. Horak, Jan-​Christopher. 2019. “FIAF Symposium: Restoration Ethics and Practices,” UCLA Library Film & Television Archive Blog, May 10. www.cin​ema.ucla.edu/​blogs/​archi​val-​spa​ces/​2019/​05/​10/​FIAF-​sympos​ ium-​eth​ics-​practi​ces/​. Hynes, Samuel. 1991. A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture. Great Britain: Atheneum. Jackson, Peter. 2018a. “The Making of They Shall Not Grow Old.” DVD extras interview track. Jackson, Peter. 2018b. “Peter Jackson on the First World War.” BBC, October 15. www.histo​ryex​tra.com/​per​ iod/​first-​world-​war/​peter-​jack​son-​interv​iew-​they-​shall-​not-​grow-​old-​first-​world-​war-​soldi​ers-​lives/​. O’Falt, Chris. 2018. “Peter Jackson Turned World War I Footage into a 3D Color Film, One Frame at a Time,” IndieWire, December 13. www.indiew​ire.com/​2018/​12/​peter-​jack​son-​wwi-​foot​age-​mod​ern-​3d-​ color-​they-​shall-​not-​grow-​old-​120​2027​263/​. Phillips, Maya. 2021. “ ‘Judas’ Is the Latest Political Movie to Punt on Politics.” New York Times, March 5. www.nyti​mes.com/​2021/​03/​05/​mov​ies/​judas-​and-​the-​black-​mess​iah-​polit​ics.html. Rodowick, D.N. 2007. The Virtual Life of Film. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Russell, Catherine. 2018. Archiveology: Walter Benjamin and Archival Film Practices. Durham: Duke University Press. Van Alphen, Ernst. 1997. Caught by History: Holocaust Effects in Contemporary Art, Literature, and Theory. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Van Alphen, Ernst. 2014. Staging the Archive: Art and Photography in the Age of New Media. London: Reaktion Books.

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6 THE HERO MYTH AND THE CUTTING ROOM FLOOR Nick Hector

Introduction The historical war film has a strict notion of the experience of combat, a heroic narrative of horror, sacrifice, and glory. Why do poignant stories dealing with themes outside this criterion commonly end up on the cutting room floor? In this chapter, I will examine the act of suppression of combat testimony in war documentaries and the repression of uncomfortable thoughts and emotions that do not align with traditional constructions through the case study of the Canadian Screen Award-​ winning documentary film series, War Story. War Story explores the experience of war through the testimony of those who fought and survived. Over four years in the 2010s, filmmaker Barry Stevens interviewed 145 Canadian combat veterans of the Second World War. These foot soldiers, pilots, gunners, medics, chaplains, tankers, sailors, officers, and non-​commissioned officers were each interviewed for approximately 90 minutes to document their first-​hand reflections on the lived experience of war. For many participants, it was the first time they had discussed their experiences post-​factum. At times, it became an end-​of-​life confessional. From approximately 220 hours of these eye-​witness accounts, 23 films with a combined screen time of 11 hours were constructed in the film editing cutting room. As the co-​director overseeing the film editing of the project, I became fascinated with the idea of narrative exclusion. What ends up on the cutting room floor and why? The intersection of these frank, emotional, and deeply personal confessionals with the artistic process and commercial imperative of the entertainment-​industrial complex raises interesting questions about form, story, and history. I draw on unpublished and redacted War Story transcripts and my lived experience as a practitioner to analyze and explain production realities and expectations that govern what is and is not included in historical war documentaries and how that distorts our understanding of mass conflict and contributes to our conceptions of what happened and what it means.

Writing with film An examination of editorial exclusion in historical war documentaries must begin by defining the opaque term documentary. Barsam suggests it is the “most abused and most misunderstood

DOI: 10.4324/9781003263234-9

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term in the film lexicon” (1973, 1). Bill Nichols, a film theorist who has written extensively about the nature of non-​fiction film, providing a formative taxonomy, claims documentary is a term so broad as to be meaningless (2001). Outside of professional practice, the term is sometimes synonymous with journalism and filmic veracity. LaRocca challenges this trope, arguing that as all films document what is presented to the camera, all films are documentaries (2017). Paradoxically, he argues, as all aspects of filmmaking require subjective creative decisions, all films are fictional. In my community of practice, the authoritative definition is found in the first usage of the term in the English language. Scottish critic and filmmaker John Grierson defined documentary as “the creative treatment of actuality” (1933, 8). This broad definition reflects the wide range of modes and styles found in the form and excludes the notion of journalism. British documentary filmmaker and theorist Ivor Montagu posits that the creative treatment of actuality is at the core of all art practice. “Actuality is the raw material that, as experience, must pass through the consciousness of the creative artist (or group) to become transformed by labour and in accordance with technical and aesthetic laws into the art product” (Montagu 1964, 281). It must be noted that all forms of documentary filmmaking are collaboratively authored, involving the collaboration of a team of filmmaker artists in conjunction with the subjects who provide the narrative fodder (Bruzzi 2013; Kerrigan and McIntyre 2010). The term film editing and the role of the film editor are widely misunderstood by the layperson (Laurier and Brown 2014). “If people consider film editing at all, they think of the editor as being the person who takes material selected by the director, cuts out the bad bits, and then puts everything together into a coherent whole” (Koppelman 2005, 3). Film editing is central to the art of filmmaking, the only creative function in cinema without an antecedent in another art form. In his seminal work Film Technique, Russian theorist and filmmaker Vsevolod Pudovkin enthusiastically defines film editing as “the creative force of filmic reality, and that nature provides only the raw material with which it works” (1933, xvi). For the purposes of this chapter, Swenberg and Sverrisson’s definition is useful: “meaning arises (or is created) in the concatenation of components and their mutual adjustment rather than residing in each of the many image and sound sequences that make up a film” (2019, 30). The complexity of this audiovisual concatenation ensures its imperceptibility, a commonly expressed artistic goal of the film editor, a self-​described invisible artist practising an invisible art (Larkin 2019). Documentary film editing, then, is the transformative labour that creates the documentary art product (Montagu 1964). In the popular imagination, documentary filmmaking is the mechanical realization of a preconceived notion. However, the vagaries of capturing fragments of actuality to serve as the building blocks of narrative construction belie this invention (Wiedemann 1998). Three decades of professional practice as a documentary filmmaker have taught me that life has a way of circumventing attempts to acquire the materials needed to formulate a stringent filmic argument. The tumult of existence, the uncontrolled events, logistical challenges, artistic opportunities, and disappointments documentary filmmaking presents render film editing a process preoccupied with exploring the narrative possibilities of source materials. Thus, while the screenplay of a fiction film is written before the filming process, in documentary film editing the reverse is true (Spence and Navarro 2011). The film editing room is a place where documentarians write with pictures and sounds, attempting to reverse the laws of narrative entropy on a journey from chaos to story (Spence and Navarro 2011; Cole 2019; Andersen 2021). Thus, the film editing of War Story was an artistic process of narrative construction, shaping combat footage and testimonies through selection and arrangement into a creative treatment of actuality that attempts to capture the experience of war.

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War story The long-​running Canadian military history documentary series War Story was envisioned by filmmaker Barry Stevens as “war movies made by pacifists.”1 Produced by filmmakers drawn to the documentary’s potential to serve as an agent of social change, the series does not celebrate war and is neither sensational nor exploitative. Using only combat footage and first-​hand testimony of those who fought and survived, War Story sought to furnish a candid exploration of the experience of war. The origin of the series and the blueprint for its artistic approach lie in Stevens’ earlier short film Remembering Juno (2010), a companion documentary to Storming Juno (2010), a dramatized reconstruction of the Canadian D-​Day landings. Remembering Juno communicates an immersive experience of D-​Day through visceral and emotionally engaging combatant testimony. The documentary is simple and elegant in construction, unencumbered by contextual narration, recreations, or the musings of historians. The critical and commercial success of a short military history film that focuses on the personal experience of war elicited a commission from Canadian broadcaster History Television along with the support of several federal and provincial arts funding agencies to develop War Story. This documentary strand was envisioned as a series of 23-​minute battle-​ focused episodes constructed from first-​hand testimony gleaned from an ensemble of combatants that sought to portray both the collective and individual experience of war. In 2011, executive producer David York and his production company 52 Media Inc. began the pre-​production of War Story, the lengthy and laborious research and planning phase of documentary filmmaking. The challenge of locating participants from a 66-​year-​old conflict fell to senior series researcher, Dr Andrew Theobald. A military historian and Canadian Armed Forces veteran, Theobald drew on his military and academic professional networks to identify subjects for the series.2 Moreover, Theobald drew on his earlier research for Historica’s Memory Project, a charitable educational resource dedicated to “capture and share the testimony of Canadian military veterans” (“The Memory Project” 2010). It is at this early stage of subject recruitment and selection that narrative omission begins. Mortality is the first exclusionary factor in this documentary filmmaking process. In order to provide testimony, the combatant need not only to have survived the war but also the intervening six decades of civilian life. Ageing-​related issues are further exclusionary factors. Is their memory detailed and reliable? Have they sufficiently dealt with the ramifications of combat trauma so that they have the desire and ability to share their experience? Are they willing to risk the distress of recounting horrific repressed memories? Few Canadians who served in the military during the Second World War were available, willing to participate, and on the radar of Theobald and his professional networks. This modest pool of veterans was further winnowed by logistical considerations. The economic realities of transporting and housing a film crew journeying across an enormous country to interview senior citizens disinclined to travel led to favouring subjects living in or near a major urban centre. The critical mass of casting also played a role in determining what was filmed. Are there enough characters to freight a battle narrative? The pool of 20,200 Canadians who survived the landing on Juno Beach on D-​Day is more likely to generate compelling combat testimony than the few survivors of Royal 22e Régiment’s C Company who fought so valiantly at Casa Berardi in the Italian winter of 1943. A multi-​character story provides the editor with the necessary volume and quality of varied material to weave and intercut stories. While a pleasing dynamic tension can be created by weaving a variety of contrasting dramatic arcs, a small cast reduces narrative flexibility and places the burden of storytelling on individual recollection. Moreover, as a visual medium, a documentary demands the use of supporting visual materials. Can the testimony be supported by 85

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archival imagery? The volume and variety of combat photography available are largely determined by the propaganda needs of the time. Thus, visual documentation of glorious victories is in greater supply than the military realities of routine, boredom, fear, doubt, failure, suffering, and trauma. Having evaded the exclusionary casting factors of mortality, logistics, critical mass, and visual corroboration, the small pool of documentary subjects is then qualitatively assessed in a telephone pre-​interview. Theobald and his research colleagues spoke with potential subjects to assess their suitability as film subjects. Are they articulate? Is their testimony intimate, emotional, and detailed? In filmmaking parlance, can they spin a yarn? Further exclusion occurred as subjects were deemed too slow, unemotional, forgetful, or boring. Subjects were also ruled out at this stage for being mentally unfit. The emotional toll of recalling horrific, long-​repressed memories was deemed too much for some subjects. In one case, recalling the memory of a nauseous reaction to brutal violence in the past provoked vomiting in the present. Repression of combat narratives was necessary at this stage to preserve the well-​being and dignity of the veteran. Of the more than one million Canadians and Newfoundlanders who served in the military during the Second World War, 145 subjects progressed from the qualitative assessment and were formally interviewed before the camera by Stevens in a series of filming sessions conducted across the country from 2012–​2016. While it is the largest undertaking of its kind in the history of Canadian filmmaking, this represents the recording of the combat testimony of a mere 0.01% of those who served. Moreover, the narrative elements generated by these veterans, their first-​hand combat stories, are the product of what they chose to share with the camera. The role of subject as author in a documentary cannot be overstated. They are the gatekeepers of as many as six years of memories of the lived experience of war. Recollection of this experience is collected in a 90-​ minute interview, a duration determined by economic and logistical considerations as well as the energy level and focus of the elderly subjects. The subjects’ distillation of as many as 52,000 hours of first-​hand experience of war into one and a half hours of retrospection is a product of the considerable interviewing expertise of Stevens but also determined by what the subjects remember, what they are comfortable sharing, and their appraisal of filmmaker and audience expectations. Approximately 220 hours of material were filmed. These rushes, the digital audiovisual recordings of the interviews, were transferred to hard drives, transcribed, and delivered to the cutting room where I would begin the editorial process of selection, omission, and arrangement to craft the War Story military history narratives.

War on film Like all cultural endeavours, the film editing of War Story stands on the shoulders of giants. A substantial body of historical war films has been produced in cinema’s first century. While exemplars of war testimony documentaries exist, the strength of landmark works such as Memorandum (1965) and Shoah (1985) lie in their immediacy. While their on-​screen testimony details historical events, these films remain firmly rooted in the present, remembrance as active present tense. This hybrid observational-​expositional form requires the participation of subjects in dynamic situations, a possibility overruled by the fragility of War Story participants in their 80s and 90s. Thus, my artistic reference points draw heavily on expositional Hollywood historical war narratives. Moreover, they are the films that inform my notions of war and heroism. Ensemble military history dramas based on non-​fiction combatant testimonies were primary cinematic references. This sub-​ genre of military history film served as a criterion of narrative structure. Foremost of these was the tapestry of storylines that communicate the collective experience of war in The Longest Day (1962). Based on Irish-​American journalist and author Cornelius Ryan’s best-​selling non-​fiction 86

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account of the invasion of Normandy, The Longest Day expertly balances personal and collective experiences of war in a multi-​layered weave of narrative lines. A Bridge Too Far (1977), also based on a Ryan non-​fiction book, was less helpful, demonstrating an ineffectual focus on command level decision-​making rather than the boots on the ground, personal experience of war. Filmic adaptations of The Thin Red Line, based on James Jones’ 1962 autobiographical novel about his experience of fighting in the Battle of Guadalcanal, explore internal conflicts and contradictions within the collective experience of war. Marton’s iteration (1964) probed the moral complexity of killing on the battlefield. These soldiers grappled not just with fear and guilt but the prospect that they might enjoy killing. Malick’s version (1998) presented the chaos and confusion of combat within a nuanced narrative frame. The television series Band of Brothers (2001) was a significant touchstone. Based on the testimonies collected by American historian Stephen E. Ambrose for his best-​selling novel of the same name, Band of Brothers is an ensemble combat narrative presented in a serialized form. The series’ intricate weave of personal and collective narrative lines coupled with an immersive depiction of combat provided a useful structural archetype. The audience also has a role in making meaning from cinematic messages. The influence of films that loom large in popular culture cannot be ignored by any filmmaker. Even a broad and cursory sampling of depictions of war across the decades since the outbreak of the Second World War reveals much about what combat looks like in the collective imagination. The well-​trained and amply resourced soldiers fighting enthusiastically in films such as Thirty Seconds over Tokyo (1944), directed by Mervyn LeRoy during the war, are “men of honour” entering combat fully apprised of the moral consequences. “If any of you have any moral feelings about this necessary killing, if you might feel afterward about yourself as a murderer, I want you to drop out… . And I promise that no one will blame you” (Thirty Seconds over Tokyo 1944). While the decade that followed produced nuanced explorations of military conflict and the morality of killing, the combatants in films such as The Young Lions (1958) have an unwavering sense of purpose. These depictions convey combat as a well-​orchestrated affair with clear objectives and tactics. The Second World War as cinema spectacle emerged in the 1960s and 1970s with films such as The Battle of Britain (1969) and Midway (1976) featuring heroic everyman underdogs overcoming the military might of a cruel and faceless enemy. Too often, cinematic representations of combat feature soldiers suffering a quick and clean death. Young men die bloodlessly in silence and without suffering. Even the depictions of combat in films lauded for their realism, such as Samuel Fuller’s The Big Red One (1980), Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998), and Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk (2017), are sanitized by community standards and censor board determinations. Hollywood historical war narratives create and shape the audience that the makers of War Story need to attract. Films, even documentary shorts, are complicated and expensive affairs. The expertise of dozens of people, including producers, directors, film editors, cinematographers, sound recordists, mixers, musicians, colourists, technicians, researchers, archivists, administrators, accountants, lawyers, transcribers, and assistants were required to create each episode. The documentary series was budgeted at $185,000 per half-​hour, representing a total production budget of approximately $3.9 million for the films discussed in this chapter,3 largely financed by the television broadcaster with the assistance of governmental arts funding agencies. Thus, to fulfil its financial obligations, War Story must consider audience expectation to attract and retain an audience. Moreover, as documentarians of the Griersonian school dedicated to making artistic films of public purpose, the pacifist filmmakers behind War Story sought a broad audience to serve their anti-​war agenda. It is within this frame of intersecting artistic, historical, and commercial interests that the act of constructing War Story narratives began. 87

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The cutting room Narrative exclusion is a necessary part of the documentary film editing artistic process. Crafting a compelling and emotionally engaging story structure from the amorphous raw filmic materials requires qualitative assessment, selection, reorganization, and elimination of content. In the process of constructing War Story, more than 209 hours of material that included eye-​witness accounts of the dramatic and historically significant Canadian military experiences of the Battle of Hong Kong, D-​Day, the Falaise Gap, Ortona, the Scheldt, the liberation of Holland, and other conflicts were considered but cast aside, thus landing on the cutting room floor. An exploration of narrative exclusion in this context requires a rendering of the film editing process. Documentary film editing, the artistic process of writing with pictures and sounds to construct filmic narratives, is typically the most time-​consuming and labour-​intensive phase of documentary filmmaking. In the case of War Story, there was a tenfold increase in duration between production and post-​production phases. While each short film only required approximately three days of filming, 30 days were required to edit the ensuing raw material. When the rushes first enter the documentary cutting room, a preliminary assessment eliminates material en masse that is technically flawed or qualitatively unacceptable. In contrast to War Story, documentaries shot in the observational mode typically generate enormous volumes of unproductive material. Their shooting ratios, the comparative index of minutes of raw footage in relation to each minute of the final film, often exceed 250:1. The artistic and technical challenges of hand-​held filming in the dynamic and uncontrolled conditions that are the hallmarks of this run and gun exploratory filming style produce an enormous amount of substandard material that is immediately discarded. War Story was shot in a staid expositional style by a highly experienced and well-​resourced crew under tightly controlled studio conditions. Consequently, no technically or aesthetically imperfect material needed to be excised at this stage. While the series’ shooting ratio was a modest 20:1, all of the filmed material was in contention for inclusion. During an initial real-​time screening, the rushes were evaluated through the prism of narrative structure and the demands of commercial television. Simply put, material deemed boring, unclear, or incomplete was eliminated in the first round of cuts. The initial film assembly of each episode would begin with the construction of independent aural and visual draft narratives. These streams were then integrated into a singular whole in a dialectical editing process. The initial aural narrative stream, a draft assembly of veteran testimony, began with screening and analysis of the footage. A qualitative assessment of the testimony generated selects of material deemed to be useful for narrative construction. Selection criteria included the ability of the material to underpin overarching historical and personal narratives, detail visceral expressions of the nature of combat, and provide intimate reflections on the emotional experience of war. Using a non-​destructive digital non-​linear film editing system, these selects were extracted from the rushes and assembled into a cogent narrative structure. Each episode is constructed as a linear depiction of a single battle and organized along the lines of the three-​act narrative model of Greek tragedy that dominates mainstream Western cinema. This conventional narrative structure is propelled by the transformative nature of dramatic conflict. The protasis introduces the ensemble of protagonists, contextualizing them in their pre-​conflict state. We meet the veterans in their pre-​war innocence expressing their motivation to join the service and their expectations of combat. The origin, objectives, and associated stakes of the battle, what the Canadian war effort stands to win or lose in its outcome, are presented. Our ensemble enters the epitasis of combat through a series of escalating dramatic incidents of combat terror and horror. The outward journey, the military objectives, and tactics of the collective experience of war are 88

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detailed and interwoven with the personal, inward reflection of the individual experience. The final act catastrophe presents the resolution of the conflict, the outcome of the military objectives, and the denouement, how the ensemble has been transformed by the experience. As the commercial specifications of the final program required the delivery of 23-​minute programmes, the target length of this initial radio edit structure, the first aural iteration of the narrative, was set at 20% fat, not exceeding 27 minutes (20% of target length). This initial radio edit was then refined by finessing the structure, timing, and performance of the aural storytelling. A second, purely visual narrative based on the radio-​edit’s structure was then constructed using archival imagery. This visual expression of the story is structured to mirror not only the larger three-​act approach of the radio edit but also the order and nature of scene and sub-​scene incidents. This visual narrative adheres to the conventions of modern film grammar, utilizing classical techniques of constructive continuity cutting, New Wave elliptical editing, Hollywood time-​compression montage, and Soviet associative montage. The overarching dialectical editorial process then merges the radio edit and the visual narrative to create a seamless blend of images and dialogue that convey an immersive, emotionally engaging, and coherent depiction of combat. Further excision of testimony is required at this stage to eliminate narrative redundancies between picture and sound streams and determine the most appropriate delivery mechanism for an idea or theme. The visual stream favours dynamic, external narrative elements depicting action, particularly combat. It may also be a useful tool to freight exposition, providing or augmenting with dialogue the details of time, place, proximity, and scale. Internal narrative, the thoughts, emotions, and sensorial stimuli of the lived experience can only be expressed with dialogue. After merging aural and visual streams into a rough cut, the final step in the integration phase addresses the editorial rhythm and pacing of this concatenation of images and sounds. The documentary was then vetted by our military advisor Dr Andrew Theobald, who fact-​checked verifiable details. The formal contractual deliverable of this rough cut, a complete but unpolished draft that represents the creative intent of the filmmakers, is delivered to the broadcaster for investor oversight. Approval of the rough cut by the broadcasting network’s executive level is essential as it is required to trigger the drawdown, one of the largest financial instalments made by investors during production to the filmmakers. The subsequent fine cut iteration of the film addresses broadcaster critiques of the rough cut and is reduced to the precise broadcast duration. It is a final opportunity to finesse the film before picture lock, the finalization of the film before it is sent to final post for scoring, colour grading, sound effects editing, and mixing. Using this process, I edited 16 short and two feature-​length War Story documentary programmes on the Second World War. The final iteration of each 23-​minute film contains approximately 20 minutes of veteran testimony distilled from 400 minutes of raw interview material. In the terminology of film production, this represents a shooting ratio of 20:1. Thus, for every minute of the finished film, 19 minutes of raw material were discarded. An examination of the exclusion of combat testimony during this process must be seen in detailed relief to the material that was included.

Making the cut The incorporation of a broad and unvarnished spectrum of combat narratives was a defining feature of War Story. Nuanced and contradictory expressions of fear were a notable aspect of the military history film series. Flight Sergeant Wally Ward flew combat missions for the RAF throughout France and the Low Countries, piloting a single-​seater Hawker Typhoon fighter-​bomber. Ward’s experience of fear aligns with audience expectations of combat. 89

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We were terrified. Terrified. Because people are shooting at you and this aircraft fire is all around you. And if you see an airplane in front of you suddenly blow up into a great cloud of black smoke, that doesn’t make you feel any better. (“Whistle for a Tiffy,” War Story series, 2014) This conventional notion of terror is expanded by Gunner Lawrence Levy, who went ashore at Normandy and fought in the Battle of the Falaise Pocket. “I was frightened, I was scared. I was a kid. I didn’t understand what was happening” (“Falaise, The Corridor of Death,” War Story series, 2014). Moreover, Rifleman Bill Halcro provides an unusually frank description of the incapacitating trepidation of exiting his D-​Day landing craft that would only be superseded by his fear of authority: When it was my turn, I was kind of very hesitant to move. The corporal had to holler at me a couple of times before I could move. I was just petrified. I finally got up, stepped over and jumped off into the water. (“D-​Day +​One,” War Story series, 2014) Antithetical experiences of fear were also included. Rifleman William Seifried, a veteran of the Battle of the Scheldt, an intense operation that saw 12,873 Allied casualties in just five weeks of brutal combat, does not recall being scared. “It’s funny. When I was there, I never thought of danger. You knew it was there all the time but it didn’t bother me at all, the danger” (Fight to the Finish 2020). Ward valued the anonymity of combat in the air in a comment prescient of modern warfare. “If I’d been in the army and having to shoot somebody in cold blood, I would have felt that. But one of the curiosities of being a pilot, you don’t see your victim” (“Whistle for a Tiffy,” War Story series, 2014). Soldiers in leadership positions needed to consider not only their own fear but that of their men. Captain Bernard Finestone landed on the beach of Pachino during the invasion of Sicily and saw almost a full year of heavy combat in the Italian Campaign before being seriously wounded during the advance on Rome. Finestone describes fear as an indicator of mental well-​being in men grappling with the ethical dimensions of killing the enemy. “Anybody with a brain in his head who goes into action and isn’t scared, is off his rocker. There’s no joy in killing and having people kill you” (Fight to the Finish 2020). This may be an astute observation when applied to adults but what of child soldiers? Seventeen-​year-​old Jim Wilkinson lied about his age to meet the minimum requirements of the Canadian Army. A veteran of the Battle of Verrières Ridge, Wilkinson is forthright about his feelings about learning to kill at an early age: The first man I ever killed. He’s got his rifle slung on, on his shoulder, a young fella. He got within about 10 feet of me and he took the rifle off, off his shoulder. I says, “You’d better do something now or he’s going to do something”. And I shot him right in the chest, and he fell at my feet, dead. I don’t think he was 15 years of age. A young German guy. Q: How did it feel? Lovely. No remorse at all. (“Falaise, The Corridor of Death,” War Story series, 2014) A torpid emotional state is another phenomenon expressed by War Story veterans that is rarely found in Hollywood historical war narratives. Rifleman Joseph Edwardson landed at Normandy and, along with the other Regina Rifles, eventually fought his way northeast to the Netherlands. “It was terrifying only when you stopped, after it was over. While you’re doing it, you’re not terrified. You’re concentrating on what you’re doing. You’re not brave; you’re not scared. You’re nothing” 90

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(Fight to the Finish 2020). Lieutenant Walter Keith witnessed the extraordinary outpouring of gratitude and relief of the Dutch crowds as the Regina Rifles participated in the Liberation of Holland. In contrast to the stock Hollywood dramatic third-​act climax, Keith felt dead inside: There was no feeling of joy or celebration or anything. It was just a numb, almost a dead feeling. All you’d think of was, you thought of the guys that were gone, and there was no feeling. There was a numbness. (“Liberation,” War Story series, 2014) War Story also incorporates testimony that both supports and challenges common war film representations of chaos and horror. In Hollywood historical war narratives, soldiers are briefed on enemy strength, equipment, and tactics and enter combat with full knowledge of their strategic objectives on the battlefield and their place in the overarching campaign. When War Story subject Rifleman Alfred Babin, along with the other members of the Royal Rifles of Canada, disembarked the HMCS Prince Robert in November of 1940, he had no idea where he was. After learning he was in Hong Kong and subsequently fighting in a chaotic defence of the city, Babin was captured by Japanese forces. “We actually didn’t have any idea of why we were there” (Fight to the Finish 2020). Finestone echoes the common fog of war theme found in many military history films but suggests it is an obstacle that can, and must, be overcome: On the battlefield, the fog of war is there and it becomes a bloody mess. And you have to be sharp enough and smart enough to overcome the mess. And if you do, you’re the winner. And if you don’t do it, you’re the loser. (Fight to the Finish 2020) Due to community standards and censorship regulations, visual representations of battle cannot convey the horrific scenes described by veterans. Corporal Ken Duffield, an infantryman with the Regina Rifles, witnessed scenes that would scarcely be believable if depicted in a dramatic reenactment. There was a little guy…lying there and kind of groaning. And we rolled him over and his clothes next to his stomach was split wide open. We could see his…some of his intestines there. But there was very little bleeding because I think the thing was that the metal that had cut him through was so hot it sort of seared the blood vessels and stuff. (“D-​Day +​One,” War Story series, 2014) Similarly, Edwardson still vividly recalls the macabre sight of a headless body: The first thing I saw when we got into this little town was three Germans lying there, obviously they had been hit by a shell or something or other. And one of them had his head off. That made an impression. (“D-​Day +​One”) War Story testimonies deliver searing accounts of warfare that cannot be conveyed through a visual medium. Levy’s description of rotting corpses littering the battlefield in the aftermath of the Falaise Pocket is as disturbing as it is visceral. “They 91

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become bloated after a while. It was August, and the heat was terrible at that time, and a body, it doesn’t take long for them to blow up. That’s the first time I could realise that there was a death smell.” (“Falaise, The Corridor of Death,” War Story series, 2014) War Story also includes material that challenges traditional cinematic notions of loyalty and grace under fire. Petty Officer John Stokes served on the HMCS Sarnia escorting convoys during the Battle of the Atlantic. He is haunted by memories of not rescuing a sinking ship in the icy North Atlantic. “We knew they got torpedoed but we were not allowed to go back and pick them up. We had to maintain our position” (Fight to the Finish 2020). Duffield shares the trauma of having to make this sort of decision on his own during the Battle of the Falaise Pocket: One of the lads got hit and he was lying there, calling for help. We couldn’t stop to help him because if we had we would have lost some more of our own men. It was a hard decision to make and leave him there. The last three words he said: “I want my mom”. He said it three times and the last time, because of the noise of the shelling you could hardly hear it. (Fight to the Finish 2020) One of the most unusual aspects of inclusion in War Story is the recurring theme of compassion for the enemy. It was common for battle-​hardened soldiers like Private Charles Miller, a man who fought against the elite German 1st Parachute Division at Ortona, the Italian Stalingrad, to find fellowship with the enemy. “I have no qualms with the enemy. He was a good man, he was a good fighter, and he was fighting for a cause, same as we were” (Fight to the Finish 2020). Falaise veteran Lieutenant Eldon Comfort echoes this sentiment: We were trying to kill young men and women, I suppose, who had had no part in the declaration of war. They weren’t, in a sense, they weren’t our enemies at all. And that was an unusually unpleasant thing to think about. (Fight to the Finish 2020) This small sample of representative excerpts paints a picture of the kind of material that made it into each War Story film. This broad range of candid themes and nuanced ideas challenges traditional notions of military conduct and heroism. In the national press, Globe and Mail film critic John Doyle described the series as “essential viewing, an exceptional and profoundly meaningful hour of plain talk about war,” noting the depth and diversity of its combat testimony (2020). “The elderly men and women featured are among the last living witnesses to battles, to destruction, to the failures and triumphs. We need to, and we must, hang on their every word” (Doyle 2020). As a filmmaker, I took pride in contributing to an expansion of the breadth and depth of the documentary conversation about war. However, when the obituaries of these ageing warriors began to trickle in after the completion of the series, my thoughts turned to what had been excised from their end-​of-​life testimonies. The outs lying on my cutting room floor threatened to become forgotten memories of our collective narrative of war. What was left and what did it mean?

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The cutting room floor For more than 100 years after George Albert Smith made the first film edit in The Sick Kitten (1901), editors employed scissors or splicers to physically extract the unwanted celluloid content during the assembly process (Cousins 2006). It was not uncommon for a cutting room to be littered with outs, the detritus of film segments excised in a frenzy of creative editorial activity. While tactile analogue cinema has long receded into film craft’s rear-​view mirror, the striking metaphorical image of the cutting room floor retains its currency in contemporary digital film editing, vividly denoting creative roads not explored. Ruthless yet respectful critical judgement is a normal and necessary part of the documentary film editor’s skill set, an artist confident that the outs are the product of careful consideration. However, excising interview material from War Story carried with it the burden of the historical record. As these editorial decisions contribute in some small way to our understanding of the Second World War, this is a cutting room floor worthy of retrospective examination. Both publicly and privately funded ventures of this scale are vulnerable to the editorial input of investors and stakeholders. Executive oversight may shape the content and meaning of filmed works. While it may not be in the form of overt censorship, editorial pressure may appear in the form of restricted access to future financing. Despite the exponential growth of broadcasting opportunities, the 1000-​channel universe has little appetite for historical non-​fiction films. Thus, funders of non-​fiction historical films wield considerable editorial power. However, History Television, the primary funders of War Story, granted its filmmakers an enormous amount of creative freedom. While they advocated for the excision of material that supported what they described as audience killing, inactive aspects of combat such as boredom or indecision, our broadcast executives were preoccupied with contextual framing. Their primary concern was that the audience was provided with information about time, place, objectives, stakes, and the historical significance of events. Thus, in the case of War Story, suppression of combat testimony was largely the product of self-​censorship. The first round of excision of historically noteworthy combat testimony was of unusual narrative outliers, stories of the war experience that did not neatly fit into the conventional three-​act structure utilized by War Story. While the vast majority of veterans stated they relished the opportunity to volunteer or embraced the patriotic duty of conscription, albeit tempered with trepidation, there were exceptions. I got this envelope in the mail, this official-​looking envelope from the mail on His Majesty’s Service, and I kind of figured maybe this was it. “You are duly called upon to appear at the Wolseley Barracks at 0800” on a certain date for enlistment. And do you know what I did? I took it and tore it up and threw it in the wastebasket. Which was a crime, but they never, they never questioned it. (Infantryman) This confession of violating the Military Act challenges conventional notions of wartime patriotic fervour and suggests Canadian conscription was inefficiently or half-​heartedly enforced. However, as this infantryman eventually volunteers for service, the inclusion of this opaque anomaly would complicate the construction of the documentary’s protasis. This convolution undermines a clear and distinct introduction of the ensemble’s state of innocence. This is further amplified by the question of how the fixed duration of a film is allocated. The three words per second cutting

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room rule of thumb indicates that this 76-​word anecdote would take approximately 25 seconds. The limited duration of a 23-​minute War Story episode means the inclusion of the unusual requires the excision of the essential. Thus, the film editor is disinclined to allot precious screen time to the unconventional. An exemplar of this is seen in a stretcher bearer’s memory of his platoon taking a defensive position in an Abruzzi taverna in the winter of 1943–​1944 during the Moro River Campaign. There was a huge, massive pile of wine there! There was a 300-​gallon tank… . And we drank it all winter. And it went dry in the spring; I couldn’t believe that this bar would go dry. So, I put up a ladder and there was a lid on it, and I got a bar and I cranked it loose. Then I got a flashlight and put it down to see if it was really empty. There was a dead woman in it. And we drank out of that bar all winter. No wonder it was that good. Q: How did the dead woman get in there? Somebody must have killed her and dumped her in there. This excised testimony is as fascinating as it is disturbing. But its misogyny and surrealness along with the accompanying unanswered questions of victim and perpetrator open a narrative door the film editor cannot enter. Who was she? Why was she killed? Did her murderer use the fog of war to conceal the crime? Was she murdered by another member of the stretcher bearer’s platoon? Was she simply a combat victim? The screen time needed to address these unanswerable questions would likely require the duration budgeted for an account of the entire campaign along with the associated production resources and costs. In this context, it is difficult to include a single outlying and unverifiable story that is impossible to express with an accompanying visual narrative. Yet, the excision of this battlefield grotesque diminishes, in some small way, our understanding of the complexity of war. Expressions of systemic incompetence and misconduct of the Canadian military were often articulated. Most notably, Canadian forces were described by some subjects as inferior to their adversaries. “The Germans were good soldiers. Disciplined, to the extreme… . We were perhaps a little less disciplined” (Infantry Sergeant). Others suggested the Canadian Army was “badly led” by a command structure that did not feel the need to communicate military objectives and strategies to the rank and file (Sergeant). “I’m not sure what the total tactic was because we never got in on that stuff” (Tanker). This historically significant material was excised, in part due to fear of the political and legal ramifications of challenging the commonly held image of our glorious Canadian military. The Canadian documentary industry still feels the hangover of the Senate inquiry into Brian McKenna’s 1991 Canadian military history series The Valour and the Horror (Taras 1995). These critically acclaimed documentary programmes cast a light on the incompetence of Canadian commanders during the Second World War while emphasizing the bravery and sacrifice of ordinary Canadian soldiers. Yet, a group of 25,000 outraged veterans initiated a $500 million lawsuit against the filmmakers (Murray 1993). While the class-​action suit was dismissed by the court, fear of the financial implications of future such actions was a contributing factor to the excision of discussions of military incompetence. Despite my best efforts to provide distant and objective judgement in the excision of testimony, my considerable admiration and respect for these veterans played a role in decision-​ making around discussions of cowardice and duty. In retrospect, I regret eliminating poignant stories about timidity on the battlefield, particularly those that convey the compassion of others: 94

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This rifleman…came up to me and he said “Sir”, practically crying. “What am I doing here?”, he says. “I’ve lost my glasses. I’ve stepped on them. I can’t see nothing”. He had glasses as thick as the bottom of a bottle. He was not your tall rangy Canadian fighting man at all. Not only that, but I think he was over 30 years old. I said, “Yeah, what are you doing here?” And sent him out. (Lieutenant) These kinds of stories challenge my notions of manhood and duty that were informed by years of watching Hollywood historical war narratives. Suppression of frank confessions of self-​interest was motivated by an instinctive desire to protect the dignity of War Story’s subjects. If you had corporal stripes, sergeant stripes or whatever, they were the first ones they’d try to pick off because they were the leaders. I turned down mine and good thing the captain knew me. He said, “We’ll send you back and you’ll take sergeant stripes”. I said, “No, I won’t go”. He said, “You know, you’ll go to hard labour for that”. I said, “No, it’s me who I’m going to look after”. (Infantryman) It is unlikely the dishonour that would have been caused by circulating this recollection of a self-​ serving action could be justified by its historical importance. Similarly, nuanced expressions of a primal desire for self-​preservation were excised: When a person gets killed right in front of you, one of your comrades, you’re elated. You actually are elated because it’s not you. You never think that could possibly happen but it does, every time. You’re so relieved that you’re still alive, he’s dead. (Infantryman). However, the removal of these nuanced sentiments from the historical record subtly colours our understanding of the soldier’s sense of duty and service. Critical analysis of documentary interview materials requires an eye watchful for subject self-​aggrandisement. However, in the case of War Story, the ageing warrior subjects articulated a duty to history and often treated the interview as an end-​of-​life confessional. Their brutal honesty regarding misdeeds, from misconduct to war crimes, was striking. Admission to petty crime, particularly robbery of prisoners, was excised. “They came out and surrendered. And what we did is we went around looking for French money or any money” (Rifleman). One subject took great pride in mistreating captives: We treated their prisoners roughly. Rough. We took everything out of their pockets, and we tore it up in front of them and stared at them and threw it on the ground. We gave them no mercy whatsoever… . We didn’t shoot them, but that’s all we didn’t do. (Infantryman) A stretcher bearer’s confession of both the robbery and battlefield euthanasia of a wounded German soldier during the Italian Campaign was a notable elimination: Dr. [Redacted] says, “Give some more morphine, give him another couple shots of morphine, put him out”. I gave him at least six shots of morphine, and he wouldn’t die. He kept 95

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putting his hand in his pocket all the time. I said, “Doc, wonder why he’s putting his hand in his pocket all the time?” So, he said, “Frisk him”. So, I frisk him, and he had a wad of money that was in his pocket. And, you know, we finally had to leave there and when I said to Doc, “What are we going to do with him?” He said, “just throw a blanket over him and give him another shot of morphine”. Dr. [Redacted] and I, we got his cash. (Stretcher Bearer) Given the meagre 23 minutes of screen time allotted to the campaign, the inclusion of these lengthy narrative outliers would distort the perception of the frequency of these misdeeds. Moreover, confessions of war crimes were not uncommon, with one trooper claiming, “I don’t think (Canadian soldiers) knew what the Geneva Convention was.” Excision of this material was made with consideration of the ramifications to the subject and the filmmakers. The fine line between combat and murder is difficult to judge on the battlefield let alone six decades later. We never, to my knowledge, ever killed a prisoner. Ever. But we could refuse to take prisoners, which is what they were doing. And in one case, I overran a position, and the people jumped out, and dropped their rifles and stuck their hands in the air and started to scream “Comrade! Comrade!” And I refused to accept their surrender. I just turned my gunner loose on them and wiped them out. I never personally did fire at an ambulance because one didn’t present itself, or I would have done. (Armoured Officer) Further confession to, and the justification of, murdering civilians, including women and children, is unsettling and unverifiable: Nothing nice about killing people. And whether you like it or not, the enemy hides amongst civilians… They would go to a farmhouse and the farmer would be there. If you blew up the farmhouse to get rid of the people who’d run in, you’d kill the farmer and his wife. It wasn’t fun. We were miserable that we had to do it, kill kids. (Armoured Officer) If true, this extraordinary confession to the intentional murder of innocent civilian bystanders, particularly children, is historically significant. However, without corroboration from a secondary source, I felt the inclusion of an inflammatory statement of this nature was irresponsible. Yet, the feeling I had somehow participated in the sanitization of combat narratives is inescapable. This is particularly apropos in one haunting final remnant on my cutting room floor. I grappled with the excision of an aid worker’s disturbing description of liberating victims of the Nazi death camps. The decision weighed heavily on me then, as it does now as I include it here: When they opened the death camps…there were mixed teams that were permitted to go in to help the people who were still alive. But that’s, that’s rather horrible to talk about it because some… The people that were still alive were barely alive and, um, they would be sitting on a corpse and defecating, or trying to defecate, or whatever. (Humanitarian Aid Worker) The impact of this kind of statement is overwhelming. It certainly speaks to the incomprehensibility of the Holocaust, but to include this extremely complex statement without context or analysis 96

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would only further suffer indignity to the victims of the death camps. However, I’m haunted by the notion that to excise testimony of this nature suppresses powerful articulations of genocide and the horror of war. Moreover, my personal family connection to this dark chapter in history makes me struggle with this content, demonstrating again just how deeply vulnerable the documentary film editing process is to subjective decision-​making.

Picture lock When the editing process of a documentary has come to an end, picture lock, the formal ceasing of revisions to narrative content, is declared. In the aftermath of this creative armistice, a film remains. War Story is an intimate articulation of the experience of war produced on a grand scale. As the largest non-​fiction Canadian military history project of its kind, it is comprehensive and well-​resourced and makes a meaningful contribution to our understanding of the experience of war. Of the more than one million Canadians and Newfoundlanders who served in the armed forces during the Second World War, 45,400 never made it home. Of those who survived to see the second decade of the twenty-​first century, 145 agreed to speak about their experiences. A small fraction of what these men remembered and chose to share with the camera made it into the final films. A detailed recounting of the more than 200 hours of their discarded recollections of combat is beyond the modest scope of this chapter. However, this exploration of War Story’s cutting room floor suggests the historical war documentary, its content and its message, is the product of a complex production process shaped by creativity, politics, economics, and the feedback loop of cultural context. Veterans are likely to contribute to the public record stories which are not just the ones they are comfortable sharing but also what they think we want to hear. This residue is further filtered through the sensibilities of the filmmakers, the limitations of the conventional documentary structural paradigm, and restrictions imposed by the entertainment-​industrial complex. Ultimately, audience, subject, and filmmaker alike participate in forming an accepted historical narrative, and thus our records of conflict often exclude affecting and illuminating aspects of war. This chapter makes clear there are many more war stories, difficult stories, yet to tell. It also suggests the experience of war is individual and deeply complex. In the words of D-​Day veteran Joseph Edwardson, a frank and visceral documentary depiction of combat, even one constructed from the testimony of those who experienced its horrors, cannot truly communicate the ineffable nature of war. “I don’t care how many films you make; you’re not gonna come near describing war because war is something by itself. Unless you experience it, you don’t know it” (“D-​Day +​One,” War Story series, 2014).

Notes 1 Barry Stevens (Director and Executive Producer, War Story), in discussion with the author, June 2012. 2 Andrew Theobald (Senior Researcher, War Story), in discussion with the author, May 2022. 3 David York (Executive Producer, War Story), in discussion with the author, May 2022.

Reference list Andersen, Niels Pagh. 2021. Order in Chaos, Storytelling and Editing in Documentary Film. Copenhagen: Pagh Productions. Barsam, Richard M. 1973. Non-​Fiction Film, A Critical History. Toronto: Clarke, Irwin & Company. Bruzzi, Stella. 2013. “The Performing Film-​Maker and the Acting Subject.” In The Documentary Film Book, edited by Brian Winston, 2nd ed., 48–​58. London: British Film Institute.

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Nick Hector Cole, Alastair. 2019. “Editing the Observed: Evaluation and Value Creation Processes in the Editing of a Feature Documentary Film.” In The Palgrave Handbook of Screen Production, edited by Craig Batty, Marsha Berry, Kath Dooley, Bettina Frankham, and Susan Kerrigan, 243–​256. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Cousins, Mark. 2006. The Story of Film: A Worldwide History. Cambridge: Da Capo Press. Doyle, John. 2020. “Fight to the Finish: Plain Unforgettable Talk about War.” Globe and Mail, November 10. www.theg​lobe​andm​ail.com/​arts/​tel​evis​ion/​arti​cle-​fight-​to-​the-​fin​ish-​plain-​unforg​etta​ble-​talk-​about-​war/​. Grierson, John. 1933. “The Documentary Producer.” Cinema Quarterly 2, no. 1 (Autumn): 7–​9. Kerrigan, Susan, and Phillip McIntyre. 2010. “The ‘Creative Treatment of Actuality’: Rationalizing and Reconceptualizing the Notion of Creativity for Documentary Practice.” Journal of Media Practice 11, no. 2: 111–​130. https://​doi.org/​doi.org/​10.1386/​jmpr.11.2.111_​1. Koppelman, C. 2005. Behind the Seen. Berkeley: New Riders. Larkin, George. 2019. Post-​Production and the Invisible Revolution of Filmmaking: From the Silent Era to Synchronized Sound. New York: Routledge. LaRocca, David, ed. 2017. The Philosophy of Documentary Film. London: Lexington Books. Laurier, Eric, and Barry Brown. 2014. “The Mediated Work of Imagination in Film Editing: Proposals, Suggestions, Reiterations, Directions, and Other Ways of Producing Possible Sequences.” In Studies of Video Practices: Video at Work. New York: Routledge. https://​doi.org/​10.4324/​978131​5851​709. Montagu, Ivor. 1964. Film World. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Murray, Karen. 1993. “Canadian Vet Org Sues Docu Makers.” Variety, July 14. https://​vari​ety.com/​1993/​legit/​ news/​canad​ian-​vet-​org-​sues-​docu-​mak​ers-​108​715/​. Nichols, Bill. 2001. Introduction to Documentary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. https://​doi.org/​ 10.2307/​j.ctt​2005​t6j. Pudovkin, Vsevolod Illarionovich. 1933. Film Technique. London: George Newnes Ltd. Spence, Louise, and Vinicious Navarro. 2011. Crafting Truth, Documentary Form and Meaning. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Swenberg, Thorbjörn, and Árni Sverrisson. 2019. “Agents, Design, and Creativity in Moving Image Postproduction: Conditions for Collaborative Creativity in Digital Media.” Journal of Integrated Design and Process Science 23, no. 4: 29–​44. https://​doi.org/​10.3233/​JID200​003. Taras, David. 1995. “The Struggle over ‘The Valour and the Horror’: Media Power and the Portrayal of War.” Canadian Journal of Political Science /​Revue Canadienne de Science Politique 28, no. 4 (December): 725–​ 748. www.jstor.org/​sta​ble/​3232​008. “The Memory Project.” 2010. Historica Canada. www.hist​oric​acan​ada.ca/​theme​mory​proj​ect. Wiedemann, Vinca. 1998. “Film Editing–​a Hidden Art?” P.O.V. 6 (December): 21–​30. https://​pov.imv.au.dk/​ Issue​_​06/​POV_​6​cnt.html.

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7 DRAMATIZING FILM HISTORY IN THE HISTORICAL FILM Jonathan Stubbs

In his influential discussion of cult cinema and the social construction of taste, Jeffrey Sconce notes that moments of excess in films such as Curse of the Swamp Creature (1968) have the potential to “collaps[e]‌ cinema’s fourth wall, allowing the profilmic and the extratextual to mesh with the diegetic drama.” In this way, he suggests, the “surface” of the film “becomes precisely that, the thin and final veil that is the indexical mark of a more interesting drama, that of the film’s construction and sociohistorical context” (1995, 391). In such films, the on-​screen, fictional story is not sufficient to hold the attention of the viewer, leaving space for the non-​fiction, off-​screen story of the film’s creation to emerge. However, some films aim to represent these off-​screen stories more directly. Beginning in the 1990s a small cycle of historical films and TV dramas have dramatized the production histories of specific, real-​world films, ranging from venerated classics of the Hollywood studio system to cult movies from the margins of the American film industry. In films like Ed Wood (1994), RKO 281 (1999), Baadasssss! (2003), and Hitchcock (2012) filmmakers revise and recirculate the history of their own industries and institutions. In the process, they enter territory which is typically occupied by scholars of film history. The work of film academics and film producers is shaped by quite different commercial imperatives and institutional standards, but their representations of film history, particularly Hollywood history, are not entirely opposed. In many cases historians and filmmakers use similar methods, drawing on primary sources and adapting first-​person accounts to “disinter the struggles which took place during a film’s production,” as Chapman, Glancy, and Harper put it (2007, 69). They also tend to position filmmaking as the film industry’s dominant activity, paying less attention to more elaborate and globally diffuse histories of film distribution and consumption (see Maltby 2011, 8). And their histories of filmmaking tend to centre on exceptional individuals within industrial systems, depicting what Hozic calls the “liberation of creativity from the limited world of mass production” (2001, 19). Production history films can be regarded as a subset of the “backstudio” film, a term Steven Cohan derives from the backstage musical. For Cohan, self-​representation in Hollywood is almost always disingenuous: “nearly every movie about filmmaking declares that it is tearing the veil from the face of Hollywood’s celebrated mystique…only to disclose several more underneath”; such films “purport to demystify the production of entertainment as a condition for remystifying it” (2018, 15, 18). More broadly, John T. Caldwell notes that “industrial self-​analysis and

DOI: 10.4324/9781003263234-10

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self-​representation” have become “primary on-​screen entertainment forms across a vast multimedia landscape,” adding that knowledge about the film industry, including the production histories of specific films, tends to be “highly coded, managed and inflected” (2008, 1–​2). The emergence of the production history film in the 1990s coincided with a broader re-​evaluation of Hollywood’s past as a marketable commodity (Horak 2001, 33). As Paul Grainge notes, the rise of the DVD and other ancillary markets prompted studios to reconsider their “once neglectful relationship with the collective movie past” and to reassess the historical material in their possession not as “dead storage,” quoting Robert Rosen, but as capital assets (Grainge 2008, 113). In the years which followed, Hollywood studios strategically excavated their film and television libraries for marketable, pre-​tested material to repackage or remake. As such, the economic survival of media corporations has become increasingly dependent on their ownership, management, and exploitation of intellectual properties rooted in the past. Production history films may thus be seen as an aspect of Hollywood’s nostalgic, reflexive, self-​referentiality, but they also highlight the broader ways in which Hollywood studios depend on the preservation and reimagining of their own corporate histories. This chapter examines how the production history film represents, recirculates, and reframes the history of American filmmaking. What do these films tell us about how film production, and film history more generally, are understood within Hollywood? What kinds of access and insight do they provide to the filmmaking process and to the industrial history of Hollywood more generally? And how do they compare to academic histories of film production? Much of the theoretical work which has developed around the historical film elaborates on Robert Rosenstone’s suggestion that visual media “propose new ways of thinking about our past” (1995, 235). Might films therefore be more suited to the task of conveying the history of their own medium than the written word? The first section looks at representations of film production within Hollywood’s studio system. These films tend to portray Hollywood as an “isolated and encapsulated institution” as Hozic puts it (2001, 20). The figure of the director is often given prominence: flawed but great, invariably male, executing his creative vision in tension with systems of industrial production. My second section looks at representations of American film production outside Hollywood, including “poverty row” b-​films from the 1950s and Blaxploitation and pornographic films from the 1970s. These production histories reflect changes in film culture and contemporary film appreciation, introducing marginalized filmmaking practices into a Hollywood-​centric film history. The films also tend to be staunchly auteurist, even when depicting ostensibly incompetent filmmaking. Finally, this chapter returns to Hollywood to examine Disney’s Saving Mr. Banks (2013), an account of Mary Poppins’ (1964) production history. A revealing depiction of film history as intellectual property, this production history provides the clearest example of how modern media corporations have sought to control and possess production history and the history of film more generally.

Production history and self-​representation in Hollywood As Cohan notes, the Hollywood “backstudio” film gathered momentum in the 1930s as studios sought to “promulgate the Hollywood mystique” in the face of economic pressures arising from the Great Depression (2018, 25). Films such as A Star is Born (1937) presented stardom in Hollywood’s “dream factory” as a fulfilment of the American dream, an aspirational narrative which was subsequently critiqued in films such as Sunset Boulevard (1950). Films depicting production histories emerged much later, but they were nevertheless grounded in the mystique and nostalgic appeal of this bygone era, looking back at the heyday of centralized, studio-​based filmmaking in the 1930s 100

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and 1940s or addressing the final throes of this industrial model in the 1950s and early 1960s. White Hunter, Black Heart (1990) dramatizes the production of The African Queen in 1950, RKO 281 (1999) looks at the making of Citizen Kane in 1941, and My Week With Marilyn (2011) re-​ stages the filming of The Prince and the Showgirl in 1957. Alfred Hitchcock was the subject of two films in 2012: Hitchcock depicts the production of Psycho in 1960 and The Girl centres on the production of The Birds in 1962. Saving Mr. Banks (2013) dramatizes the pre-​production of Mary Poppins in the early 1960s while Mank (2020) returns to Citizen Kane, offering a different perspective on the conflict between Orson Welles, Herman J. Mankiewicz, and William Randolph Hearst. In a serialized format, the TV miniseries Feud: Bette and Joan (2017) and Fosse/​Verdon (2019) dramatize the production of several films, focusing on the 1960s and the 1970s respectively, while The Offer (2022) portrays the development and production of The Godfather (1972) from the point of view of producer Albert S. Ruddy. Outside the United States, the Hungarian film Curtiz (2018) dramatizes the filming of Casablanca in 1943. In these productions, Hollywood is depicted as a secluded, largely inaccessible space, enclosed within the iconic gates of the studio compound. In industrial terms it is animated by working conditions which put individual artistry and the industrial logic of mass production into conflict. But these films also render Hollywood as kind of a mystique: as Cohan suggests, Hollywood is shown to be the site of “an enduring fantasy about fame, leisure, consumption, sexuality, artistry, and modernity” (2018, 23). Production history films tend to capture Hollywood at moments of significant change and transition. The dominant system of studio production is largely romanticized but it is also presented as being at risk, assailed by both internal and external forces. Thus, in Hitchcock, the production of Psycho is jeopardized both by the penny-​pinching timidity of Paramount bosses and by the prudishness of the Production Code Administration. In RKO 281 the interference of William Randolph Hearst endangers the release of Citizen Kane, and in Curtiz government bureaucrats from the Office of War Information pressure Warner Bros. to insert wartime propaganda into Casablanca. But these accounts of officious meddling, setting cultural production against bureaucratic constraints, tend to obscure more significant changes during the periods represented. In particular, the 1950s and 1960s were a time of unprecedented restructuring in the American film industry. More and more filmmaking in this era was outsourced internationally and undertaken by independent producers attached to the studios, in concert with increasingly powerful talent agencies. In turn, Hollywood studios repositioned themselves as the financiers and distributors of films made outside their immediate control and were ultimately absorbed by large conglomerates whose business interests stretched beyond the entertainment industry.1 These structural changes are acknowledged to some extent in My Week With Marilyn and White Hunter, Black Heart, which present the exploits of Hollywood talent (Marilyn Monroe and John Huston) working on international productions outside the US. But for the most part, films depicting the end of Hollywood’s classical era focus on centrally managed, self-​contained, studio-​based models of production. This is perhaps clearest in Saving Mr. Banks, in which Disney’s Burbank premises are idealized as an amiable wonderland of creativity. In Hitchcock, the production of Psycho is reenacted in the offices and soundstages of Paramount’s elegant, palm tree-​lined compound. But Psycho was in fact filmed at the cheaper, less glamorous Universal-​International backlot in a complex arrangement, brokered by Hitchcock’s agent, which reduced Paramount’s financial exposure (Rebello 1990, 29). The transition away from in-​house, studio-​based production was thus well underway during the era depicted in Saving Mr. Banks and Hitchcock.2 But Hollywood production history films tend to be anachronistic, taking the heyday of studio production as their main point of reference and circumventing the significant changes which have since restructured American filmmaking. 101

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Depictions of creative labour are central to the production history film. Female stars feature prominently, notably in Feud: Bette and Joan, which centres on Joan Crawford’s struggle to remain professionally active, and My Week With Marilyn, which dramatizes the star’s relationship with a lowly assistant and her conflict with director Laurence Olivier. Crawford and Monroe are shown to be vulnerable, but in The Girl (and to a lesser extent in Hitchcock) female stars endure the obsessive and vindictive behaviour of their director. Screenwriters also appear in several films: in White Hunter and The Girl they serve as disillusioned, mainly passive observers of directorial misbehaviour. Screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz is elevated to the leading role in Mank, but he too becomes disillusioned. His creative process is solitary and intensely personal, but credit for his work is subsequently absorbed by Orson Welles. As these accounts suggest, film directors feature much more heavily than other professions. They are shown to be great but flawed men (always men), defined by a personal vision but given to excessive, sometimes self-​destructive appetites. They are individualists who thrive in conflict with authority, battling against the odds but ultimately vindicated by the scale of their creative achievements. The touchstone geniuses of the production history film are Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles. The former appears in two films during his late-​career pomp while the latter is dramatized, also in two films, as a youthful iconoclast during the production of Citizen Kane. The elevation of Hitchcock and Welles reflects the intellectual preferences of film criticism in the 1950s and 1960s, particularly the politique des auteurs associated with the Cahiers du cinéma critics and their influential reappraisal of studio-​era directors (Buscombe 1981). Academic approaches to American films have changed a great deal since this period, but Hitchcock and Welles remain firmly ensconced as paradigms of Hollywood artistry. In particular, Citizen Kane has become the locus classicus of great American filmmaking: “Hollywood’s supreme fetish” as J. Hoberman puts it (2000, 75). The dominant depiction of film directors corresponds with a romantic conception of authorship in which the themes and formal patterns of great art are thought to be rooted in the psychology and personal experience of the artist responsible for them. Thus, in The Girl, key scenes from The Birds and Marnie (1964) are shown to be directly motivated by Hitchcock’s sexual obsession, and RKO 281 draws out parallels between the egomania of Welles and Kane. More collaborative approaches to film production do sometimes feature, notably in Hitchcock and Fosse/​Verdon, although in both cases the additional creative input comes from the director’s romantic partner and their contributions are ultimately marginalized. Hitchcock also recreates the director’s innovative promotional TV appearances, reflecting a more modern understanding of directors as marketable, celebritized brand-​names rather than solitary fonts of creativity. For the most part, however, production history films dramatize the collective labour of filmmaking in highly individualistic terms, eulogizing creative genius within hierarchical systems of industrial production. Depictions of directors in the production history film also draw on the conventions of the studio-​era biopic, established in films such as The Story of Louis Pasteur (1936) and The Life of Emile Zola (1937). Like biopics, production history films exemplify the pervasive but commonly disputed “great man” version of history, in which historical narratives are structured around the lives of significant personalities. As George Custen notes, the great man approach suggests that social change emerges not from “social or economic tensions” but rather from “the far-​sighted actions of uniquely gifted individuals” (2000, 132). Biopics typically valourize the moral and intellectual achievements of impassioned individuals for the benefit of society at large, usually in opposition to reactionary establishment forces. In screenwriter Lamar Trotti’s summary, the biopic hero must “battle against something great for something great” (Custen 1992, 136). Directing Citizen Kane may be a lesser achievement than developing treatments for microbial diseases, but 102

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RKO 281 and The Story of Louis Pasteur share similar narrative arcs and the bold, creative figures at their centre are cut from the same cloth. To use Leo Lowenthal’s phrase, film directors and scientists are “idols of production,” stemming from “the productive life, from industry, business, and the natural sciences” (1944, 512). The relationship between the biopic and the production history film perhaps goes even further. Custen has argued that studio-​era biopics “created a view of history that was based on the cosmology of the movie industry” in which filmmakers “filtered the content of a great life through the sieve of their own experiences” (1992, 4). In a self-​referential turn, films depicting Hollywood history are thus informed by genre conventions which derived from Hollywood’s own internal culture. The historical perspective adopted in the Hollywood production history film is nostalgic and firmly auteurist—​rather more so than in film studies, where directors have to some extent become less central in discussions of filmmaking. Since the 1980s film scholarship has tended to favour histories of corporations and institutions (studios, trade associations, censorship bodies) over individuals, attempting to historicize discursive practices and power relations via primary materials (Smoodin 2007, 11). As Allen and Gomery note, however, histories of this type may still be organized around the actions of “great men” (1984, 155). Production history films are also shaped by the conventions of the Hollywood biopic, featuring narratives in which individuals transcend socially imposed constraints. The production history film’s preference for the individual over society also means that structural transformations in the American film industry, which academic histories attempt to capture, tend to be elided. Whereas academic film history typically depends on material from film archives, the production history films mentioned earlier make limited use of it. Some are based on first-​hand accounts, notably My Week With Marilyn (adapted from the diaries of Colin Clark [2000]) and White Hunter (based on a roman à clef by screenwriter Peter Viertel [1954]). But for the most part they draw, directly and indirectly, from secondary material: The Girl and Hitchcock are officially credited as adaptations of books by Donald Spoto (2008) and Stephen Rebello (1990), although both films augment the historical research of these authors with invented incidents. At the same time, academic film history and production history films share a tendency to focus on the production of films within Hollywood rather than the distribution of films in the world beyond it. This limited perspective is highlighted by the trope of the triumphant premiere, in which the creative instincts and personal sacrifices of the director are vindicated by the public. In RKO 281 Welles and Mankiewicz reflect on their tribulations at the bar as the cinema curtain finally opens on their creation; in Hitchcock the director retreats nervously to the theatre lobby, miming the flourishes of a conductor as the audience screams in terror. In each case, the narrative concludes with a completed film meeting its audience in a glitzy Los Angeles theatre. But the films remain enclosed by the studio system in which they were created: made in Hollywood, they barely circulate outside its gilded environs.

“Off-​Hollywood” production history If the films already mentioned imagine Hollywood to be closed-​off from the audience it serves, production history films set outside the mainstream American film industry provide a different perspective. Ed Wood (1994) follows the career of the exploitation director of the same name; The Disaster Artist (2017) gives a similar treatment to director Tommy Wiseau and his more recent cult hit The Room (2003). As Dennis Bingham suggests of Ed Wood, the valourization of directors normally regarded as bad serves to invert the values of the biopic, creating a kind of “anti-​Great Man film” (2010, 147). Blaxploitation films produced outside Hollywood are examined in two films: in Baadasssss! (2003) director Mario Van Peebles dramatizes the production of Sweet Sweetback’s 103

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Baadasssss Song (1971), as directed by his own father, and Dolemite is My Name (2019) focuses on comedian Rudy Ray Moore and his film Dolemite (1975), using a script from the writers of Ed Wood. Also set in the 1970s, Lovelace (2013) depicts the production and aftermath of the pornographic film Deep Throat (1972) from the perspective of its star, Linda Lovelace. All of these films are set primarily in Los Angeles, but they dramatize low-​budget, often disreputable modes of film production which are disconnected from the studio system. To use Lupo and Anderson’s phrase, they are set “off-​Hollywood,” at the seamy margins of America’s film industry (2008, 102). In a sense, off-​Hollywood offers an inverted self-​portrait of the mainstream American film industry, replacing the glamour, craft, seriousness, and moral uplift which Hollywood strives for with varying measures of squalor, incompetence, camp, and vice. At the same time, by adapting off-​Hollywood histories through the conventions of the Hollywood biopic in studio-​funded films with prominent stars, these films serve to incorporate certain aspects of off-​Hollywood history into the Hollywood mainstream. Ed Wood, for example, was released by Disney’s Touchstone Pictures and arrived on the heels of director Tim Burton’s enormous success with Batman (1989) and its sequel. Of the films mentioned earlier, Baadasssss! is closest to being independent of Hollywood but it was nevertheless distributed by Sony Pictures Classics, a prestigious boutique operation owned by Sony Pictures. Off-​Hollywood production histories are connected to relatively recent shifts in film culture and appreciation, including scholarly interest in “cult” and exploitation films. As Sconce proposed in 1995, the cult appeal of typically maligned films and filmmakers reflects a “subcultural sensibility devoted to all manner of cultural detritus,” whether “explicitly rejected or simply ignored by legitimate film culture” (1995, 372). The cult discovery and celebration of Ed Wood’s Plan 9 From Outer Space (1957), as well as the more rapid elevation of The Room, is partly due to an ironic or camp enjoyment of bad filmmaking, often as a collective experience at midnight screenings. According to Sconce, Plan 9 has become “badfilm’s equivalent of Citizen Kane” (1995, 387). But Sconce and others have also discussed engagement with these films as a counter-​cultural reading strategy which challenges socially constructed taste formations and stands in opposition to “the agendas of the academy” (1995, 380). The reappraisal of Blaxploitation films from the 1970s is similarly ideological, reflecting efforts to assert the significance of Black filmmakers and audiences in American film history. Dolemite has attracted limited academic attention, but Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song is often regarded as a breakthrough in African American film, establishing a Blaxploitation narrative formula and confirming the economic importance of Black audiences (Guerrero 1993, 86). The director-​as-​auteur features very strongly in the off-​Hollywood production film. As Becky Bartlett notes, “auteurist interpretations generally underpin cult appreciation,” leading cult fans to attribute both achievement and incompetence to the director (2020, 44). In several cases directors are depicted as being even more monomaniacal than their Hollywood peers, even more committed to the realization of their personal visions, and assailed by even greater institutional forces. Baadasssss! depicts a particularly extreme form of filmmaking individualism: Mario Van Peebles is a kind of one-​man-​band, operating as director, star, producer, writer, editor, and even a composer (Benshoff 2020, 133). Striving against severe financial constraints and the intrusion of the police and film unions, the production takes a severe toll on his mental and physical health. Rudy Ray Moore does not direct or write in Dolemite is My Name, but his authorship is clear: he is the star, producer, financier, and all-​purpose set hand in a film based on his stage persona. In several films, of course, the personal vision of the director is plainly bad.3 The films of Ed Wood suffer from inconsistencies in narrative and editing continuity, uneven performances, and flimsy set design. In Tim Burton’s film, Wood is steeped in the lore of studio-​era Hollywood but is unable to master the 104

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basic principles of classical Hollywood form. But as David Singleton suggests, the Ed Wood of Ed Wood is an “idiot savant” rather than a hack (2019, 420): his authentic innocence and unworldliness is celebrated rather than mocked. In The Disaster Artist the peculiar badness of The Room is attributed to the bungling eccentricity and unexplored misogyny of writer-​director Wiseau. Inexplicably wealthy, Wiseau appears to finance The Room personally, making The Disaster Artist one of the few production history films in which funding is not a significant hindrance. In both Ed Wood and The Disaster Artist, histories of film production remain structured around the decisive actions of the director. Wood and Wiseau may lack professional status, but they struggle against financial constraints and strive to impress their unorthodox methods on those around them, just like Welles and Hitchcock. The auteur may be bad, but he is still an auteur. Indeed, Ed Wood presents its protagonist, ironically, as a peer to Welles, a characterization confirmed when Wood, dressed in drag, encounters Welles at a bar. As Constantine Verevis writes, “the scene serves to recast Wood as an auteur: Wood and Welles are rendered as two kindred spirits [who] complain about invasive money men and indignities of artistic compromise” (2016, 87). Clint Eastwood asserted his credentials as an auteur in White Hunter, Black Heart by casting himself as John Huston, embodying the historical image of a storied director from the studio era (Smith 1993, 261). For the most part, however, the directors of Hollywood production films have not attempted to explore their own relationship to the historical directors they depict. Certainly, the directors of RKO 281, Hitchcock, and The Girl did not actively measure themselves against Hitchcock and Welles. By contrast, off-​Hollywood production films have been much more self-​ reflexive in their presentation of directors. Despite finding immediate success in the Hollywood mainstream, Tim Burton has claimed to identify closely with Wood (Salisbury 2006, 131) and in Ed Wood he projects an image of himself as a guileless outsider struggling to realize an eccentric vision. Mario Van Peebles went further in Baadasssss! by portraying Melvin Van Peebles himself, a modern Black actor-​director inhabiting the image of a historical Black actor-​director who is both his predecessor and his actual father. According to Adam Coombs, the intergenerational casting entails both the embodiment and the “Oedipal replacement” of the father (2017, 43). And in The Disaster Artist, actor-​director James Franco performs an elaborate impersonation of actor-​director Tommy Wiseau, using Wiseau’s performance as Johnny in The Room as his reference point. It was repeatedly publicized that Franco stayed “in character” even when off-​camera, his performance as Wiseau/​Johnny apparently encroaching on the direction of the film itself (Hirschberg 2018). Echoing Burton, Franco has claimed to identify with Wiseau, describing the film as “my story. In a weird way” (Hirschberg 2018). But if Burton’s depiction of Wood asserted a kinship based on a shared passion for schlocky genre filmmaking and a sense of alienation within the film industry, Franco’s identification with (and embodiment of) Wiseau is more ironic and disingenuous, allowing him to assert his seriousness as filmmaker and his privileged status as a Hollywood-​insider at the expense of his subject. Off-​Hollywood production history films also stand apart from Hollywood production history films due to their frequent reenactment of scenes from the films they depict. Whereas films like Hitchcock and RKO 281 avoid directly replicating scenes from Citizen Kane and Psycho, largely due to the cost of licensing material from other Hollywood companies, detailed reenactments feature prominently throughout Ed Wood, Baadasssss!, The Disaster Artist, Dolemite is My Name, and to a lesser extent in Lovelace. It was reported that Tim Burton purchased the rights to remake Plan 9 From Outer Space in order to restage portions of it in Ed Wood (Verevis 2016, 89), and similar licensing arrangements were presumably made in the other films mentioned. The process of engaging with the past through reenactment has recently been discussed as a method of historical enquiry. Robert Burgoyne has suggested that reenactment in historical films allows 105

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both filmmakers and spectators to “project themselves into a past world in order to reimagine it, to perform it, and to rethink it” (2008, 8). More broadly, Vanessa Agnew identifies reenactment with history’s “affective turn,” which she argues may facilitate “sympathetic identification with the past” (2007, 302). The reenactments staged in Ed Wood are sympathetic, but they also derive humour from the incompetence and campness of Wood’s filmmaking. The clear contrast between Burton’s slick, professional style and the off-​Hollywood amateurishness of Wood does not appear to serve a broader analytical purpose. Instead, the ironic representation of incompetent film style within the context of a well-​made film reinforces a distinctly non-​ironic hierarchy between Hollywood and off-​Hollywood. This is also made clear in Dolemite is My Name, which finds humour in Moore’s ignorance of filmmaking norms and his inept staging of kung fu action sequences. Several of the scenes reenacted during the film are featured in their original form during the credit sequence, corroborating the authenticity of the restaging but also highlighting the aesthetic and professional gap between the 2019 film and the 1975 film taken as its subject.4 Similarly, The Disaster Artist meticulously restages multiple scenes from The Room, emphasizing the bemused response of the professional crew hired by Wiseau. Original scenes from The Room also feature during the credit sequence, but the film goes further than Dolemite is My Name by playing Franco’s restaged versions side-​by-​side with Wiseau’s originals, including simultaneous sound.5 The compositions, cinematography, production design, and performances are shown to be almost identical. But other than emphasizing, once again, the ludicrousness of The Room and the pains which the modern filmmakers took to mimic it, the broader purpose of the comparison is unclear. As with Franco’s impersonation of Wiseau, the imitation seems superficial and provides limited insight into its subject. The off-​Hollywood production film shares the Hollywood production film’s auteurist conception of filmmaking and film history, but its depiction of filmmaking tends to be more self-​reflexive and allows more space for the reenactment of filmmaking. The off-​Hollywood film also takes a much more extensive interest in the activities of the film industry once the production stage is complete. Whereas the Hollywood production film typically starts and ends within the enclosed space of the studio, the narrative scope of off-​Hollywood films is often broader, shedding light on distribution and representing a fuller encounter between films and their audiences. This stage is particularly significant in Blaxploitation films, a genre founded on the interests of a specific audience. In Baadasssss! the distributors walk out when Van Peebles screens Sweetback for the first time, leaving him on the verge of ruin with the near-​bankrupt exploitation distributor Cinemation as his only option. His film opens in just two locations, Detroit and Atlanta, and only three tickets are sold at the first performance. But a massive, appreciative audience suddenly materializes at the second screening, mobilized in part by the support of the Black Panthers, and the film becomes a hit. In Dolemite is My Name, a distraught Moore is shown calling a list of distributors from a phone booth, crossing them off one by one as they turn down his film. Meeting a cinema owner in Indianapolis, Moore learns about “four-​wall” distribution, a relatively common exploitation film strategy in which individual cinemas were rented for a flat fee in exchange for the full box office takings. The Indianapolis cinema is packed and Dolemite sets a house record, gaining the attention of an exploitation film distributor who purchases the film from Moore and gives it a professional release. Depictions of unexpected, runaway success also feature in Lovelace as Deep Throat (which was also distributed on a four-​wall basis) becomes a popular phenomenon, verified by inserts showing box office figures published in the trade press. The trope of the triumphant premiere, often as a vindication for the auteur, is strongly evident in all these films. Two premieres are featured in Ed Wood. At the first, for Bride of the Monster (1955), Wood and his cast are chased from the theatre by an unruly mob. But the Plan 9 premiere, 106

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at the plush Pantages Theatre in Hollywood, is an unlikely success. Wood is shown mouthing the dialogue as the film plays, enthralled by his own creation, and is later warmly applauded by a packed house. Plan 9 was in fact distributed in downmarket regional theatres (Singleton 2019, 429), but the invention of a glamorous Los Angeles opening gives Wood’s story a more uplifting conclusion. The premiere of The Room is dramatized extensively in The Disaster Artist, occupying the film’s final 12 minutes. Wiseau introduces the film as “my life,” but the audience does not respond as intended—​amid howls of laughter, the director retreats to the lobby in dismay. But his friend persuades him to embrace the audience’s enthusiasm, asking “how often do you think Hitchcock got a response like this?” After the screening, Wiseau suddenly distances himself from the failed seriousness of his creation, declaring “I’m glad you liked my comedic movie.” In highly compressed form, The Disaster Artist dramatizes the ironic reading strategies which made The Room a cult hit. Its production history foregrounds the intentions of Wiseau as auteur, but the meaning of the film is transformed as soon as it reaches an audience. Breaking out of the hermetic space of the studio compound, the off-​Hollywood production film thus provides a more extensive picture of American film history. Their depiction of creative work still centres on a romanticized auteur figure, but by dramatizing the distribution process and highlighting the interpretative activities of film audiences, they move beyond the limitations of this historical perspective.

Intellectual property and the archive in Saving Mr. Banks Saving Mr. Banks provides a third perspective on the history of American film production. It is also by far the most successful production history film thus released, with international box office grosses exceeding $100 million (The Numbers 2022a). Saving Mr. Banks dramatizes the history of a film, a person, and a corporation. The film is Mary Poppins (1964): Saving Mr. Banks depicts its pre-​production, particularly the composition of its songs, and the contentious negotiation over the sale of the adaptation rights, conducted by Walt Disney in person. The absence of scenes dramatizing the actual filming of Mary Poppins is unusual—​of the films discussed previously, only Mank takes the same approach. The person is PL Travers, the prickly novelist who created Mary Poppins and who must be persuaded to allow Disney to make the film. The portrayal of Travers leans heavily on the psychological conventions of the biopic, grounding her personality in childhood trauma by interspersing the main narrative with a series of flashback scenes set in Australia during the early twentieth century. Childhood quickly turns from idyll to tragedy as Travers’ charismatic father succumbs to alcoholism and dies in disgrace—​a memory which continues to haunt her. And the corporation is Disney, led and personified by the canny, auteur-​like Walt. In the film, Disney has begun the process of adapting the Mary Poppins books but they have only a verbal agreement with Travers—​they require her to approve the script and formally reassign her rights.6 Travers agrees to travel to Los Angeles to collaborate in the film’s pre-​production, setting up creative conflict with its writers and with Walt himself. Travers’ input is shown to be capricious and eccentric: she does not wish the colour red to be used in the film, she opposes the moustache given to Mr. Banks, and she dismisses early versions of songs which most audience members would recognize as indelible classics. But as the flashbacks gradually reveal, Travers’ protectiveness stems from the way she has used Mary Poppins to process her feelings toward her father. As she resists the contract in front of her, Walt’s negotiation comes to resemble a seduction. He fills her hotel room with branded soft toys and disarms her with his informality, leaning toward her at their first meeting and softly declaring “I love Mary Poppins and you have got to share her with me.” After she flees to London, aghast at the prospect of animated penguins appearing in the film, an apparently penitent Walt follows on the next plane and appears at her doorstep. The scene 107

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draws on a familiar romantic comedy trope, except the suitor bears a contract rather than flowers or a ring. Travers submits, transferring the rights to her valuable intellectual property to Walt. Saving Mr. Banks can thus be read as the history of a piece of intellectual property (IP) as much as it is the history of a film. The rights to Mary Poppins are procured, exploited to generate a marketable entertainment product, and protected to maximize Disney’s return on their investment. In promotional materials, Travers’ creation was re-​designated “Walt Disney’s Mary Poppins.” The transfer of IP away from an author and the creation of a film removed from her sensibilities might seem a rather ruthless (not to mention bureaucratic) aspect of film production. But just as popular success and artistic achievement excuse the excesses of auteurs elsewhere, Disney’s appropriation is vindicated by the enduring appeal of Mary Poppins and its music. The final scene, depicting the film’s premiere at the iconic Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, plays a crucial role in this regard. Travers is initially denied an invitation, but she arrives in a limo and is led down the red carpet by a figure in a Mickey Mouse costume. As the film plays, the camera focuses not on the audience but on Travers herself, her disdain for the songs and the animated penguins giving way to tearful appreciation for the way her father’s memory—​embodied on screen as Mr. Banks—​has been treated. Mary Poppins has indeed “saved” Mr. Banks and Walt has kept his promise to “restore order through imagination.” In fact, Travers was much more ambivalent about Disney’s adaptation and declined offers to work with the company again until 1988 (Lawson 1999, 350).7 Disney’s IP and corporate branding are rife in the world of Saving Mr. Banks. Walt’s attempt to charm Travers by piling toys into her hotel room might be understood as an extension of Disney’s branding into her personal space. Shortly after disposing of the toys, Travers sees Walt hosting The Wonderful World of Disney on TV—​a weekly show which cemented his celebrity and helped diversify the Disney brand. The studio compound where Travers meets Walt in person also teems with Disney branding; to some extent it serves as an extension of Disneyland, a space which Grainge describes as the “primal scene of brand synergy” (2008, 122). Confirming the link, Walt later cajoles Travers into a private tour of his amusement park: the “happiest place on earth” to him, “a dollar printing machine” to her. In the process, Saving Mr. Banks outlines the branded commercial structure which Mary Poppins is due to enter. The Mary Poppins IP has certainly been profitable for Disney: the film was re-​released in cinemas in 1973 and 1980, made available on home video in 1980, re-​branded as part of the “Walt Disney Masterpiece Collection” in 1994, and released as Disney’s first ever DVD in 1998 (Disney Wiki n.d.). The film was also adapted as a West End/​Broadway musical in 2004, and spawned a belated sequel, Mary Poppins Returns, in 2018. Over time, the film has become a brand unto itself. To use Simone Murray’s formulation, it has been “translated across formats to create a raft of interrelated products, which then work in aggregate to drive further consumer awareness” of the original property (2005, 417). In depicting the creation of Mary Poppins, Saving Mr. Banks draws on the type of archival material which film historians have typically used in their own histories of film production. The costume design and storyboard sketches displayed in the rehearsal room appear to be copies of real drawings from the early 1960s. The contract which Travers eventually signs also seems to be a copy of the archived original, as does the screenplay which she throws out of the window to make a point about its lack of “gravitas.” Most significantly, a mid-​credit sequence features an audio recording of the real Travers giving feedback during a read-​through of the screenplay, corroborating the film’s depiction of her as rude, pedantic, stubborn, and snobbish. But these documents, which no doubt contain significant insights into the creative and corporate environment from which Mary Poppins emerged, are not freely available to researchers. Disney maintains an extensive corporate archive, founded in 1970 at the Burbank compound featured in Saving Mr. Banks,

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but admission is highly restricted. Neal Gabler was given access for his 2006 biography of Walt, written with the co-​operation of the studio’s Vice President of Studio Communication, and a small number of (presumably carefully vetted) researchers have been granted similar privileges.8 But for most, the Disney archive remains out of bounds. As Gabler put it, “the Walt Disney Company has gained the unenviable reputation of being an impregnable corporate fortress, about as forthcoming as the old Soviet Kremlin. No one gains full access” (2006, 647). Archive collections from several other Hollywood studios are freely available, notably those of Warner Bros., whose parent company donated an extensive set of records to the University of Southern California in 1977 (University of Southern California (USC), n.d. ). Partial records from long-​defunct studio RKO are held by UCLA, and even more partial collections from MGM, Universal, United Artists, and Paramount are split between various institutions, mostly in Los Angeles (Carman 2014, 32). But as with Disney, the archives of 20th Century Fox and Sony/​Columbia are maintained in-​house and researcher access is limited. In a critical account of the Universal archive, which he was hired to curate, Jan-​Christopher Horak claims that “its function is no longer to make history visible, but to bury it” (2001, 41). The limited and uneven availability of these vital historical records has decisively shaped the public understanding of film history. Sequestered in private archives, film history itself becomes a form of IP, a corporate asset which sees the light of day only if it is thought to have commercial value. Disney’s control over both Mary Poppins’ archival record and its IP is made clear by the production history of Saving Mr. Banks itself. The film originated outside the Disney Company as an adaptation of a biographical documentary made for Australian TV. Screenwriter Kelly Marcel rewrote the script to ground it more directly in the pre-​production of Mary Poppins, but the need to licence IP owned by Disney put the film at a crossroads (Kilda 2013). On learning of the screenplay, Disney sought to obstruct any potentially negative depiction of their founder. According to Sean Bailey, Disney’s president for production, the company considered three options: buying the script “defensively” and leaving it unmade, passing on the project but making it “difficult” for another company to make it, or purchasing the project and putting it into production (Barnes 2013, C1). Seeing the potential alignment between the film’s message and Disney’s corporate ethos, they selected the latter. According to Bailey, Saving Mr. Banks demonstrates “how storytelling can change people’s lives” (Barnes 2013, C1)—​implicitly, how Walt’s somewhat coercive adaptation of Mary Poppins helps Travers to process her childhood trauma. Sale to Disney provided access to the IP necessary to produce the script, particularly rights to use the songs of Mary Poppins, but also rights to Disney’s corporate iconography, rights to film at Disneyland, and rights to show extracts from Mary Poppins in the premiere scene. Access was also provided to Disney’s corporate records. According to the Hollywood Reporter, the company “threw its archives open to the filmmakers,” an experience the producer likened to “kids in a candy store” (Kilda 2013). By guarding their IP and their archive so jealously, Disney is thus able to ensure that their own history may only be told within Disney’s enclosed corporate structure. But what does Saving Mr. Banks say about Disney’s history? The film returns to the early 1960s, prior to the death of Walt and before industry-​wide restructuring began to seriously affect the company. This return to Disney’s corporate past is highlighted by the historical logo at the very beginning of the film, used in place of the contemporary Disney branding. Under Walt’s leadership, Disney maintained a certain distance from other studios, focusing on animation, merchandising, and amusement parks while avoiding the trappings of Hollywood glamour and excess. Even in the immediate post-​Walt era, Disney “held itself aloof from Hollywood” (Stewart 2006, 22), focusing on medium-​budget family films while maintaining a steady stream of revenue by re-​releasing their “classic” animations. In the late-​1980s, however, Disney transitioned into the 109

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Hollywood mainstream, expanding its worldwide box office share by diversifying beyond family films. Disney has successfully protected the IP generated within the company since the 1920s while accumulating new material in a series of ambitious acquisitions: Pixar Animation in 2006, Marvel Entertainment in 2009, Lucasfilm/​Star Wars in 2012, and 20th Century Fox in 2019. As America’s dominant media conglomerate, Disney’s modern business model increasingly corresponds with Allen J. Scott’s description of Hollywood as a “cultural production and franchising complex, disgorging an endless variety of products designed for many different market niches” (2005, 58). Saving Mr. Banks may thus be seen as an idealized corporate history by a company which is deeply invested in its past but has significantly outgrown its humble beginnings. It reveals how Disney might like to see itself, romanticizing the leadership of Walt, the warm atmosphere of its Burbank compound, and the creativity of its in-​house writing teams. But by emphasizing Walt’s shrewdness as a business operator—​his cultivation of his own image, his exploitation of Disney’s branding, his instinct to diversity business operations beyond filmmaking, and his stubborn pursuit of new creative properties—​it also foreshadows the company’s modern incarnation. Saving Mr. Banks might thus be regarded as what Caldwell calls a “company confession,” a “mediated self-​ disclosure” which asserts Disney’s institutional self-​awareness (2006, 124). Looking beyond the polish and glamour of the Hollywood production history film, as well as off-​Hollywood’s innovation and naiveté, Saving Mr. Banks comes closest to acknowledging the corporate imperatives which animate film production, even as it reveals the difficulty of producing historical accounts of this process on an independent basis.

Conclusion The production history film might be regarded as testament to public fascination over how things get made and the creative talents and foibles of the people who make them. But apart from Saving Mr. Banks and Feud: Bette and Joan, these films and TV dramas have never been particularly popular. Ed Wood, for example, is the least commercially successful release in Tim Burton’s money-​spinning filmography, while White Hunter, Black Heart is the second or third lowest grossing release among the 39 films directed by Clint Eastwood (The Numbers 2022b; The Numbers 2022c). Instead, the production history film reflects the desire and the ability of filmmakers to take on the history of their own industry. Hollywood production history films tend to be nostalgic and anachronistic, dwelling on a romanticized image of production and territorializing the film industry within the gilded, neatly circumscribed space of the studio compound. These films tend to valourize auteurs at the expense of other filmmaking labour; in many cases, film history is narrated as the triumph of individual genius within creative constraints imposed by an industry geared toward mass production and standardization. Off-​Hollywood films tend to be more outward looking, particularly in their attention to distribution and audiences, and their representation of the filmmaking process is often more self-​reflexive. But as with the Hollywood production film, their analysis of film history is limited by a focus on the individual achievements of male auteurs—​their heroic artistic commitment, their surmounting of insuperable odds, and in some cases their abject lack of talent. These films grant recognition to marginalized aspects of film production, integrating selected off-​Hollywood histories into the broader historical narrative of American film. But they do so within the economic and aesthetic context of the professionally competent, well-​funded Hollywood film, upholding the dominance of the Hollywood model in the process. Finally, the production history contained within Saving Mr. Banks spells out the relationship between the romanticized image of Hollywood’s past and the industrial logic of Hollywood in the present. The history of Mary Poppins—​and numerous other films by extension—​is shown 110

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to be an asset, a commodity, a marketing tool, a trade secret to be managed and protected within Disney’s vast corporate infrastructure. The history of film is thus made visible for an audience of millions. But in another sense this history is also made inaccessible, buried (for now at least) in the studio compound where it emerged.

Notes 1 On overseas production see Stubbs 2009; on independent producers see Mann 2008; on studios as financiers see Scott 2005; on conglomerate takeovers see Maltby 1998. 2 The effects of overseas production can even be seen in the production history film itself: both RKO 281 and The Girl cut costs by recreating the glamour of the studio system in locations thousands of miles away from Hollywood, in London and South Africa, respectively. 3 Other biopics depicting individual incompetence include the sports film Eddie the Eagle (2015) and Florence Foster Jenkins (2016), a biopic of the singer. 4 Dolemite is My Name ostensibly depicts the production of Dolemite, Moore’s first film, but many of the reenacted scenes are taken from his second film, The Human Tornado (1976). 5 The side-​by-​side comparison of images in credit sequences has been a widely used corroboration strategy in historical films since the 2000s (Stubbs 2013, 26). 6 According to Travers’ biographer, Travers had in fact signed a contract with Disney prior to her LA visit—​it would have been risky to begin pre-​production without first securing the rights. But Travers was required to approve the screenplay. Travers’ contract also entitled her to 5% of Mary Poppins’ gross earnings, a lucrative arrangement which the film does not refer to (Lawson 1999, 243–​247). 7 This project, a sequel to Mary Poppins, was not realized until 2018. 8 They include Watts (1997) and Barrier (2007).

Reference list Agnew, Vanessa. 2007. “History’s Affective Turn: Historical Reenactment and its Work in the Present.” Rethinking History 11, no. 3: 299–​312. https://​doi.org/​10.1080/​136425​2070​1353​108. Allen, Robert C., and Douglas Gomery. 1984. Film History: Theory and Practice. New York: McGraw-​Hill. Barnes, Brooks. 2013. “Forget the Spoonful of Sugar: It’s Uncle Walt, Uncensored.” New York Times, October 16: C1. Barrier, Michael. 2007. The Animated Man: A Life of Walt Disney. Berkley: University of California Press. Bartlett, Becky. 2020. “It Happens by Accident! Failed Intentions, Incompetence, and Sincerity in Badfilm.” In The Routledge Companion to Cult Cinema, edited by Ernest Mathijs and Jamie Sexton, 40–​49. London: Routledge. Benshoff, Harry M. 2020. “Blaxploitation Filmmaking.” In The Routledge Companion to Cult Cinema, edited by Ernest Mathijs and Jamie Sexton, 133–​138. London: Routledge. Bingham, Dennis. 2010. Whose Lives Are They Anyway? The Biopic as Contemporary Film Genre. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Burgoyne, Robert. 2008. The Hollywood Historical Film. Malden: Blackwell. Buscombe, Edward. 1981. “Ideas of Authorship.” In Theories of Authorship, edited by John Caughie, 22–​34. London: BFI. Caldwell, John T. 2006. “Critical Industrial Practice: Branding, Repurposing, and the Migratory Patterns of Industrial Texts.” Television & New Media 7, no. 2: 99–​132. https://​doi.org/​10.1177/​15274​7640​3255​811. Caldwell, John T. 2008. Production Cultures: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television. Durham: Duke University Press. Carman, Emily. 2014. “That’s Not All Folks! Excavating the Warner Bros. Archives.” The Moving Image: Journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists 14, no. 1 (Spring): 30–​48. https://​doi.org/​ 10.5749/​movi​ngim​age.14.1.0030. Chapman, James, Mark Glancy, and Sue Harper. 2007. The New Film History: Sources, Methods, Approaches. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Clark, Colin. 2000. My Week With Marilyn. New York: HarperCollins.

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Jonathan Stubbs Cohan, Steven. 2018. Hollywood by Hollywood: The Backstudio Picture and the Mystique of Making Movies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Coombs, Adam. 2017. “Queer Oedipal Drag in Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song and Baadasssss!” African American Review 50, no. 1 (Spring): 41–​58. www.jstor.org/​sta​ble/​26444​123. Custen, George F. 1992. Bio/​Pics: How Hollywood Constructed Public History. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Custen, George F. 2000. “The Mechanical Life in the Age of Human Reproduction: American Biopics, 1961–​ 1980.” Biography 23, no. 1 (Winter): 127–​159. www.jstor.org/​sta​ble/​23540​206. Disney Wiki. n.d. “Mary Poppins.” Accessed April 5, 2022. https://​dis​ney.fan​dom.com/​wiki/​Mary_​P​oppi​ ns_​(film). Gabler, Neal. 2006. Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination. New York: Knopf. Grainge, Paul. 2008. Brand Hollywood: Selling Entertainment in a Global Media Age. London: Routledge. Guerrero, Ed. 1993. Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Hirschberg, Lynn. 2018. “James Franco Says Staying in Character as Tommy Wiseau While Directing The Disaster Artist ‘Helped the Vibe’.” W Magazine, January 5. www.wmagaz​ine.com/​story/​james-​fra​nco-​ tommy-​wis​eau-​the-​disas​ter-​art​ist. Hoberman, J. 2000. “RKO 281.” Film Comment 36, no. 1 (January/​February): 75–​77. Horak, Jan-​Christopher. 2001. “The Hollywood History Business.” In The End of Cinema as we Know It: American Film in the Nineties, edited by Jon Lewis, 33–​41. New York: New York University Press. Hozic, Aida A. 2001. Hollyworld: Space, Power, and Fantasy in the American Economy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Kilda, Gregg. 2013. “Bringing Walt Disney (and Mary Poppins) Back to Life: The Making of Saving Mr. Banks.” Hollywood Reporter, December 16. www.hollyw​oodr​epor​ter.com/​news/​gene​ral-​news/​mak​ing-​ sav​ing-​mr-​banks-​bring​ing-​665​733/​. Lawson, Valerie. 1999. Mary Poppins, She Wrote: The Life of PL Travers. New York: Simon and Schuster. Lowenthal, Leo. 1944. “Biographies in Popular Magazines.” In Radio Research 1942–​43, edited by Paul Lazarsfeld and Frank Stanton, 507–​548. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce. Lupo, Jonathan, and Carolyn Anderson. 2008. “Off-​Hollywood Lives: Irony and Its Discontents in the Contemporary Biopic.” Journal of Popular Film and Television 36, no. 2: 102–​112. https://​doi.org/​ 10.3200/​JPFT.36.2.102-​112. Maltby, Richard. 1998. “Nobody Knows Everything: Post-​classical Historiographies and Consolidated Entertainment.” In Contemporary Hollywood Cinema, edited by Steve Neale and Murray Smith, 21–​44. London: Routledge. Maltby, Richard. 2011. “New Cinema Histories.” In Explorations in New Cinema History: Approaches and Case Studies, edited by Richard Maltby, Daniel Biltereyst and Philippe Meers, 3–​40. Oxford: Blackwell. Mann, Denise. 2008. Hollywood Independents: The Postwar Talent Takeover. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Murray, Simone. 2005. “Brand loyalties: rethinking content within global corporate media.” Media, Culture & Society 27, no. 3: 415–​435. https://​doi.org/​10.1177/​01634​4370​5053​973. Rebello, Stephen. 1990. Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho. London: Marion Boyars. Rosenstone, Robert. 1995. Visions of the Past: The Challenge of Film to Our Idea of History. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Salisbury, Mark, ed. 2006. Burton on Burton. London: Faber and Faber. Sconce, Jeffrey. 1995.“‘Trashing’ the Academy: Taste, Excess, and an Emerging Politics of Cinematic Style.” Screen 36, no. 4 (Winter): 371–​393. https://​doi.org/​10.1093/​scr​een/​36.4.371. Scott, Allen J. 2005. On Hollywood: The Place, The Industry. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Singleton, Daniel. 2019. “The Bad Auteur(ist): Authentic Failure and Failed Authenticity in Tim Burton’s Ed Wood.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 36, no. 5: 414–​444. https://​doi.org/​10.1080/​10509​ 208.2019.1593​013. Smith, Paul. 1993. Clint Eastwood: A Cultural Production. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Smoodin, Eric. 2007. “Introduction: The History of Film History.” In Looking Past the Screen: Case Studies in American Film History and Method, edited by Jon Lewis and Eric Smoodin, 1–​33. Durham: Duke University Press. Spoto, Donald. 2008. Spellbound by Beauty: Alfred Hitchcock and His Leading Ladies. New York: Harmony Books.

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Dramatizing film history in the historical film Stewart, James B. 2006. DisneyWar: The Battle for the Magic Kingdom. London: Pocket Books. Stubbs, Jonathan. 2009. “The Runaway Bribe? American Film Production in Britain and the Eady Levy.” Journal of British Cinema and Television 6, no. 1: 1–​20. Stubbs, Jonathan. 2013. Historical Film: A Critical Introduction. London: Bloomsbury Academic. The Numbers. 2022a. “Saving Mr. Banks.” Accessed April 5, 2022. www.the-​numb​ers.com/​movie/​Sav​ ing-​Mr-​Banks. The Numbers. 2022b. “Tim Burton Technical Credits.” Accessed April 7, 2022. www.the-​numb​ers.com/​per​ son/​21830​401-​Tim-​Bur​ton#tab=​techni​cal. The Numbers. 2022c. “Clint Eastwood Technical Credits.” Accessed April 7, 2022. www.the-​numb​ers.com/​ per​son/​43320​401-​Clint-​Eastw​ood#tab=​techni​cal. University of Southern California (USC). n.d. “Collection Overview.” Accessed March 31, 2022. https://​cin​ ema.usc.edu/​about/​war​nerb​rosa​rchi​ves.cfm. Verevis, Constantine. 2016. “ ‘Weird Andy Hardy’: Ed Wood and American National Identity.” In Invented Lives, Imagined Communities: The Biopic and American National Identity, edited by William H. Epstein and R. Barton Palmer, 73–​90. Albany: SUNY Press. Viertel, Peter. 1954. White Hunter, Black Heart. London: WH Allen. Watts, Steven. 1997. The Magic Kingdom: Walt Disney and the American Way of Life. Columbia: University of Missouri Press.

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8 MIRRORING THE 1980S IN CONTEMPORARY HORROR Chera Kee

The sounds of screams from carnival-​goers compete with the sounds of waves as a little girl jumps down the dark wooden steps of the Santa Clara pier to the sand below. She leaves the well-​lit games and rides to walk along a nearly deserted beach. There’s a storm on the horizon. The transition from light to darkness, from the calm weather to the looming storm, suggests that danger is ahead, yet the girl doesn’t seem to notice. She wanders up to a lonely attraction called “Vision Quest” that promises you can “find yourself” within. As the girl enters, the rain begins to pour. The funhouse is dark; the girl is cloaked in shadows, jumping at the hoots of mechanical birds. As the lights go out, she panics—​her breath comes quickly as she manoeuvres through the darkness toward an exit sign. But the funhouse mirrors trick her, and soon, she comes face to face with something terrible. The only explicit indication that this scene from the 2019 film Us is set in the past is a short preamble to the girl’s experiences on the boardwalk. She is home watching TV when an ad for the 1986 Hands Across America event comes on screen. But there are other clues to the scene’s setting: the girl’s mother mentions a film being shot nearby—​a quick nod to the vampire film The Lost Boys (1987)—​and when the girl’s father wins a game, the girl selects a tee-​shirt displaying a promotional still for Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video. Almost all the rest of Us is set in the present day, but these opening moments suggest that the 1980s, and in particular this night on the boardwalk, represent a formative moment in the little girl’s life. Throughout the 2010s, several horror films and television shows have set part or all their action in the 1980s. Besides Stranger Things (Netflix, 2016–​present), which begins in 1983, American Horror Story’s ninth season (FX, 2019) and the Black Mirror episode, “Bandersnatch” (Netflix, 2018), were set in 1984, as was the film Summer of ’84 (2018). Similarly, while Us (2019) sets its framing action in 1986, the 2017 version of Stephen King’s It is set in 1988. The Final Girls (2015) is partially set within a 1986 slasher film; most of Paranormal Activity 3 (2011) takes place in 1988; and The House of the Devil (2009) takes place in 1983. Many point to a growing nostalgia more generally in twenty-​first-​century American culture as one reason why so many films and television series are turning to the 1980s for material.1 Yet, as Nicola Sayers reminds us, “Despite the long-​standing and ongoing observations of a nostalgia boom in American culture, there has been a consistent tendency to perceive this boom as

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something new” (Sayers 2020, 4). Sayers notes that as early as the 1970s, commentators observed a turn toward nostalgic media in the United States. So, the current trend is far from new. Yet, even if nostalgia is a common fixture in American media, there seems to be a particular contemporary fascination with the 1980s, and while there is often a marked distrust of nostalgic media that sees it as a reactionary romanticization of the past, some nostalgic pop culture texts move beyond simple romanticization (Sayers 2020, 2). As Svetlana Boym observes in the introduction to The Future of Nostalgia, “A cinematic image of nostalgia is a double exposure, or a superimposition of two images—​of home and abroad, past and present, dream and everyday life” (Boym 2002, xii–​xiv). Remembering that nostalgia not only provides a view of a past, real or fictive, but that it comments on the present as well is vital to understanding the ways that nostalgia might operate not only on an uncritical, romanticizing level but on an evaluative one as well. In terms of horror media, it is also important to remember that there is a nostalgic thrust within the Gothic tradition itself. If we consider the nostalgic as not only romanticizing the past but as also bringing the past into direct conversation with the present—​nostalgia as haunting, if you will—​then the recent trend of nostalgic horror in the United States takes on another layer of meaning. Jason Landrum observes “the Gothic, as an art form, provokes our anxiety for what used to be. But what we see in the present never tell us the whole story of what happened in the past” (Landrum 2017, 140). The Gothic presents us with a past that is incomplete but also formative of the present moment, and many Gothic texts are concerned with characters trying to uncover the hidden bits of the past that will help them make the present more liveable. In other words, as seen through a Gothic lens, nostalgia could be a means of seeing how the past is tied to, and foundational to, the present. Using these ideas as a starting point, this chapter explores Jordan Peele’s film Us and the Netflix series Stranger Things, two texts that use the 1980s as setting and stylistic influence, to propose that both texts seemingly present a largely apolitical vision of the 1980s where the era is imagined through pop culture texts more than actual historical events: the 1980s as simulacra, not historical moment. Yet, in both Stranger Things and Us, the horror of the text is predicated on a heretofore unknown mirror world housing monstrous threats, and in both, this mirror world serves to reimagine the simulacra of the past not as stylistic spectacle but as horrific counterpart. In Us and Stranger Things, these mirror worlds collide with the seeming simulacra of the 1980s to produce not a nostalgic rendering of the past devoid of any meaningful historical commentary, but rather an account of the 1980s as the historical underworld of the present moment.

Terrible things just out of sight The television series Stranger Things follows the unusual goings-​on in the town of Hawkins, Indiana in the 1980s. The first season begins in November 1983 and focuses on the disappearance of 12-​year-​old Will Byers. Will is trapped in the Upside Down, a dark mirror world attached to our own and controlled by a monster called the Mind Flayer. Will is being hunted by its minion, the Demogorgon, and manages to hide from it for most of the season. As Will’s friends, Lucas, Mike, and Dustin, search for him, they meet Eleven, a young girl with psychic powers who has escaped a government facility near Hawkins. With her help, and eventually joining up with Will’s mother, Joyce, his brother, Jonathan, Mike’s sister, Nancy, town sheriff, Jim Hopper, and Nancy’s boyfriend, Steve Harrington, the group brings Will back from the Upside Down. In the second season of the show, set in October 1984, Will is haunted by the Upside Down, and viewers soon learn that he is being partially controlled by it. Meanwhile, Eleven, who has

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been living under Sheriff Hopper’s protection, searches for clues about her past. Eventually, the entire group from the previous season, and the boys’ new friend Maxine “Max” Mayfield, face off against the Mind Flayer to close the gate to the Upside Down once and for all. The third season is set in the summer of 1985 and finds the group—​with the additions of Lucas’ sister, Erica, and Steve’s co-​worker, Robin—​battling Soviet agents and the Mind Flayer at the newly built Starcourt Mall just outside of Hawkins. In the series’ fourth season, the action takes place in 1986 and focuses on a new big bad—​Vecna—​who is murdering residents in Hawkins to open a permanent gate to the Upside Down. The film Us focuses on the Wilson family, who are travelling to their vacation home outside Santa Cruz, California. The beginning of the film starts in 1986, when the matriarch of the family, Adelaide, was a young girl. She wanders off from her father at the Santa Cruz boardwalk and ends up in a funhouse where she sees something terrible. As viewers learn later in the film, the event was highly traumatic, and in the present day, Adelaide is uneasy about returning to Santa Cruz. Adelaide’s husband, Gabe, however, is excited by the vacation, and soon the family, including Gabe and Adelaide’s son Jason and daughter Zora, are at the beach meeting up with their friends, the Tyler family. Later that night, four figures dressed all in red appear on the Wilson’s driveway. The figures eventually break into the house to confront the Wilsons, revealing that they are doubles of the family called the “Tethered.” There is Pluto, Jason’s double; Umbrae, who is Zora’s; Abraham, who is Gabe’s double, and Red, who is Adelaide’s. Red tells the Wilsons that the Tethered plan to kill them and take over their lives. After years of living a painful shadow life of the Wilson’s aboveground experience, they are taking their revenge. Meanwhile, other Tethered are coming to the surface and murdering their doubles, including the Tyler family. The Wilsons manage to escape their Tethered and eventually kill them, but at the end of the film, viewers learn that in 1986, Adelaide saw her double in the funhouse. Her double choked her, drug her underground, and switched places with her, meaning that the woman escaping with the Wilson family at the end of the film is actually Adelaide’s Tethered. While these texts differ in several ways, both imagine underworlds or mirror worlds that reflect our own. In Stranger Things, the Upside Down is a dark, nearly monochromatic copy of our world, filled with strange vines and spores. As is made clear throughout the seasons by the fact that the government scientists studying the Upside Down use protective gear in their interactions with it, this is a dangerous place, not only because of the monsters inhabiting it but because its atmosphere is deadly after prolonged exposure. In Us, the underground world inhabited by the Tethered looks more institutional in nature. It resembles a school of sorts, with long yellowish hallways and non-​descript classrooms, and while the world itself does not match the aboveground world, the Tethered seem to be caught in a psychic link with their doubles aboveground and mimic their actions as they happen. These two examples are not the only recent horror films/​TV shows to imagine horrific mirror worlds connected to our own. The game-​within-​a-​game aspects of “Bandersnatch,” as well as dialogue, allude to alternate realities and other worlds. American Horror Story: 1984 is full of ghosts who haunt the summer camp at the heart of the story, while a horror film itself serves as the otherworld in The Final Girls. Likewise, Bernice M. Murphy observes that three of the earliest of the popular Blumhouse films, Paranormal Activity (2007), Insidious (2010), and Sinister (2012), as well as The Conjuring (2013), all: posit the existence of sinister parallel worlds existing alongside our own. The camera that keeps rolling throughout Paranormal Activity impassively records supernatural incursions

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in a manner that emphasizes the suggestion that below the cosy façade of everyday life there are malevolent entities looking for a chance to ‘break through’. (Murphy 2015, 240) Murphy sees the “recurrent depiction of the family home as an inherently insecure milieu ripe for invasion by sinister forces” as a way to tap into “the kind of powerful uncertainty which increasingly characterizes middle-​class life in the United States” (240). In these films, she argues, mirror worlds act as a symbol for economic insecurity. But sinister mirror worlds are also a means of dealing with other cultural fears and anxieties, and within Stranger Things and Us, combining the use of mirror worlds with nostalgia produces a series of mirrored reflections that serve not only to connect darkness with light but the past with the present. Matthew Christopher Hulbert concedes that in general, films are born of their historical and cultural contexts, but he also observes that they can colour audiences’ conception of the past (Hulbert 2019, 4). As he suggests, “Films have virtually unlimited power to share ideas and symbols; to praise and honour causes and characters; to endorse or attack political ideologies; to carve out and normalize legacies; and to regulate patterns of collective remembrance on a national scale” and as such, “movies are something akin to historical Trojan horses” (3). Hulbert is not suggesting that audiences believe the histories presented in moving-​image media uncritically; he knows that the genre of the film, as well as its budget and perceived prestige, among other things, can colour viewers’ relationships with the material. However, Hulbert is implying that there is always the possibility that the historical images presented on film, TV, or computer screens might influence how any given viewer perceives the history being depicted there. Horror is often regarded as low-​brow entertainment, and while one could argue that both Us and Stranger Things are forms of “elevated” horror, that does not mean that the history presented in either would be accepted in the same way the history presented in a drama might. Still, horror has a very peculiar relationship with how any given culture perceives itself and this is key in considering both texts’ representations of the 1980s. In Monsters in America, W. Scott Poole tells us that “History is horror” and notes that stories of monsters “provide a place to hold conversations about our public anxieties. Our monsters register our national traumas” (Poole 2011, 22–​23). Using a psychoanalytic approach to horror, Robin Wood suggests something similar when he notes that more than other genres, horror has perhaps the clearest response to those things that society “represses or oppresses” (Wood [1978] 2018, 79). If a culture tries to ignore its past or demonize some people in contrast to those it deems “normal,” horror is the genre most likely to try to resurrect that past or put those demonized Others on full display. One might suggest, then, that the monsters and boogeymen of our horror tales are designed to reflect our societal fears, albeit as funhouse mirrors that distort and reshape them. As such, when we approach how history is represented in Us and Stranger Things, we must do so with the understanding that the history represented in both is necessarily coloured by horror’s cultural function as a genre intended to reflect our collective fears and anxieties. Thus, the accuracy of historical representation in either one is less important than how these texts tie the fears and anxieties of the 1980s to similar fears and anxieties today. It is telling that in neither text is there a perfect one-​to-​one correlation between the “regular” world and its mirror, rather some form of distortion exists. Thus, we get a visual representation of a sort of warped echo—​similar but not exactly the same. This carries over to the relationships created between the 1980s and the present moment in both texts too, as the nostalgia for the 1980s present in Us and Stranger Things provides, at once, a fanciful view of the past while offering up a commentary on the present that suggests we cannot fully understand one without understanding the other. 117

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’80s nostalgia Both Us and Stranger Things are full of products and media from the 1980s and use 1980s pop culture formally and narratively to structure their stories. For instance, Stranger Things uses synthesized music not unlike the music composed by John Carpenter or Vangelis in the ’80s, and Jordan Peele uses a distinctly pre-​digital look for the television commercials he creates at the beginning of Us. Moreover, during the roughly eight and a half minutes the film initially spends in 1986, there are brief references to, among other things, The Man with Two Brains (1983), The Right Stuff (1983), C.H.U.D. (1984), and The Goonies (1985). This seems to be a trend throughout 1980s-​set contemporary horror: The Final Girls depends on both the characters’ and audiences’ familiarity with 1980s slasher conventions to propel its plot forward, and “Bandersnatch” is structured like a Choose Your Own Adventure book, which were highly popular in the 1980s. There are also a number of 1980s references in these texts that can be used to temper audience expectations. M. Keith Booker and Isra Daraiseh suggest that, in the case of Us, “much of the pleasure of the film involves the number of reminders that it contains of previous horror favourites” (Booker and Daraiseh 2020, 120). They note that “these connections help to set the atmosphere for Us,” suggesting that the film deploys intertextual references to 1980s texts to manage (and perhaps subvert) audience expectations. For those familiar with the referenced material, not only is there a point of recognition of an older text, but its presence works as a paratext to help shape how the viewer enters the contemporary text. Within Us, for instance, when Adelaide’s father wins her a prize at the fair, she chooses a “Thriller” tee-​shirt. If one considers the opening lyrics of the song, with their descriptions of freezing in fright in the face of something terrible, they accurately describe what is about to happen to the girl in “Vision Quest.” Stranger Things likewise makes references to the films E.T. (1982), The Thing (1982), The Evil Dead (1981), Risky Business (1983), the original Star Wars trilogy (1977–​1983), and Ghostbusters (1984), as well as the video games Dig Dug (1982) and Dragon’s Lair (1983) and the music of David Bowie and The Clash. While some of these references may exist to provide a quick intertextual thrill (“I remember that!”), others reflect themes or future plot points. For instance, Dig Dug, which is one of the games the kids play at the arcade in season two, is a game where one digs underground tunnels to battle enemies, foreshadowing the actions the Stranger Things characters will undertake in the tunnels below Hawkins later in the season. Kevin J. Wetmore Jr. argues that “Post-​millennial pop culture tends to construct the ’80s as a kind of innocence, as a decade when we did not know how horrible things actually were…” (Wetmore 2018, loc: 100). And indeed, many texts set in the 1980s tend to gloss over or completely ignore some of the more pressing concerns of the decade, including the AIDS crisis, widening economic gaps, and the rise of the New Right. Even Matt Duffer, one of the creators of Stranger Things, suggests that many of the references in the show were not meant to be read very deeply. As he says: Sometimes I see people write about [Stranger Things] and they say they like that the show is ‘self-​aware.’ And I guess I really didn’t want it to be self-​aware. We never wanted to be ironic; we didn’t want to wink at the audience. We wanted it to play like one of those movies would’ve back then, that was sort of the goal. (quoted in Vogel 2018, loc: 168) Thus, while many of the references to the 1980s are clever, they were not necessarily used to provide any insight into the 1980s themselves and instead, may paint a distorted picture of 118

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the era. Joseph Vogel observes that with Stranger Things, “There are no serious indications of poverty, crime, or blight in Hawkins, Indiana” (Vogel 2018, loc: 1502). Brenda Boudreau likewise notes that with Stranger Things, “there are no references to a historical landscape outside of Hawkins, other than the references to movies and music and hairstyles. There are no racial tensions and feminism seems to have never happened” (Boudreau 2018, loc: 3247). Moreover, while the 1984 election may be alluded to by yard signs in the second season, no one ever directly mentions it. Nor does anyone discuss the AIDS crisis or tensions in the middle east—​all issues at the time. Even when Soviet agents enter the picture in the show’s third season, they are largely de-​contextualized: they are typically referred to as the “Russians” but the relationship between the USSR and the US is not discussed, nor are Cold War tensions or the arms race. The world outside of Hawkins, Indiana is largely ignored to create a picture of an uncomplicated small-​town past where the biggest dangers anyone faces are from the fantastic monsters of the Upside Down. This parallels claims by Michael D. Dwyer in his analysis of the 1985 film Back to the Future, a film which finds its main character, Marty McFly, visiting his teenage parents in the 1950s. Dwyer notes that “The Hill Valley that Marty stumbles through in 1955—​with its blue skies, stately town hall, bustling sidewalks, and commercial prosperity—​is illustrative of the fantasy of the Fifties circulated through the imagery and rhetoric of the New Right” (Dwyer 2015, 19). As he observes, “In 1955 Hill Valley, there is no trace of feminism, civil rights for racial minorities, student demonstrations, or (until Marty’s impromptu guitar performance at the school dance) rock and roll” (21). Dwyer suggests visions of the 1950s by the New Right and films such as Back to the Future were highly selective in their memories: “Historical elements of the 1950s that do not fit,” such as “the Montgomery bus boycotts” or “the House Un-​American Activities hearings” could thus be “managed” and repackaged “as the result of personal or moral failures or diminished as fodder for humor or trivia” (22). It is not just that parts of the 1980s are erased in Stranger Things, then. The intervening decades may be erased too. Dwyer suggests that in using the rhetoric of “the good old days” in the 1980s, Reagan and the New Right were trying to appeal to a sense of nostalgia but also trying deliberately to forget the 1960s and the social movements and unrest of that decade. Melissa A. Kaufler likewise notes “Reagan was eager to play off American fears of the Soviet Union and a possible full-​blown war by trying to re-​write America’s morose and cynical views of the Vietnam War” (Kaufler 2018, loc: 1701). And Reagan’s selection of the 1950s instead of the 1960s was also deliberate, as in that way, The Fifties and the Sixties were presented to Americans as an absolute binary, which not only eliminated the continuum of historical events that connected the two periods but also flattened them so as to fix one homogeneous meaning to the Fifties and another oppositional meaning to the Sixties. (Dwyer 2015, 29) Vietnam, Watergate, and the social movements in the ’60s could thus be erased with ’50s nostalgia in the 1980s. Using a similar logic, in setting their action in the 1980s, not only could both Us and Stranger Things pass over the digital revolution of the 1990s and 2000s, but they could “forget” 9/​11 and the war on terror, as well as the mortgage crisis and recession in 2007–​2009. The rise of #BlackLivesMatter and growing concerns over police violence could also be skipped in the jump from the 1980s to the late 2010s. Thus, the 1980s seemingly become a fairy-​tale era of cool 119

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music and colourful movies that help viewers forget about the Gulf War, terrorism, or the financial crisis of the late 2000s: seemingly giving them a time when things were simpler and more straightforward.

Tying the past to the present Hassler-​Forest suggests that Stranger Things “romanticises the neoconservative politics of the 1980s by refusing to engage critically with the cultural politics of the period it revives with such gleeful abandon…” (Hassler-​Forest 2020, 183–​184). He further argues that in pitting the government against the small town of Hawkins, Stranger Things ends up replicating the New Right’s nostalgic rhetoric, by implicitly making “big government” the bad guy. It is true that with both Stranger Things and Us, there is a strong implication that the government plays some role in either opening access to or creating the mirror worlds in question. While in Us, this is more implicit as Red only ever refers to those who created the Tethered programme as “they,” there is still a strong suggestion that the programme had government backing. In Stranger Things, the connection is explicit—​the gate to the Upside Down was opened during government experiments on Eleven, and the government, in season one, keeps the gate open to explore the Upside Down. In season two, the government works to keep the Upside Down from expanding, and in season three, the focus shifts to the Soviets, who are clearly trying to open a gate to the Upside Down. In both Us and Stranger Things, then, mirror worlds are not simply sinister reflections of the real world but are artificially constructed or unintentionally opened by those who are supposed to protect us. The government is painted as ineffectual, at best, and malicious, at worst. Moreover, in neither text are the mirror worlds well contained. While throughout the various seasons of Stranger Things, the gate to the Upside Down is closed, the next season, it inevitably opens again. In Us, the film ends with the Tethered pouring out of their underground lair to the surface world and taking over. Thus, the separation of the “real” world and its mirror is never clean, and this has implications not only for the characters in the past but for those of us watching in the present. Christine Muller suggests, with Stranger Things, “Perhaps, rather than demarcating clearly between that-​which-​was and that-​which-​is, viewing this series entangles the two. If we watch the past with the present in mind, we experience them not as separate, but as tied together” (Muller 2018, loc: 3928). Approaching both Stranger Things and Us in this way, it becomes clear that while some of the references to the 1980s in these texts may seem de-​ contextualized or designed to help us forget the intervening decades, other references create a space for re-​evaluation. In Us, for instance, the Wilsons have a comfortable upper-​middle-​class American life. Soraya Nadia McDonald notes that “Everything about” the Wilsons “says we’re perfectly typical. We belong” (McDonald 2019, 45). Yet, as McDonald observes in the next sentence, “Except one of them doesn’t” (45). She is specifically referring to the fact that the Adelaide the audience comes to know is the Tethered who switched with the real Adelaide in 1986. But she could also be referring to the fact that while the Wilsons seem comfortable, the white Tyler family always seems to have things just a little bit better: the bigger boat, the better vacation home. This subtly suggests that while the Wilsons are doing well, structural racism has most likely affected the degree to which they have been able to fully achieve the American Dream. In Us, Adelaide’s past literally comes back to haunt (and hunt) her, threatening to take away the American Dream life she has been living. But read from a different perspective, it also shows how ruthless one must be to get ahead in America, even as a child. 120

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With Stranger Things, there are stark differences in how the Byers live as opposed to the families of Will’s friends. Not only are their houses quite different, but Joyce is the only character within the series whose money issues are part of the plot. In season one, when Joyce shows up to Melvald’s General Store, where she works, to buy a new phone and she does not have the money to pay for it, she is frustrated when the owner does not want to give her a two-​week advance on her paycheque. She tells him, “I’ve been here ten years, right? Have I ever called in sick or missed a shift once? I’ve worked Christmas Eve and Thanksgiving.” Joyce clearly works hard, even having sacrificed holidays to make ends meet, yet she still cannot get ahead in Reagan’s America—​not only does this implicitly critique the fantasy of economic prosperity in the 1980s, but it resonates now when so many people are in a situation similar to Joyce’s. Us also allows Peele to re-​evaluate Hands Across America, the 1986 charity event where Americans were supposed to join hands across the nation to combat hunger. Viewers see an ad for Hands Across America at the beginning of the film; it is not an actual 1986 ad, but rather one Peele created that makes use of paper doll imagery, as well as the word “tethered,” offering up hints about future plot content. Peele’s ad also mentions the twin towers, a reference that would have been benign in 1986 but carries a loaded meaning after the events of September 11, 2001.2 Peele’s ad also signals the failure of Hands Across America. Analysing Peele’s use of the event, Tatianna Cozzarelli observes: In order to get a space in this human chain, one had to donate at least $10 in order to fight hunger and homelessness. In the meantime, Ronald Reagan was president, cutting welfare using the racist tropes of the ‘welfare queen’ and launching an offensive against labor unions, structural causes of hunger and homelessness. Reagan’s foreign policy was even more devastating, supporting right-​wing leaders and coups around the world… . Clearly, holding hand for 15 minutes was a feel-​good project, but it wouldn’t put a dent in the neoliberal offensive that began to take shape in the Reagan years. (Cozzarelli 2019) Sophia Mager likewise notes that Hands Across America: points to the tendency of the American upper-​middle class to participate in self-​assuring performative spectacles for the benefit of those less fortunate. Such performative actions, while most likely resulting in short-​term awareness and assistance, often die out quickly and actually function to move the focus away from pressuring the government into implementing… change that will work to actually eliminate the problems of class disparities in the United States. (Mager 2021, 32) Within the context of Us, the restaging of Hands Across America by the Tethered is an empty gesture of togetherness that does nothing. It does not make up for the dead nor does it expose those responsible for the Tethered’s plight. It is a performative act that works to exaggerate the emptiness of the original Hands Across America by repositioning it in the current moment as yet another meaningless gesture. Even contemporary viewers unaware of the original event know that hunger is still an issue in the United States, so the ad at the beginning of the film both illustrates the naïve optimism surrounding Hands Across America while also drawing a parallel between that moment and today. 121

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In Joseph Vogel’s estimation, something similar is happening in Stranger Things’ use of Dungeons & Dragons (D&D). As is highlighted in the series’ fourth season, in the 1980s, D&D inspired a national panic led by groups convinced that the game led to Satan worship, but Vogel, writing well before the fourth season, argues that Stranger Things uses D&D not only as a “prop or nostalgic game reference” but as “a symbolic mythology through which the characters—​and audience—​navigate through their adventures” (Vogel 2018, loc: 1759). In this way, what on the surface might be read as a nostalgic reference serves to structure the text itself while also reconceptualizing the referenced material. In the case of Stranger Things, this means that Mike, Will, Dustin, and Lucas overlay D&D concepts onto what is happening to better make sense of their situation. Hence, in the first season, the monster hunting Will is cast as a Demogorgon and the Upside Down is compared to the Vale of Shadows; in season two, Mike wonders if Will has Truesight. These are all D&D terms and concepts. In this way, prior to the fourth season, the show had already provided an implicit critique of the fears of D&D that ran rampant in the 1980s by presenting D&D as not only not malevolent but as a highly useful reference point. With the fourth season’s foregrounding of D&D and the “satanic panic” of the 1980s, this is more explicitly emphasized, as the heroes—​namely Mike, Will, Dustin, Lucas, Erica, and newcomer Eddie Munson—​are all D&D players and stand in contrast to the seemingly small-​ minded townsfolk, who are easily convinced that all the problems of the town can be traced back to the game. Viewers can see the disparities between the D&D players—​who are ready to believe and help each other—​and those positioned as villainous, such as popular basketball player Jason Carver, who convinces the townspeople that Eddie Munson and his fellow D&D players are evil. During the fourth season’s climax, Carver refuses to listen to his teammate Lucas and tries to kill him, nearly helping Vecna succeed in his plan to create a permanent gate to the Upside Down. In Stranger Things, the kids who play D&D are not devil worshippers; rather, they are the ones who repeatedly save the town, while most of their parents and fellow townsfolk do not even realize that anything is wrong. And by the fourth season, this is no longer subtext because while the D&D players are actively trying to stop the end of the world, those who would demonize D&D do nothing to stop it and may even unwittingly—​in Carver’s case—​ help it along. Thus, while on the surface, the series’ images of latch-​key kids and families torn apart by divorce could play into the New Right’s rhetoric about the need to return to traditional values, Butler suggests that Stranger Things “can be more accurately read as a damning comment on Reagan’s conservative ideology” (Butler 2018, loc: 1436). This is unequivocally the case by season four, with its positioning of the D&D players, single mothers, outcasts, and queer characters as heroes and the “normal” people as ineffectual at best and destructive or malicious at worst. Stranger Things’ use of the 1982 song “Should I Stay or Should I Go” in the first season also points to ideological fractures within the 1980s. The song comes from The Clash, a British punk group often associated with rebellion and radical, left-​wing politics. The song appeared on their album Combat Rock, which was their fifth studio album and their big US breakthrough. The album also included songs such as “Know Your Rights,” “Rock the Casbah,” and “Straight to Hell,” which condemn modern capitalism, US foreign policy, and systemic abuses of power. By not only including The Clash within the mise-​en-​scène of the first season, but by using a Clash song as an important motif, the show amplifies at least one set of voices that were pushing back against Reagan’s America and Thatcher’s United Kingdom.

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Vogel suggests: the Upside Down can also be read as the darker underbelly of the idyllic surface of the Reagan era. From one vantage point, everything seems relatively normal and tranquil. But lurking just beneath that surface is rot and terror, destruction and death. (Vogel 2018, loc: 1539) Booker and Daraiseh make a similar suggestion about Us, noting: the fact that young Adelaide experiences a traumatic loss during what is seemingly a happy outing can be read allegorically as a suggestion that the seemingly idyllic Reagan years of 1980s nostalgia actually introduced a number of traumas into American history from which we have yet to recover. (Booker and Daraiseh 2020, 125) Certainly, in the decades between the 1980s and the present moment, the disparities between rich and poor around the world have grown, infrastructure has weakened, and as Pearson observes, in the United States, “Black and Brown men and women are being arrested and incarcerated at historical rates, so quickly that now more Black men are in prison than were enslaved prior to the Civil War” (Pearson 2016). As Pearson continues, “the monster has been lurking for a long, long time…” (Pearson 2016). In this sense, then, the monsters of the 1980s have been lying in wait, and Us and Stranger Things bring those monsters to the surface, and in doing so, both texts draw clear lines between Reagan’s America and the Trump era. In an interview with Vogue about her 2017 documentary The Reagan Show, filmmaker Sierra Pettengill reflects, “We definitely could not have had Trump if we hadn’t had Reagan” (Felsenthal 2017). Trump’s supporters have tried to link the 45th President with his predecessor—​often viewed in conservative circles as the epitome of a great president—​but there are several more concrete ways in which Trump’s presidency resonates with Reagan’s. Not only are both men considered populists who fuelled distrust for the federal government, but both created racist boogeymen for their constituency to blame for the world’s ills, including Reagan’s “welfare queens” and Trump’s “criminal” immigrants. Both presidencies were littered with charges of corruption and criminal activity, including Reagan’s Iran-​Contra scandal, rigged HUD grants, and misused funds at the EPA, and Trump’s involvement in the January 6th insurrection, his mishandling of documents, and charges of abuse of power leading to his first of two impeachments. Both men also spent time as entertainers before entering politics, and Julia Felsenthal suggests that this experience may have helped both men sell their presidential personas (Felsenthal 2017). Yet, perhaps the biggest similarity between the Reagan and Trump eras is the insistent evoking of a sense of national renewal. Trump borrowed his infamous “Make America Great Again” slogan from Reagan, who campaigned on the idea that it was “Morning again in America” after four years of the Carter presidency and the preceding Watergate scandal, war in Vietnam, and general cynicism of the 1970s. But whereas Reagan’s message was largely optimistic about the renewal he was set to lead, Trump’s message was much darker. As Pettengill notes, if Reagan’s “Morning in America” was trying to sell a “way of looking at the country through rose-​colored glasses” then Trump’s position represented “Midnight in America. It’s a really apocalyptic view” (Felsenthal 2017). If Reagan imagined a nostalgic return to the America of the 1950s as an antidote to the turbulent 1960s and ’70s, Trump has imagined a similar nostalgic return, but rather than trying to sell this in the rosy terms Reagan used, Trump’s vision is one of a dangerously out-​of-​control America: in

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many ways the “Upside Down” of what Reagan was selling. Thus, just as both Us and Stranger Things suggest connections between the Reagan era and today, so too does the rhetoric of Donald Trump, which imagines the intervening years as producing the same sort of decay and ruin as the mirror worlds in Us and Stranger Things.

Looking into the mirror Jason Landrum notes that Stranger Things “invokes a haunted Cold War past when governments and corporations experimented with limited analog technology, the rest of the population going about their daily lives unaware of their sinister intent” (Landrum 2017, 144). He argues that the Cold War era buildings, such as Hawkins Lab, operate much as the haunted monastery might have in a traditional Gothic tale—​as a symbol overloaded with meaning for its contemporary audiences (144). But part of this haunting is the realization that the same sorts of experiments and monitoring that audiences can picture happening in these Cold War relics still happen today. The meaning of these spaces in Stranger Things, then, is not only generated by how they seem to operate in the 1980s but how their legacy continues. In Us, the haunting is much more explicitly tied to Adelaide herself—​we see her memories evoked by certain spaces and objects within her vacation home—​ but we also see it in subtle clues that nod to the old adage “the more things change the more they stay the same.” When the Wilsons visit the beach, for instance, we can see that the “Vision Quest” of Adelaide’s youth is gone, replaced by “Merlin’s Forest.” The funhouse is different, and yet underneath the veneer, it’s the same. But does anyone notice this fundamental similarity? With Adelaide, we get a character who is cognizant of the signs of danger around her but who has also managed to ignore or avoid those signs and the danger they represent for decades. In her, we have a representation of those who can see trouble on the horizon and who hope that ignoring it will make it go away. Yet, while Adelaide may be weary of the Santa Cruz boardwalk, her husband does not take her qualms seriously. Similarly, in Stranger Things, while Mike, Lucas, and Dustin run around Hawkins battling monsters, their parents are oblivious not only to the monsters but to most aspects of their children’s lives.3 Heath Pearson notes, “What makes Stranger Things a modern classic is its relentless insistence that the terrors happening right now are being entirely missed, and mindlessly supported, by a sleeping, White, public—​a strange parallel in the dawning days of Trump” (Pearson 2016). Indeed, in both Stranger Things and Us, there is a strong sense that most people, be they the 1980s residents of Hawkins, Indiana or the present-​day beachgoers at the Santa Cruz boardwalk, do not see the dangers around them. They ignore the signs—​such as the literal signs held up in Santa Cruz reading “Jeremiah 11:11” or the less explicit signs such as power outages in Hawkins—​and keep living their lives until it is too late. This wilful ignorance is, of course, a staple of horror, but given that there are so many connections to be made between the era of Reagan and the era of Trump, both Stranger Things and Us are creating a definitive link between wilful ignorance then and the same today. As such, Rose Butler suggests that Stranger Things “uses its allusions to artifacts of the 1980s as a prism through which to understand both the Reagan era and contemporary America, revealing the stark similarities between two troubling times in the nation’s history” (Butler 2018, 188–​189). Still, I want to suggest that the picture painted of the wilfully ignorant populations in both Us and Stranger Things is not intended to be a realistic rendering but rather serves as another centre of horror. If there are mirror worlds filled with threats to our way of life, one thing that exacerbates those threats is a population willing to ignore the horror. Hence, the same crises that were being ignored in the 1980s—​and in some cases, the crises that were allowed to linger and worsen—​may 124

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still be crises today. Or, just as the mirror worlds of both texts reflect our own world, the crises of the 1980s may serve as eerily similar doppelgangers to other crises today. Either way, the mirror world is not the only threat to contend with—​ignoring it is equally fraught with danger. In both Stranger Things and Us, then, something threatens our way of life and only a select few can see it, let alone react to it. But in both texts, the threat really cannot be contained—​it’s already here—​and there are large portions of the population that do not want to acknowledge the threat or are not able. In Stranger Things, this becomes evident with the Mind Flayer’s brief appearances in the real world in season one and the myriad ways that officials want to explain Will’s “death” and Barbara’s “disappearance.” In season two, viewers learn that Will Byers still has a mental connection to the Mind Flayer, which continues trying to break into our world. While initially this is a threat directed primarily against Will, and the threat seems contained in the Upside Down, as the season continues, it becomes clear that the denizens of the Upside Down are making their way into our world to take it over. Yet for all of their work in stopping this from happening, Will and his friends are outsiders, and Joyce and Hopper are labelled over-​reactive; there is no system of support available to help these people take on the Mind Flayer, be it from their government or their fellow townspeople, and this small group seems to be the only ones who recognize that something is wrong. In season three, the Mind Flayer already exists in our reality, taking over the minds and bodies of several of Hawkins’ citizens (in a nod to Invasion of the Body Snatchers). The threat to overtake our world is nearly complete as the Mind Flayer uses these people to help open the link to the Upside Down. Similarly, in season four, when Vecna begins killing Hawkins’ residents, it is clear that he has a firm hold in the “real” world already, that his aim is to make it more stable and permanent. The suggestion throughout the seasons, then, is that the mirror world does not exist outside but within—​and as such, it is the ghost already haunting the castle and not the barbarian at the gate. Similarly, with Us, when Adelaide visits the Tethered’s realm, she gets there via a door and an escalator—​nothing appears to be locked or guarded, and any thresholds between the Tethered’s world and ours appear thin at best. Moreover, by the end of the film, it appears that the Tethered have not only invaded our world, but they are winning. The viewer knows that the Taylors are dead, and indications are that many other families were likewise killed, so the mirror world is no longer separate but simultaneous. In other words, in both texts, the sinister otherworld and the seemingly happy “real” world do not exist in a binary, but with one overlaid on top of the other—​ we experience them together. In Ode to Gen X: Institutional Cynicism in Stranger Things and 1980s Film, Melissa Vosen Callens observes, “In the 1980s there was a sense that, beneath the political and economic veneer, the country was vulnerable, from the outside as well as from the inside” (Callens 2021, 97). I might reflect that what both Us and Stranger Things do in their collapsing of past and present, real world and mirror world, is make this vulnerability visible: the past is formative of the present and the present seems doomed to repeat the past. Ronald Reagan and the New Right played on fears of external threats to win the 1980 election. They could attach the so-​called malaise of the 1970s, as well as fears of the United States losing its position as the world’s premier superpower, to the external threats of OPEC and Japanese economic growth. But these were soon joined by internal threats, such as “Welfare Queens” and unionized air traffic controllers, that the administration likewise promised to defeat. Yet, for many who came of age in the 1980s, these promises of a better tomorrow where all threats were vanquished were never kept: after the 1980 Iran Hostage Crisis, there were plane hijackings as well as the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 in 1988; there was war between Iraq and Iran, followed by the United States entering the Gulf War in 1990; in 1986, the Iran-​Contra affair 125

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burst onto the airwaves not long after the space shuttle Challenger exploded on live TV. Decades later in the 2020s, oil prices are still an issue, terrorism still besieges us, and politicians still create boogeymen out of vulnerable populations that are different from the White, cis, Christian “norm.” Callens notes that for Generation X, a generation often aligned with cynicism, “The economic difficulties” they faced “continued despite Reagan’s reelection…ultimately serving as fuel for Gen Xers’ growing pessimism and apathy” (Callens 2021, 99). Callens suggests that this pessimism toward the government has never gone away, and as such, it makes sense that Gen. X viewers would respond to a series where the government is both complicit and bungling, such as Stranger Things. Even with Us, those who created the Tethered abandoned the project, not by eradicating all evidence and/​or danger, but, it seems, simply by walking away. In Stranger Things, the military likewise abandons the lab outside Hawkins, driving away to leave it as a monument to their failure. Both Us and Stranger Things thus play on the sense that this is what has been happening for a long, long time: one group walking away from their mistakes and leaving future generations to clean up the mess. In talking about Us, Jordan Peele has said, “Right now, my country is going through an obsession with the outsider, and the fear of the invader and the Other. This is a movie about the fact that maybe we are our own worst enemy” (quoted in Han 2019, 36). Similarly, Simran Han suggests that “The use of the doppelganger motif in Us might indeed be understood as an illustration of the United States’s self-​immolating politics…” (Han 2019, 35). And while, on one level, the enemy they are talking about is the Tethered, on another, it is the people who created the Tethered—​just as in Stranger Things, while the Mind Flayer is the primary threat, it is only able to threaten Hawkins because the government opened the door. In their use of the 1980s as a setting for some or all of their horror, these texts are not only suggesting that the United States is its own worst enemy, but that this is a condition with a long history. Thus, there is not just the literal mirror world of the Upside Down to contend with or the strange world of the Tethered; there is also the mirror world of the United States itself—​on one side what it promises to be and on the other, what it actually is. Even if this is not as explicitly acknowledged in Us, polysemy threatens to overrun its world just as much as it does the world of Stranger Things: in the knowing winks and nods to the audience, both texts break the fourth wall to connect the fictive and real 1980s to the present moment while simultaneously drawing lines between the institutional duplicity, if not outright malevolence of the 1980s, with the institutional duplicity and wilful ignorance of today. Harry Olafsen suggests that in Us, “there is a clear sense that horror stems from seeing a reflection of the self in the Tethered…” (Olafsen 2020, 20). I might extend this to suggest there is also a sense of horror that stems from seeing how well the present mirrors the past.

Reflections Gothic tales offer up a past that is somehow formative of the present moment, a past that it is vital to understand to survive. In both Us and Stranger Things, the 1980s become the touchstone for the present moment, but the ’80s do not necessarily offer up any clues to make the present day easier to survive. Rather, the ’80s offer up a mirror world of their own. This is easier to see in Us, where on one hand, “Adelaide” can use her knowledge from the past to her advantage, but on the other, at the end of the film it seems most of the Tethered have achieved their goals. As “Adelaide” drives the family off into the sunset, the Tethered stand in a long line across the landscape, holding hands in a mirror version of Hands Across America. Just like the event in 1986, it seems a meaningless gesture: the past returning as its own pastiche, so that the 1980s are formative of the present, but 126

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in the emptiest way possible because the same sorts of follies continue, reenacted by each new generation. Stranger Things does not offer a view of the future from its spot in the 1980s, yet it too points to the ways in which the present mirrors the past. It does so in the knowing allusions to 1980s media throughout the series that work, as all intertexts do, to draw a line between the text-​as-​I-​knew-​it-​ then and the text-​as-​I-​know-​it-​now, but the allusions also work to engender a critical distance for viewers, for whom the allusions are less likely to invite one into the diegetic world as to pull them out toward their own experiences of the texts being referenced. But the connection between then and now is not forged solely through movie trivia and ’80s pop lyrics, it also appears in a sense that all still may not be what it seems on the surface and that there may be dangers lurking, even from those institutions and people who are supposed to protect. Toward the end of the first season of Stranger Things, when the Mind Flayer has seemingly been put back in its place and Will Byers has been rescued, the boys are playing Dungeons & Dragons. A monster appears in the game and Will reacts with “fireball,” a spell that does enough damage to kill the creature. The boys howl triumphantly at their victory, but then complain that the campaign was too short, with too many questions left unanswered. This is both a victory and not—​ it is a victory within the game, but it is also fantasy. Everything seems back to normal, but later that night, Will stands in his bathroom and coughs something up. It is a vile, slug-​like thing that slowly slips down the sink. Will then stares into his bathroom mirror in horror as, for a moment, he is back in the Upside Down—​the victory his friends and family thought they had won seemingly proven both real and not. The past here is not a nostalgic delusion but a warning that monsters are still waiting to attack. The use of mirror worlds in Us and Stranger Things offers up a means for considering all of the ways in which the current moment is haunted by the past. The 1980s become the focal point of this, presented—​on the surface—​as inconsequential simulacra, but later revealing itself to be an era wrought with monsters hiding under the bed—​monsters that may still, at any moment, jump out to get us.

Notes 1 If we think beyond horror, we can see this nostalgia in a number of film and television reboots of properties popular in the 1980s and 1990s, such as Rosanne (1988–​1997; 2018), The X-​Files (1993–​2002; 2016–​2018), Twin Peaks (1990–​1991; 2017), Will and Grace (1998–​2006; 2017–​2020), Full House (1987–​1995; revived as Fuller House, 2016–​2020), and the rebooted Star Wars and Star Trek franchises. 2 Interestingly enough—​at least to my contemporary eyes—​Peele’s ad seems much less campy than some of the original ads, one of which shows clapping people dressed as football players, chefs, and welders happily standing next to each other with intonations to join the event and “Let the Healing Begin” (Vaseline 1986). 3 I necessarily leave Will off this list as his mother believes in the monsters and actively helps in battling them.

Reference list Booker, M. Keith, and Isra Daraiseh. 2020. “Lost in the funhouse: Allegorical horror and cognitive mapping in Jordan Peele’s Us.” Horror Studies 12, no. 1 (March): 119–​131. https://​doi.org/​10.1386/​host_​0003​2_​1. Boudreau, Brenda. 2018. “Badass Mothers: Challenging Nostalgia.” In Uncovering Stranger Things: Essays on Eighties Nostalgia, Cynicism and Innocence in the Series, edited by Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr., Loc: 3229–​ 3422. Jefferson: McFarland. Kindle. Boym, Svetlana. 2002. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books.

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Chera Kee Butler, Rose. 2018. “The Eaten-​for-​Breakfast Club: Teenage Nightmares in Stranger Things.” In Uncovering Stranger Things: Essays on Eighties Nostalgia, Cynicism and Innocence in the Series, edited by Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr., Loc: 1410–​1658. Jefferson: McFarland. Kindle. Callens, Melissa Vosen. 2021. Ode to Gen X: Institutional Cynicism in Stranger Things and 1980s Film. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press. Cozzarelli, Tatiana. 2019. “ ‘We’re Americans’: Class and the State in Jordan Peele’s ‘Us’.” Left Voice, April 25. www.leftvo​ice.org/​were-​americ​ans-​class-​and-​the-​state-​in-​jor​dan-​pee​les-​us/​. Dwyer, Michael D. 2015. Back to the Fifties: Nostalgia, Hollywood Film, and Popular Music of the Seventies and Eighties. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Felsenthal, Julia. 2017. “The Reagan Show Reveals How Ronald Reagan Laid the Groundwork for Trump.” Vogue, June 29. www.vogue.com/​arti​cle/​the-​rea​gan-​show-​sie​rra-​pet​teng​ill-​pacho-​velez-​interv​iew. Han, Simran. 2019. “The Lives of Others.” Sight & Sound (May 2): 34–​36. Hassler-​Forest, Dan. 2020. “ ‘When you get there, you will already be there’: Stranger Things, Twin Peaks and the nostalgia industry.” Science Fiction Film and Television 13, no. 2 (Summer): 175–​197. https://​doi. org/​10.3828/​sfftv.2020.10. Hulbert, Matthew Christopher. 2019. “Introduction: Reappraising a Century’s Worth of Lightning.” In Writing History with Lightning: Cinematic Representations of Nineteenth-​Century America, edited by Matthew Christopher Hulbert and John C. Inscoe, 1–​9. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Kaufler, Melissa A. 2018. “Women as Stranger Things: Frankensteinian Exploitation and Weaponization of Female Bodies” In Uncovering Stranger Things: Essays on Eighties Nostalgia, Cynicism and Innocence in the Series, edited by Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr., Loc: 1664–​1836. Jefferson: McFarland. Kindle. Landrum, Jason. 2017. “Nostalgia, Fantasy, and Loss: Stranger Things and the Digital Gothic.” Intertexts 21, no. 1–​2 (Spring–​Fall): 136–​158. https://​doi.org/​10.1353/​itx.2017.0006. Mager, Sophia. 2021. “ ‘The Girl Had a Shadow’: Us (2019) as a Modern Black Gothic.” Zentith 5, no. 1: 25–​ 34. https://​doi.org/​10.17161/​zen​ith.v5i1.15565. McDonald, Soraya Nadia. 2019. “Free to Be You and Me.” Film Comment (May–​June): 44–​47. www.film​ comm​ent.com/​arti​cle/​free-​to-​be-​you-​and-​me/​. Muller, Christine. 2018. “ ‘Should I Stay or Should I Go?’: Stranger Things and the In-​Between.” In Uncovering Stranger Things: Essays on Eighties Nostalgia, Cynicism and Innocence in the Series, edited by Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr., Loc: 3880–​4079. Jefferson: McFarland. Kindle. Murphy, Bernice M. 2015. “ ‘It’s Not the House That’s Haunted’: Demons, Debt, and the Family in Peril Formula in Recent Horror Cinema.” In Cinematic Ghosts: Haunting and Spectrality from Silent Cinema to the Digital Era, edited by Murray Leeder, 235–​253. New York: Bloomsbury. Olafsen, Harry. 2020. “ ‘It’s Us:’ Mimicry in Jordan Peele’s Us.” Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies 20, no. 1: 20–​32. https://​doi.org/​10.17077/​2168-​569X.1546. Pearson, Heath. 2016. “OpEd: ‘Stranger Things’ and the Upside Down Dawn of Donald Trump.” NBC News, December 12. www.nbcn​ews.com/​news/​nbc​blk/​oped-​stran​ger-​thi​ngs-​ups​ide-​down-​dawn-​don​ald-​trump-​ n694​561. Peele, Jordan. 2019. Us. Los Angeles: Monkeypaw Productions. Streaming. Poole, W. Scott. 2011. Monsters in America: Our Historical Obsession with the Hideous and the Haunting. Waco: Baylor University Press. Sayers, Nicola. 2020. The Promise of Nostalgia: Reminiscence, Longing and Hope in Contemporary American Culture. New Brunswick: Routledge. Stranger Things. 2016. Season 1, episode 2. “The Weirdo on Maple Street.” Directed by Matt Duffer and Ross Duffer. Written by Matt Duffer, Ross Duffer, and Jessie Nickson-​Lopez. Aired July 15, 2016, Netflix. Vaseline. 1986. “Hands Across America” Commercial. Accessed July 9, 2021, on YouTube, uploaded by Hugo Faces. https://​youtu.be/​VqPN​T8tQ​Xtk. Vogel, Joseph. 2018. Stranger Things and the ‘80s: The Complete Retro Guide. London: Cardinal Books. Kindle. Wetmore, Jr. Kevin J. 2018. “Introduction: Stranger (Things) in a Strange Land or, I Love the ’80s?” In Uncovering Stranger Things: Essays on Eighties Nostalgia, Cynicism and Innocence in the Series, edited by Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr., Loc: 62–​136. Jefferson: McFarland. Kindle. Wood, Robin. [1978] 2018. “An Introduction to the American Horror Film.” In Robin Wood on the Horror Film: Collected Essays and Reviews, edited by Barry Keith Grant, 73–​110. Detroit: Wayne State UP.

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9 FANTASTIC HISTORIES Medievalism in fantasy film and television Avery Lafortune

Picture the opening shot of a film featuring a man dressed in a suit of armour, riding a horse down a well-​beaten dirt path in an unremarkable countryside. From this very limited information, many viewers, particularly Western viewers, can interpret that this man is a knight, he exists in the Middle Ages and is likely somewhere in England, or if not England specifically, then Western Europe. We can make this interpretation because we have seen this knight before, many times. He exists not only in a layperson’s understanding of medieval culture learned in history class, but also across an ever-​increasing body of media that includes film, television, and video games. These media rely on and reinforce through repetition established tropes and symbols including that of the knight to bring the medieval world to life on screen. So pervasive is this iconography that it serves as a kind of cinematic shorthand for the Middle Ages enabling viewers to quickly and easily identify the when and where of the story (Finke and Shichtman 2010, 36). Representations of the Middle Ages on screen can be more broadly understood within the context of medievalism which Kevin Harty (1999) describes as “a continuing process of creating and recreating ideas of the medieval that began almost as soon as the Middle Ages had come to an end” (3). A cultural preoccupation with the medieval is not a new phenomenon, it is part of Western historical cultural capital (Sorlin 1980, 20). However, some of its most popular recent manifestations are found in film and television and employ new developments in cinematic technologies. Films set in the Middle Ages demonstrate clear, established conventions for communicating the time period to modern audiences. These conventions include: a plot based on a quest or romance; key characters including knights as heroes, old women as witches, and beautiful maidens as damsels; and a setting including stone castles, wooden taverns, and a natural, undisrupted countryside. Whether a sub-​category of the history film or a unique filmic genre (Bildhauer 2011; Bernau and Bildhauer 2009), medieval films constitute a steadily popular historical movie-​making tradition and method of engaging with the past (of which Kevin Harty [1999] has compiled an extensive list). Medieval films often include hallmarks of other forms of historical films including biopics (Braveheart [1995], The Outlaw King [2018]), war movies (Kingdom of Heaven [2005]), and epics (The Last Duel [2021], The Green Knight [2021]). Demonstrating clear interest in history and its figures, medieval movies provide ample material for scholars of history and film and

DOI: 10.4324/9781003263234-12

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critics to discuss what Hollywood got right and wrong in their depictions of the period according to academic understanding of the past (Kevin Harty’s The Reel Middle Ages: American, Western and Eastern European, Middle Eastern, and Asian Films about Medieval Europe [1999] and John Aberth’s A Knight at the Movies: Medieval History on Film [2003] are early examples of such criticisms of cinematic medievalism). Evaluating the historical film on its ability to meet the standards of academic written history has been a sustained—​but narrow—​approach in history and film scholarship (Treacey 2016, 150). In revisiting our imagined knight on horseback, if the knight held a magical staff in his left hand with a dragon behind him in swift pursuit, the scene’s relationship to history changes. Although the same elements that determined and legitimized its historical status remain (the unpaved path, undisturbed countryside, travel by horseback, armour), the overt symbols of magic and mythical creature alert us that we have now taken a step away from a medieval film and toward the fantastic. Here, we see how the idea of fantasy is built from combing elements of fact and fiction, from historical understanding and imagination. It is the nature of this relationship between the past and present, fact and fiction, as presented in medieval fantasy narratives that this chapter explores.

Can a medieval fantasy film be a form of historical film? Film cannot provide an unmediated window into the past. All examples of history on film necessitate some form of fictionalization or the presence of anachronisms whether intentional or not. Fantasy, by its very name, appears to be at odds with anything real and examples of the genre often go to great lengths to flaunt its fantastic nature by using special effects and computer-​generated imagery (CGI). Yet, fantasy films also demonstrate a clear interest in the historical by grounding their narratives in medieval culture. Alec Worley asks, “how else can one define what doesn’t exist except by what does?” (2005, 4). Stephanie Trigg observes that the borders between the medieval world and the fantasy world are “porous” (2008, 102). Myth and magic have a way of infiltrating medieval films just as medieval settings, technologies, political systems, and social structures have become hallmarks of fantasy worldbuilding. While these films are not dedicated to historical education, they certainly demonstrate a deliberate type of engagement with the past. As per Worley’s question, this engagement with the real is not accidental or even optional, but essential to the creation and function of fantasy. The fantastic cannot be severed from the real. The medieval, however loosely interpreted or imaginatively translated, is what provides the fantastic its familiar, grounding realism. This form of historical engagement is easily accessible for large audiences and specifically designed to hold mass appeal. The continued prevalence of big-​budget fantasy series and films in mainstream media, particularly in the 2000s and 2010s, speaks to their commercial viability and suggests a continued interest in this form of historicized narrative. Record-​breaking amounts of money have been poured into series like Game of Thrones whose final season, costing $90 million in 2019, was the most expensive season of TV ever made (Pisapia 2021) but has since been surpassed by Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power which reportedly cost $715 million for its first season (Weaver 2022). While budget does not necessarily translate to quality, it does function as a measure of expected return. In short, medieval fantasy is big business and huge audiences are engaging with it. Whether or not audiences are watching out of an interest in the medieval (arguably not a likely primary motivation), these films and series nonetheless forge a relationship between present-​day viewers and ideas of the past. It is perhaps not so outlandish to suggest including medieval fantasy film in discussions of history on film. The definition of a historical film is expanding beyond a narrow range of films that 130

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focus their story on known historical events and characters. Jonathan Stubbs defines the historical film as “one which engages in some way with the past,” and continues to say that “the nature of this engagement should not be prescribed” (2019, 7). Marnie Hughes-​Warrington also supports a broader definition of the historical film arguing they are those that function within discussions on the nature of history itself including how it is constructed and for what purpose (2006, 191). By adopting these broader parameters, a more diverse selection of films can be examined through their contribution to historical understanding. This approach to historical film therefore includes fantasy film grounded in medieval culture. Tracing this line from other historical film to the fantasy film is not intended to legitimize it within history and film scholarship through its relationship to strict academic History. Instead, it highlights a pre-​existing relationship between the Historical and the fantastic. Expanding traditional parameters necessitates the inclusion and acknowledgement of different forms of moving visual media. Thus, this chapter will also employ Mia Treacey’s more encompassing term “screened history” (2016, xvii). Referring to these works as screened history facilitates discussion that includes both television and film as well as motion pictures that are not created with film but digital cameras or works that are combinations of film, digital imaging, and CGI. While each of these media has their respective qualities and strengths, this discussion will focus on the historical perspectives they provide. Medieval fantasy films rely on established historical film strategies to ground their stories. This lends a sense of legitimacy but also grounds the narrative in a familiar cinematic realism. Fantasy demands more from audiences than other narrative forms, requiring a higher suspension of disbelief in order to engage with a fantastical world that features great departures from the world of the audience. Framing the outlandish, foreign, and other within the familiar trappings of the historical film eases this process. By relocating strategies of the historical film (such as the use of prologue or reliance on period-​specific material culture) onto an overt fiction, these films reveal the constructed nature of the past on screen. This practice builds on broader discussions around the nature of doing history, making history, or narrativizing the past that highlight the role of the historian in shaping history rather than acting as an impartial documenter of an objective past (see Munslow [2007] and Rosenstone [2016]). This discussion highlights the presence of the author or, in the cases of film and television, a collaborative process of several authors including screenwriters, showrunners, directors, producers, and production designers, among others who strategically orchestrate the narrative. Rather than defend the medieval fantasy film for its fictive or anachronous elements, it is precisely because of these elements that it is worth consideration in discussions of history on film. Jerome De Groot argues that the fictive elements are “fundamental to the purpose of these works,” enabling them to provide alternative perspectives to historical understanding (2016, 2). The intended purpose of these texts is not to teach history and therefore they provide non-​traditional means of historical engagement. In doing so, they offer new possibilities and insights into how the past is constructed on screen and its function in today’s visual narratives. Caroline Guthrie outlines how films that show counterfactual histories challenge viewers to question established historical narrative or their own gaps in knowledge as well as its relevance to shaping the present (2019, 359). This type of positioning encourages viewers to take on an active role over more passive modes of viewership where the film is intended to function solely as a means of delivering information that audiences are intended to passively absorb. This chapter challenges a tradition of history and film scholarship that has focused on a very narrowly defined selection of historical films, neglecting other styles of narrative representation (Treacey 2016, 123). It builds off the work of Guthrie, De Groot, and other scholars who call for films of genres outside the traditional historical film to be included in academic discussion 131

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of screened histories. To determine the value of historical fiction based on its ability to exactly represent the standards of written history not only misses the point of the function of fiction, but also overlooks what these media can provide: alternative methods of engagement with the past that have the potential to produce different forms of knowledge. In studying the historical presence found in films whose primary motivations are not to depict history as it is known to academic historians, scholars and film-​goers are challenged to think about history in new ways including how it is constructed and its relationship to the present. If medieval fantasy does not set out to teach history, what is the nature of its relationship to the past? What is the function of the medieval and how is it constructed? To explore these themes, this chapter highlights the ways in which history is presented and used in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), Andrew Adamson’s The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005), and Game of Thrones Season 3 Episode 9 “The Rains of Castamere” directed by David Nutter (2013). Each of these stories is set in a pseudo-​medieval world with particular ties to England. Due to the immersive quality of their respective fantasy worlds, the concept of history is multi-​layered including elements presented in these stories that speak to a real medieval past as well as fictional histories of the fantasy worlds developed within the realm of the show. Each chosen example relies on established medieval conventions including knightly protagonists, travel by horseback, limited communication and literacy, hand production, castle and cathedral architecture (with a particular emphasis on the gothic), feudal organization, monarchical regimes, and pre-​industrial technologies that focus predominantly on agrarian or military enhancements. As a result of these shared conventions and the medieval film tradition they build upon, the visual language and overall aesthetics across the three case studies are strikingly similar despite differences in plot, tone, and targeted demographic. In spite of their similarities, each work demonstrates different approaches to locating the medieval past, accessing it, and the function of this type of historical engagement. Each case study is an adaptation of a canonical fantasy literary work. Just as the original writing of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and George R.R. Martin have heavily influenced the literary genre of fantasy, the cinematic adaptations of their stories are now cultural touchstones in and of themselves and influencing the next generation of fantasy film and television. Moreover, there is evidence that the three productions are in dialogue with one another, as earlier productions appear to influence those created later, either through emulation or critique. This demonstrates that the use of history for entertainment purposes is not simply a set of static conventions, but a series of ever-​ evolving strategies that change alongside audience taste and the demands or trends of the media industry. This changeability reflects a broader dynamism between past and present as historical understanding evolves depending on the knowledge and memory used to shape the narrative of the past.

The Fellowship of the Ring Peter Jackson’s The Fellowship of the Ring is the first installment of a filmic trilogy based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s epic literary fantasy series The Lord of the Rings. The trilogy follows the journey of Frodo Baggins who leaves his comfortable home in the Edenic Shire to traverse the dangerous pseudo-​medieval lands of Middle-earth and destroy a ring of power that embodies evil. He is joined in his task by a group of imaginative characters who also wish to rid their homeland from its evil. Fellowship tells the beginning of this story and serves as an introduction to the world of Middle-earth. 132

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The pseudo-​historical world found in Fellowship is framed as a myth or prehistory of the real world. Tolkien’s original intent while writing the series was to create a mythology for England, drawing inspiration from Norse and Finnish mythology and strategically following the patterns of ancient stories to create something new (Wainwright 2004, 15). Jackson’s films uphold and visually develop the mythological and historical themes set out in the source material. Articulating his vision for Fellowship, Jackson stated: “It might be clearer if I described it as an historical film… . Imagine something like Braveheart, but with a little of the visual magic of Legend… . It should have the historical authority of Braveheart” (Knowles 1998). There is strong authorial intent—​in Tolkien’s books and Jackson’s films—​to frame Middle-earth as a real place located in a distant, nearly lost past. In this way, Fellowship can be read as a component of an alternative history or perhaps a mythic origin story for England. Viewers must therefore reorient themselves to think of their present world as having emerged from the legacy of Middle-earth instead of Middle-earth having been born from a mind in the modern world. Middle-earth is not a place to which we can truly return, but a past from which we have emerged. The story of The Lord of the Rings is temporally located somewhere vaguely behind us. Although it has many of the aesthetic and technological trappings of the Middle Ages, its otherworldly components deny the possibility of locating it at a specific point on a linear timeline of Western history. Therefore, it is behind us but perhaps not directly behind us. The contextual framework for the trilogy is established in the first scenes of Fellowship through narrated prologue. By utilizing this cinematic language of the historical film, Fellowship forges an association with other historical representation in other genres with overt connections to reality. Galadriel’s voice describes key events in the history of Middle-earth over a series of illustrative scenes. Galadriel leads viewers through a series of cause and effect that led to the social and political conditions that necessitate Frodo’s adventure. She delivers concise statements as though recounting a series of facts with the authority of the historian. The prologue states the film’s claim to authenticity, that this is the real history of Middle-earth, imbuing the tale with fantastic realism. Paradoxically, the prologue for this pseudo-​historical world can deliver more detail and establish a greater sense of truth or accuracy than in other genres of historical film. By virtue of Galadriel’s immortality, there are no gaps in her historical knowledge. The past she recounts is part of her own memory, unlike a historian studying a distant past whose knowledge is shaped by the limitations of what evidence has survived. The prologue orients the audience in time and space and serves as an invitation to engage with a time and place that is not their own. This sets up not only the context for the story but also teaches audiences how to interpret the film. Fellowship documents the next chapter in the history of Middle-earth. There is, throughout the trilogy, a sense of loss accompanied by the shifting of time. This is presented metaphorically with the autumnal atmosphere in Rivendell and explicitly when Elrond acknowledges that “the time of the elves is over; my people are leaving these shores.” When the fellowship arrives in the Mines of Moria, the dwarves who built the mines are conspicuously absent. The cavernous underground architecture speaks to a grandeur and flourishing community that once was. All around, viewers can see material evidence of their existence, the immense scale of which only serves to underscore its emptiness. The presence of magic, superstition, and an acceptance of the unexplainable in everyday life are key characteristics of modern conceptualizations of the Middle Ages, particularly as they are defined relationally to Modernity with its influx of scientific method, enlightenment, and agnosticism. The growing absence of fantastic characters and sense of dwindling magic bring the world of Middle-earth closer to our own. However, the emphasis on loss, mourning something that is gone forever, raises questions about what might have been left behind through the shifting of ages. 133

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Loss is inherent with linear conceptions of time. If time is understood to be unrepeatable and relentlessly moving forward, anything that is not actively brought forward is left behind and therefore irretrievable under conceptualizations that deny the possibility of temporal return. However, fantasy narrative provides a mechanism for the disruption of linear time. An alternative, fantastic origin can be written and rewritten for a nation. This fantastic past can be revisited through an immersive cinematic experience. There is a thematic optimism throughout the story as characters persevere in their daunting task but the framing of the story as myth also presents a temporal optimism. Time does not have to be strictly linear. The characters that live on screen warn viewers against the losses of linear time while also actioning a remedy (or, if not a full remedy, at least a countermeasure) of determined optimism. Tolkien’s original novels were infused with anti-​industrial and anti-​consumerist ideas, themes that are carried through in Jackson’s films. The Edenic land of the Shire with its romanticized pastoral charm is posited against pointed shots of orcs ripping down forests to fuel their forges and mass-​produce armour in a factory-​like manner. The invasion of evil forces, characterized by their destruction of nature, threatens the peace of the hobbits’ agricultural life, an aggressive metaphor for the perils of modernity. The environmental movement has gained significant momentum since Tolkien published in the 1950s. Even since Jackson’s films were released in the early 2000s there has been steadily increasing discussion around the consequences of industrial pollution and unchecked consumption (particularly by capitalist Western societies). Here, the fantastic world becomes a realm to explore concerns of the present, effectively demonstrating how fantasy functions as a platform to discuss relevant sociopolitical ideas. The process of relocating real-​world anxieties to a fantastic space is discussed in more depth in the next case study: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. However, The Lion demonstrates this strategy on an individual level with emphasis on personal growth, whereas Fellowship explores issues that implicate broader social structures and dynamics of power across national and international systems. Frodo’s quest to save his agrarian way of life connects sociocultural concerns of past and present. The stance of the film is clear in its romanticization of pre-​industrial society. The fantastic elements as well as positioning Frodo as the sympathetic point of view character prevent this message from feeling sententious or accusatory, particularly for viewers who participate in, or perpetuate consumerist systems. Audiences may or may not agree with the narrative’s stance but are invited into a space where they can ponder such questions. Beyond the specifics of environmentalist themes is a broader opportunity to ask questions about the needs of humanity and the nature of the world humans have built. The film provides audiences with a window to a world that stands as an alternative to their own. In this alternative space there is room to contemplate our understanding of time and questions of progress. As the fellowship walk past the crumbling gothic architectural remains of Arnor, they are not on a quest to rebuild once-​great empires (after all, past hubris has led to their current predicament) but to rectify past mistakes in order to change the present and invest in the future. The value of the film is in its ability to provide an immersive visual environment in which to explore these ideas and present a compelling world of alternatives, a vision of society that deeply resonates with the one viewers currently inhabit while simultaneously broadening the realm of possibility. Jackson’s films were not the first attempted cinematic adaptation of Tolkien’s works; however, if box office earnings and broader cultural impact are any measure, they are by far the most successful. Moreover, Jackson’s films catered to pre-​existing fans of the books while also making the films more broadly accessible to those outside of the fandom. These iterations contributed to a broader shift that brought “nerd culture” into the mainstream (a trend that persists today not only with fantasy but also the ever-​ increasing screened adaptations of comic book superheroes). 134

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The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe Andrew Adamson’s film The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005) is based on C.S. Lewis’ children’s novel, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Unlike the other case studies, this story was written for a younger audience and explores the narrative through child protagonists. While stories written for children do not preclude adult enjoyment, they do demonstrate a different type of storytelling; they offer an introduction to the genre without the expectation that audiences have prior knowledge of generic convention. It is possible that for many readers and watchers, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe stands as their first engagement with medieval-​ inspired fantasy fiction. Situating children’s stories within a pseudo-​medieval setting highlights an existing cultural preoccupation with the medieval while ensuring its continued relevance as a fondly remembered, even nostalgic, part of childhood. Entering these medievalesque worlds becomes a coming-​of-​age rite of passage to be passed down to the next generation. Locating the fantastic in a medieval setting thus becomes normalized from our earliest days of experiencing stories. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe follows the lives of the Pevensie siblings: Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy. The children are evacuated from London during the Blitz and sent to live with a professor in the English countryside, establishing another key historical era for contemporary viewers. They soon discover that an old wardrobe in the professor’s house is a gateway to the magical kingdom of Narnia. Upon entering Narnia, they learn that they are the instigating component of a prophecy that will determine the fate of the land and become instrumental figures in a battle of good versus evil full of medieval symbolism. Upon winning the battle, they rule as the kings and queens of Narnia before eventually finding their way back through the wardrobe to 1940s England. The sustained popularity of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is evident in its numerous adaptations across film, television, and theatre and its inclusion within the Western canon of childhood stories. Since its first publication in 1950, the story has successfully transitioned from one generation to the next, demonstrating a continued appeal. The initial telling establishes a story while the later retellings shape it to suit changing social and cultural contexts. Released the year following the final (lucrative) instalment of Jackson’s Rings trilogy, the influence of Jackson’s success can be seen throughout The Lion but, perhaps most clearly, in the final extended fight sequence. This sequence was shot in New Zealand, just as all three of Jackson’s movies were. The shared landscape accounts for some of the visual similarities in addition to the epic scale of the battle that is allotted almost 20 minutes of the two and a half hour run time. The emphasis on this battle was greatly expanded from the original books. This, combined with several added chase sequences, enhances the suspense and drama of the story turning it into, as Megan Stoner puts it, “more action-​flick than allegory” (2007, 78). The essential elements of C.S. Lewis’ original tale remain including its many Christian allusions. However, its adaptation from text to screen was influenced by the cinematic trends of the early 2000s. This is especially true for fantasy films that had franchise potential and a built-​in fanbase from a pre-​existing intellectual property. The Lord of the Rings trilogy and the simultaneous ongoing success of the Harry Potter series laid out blueprints for successful fantasy franchises other production companies looked to emulate (see Jonathan Stubbs’ investigation into 2000s fantasy franchise politics [2019, 165–​189]). Changing the creative medium alters the way audiences experience narrative or art more broadly. This is especially true for younger eyes to whom imaginative, immersive worlds appear to come to life on the big screen. Story and make-​believe are compulsory and essential parts of childhood (Gottschall 2012, 6). Children naturally engage with fantasy and imagination, easily incorporating 135

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them into their everyday play. To a child who is already accustomed to moving between spheres of reality and imagination and has yet to develop a capacity for critical media engagement, the higher suspension of disbelief demanded by fantasy film comes more naturally than for adults who are more accustomed to clearer delineations between fact and fiction. The immersive nature of film, particularly an action-​oriented film like The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, delivers an exciting, engaging, and lasting visual impression for young people discovering these types of stories for the first time. Up until the point in the narrative when Lucy first enters the wardrobe, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe presents itself with all the trappings of a traditional historical film. The film opens amidst a German air raid over London. Period-​specific aeroplanes, technologies, uniforms, buildings, and household goods, desaturated colour and explosive noise communicate an environment of cinematic realism. The heightened tension and anxiety of the scene are consistent with assumptions about audience understanding of what such an event might feel like. Neither the medieval nor the fantastic appear to be present. The audience is immersed in a different history, a real history. This case study, unlike the others, provides a specific, direct point of contact with the real world of the audience. Young audiences in 2005 would not have personal memories of the 1940s. Children would learn of the events of the Second World War through other forms of public history including school curriculum, public holidays, monuments, museum exhibits, and other television shows and movies. When the world of Narnia is discovered, it is revealed that the fantastic exists alongside the real world, whether the occupants of the real world are aware of it or not. When Lucy walks through the wardrobe, the film transitions from a historical film with a primary focus on known historical events into a medieval fantasy. Lucy guides the audience through the transition from the real into the unreal. At first, Narnia appears enchanting and ethereal in comparison to the grittiness of the real world and yet by the end of the film, notions of reality are reversed. Alison Searle argues that the alternate medieval world becomes more real and feels more like home than the actual world from whence they came which is rendered “alien and unreal” (2007, 13). After winning the war, the children feel so at home in Narnia that they choose to stay for many years instead of immediately returning through the wardrobe. The lines between actual history, imagined past (located in a parallel present), fact, and fiction blur, emulating a child-​like perspective that allows for less rigid categorization of time and place. It is through their ability to move between these spatial and temporal spheres that the children come to know themselves and understand larger truths about family, character, and morality. Medieval history is presented in the film in two forms. The professor’s house contains many distinctly medieval artefacts including weaponry and a suit of armour. The fragile, dusty artefacts contribute to the stifling and serious environment that emphasizes the children’s distance from home and comfort. The children are strictly informed not to touch the artefacts and when Edmund accidentally knocks over the suit of armour, they flee the scene fearful of repercussion. This stiff, inanimate representation of the medieval past contrasts sharply with the living, adventurous medieval world they soon discover on the other side of the wardrobe. In this film, the medieval past is not over and gone but continues to exist alongside the real world. Narnia is set up as a portal world, distinctly separate from the real world but accessible through a specific site for those who know where to look. Despite this spatial separation, there are strong parallels between the political turmoil in Narnia and that of the real world during the Second World War. Leaving 1940s England, the children enter a place that is just as dangerous, however, their relationship to the conflict is changed. Instead of being sent away from danger, they are thrust into it

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headfirst. In the real world, adults made decisions that structured the children’s lives but in Narnia, the children are offered the opportunity to decide their own courses of action. It is in making these decisions that they come to learn who they are, what they stand for, and discover their own power to make change. The moral dilemma the children face is not only in discerning right from wrong but also finding the courage to do what is right. As they grow in their conviction to stay in Narnia and join the battle for good, the children become increasingly medievalized. They are given medieval weapons followed by pre-​Raphaelite-​inspired clothing (long, flowing dresses for the girls and tunics and leggings for the boys) (“The Wardrobe Door Interviews Isis Mussenden” 2005). While the idea of war remains frightening, the children prepare to face it head on. A bright montage of arms practice, strategizing, and sibling co-​operation contrasts sharply with the scenes of modern warfare at the start of the film. The opening sequence of the film was dark, chaotic, and frightening. The larger conflict of the war brought out the interpersonal conflict within the family. In the medieval world, the Pevensies face their antagonists as a unified group using skills they have acquired in the pseudo-​medieval world. Their identity formation is facilitated through their engagement with the medieval. Fantasy has often been accused of being an escapist genre, with the assumption that this is something to be devalued (Butler 2009, 3). However, in the process of escaping their present reality, the Pevensie siblings experience immense personal growth. They find their individual strengths and learn how to deal with the stress of conflict by becoming a support system for one another. In this case, their escape from the real world is quite productive. Just as Alice fell down the rabbit hole and Dorothy emerged into a world of technicolour, the Pevensie children find themselves in an otherworld of strangeness and fantasy with pointed references to the anxieties they have temporarily left behind in the real world. It is in the otherworld that they discover who they are and develop the tools to grow into who they choose to be. While narrative themes of identity and morality exist across a vast array of time periods and cultures, it is in the landscape of a fantastic medieval England that the Pevensies are finally able to productively engage with these deep, personal questions. Moreover, their chosen answers to these questions, that they will stand against evil forces and become fair and just rulers of Narnia, are outwardly expressed through established conventions of cinematic medievalism. Peter and Edmund become heroic knightly figures in the final battle after which all four children are coronated. The fantastic medieval provides the location for the Pevensies’ productive escape as well as the means to demonstrate their growth. The Pevensies pass through the wardrobe to escape the challenges of the present only to find the same challenges, but this time repackaged in a more digestible way. They are far enough removed from reality to allow for exploration and gain perspective that is not possible in the immediacy of the present. This experience mirrors that of the audience who are themselves afforded a temporary reprieve from the anxieties of the present for the duration of the film. Just as the wardrobe functions as the portal to Narnia, the movie screen exists as a portal to any number of fictional worlds. Considering that stories are a tool for teaching, particularly for young audiences, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe provides a more broadly applicable framework for using an imagined past as a reprieve from the day-​to-​day and a productive tool of problem-​solving. These imagined worlds can function as a productive coping strategy not only for extreme circumstances such as world wars, but any kind of overwhelming collective or individual anxiety. Fantasy operates as a tool to remove oneself from the overwhelming immediacy of a situation in order to gain perspective or respite, explore alternative possibilities or relocate to a place whose newness and distraction refocuses the mind. We do not engage with story despite times of stress but because of them. As such, fantasy worlds should not be framed as mere avoidance but as tools for learning

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and survival. This is especially true for children who already learn and process the world through imaginative play. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe utilizes medieval history as a form of productive escape. It functions as a place to learn, grow, and problem-​solve. It positions history as something that exists alongside us, not just in its scholarly form as the suits of armor in the professor’s house, but as a dynamic and accessible venue to learn vital skills. Jonathan Gottschall asserts that “human life, especially social life, is intensely complicated and the stakes are high. Fiction allows our brains to practice reacting to the kinds of challenges that are, and always were, most crucial to our success as a species” (2012, 67). Here, Gottschall connects practices of fictive narrative to a long tradition of human development and marker of species. When the Pevensies enter Narnia and engage with its adventurous, child-​friendly pseudo-​medieval culture, they embark on a journey of learning not about history but about themselves and how to exist in the human world.

“The Rains of Castamere” The final case study is “The Rains of Castamere” from the HBO streaming series Game of Thrones. Based on George R.R. Martin’s epic fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire, Game of Thrones follows the political machinations of various noble families all intent on ruling over the land of Westeros. Season 3 Episode 9 “The Rains of Castamere” also known as “The Red Wedding,” premiered in 2013 and tells the story of Robb Stark, King of the North, who was promised to marry a Frey daughter to unite the two families. Before this wedding can take place, Robb falls in love with another woman and breaks his oath to the Freys. Robb journeys to the Frey lands (known as the Twins) with his army to formally apologize and watch another man, Edmure Tully, marry his original betrothed. Robb and his men are welcomed by the patriarch of the family, Walder Frey, and attend the ceremony as guests. During the post-​wedding feast, Walder’s men violently slaughter everyone including Robb, all of his men, his love interest, and unborn child. Robb’s mother, Catelyn, kills Walder Frey’s wife in revenge before her throat is also mercilessly cut. This episode is emblematic of the shocking and gratuitous violence characteristic of the series. Game of Thrones falls into a type of medieval representation that sits in opposition to more romanticized forms of medieval nostalgia. It is a type of medievalism described by Finke and Shichtman as one that “associate[s]‌the medieval with the barbarity, superstition, and violence from which civilization (modernity) is supposed to have rescued us” (2010, 18). Audiences are not presented with an idyllic, escapist world meant to assuage real-​world anxieties. Nor does it ask viewers to contemplate the virtues of the past and question notions of progress in the modern era. Generally speaking, Westeros is much more viscerally brutal and physically and psychologically traumatic than what the average observer could be expected to experience in their lifetime. It glorifies violence, manipulation, sociopathic tendencies, and the worst aspects of human nature are often rewarded. The audience is not persuaded to envy the characters or the lives they lead but perhaps feel grateful for the comfort and civility of their own world. Where the medievalism of Middle-earth in Fellowship locates an optimistic tale of courage and friendship, and Narnia in The Lion encourages productive behaviour modelling, Westeros embodies a grimdark fantasy that presents a deep cynicism about human nature. Westeros is not constructed as a parallel world accessible through a portal, nor is it a Tolkienian myth about a place from which the audience may have come. Westeros is ostensibly situated as a stand-​alone world. It is located not behind us or next to us but apart from us. However, its relationship to real-​world history goes beyond adopting the aesthetic characteristics of a medieval past. “The Rains of Castamere” uses its fictional characters to tell an altered version of stories found 138

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in a real past. Martin’s Red Wedding was roughly based on two identifiable events in Scottish history: the Black Dinner and the Glencoe Massacre (Hibberd 2013). Both events are particularly notorious tales from Scotland’s history, the exact details of which, especially for the Black Dinner, are contested and intertwined with local legend and sensationalism. The Black Dinner took place in Edinburgh in 1440. Sixteen-​year-​old William Douglas and his younger brother were invited by William Crichton to dine with King James II at Edinburgh castle. Motivated by fear of the growing power of clan Douglas, the head of a black boar, a Scottish symbol of death, was supposedly placed in front of William Douglas during the meal. Conspirators then forced the boys through a mock trial where they were forcibly found guilty and subsequently beheaded. The theatricality of the boar’s head and mock trial are in doubt due to conflicting sources and it is possible that this event was conflated with another murder of a young Douglas earl that occurred years later (Weinczok 2019, 183). The Glencoe Massacre occurred in 1692 where approximately 30 members of clan MacDonald were slaughtered in their sleep by clan Campbell after the MacDonalds had hospitably hosted them for several days. Guests turned on their hosts ostensibly in retribution for Maclain of Glencoe’s six-​day delay in signing an oath of allegiance to King William III. The Glencoe Massacre is more thoroughly documented than the Black Dinner and although the details of the actual event are far less contested, the common interpretation of the event as solely an instance of rivalry is misleading. David Weinczok emphasizes that the order to kill the MacDonalds came directly from the king and that: to simplify that dark day by presenting it as a continuation of the clans’ almost ritualized rivalries is to fundamentally misrepresent the greater power dynamics at play, and to allow those whose authority the massacre was carried out in the name of to escape the judgment of history. (2019, 190) In this he highlights how the interpretation of history and the emphasis or omission of details, intentional or not, can shape not only the historical narrative but social judgement and the ethics of accountability. Both historical events represent egregious betrayals of trust and highlight a ruthlessness justified for the sake of power. “The Rains of Castamere” places particular emphasis on the breaking of the guest right law, an established social code that protects both guest and host with its foundations in a myriad of cultures throughout history. Hospitality was not only valued but, particularly in northern communities, was essential for survival. The first scene in the Frey castle opens on a shot of a tray carrying bread and salt being passed around. Robb eats from it while Walder Frey welcomes him and his men, explicitly offering his hospitality and protection. Although tense, a social contract is established between the two parties. Guests have been offered and accepted the offer of food and protection for the night with the mutual expectation of a peaceful evening. The setup of such a strong social pact only serves to highlight the heinousness of the later slaughter and reinforces the bleak portrayal of humanity that is characteristic of the series. Unlike The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, which presented a definitive real-​world historical touchstone, these two pieces of Scottish history are conflated and recontextualized in such a way that many viewers are unlikely to notice the references. An audience’s historical knowledge depends greatly on their own cultural heritage. Pierre Sorlin refers to the common basis of known historical characters, dates, and events within a community as “historical capital” which then enables individuals to approximately place the temporal context of a narrative (1980, 20). For 139

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a series such as Game of Thrones that is heavily marketed to international audiences, its audience will be diverse viewers who draw from differing or even contradictory pools of historical capital. Especially for non-​Scottish viewers, this episode might be their first exposure to these particular events. For these viewers, the two historical events will be framed by how they first encountered them within the show. Instead of taking prior historical knowledge and mapping it onto the show, the show presents an event that audiences may later map onto history. This idea is supported by scholar Hilary Jane Locke (2018) who recognized a growing trend in book marketing and publication where diverse histories are sold to the public through a branding connection to Game of Thrones. More than the general idea of the Middle Ages supplied by The Chronicles of Narnia and The Lord of the Rings, “The Rains of Castamere” offers fans specific moments in history to research and discuss in relation to the show. This strategy encourages viewers to take an active role in their own historical learning, seeking out information to discover for themselves the narratives of a nation. This episode demonstrates how history can be used to form popular narrative and that popularity leads viewers back to more traditional forms of history. The promise of the fantastic draws viewers in, encouraging them to engage with pasts they might not have otherwise explored. One of the praised elements of Game of Thrones is its dedication to detail in all areas of worldbuilding, shaking off the last elements of fairy tales that The Lord of the Rings held onto with its happy, eucastrophic ending. Attention to detail amounts to a heightened sense of realism in the fictional world. George R.R. Martin has spoken about his desire to delve into the political complexities of power that are not always explored in fantasy: Tolkien can say that Aragorn became king and reigned for a hundred years, and he was wise and good. But Tolkien doesn’t ask the question: What was Aragorn’s tax policy? Did he maintain a standing army? What did he do in times of flood and famine? … Just having good intentions doesn’t make you a wise king. (Gilmore 2014). Aspects of society that are often neglected in worldbuilding, such as poverty, economics, religious extremism, disease, and public health, are discussed at length in Game of Thrones lending its fantastic world a greater sense of realism than the other fantasy narratives. This attention to detail within a pseudo-​historical setting creates, as Locke describes it, “a reality that is often mistaken for truth and, ultimately, better historical accuracy than traditional history mediums” (2018, 171–​172). Because of its conventions, fiction can create what appears to be a more truthful or realistic world than what can be reconstructed in academic history narratives. Fantasy writers are not constrained by facts. Fiction authors have the freedom to imagine more details in their stories than what may be allowed by the standards of academic history. Fictional narratives are allowed to include overt markers of fiction and be forthright with their inventiveness. Martin stated that “the problem with straight historical fiction is you know what’s going to happen” (Gilmore 2014). Thus, Martin consciously chose to write fantasy instead of history or historical fiction because he saw the limitations of the historical genre. A consequence of the conventions of fantastic realism is that fantasy worlds like Westeros can feel more realistic to audiences than accounts of historical events due to the genre’s lack of detail as a result of unavoidable gaps in historical records. Experiencing these worlds through sympathetic point of view characters humanizes these stories and encourages an emotional engagement that can also heighten the realism of the watching experience. Remembering Searle’s aforementioned idea where Narnia

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became more real to the Pevensie children than their actual world, here, Westeros can come across as more real to audiences than actual history they have learned from academic sources.

The medieval fantasy film as historical film These case studies demonstrate three distinct methods of accessing the medieval past: through a mythical origin (Fellowship), as a portal fantasy (The Lion), and an alternative retelling of the past (“Rains of Castamere”). Each of these strategies locates the past in relation to the present in different ways, and thus alters the relationship between the present of the audience and the imagined past portrayed on screen. These differing approaches reveal the complexity of the past and how it can be reshaped to tell stories that put forth arguments about the nature of humanity. Despite each case study relying on similar markers of time and place (material culture, social organization, technologies), the character of the medieval and what it represents is changeable. The pseudo-​medieval remains relevant in the popular consciousness as demonstrated by an increasing number of medieval fantasy productions including The Witcher (2019–​present), The Wheel of Time (2021–​present), and most recently The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power (2022–​present) and House of the Dragon (2022–​present). Rings of Power and House of the Dragon are prequals that delve further into the pasts of Middle-earth and Westeros, respectively. Returning to these worlds not only allows for production companies to capitalize on pre-​ established fanbases but also elaborate on the histories of these worlds which, in turn, makes the worlds appear more real. The almost simultaneous release of two big-​budget high fantasy prequals of beloved stories necessarily invokes comparison particularly in light of their being released by competing streaming giants Amazon (Rings) and HBO (Dragon). Indeed, much of the media coverage, even articles that appear to set out to focus on one show, inevitably discuss each show in relation to the other: “Fantasy Face-​Off: ‘The Rings of Power’ vs. ‘House of the Dragon’ ” (Vineyard 2022), “ ‘House of the Dragon’ Is Just Better Than ‘Rings of Power” (Tassi 2022), and “ ‘The Rings of Power’ Producers Aren’t Concerned About That Other Fantasy Drama On HBO—​ TCA” (Rice 2022). Just as the influence of Jackson’s movies can be seen in the creation of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and later, Game of Thrones, dynamics of emulation and intentional deviation can be seen in the newer prequels. Both Rings and Dragon appear to be responding to longstanding criticism of fantasy worlds for their male-​centrism and racism by placing female characters at the centre of their stories and increasingly casting racially diverse actors in meaningful roles. However, each show also functions as a continuation of the style of its predecessor. Rings of Power maintains the quirky and hopeful world of Middle-earth while House of the Dragon flaunts the particular brand of violence and gore familiar to Game of Thrones audiences. The dynamic and changeable nature of this conversation reveals how media shapes other media. Additionally, it demonstrates different perceptions of the past as well as how representations of the past are influenced by cultural and temporal context, reflecting the interests and values of audiences and their expectations concerning popular entertainment. The lasting economic, physical, and social impacts of these imagined worlds increasingly blur the boundaries between the real and imagined. Preserved sets, props, and costumes exist as physical artefacts tied to the making of these worlds. The economic impact of a large-​scale production creates jobs and stimulates tourism. Hobbiton movie set tours in Matamata, New Zealand and Game of Thrones tours across several filming sites including those in Ireland, Croatia, and Iceland provide additional forms of engagement with fictional worlds within specific real-​world geographical

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contexts. The process of creating Middle-earth, Narnia, and Westeros is now embedded in the history of the places where they were made. The filming of these screened histories becomes a historical event in and of itself, glorified through behind-​the-​scenes special features on DVDs as well as the feature-​length documentary about shooting the final Game of Thrones season, Game of Thrones: The Last Watch (2019). There is a multi-​layered creation of history at work. The production company is tasked with recreating convincingly real medieval elements informed by historical study in order to visually create a fantasy world adapted from a literary work and in doing so they contribute to the history of a real place. Over 20 years have passed since The Fellowship of the Ring was first released and yet the dialogue stimulated by its success is far from over. While Jackson’s film by no means began the conversation—​decades of fantasy film and an even longer tradition of fantasy writing preceded it—​it has had a lasting influence on screened fantasy narratives and popular culture of the 2000s and 2010s. The last 20 years have seen epic fantasy transition from smaller, niche fandoms into mainstream blockbuster culture. Medieval fantasy provides a non-​traditional avenue of historical engagement and as a result, encourages different forms of historically centred conversation. Borrowing from medieval history to serve fantastic narratives complicates and challenges an audience’s relationship with history. While fantasy films are not traditionally included in discussions of screened histories, this chapter highlights some of the ways in which historical learning can be gleaned from these screen texts. These narratives serve important functions and should be investigated because of, not despite, their overt fiction. As demonstrated by the case studies, there is diversity in medieval fantasy storytelling. Each example utilized different strategies for locating, characterizing, relating to, and generally thinking about the past. By reconfiguring and reorienting the past, they prompt a dialogue about its relevance in present-​day society and demonstrate how it can be used to form spaces for considering one’s own understanding of past and present. Through lands of fantasy, each story asks questions about the real world, presenting audiences with perspectives on the nature of humanity and the world in which we exist. One of the hallmarks of fantasy is to ask viewers to engage with worlds and ideas that are foreign, unusual, or antithetical to the world they have come to know. In this way, fantasy is perhaps perfectly suited to invite audiences to challenge preconceived notions about history that may include incomplete narratives or hegemonic perspectives that neglect other historical possibilities. Imaginative access to other worlds is not only a feature of the human experience, a marker of the species, but an essential strategy for survival and general well-​being. Audiences are drawn to these works for a myriad of reasons but whatever the cause, the result is that the concept of the medieval continues to evolve in popular imaginings and carries with it new ways of asserting the past firmly in the consciousness of the present.

Reference list Aberth, John. 2003. A Knight at the Movies: Medieval History on Film. New York: Routledge. Adamson, Andrew. 2005. The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. DVD. Walt Disney Pictures. Bernau, Anke, and Bettina Bildhauer. 2009. Medieval Film. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Bildhauer, Bettina. 2011. Filming the Middle Ages. London: Reaktion Books. Butler, David. 2009. Fantasy Cinema: Impossible Worlds on screen. London: Wallflower Press. De Groot, Jerome. 2016. Remaking History: The Past in Contemporary Historical Fictions. New York: Routledge.

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Fantastic histories Finke, Laurie A., and Martine B. Shichtman. 2010. Cinematic Illuminations: The Middle Ages on Film. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Gilmore, Mikal. 2014. “George R.R. Martin: The Rolling Stone Interview.” Rolling Stone, April 23. www. rolli​ngst​one.com/​cult​ure/​cult​ure-​news/​geo​rge-​r-​r-​mar​tin-​the-​roll​ing-​stone-​interv​iew-​242​487/​. Gottschall, Jonathan. 2012. The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human. New York: Mariner Books. Guthrie, Caroline. 2019. “Narratives of Rupture: Tarantino’s Counterfactual Histories and the American Historical Imaginary.” Rethinking History 23, no. 3: 339–​361. https://​doi.org/​10.1080/​13642​ 529.2019.1615​200. Harty, Kevin. 1999. The Reel Middle Ages: American, Western and Eastern European, Middle Eastern, and Asian Films about Medieval Europe. Jefferson: McFarland. Hibberd, James. 2013. “ ‘Game of Thrones’ Author George R.R. Martin: Why he Wrote The Red Wedding.” CNN, June 7. www.cnn.com/​2013/​06/​07/​show​biz/​tv/​game-​mar​tin-​red-​wedd​ing-​ew/​index.html. Hughes-​Warrington, Marnie. 2006. History Goes to the Movies. London: Routledge. Jackson, Peter. 2001. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. DVD. New Zealand: New Line Cinemas. Knowles, Harry. 1998. “20 Questions with Peter Jackson.” Ain’t It Cool News. http://​memb​ers.tri​pod.com/​ peter​_​jac​kson​_​onl​ine/​lotr/​artic​les/​20_​qu​esti​ons.htm. Locke, Hilary Jane. 2018. “Beyond ‘Tits and Dragons’: Medievalism, Medieval History and Perceptions in Game of Thrones.” In From Medievalism to Early-​Modernism: Adapting the English Past, edited by Marina Gerzic and Aidan Norrie, 171–​187. New York: Routledge. Munslow, Alun. 2007. Narrative and History. New York: Palgrave Macmillan Nutter, David. 2013. Game of Thrones. Season 3, episode 9, “The Rains of Castamere.” HBO. Pisapia, Tyler. 2021. “Breaking Down Game of Thrones’ $90 Million Final Season Budget.” Looper, May 3. www.loo​per.com/​155​278/​break​ing-​down-​game-​of-​thro​nes-​90-​mill​ion-​final-​sea​son-​bud​get/​. Rice, Lynette. 2022. “‘The Rings of Power’ Producers Aren’t Concerned About That Other Fantasy Drama On HBO—​TCA.” Deadline, August 12. https://​deadl​ine.com/​2022/​08/​the-​rings-​of-​power-​fant​asy-​drama-​ ama​zon-​prime-​123​5091​052/​. Rosenstone, Robert. 2016. Adventures of a Postmodern Historian: Living and Writing the Past. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Searle, Alison. 2007. “Fantastical Fact, Home or Other? The Imagined ‘Medieval’ in C.S. Lewis.” Mythlore 25, no. 97/​98 (Spring): 5–​15. Stoner, Megan. 2007. “The Lion, the Witch and the War Scenes: How Narnia Went from Allegory to Action Flick.” In Fantasy Fiction into Film: Essays, edited by Leslie Stratyner and James R. Keller, 73–​79. Jefferson: McFarland. Stubbs, Jonathan. 2019. Hollywood and the Invention of England: Projecting the English Past in American Cinema, 1930–​2017. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Sorlin, Pierre. 1980. The Film in History: Restaging the Past. Totowa: Barnes & Noble Books. Tassi, Paul. 2022. “ ‘House of the Dragon’ Is Just Better Than ‘Rings of Power.’ ” Forbes, September 11. www.for​bes.com/​sites/​paulta​ssi/​2022/​09/​11/​house-​of-​the-​dra​gon-​is-​just-​bet​ter-​than-​rings-​of-​power/​?sh=​ 1e5cd​1285​1be. “The Wardrobe Door Interviews Isis Mussenden.” 2005. Narniaweb (blog). November 24. www.costu​mes. narnia​web.com/​mus​send​enin​terv​iew.asp. Treacey, Mia E.M. 2016. Reframing the Past: History, Film and Television. New York: Routledge. Trigg, Stephanie. 2008. “Medievalism and Convergence Culture: Researching the Middle Ages for Fiction and Film.” Parergon 25, no. 2: 99–​118. https://​doi.org/​10.1353/​pgn.0.0060. Vineyard, Jennifer. 2022. “Fantasy Face-​Off: ‘The Rings of Power’ vs. ‘House of the Dragon.’ ” New York Times, September 5. www.nyti​mes.com/​2022/​09/​05/​arts/​tel​evis​ion/​rings-​of-​power-​vs-​house-​of-​the-​dra​ gon.html. Wainwright, Edmund. 2004. Tolkien’s Mythology for Middle-earth. Norfolk, England: Anglo-​Saxon Books. Weaver, Jackson. 2022. “Rings of Power Could Cost $1B. What’s Making TV so Expensive?” CBC News, September 4. www.cbc.ca/​news/​entert​ainm​ent/​rings-​of-​power-​expens​ive-​1.6571​965. Weinczok, David C. 2019. The History Behind Game of Thrones: The North Remembers. Yorkshire: Pen & Sword Books. Worley, Alec. 2005. Empires of the Imagination: A Critical Survey of Fantasy Cinema from George Méliès to The Lord of the Rings. Jefferson: McFarland.

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10 SATIRE AND REALISM IN THE HISTORICAL FILM Eleftheria Thanouli

Introduction The study of historical representation in the cinema has been increasingly gaining ground since the mid-​1980s when Robert Rosenstone laid the foundations with his pioneering study Visions of the Past: The Challenge of Film to Our Idea of History (1995), where he acknowledged cinema’s potential for “doing history.” It was the first step toward a major disruption in historical thinking, which had been confined within the boundaries of academic scholarship for over a century. Although history as a general notion is considered to date back to Herodotus, academic historiography, as we know it, stretches back to the early nineteenth century when history became an object of study within universities (White [1973] 2014). It was only then that it acquired the status of a science of sorts, embodying the principles of objectivity, empiricism, and fact-​based research. Rosenstone’s claim that films, apart from history treatises, could advance historical thought was indeed revolutionary. In due time, many other scholars followed his lead from both fields, historical studies and film, exploring the possibilities for a history on screen and discussing the particularities of this new form of “historying.”1 Over the years, the literature on the topic of historical cinema grew exponentially with key publications, such as Natalie Zemon Davis’ Slaves on Screen (2000), Rosenstone’s follow-​up monograph History on Film/​Film on History (2006), Robert Burgoyne’s The Hollywood Historical Film (2008), and Jonathan Stubbs’ Historical Film: A Critical Introduction (2013), addressing a series of fundamental issues in the complex relationship between historical films and the traditional form of written history. In my own contribution, History and Film: A Tale of Two Disciplines (2018), I explained that the history of the two fields should not be construed as a tale of “fierce antagonism and hostility but one of intricate interactions, unexpected exchanges and ironic mirrorings between two different forms of history” (2018, ix–​x). In fact, in order to grasp the workings of filmic history I turned to the poetics of written history, and specifically, Hayden White’s seminal study, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-​Century Europe, first published in 1973. Therein, I discovered his approach to the historical work as a narrative act that seeks to explain the past through three different layers of explanations: the formal, the philosophical, and the ideological (White [1973] 2014). The application of White’s analytical taxonomy to historical

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Satire and realism in the historical film

Figure 10.1 Stalin’s funeral. Moviestore Collection Ltd /​IFC Films /​Alamy Stock Photo

cinema, whether fiction or non-​fiction, allowed me to craft a comprehensive interpretative grid for understanding historical films and the explanations they propose around historical events and processes (Thanouli 2018). The neat arrangement of formal, philosophical, and ideological mechanisms that I forged is a tool that works for most films most of the time. There are cases, however, that test this complex classification and beg for a more meticulous refinement of some of its principles. One such case is Armando Iannucci’s remarkable satire, The Death of Stalin (2017). Based on the graphic novel La Mort de Staline created by Fabien Nury and Thierry Robin, the film’s plot opens in the Soviet Union in 1953 shortly before Stalin’s death and portrays the machinations among the members of the Politburo as they plan the next day for the USSR. The Death of Stalin premiered in the UK on October 20, 2017, and in New York on March 9 the following year to a slate of favourable reviews that debated the portrayal of Stalinism in relation both to its historical accuracy and the choice of satire as a genre. My goal in this chapter is to use Iannucci’s film to expand on my theoretical approach to historical cinema and to examine how the mode of narration as a type of historical explanation at any given historical account is often at odds with other constructional elements that belong to either a higher or a lower level of generality, such as a mode of emplotment or a film genre, respectively. What I find worth investigating in The Death of Stalin, in particular, is the tension between the character-​centred causality of its classical narration and the subversion of classical agency of its satiric impulse. Ultimately, I would like to discuss how these two representational tactics, namely classicism and satire, relate to the historical reality of communism and reinstate a new form of historical realism.

Mode of emplotment vs. mode of narration The concept of “emplotment” is central in White’s poetics of history. It is an integral part of his definition of the historical work as “a verbal structure in the form of narrative prose discourse that purports to be a model, or icon, of past structures and processes in the interest of explaining what they were by representing them” (White [1973] 2014, 2; emphasis in the original). The narrative 145

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structure of a historical account that represents the past can be described as an emplotment, i.e., a plot structure that shapes a sequence of events into a story of a particular kind. In order to mold the past into a meaningful story, the historian—​consciously or not—​draws upon “a fund of culturally provided” emplotments that organize the facts and make sense to the readers ([1973] 2014, 294). The range of plot structures available to a historian, however, is not particularly wide. White relies on Northrop Frye’s literary theory for identifying and classifying the number of such possible structures, arguing that they are four: Romance, Tragedy, Comedy, and Satire. Each story type contains a number of plot elements and plotlines that delimit the meaning of the events carried within them. If we take the French Revolution, for instance, there are numerous events and personages that one can chronicle from that historical period but there are not numerous archetypal structures, within which one can narratively contain them; there are only and strictly those four. If the French Revolution is cast as Romance, as in Jules Michelet’s work for instance, then history is implicitly carved out as “a drama of self-​identification symbolized by the hero’s transcendence of the world of experience, his victory over it, and his final liberation from it” ([1973] 2014, 8). If a historian opts for Tragedy, however, the hero’s triumph is false and illusory; his story ends in a tragic fall that shakes the world around them but does not come in vain. The redemptive part of a history told in the Tragic mode concerns those who have survived the agonic test and especially the audience who gains consciousness of the conditions of the world (8–​9). The emplotment of Comedy also shares a partially redemptive outlook on the role of humans and their fate but the tone is explicitly more optimistic than in Tragedy. According to White, Leopold von Ranke is an example of a historian who cast the history of the sixteenth-​ and seventeenth-​century Europe as Comedy, holding out the hope that humans can temporarily triumph over the forces of the social and natural world, while reaching a reconciliation among them (8–​9). The break comes from the mode of Satire, which frustrates the expectations of the other three modes and “presupposes the ultimate inadequacy of the visions of the world dramatically represented in the genres of Romance, Comedy and Tragedy alike” (10; emphasis in the original). The use of the term “genre” in the previous quote, as well as in other places throughout Metahistory, should not create the impression that “genre” and “emplotment” are interchangeable. In fact, White abides by Frye’s initial assertion that the “modes” are “narrative categories of literature broader than, or logically prior to, the ordinary literary genres” and, therefore, we can identify only four and not more (Frye [1957] 1990, 162). The modes of emplotment are also described as pre-​generic plot-​structures or “mythoi” that the Western literary tradition sanctions as “appropriate ways of endowing human processes with meanings” (White [1973] 2014, 294). This general conceptualization of the emplotment allows White to accommodate all historical works within the four modes, emphasising the overarching trajectory of human action as depicted in a historical book rather than the specifics of the historical data. When it comes to the historical film, however, the taxonomy of the four modes of emplotment may not be as applicable as in written accounts. This was my concern as I was formulating the poetics of historical cinema based on White’s theory, arguing that the descriptive value of the modes of Romance, Tragedy, Comedy, and Satire for the cinematic narrative structures was “extremely limited” (Thanouli 2018, 104). Instead, I suggested deploying the historical modes of narration, as construed by David Bordwell in his historical poetics (Bordwell 1985), as a means to describe in greater detail the filmic narrative structures that we encounter in the historical film. If we were in a position to describe with precision the formal vehicle of a historical representation, then we would be better equipped to interpret the historical explanations that stem not only from the narrative elements but also from the other two interrelated levels, namely the explanation by argument and by ideological implication. Thus, although I kept intact White’s meticulous taxonomy in relation 146

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to the two higher levels,2 I considered it imperative to do justice to cinema’s formal particularities and adopt the concept of the “mode of narration” as a more suitable tool for assessing the narrative principles of a historical work in the cinema. Yet the two concepts, mode of emplotment and mode of narration, are not easily compared; in fact, they are incommensurable. The emplotments, deriving from Frye’s writings and adapted by White to the properties of the historical book, amount to structures that relate the abstract mythical processes of the human mind to archetypical characters and actions that we trace in historical texts. The modes of narration, on the other hand, are analytical constructs that detail the paradigmatic narrational options that we discern in fiction films across different temporal and geographical coordinates. Thus, the categories of Romance, Tragedy, Comedy, and Satire are not only broader in scope—​not to mention theoretically convoluted—​but also significantly more abstract in the way they articulate their narrative components. In contrast, the four modes of narration (the classical, the art-​cinema, the historical-​materialist, and the post-​classical) are historically specific sets of norms of narrational construction (Bordwell 1985; Thanouli 2009). They seek to do justice to the narrational principles of the fiction film, encompassing not only characters and plotlines but every formal detail contained therein.3 According to Bordwell, the term “mode” is distinguished by its ability to “reveal, at a certain level of generality, significant unity among historically specific narrational strategies” (1985, 150). Compared to a film genre, a movement, or even a national cinema, a mode of narration is more fundamental, less transient, and more pervasive. Compared to the emplotments, however, the filmic modes are more historically specific and tied to concrete institutional and production practices. Although I stand by my choice to favour the mode of narration over the mode of emplotment in the analysis and interpretation of the historical fiction film, in some cases the categories of Romance, Tragedy, Comedy, and Satire seem to be particularly pertinent. The Death of Stalin and its powerful satire make one such example where the combination of a largely classical narration with heavy doses of satiric elements resulted in a historical representation that stirred controversy and instigated, as we shall see, a wave of heated debate over the realism (or the lack thereof) of the depicted events. The particularities of the filmic elements in Iannucci’s brilliant work, as well as its reception in various national and cultural contexts, begged for me the following research question: how does Satire work in a classical historical film and how does it affect the realism of classical representation? To address this complex problem, we need to investigate how the two otherwise incomparable units of assessing narrative structures, i.e., the mode of narration and the archetypical plot structures, intersect at various points, stressing and testing each other, while building a historical representation that forges a complicated relation to the historical truth.

The Death of Stalin Reviews and reception This is such a bizarre, absurd, farcical and yet horrifying story, and it’s true, so that’s what I’m going to do. (Iannucci 2018) But I can tell you that from all accounts, from every testimony that I’ve read, I didn’t invent anything. I could never invent something that insane. (Nury 2017)

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Nury and Iannucci, the creators of the comic and the filmic version of The Death of Stalin respectively, describe the historical events depicted in their works with the same emphasis on the glaring paradox, namely the absurdity and yet the truthfulness of the historical reality surrounding Stalin’s death. The same keywords, such as “absurd,” “horrifying,” “insane,” and “true,” appear time and time again in the majority of the reviews, commentaries, and articles surrounding the release of the film. The weight, however, as we shall see, either gravitates toward the “absurd” or the “true,” often creating diametrically opposed readings of the historical representation in the film. Among the most positive appraisals we find Masha Gessen’s review in The New Yorker where she argues that “Iannucci paints perhaps the most accurate picture of life under Soviet terror that anyone has ever committed to film,” while adding that the film “shows something that few people understand about Stalin’s reign and its aftermath: that it was both terrifying and ridiculous, and terrifying in its ridiculousness” (Gessen 2018). Accuracy is also praised by Margaret Frainier who finds that “this attention to detail and fairly accurate representation of history has none of the stiffness of other cinematic representations of the Soviet Union and the people inhabiting it” (Frainier 2017). In the same spirit, Stephen M. Norris launches a comparison between the academic historical books on Stalin’s last years and Iannucci’s film, noting that “The Death of Stalin’s success as an interpretation of Stalinism rests not just with the combination of comedy and seriousness, absurdity and violence, but in how it allows us to ‘see’ the workings of Stalinist politics” (Norris 2018, 844). Despite the creators’ expressed commitment to the historical truth and the positive comments about the film’s adherence to the Stalinist reality, other critics chose to play Everett’s Game4 in an effort to discredit the historical value of the film. In his review for The Calvert Journal, Samuel Goff laughs at those who praised the film as a “black comic masterpiece” and begins dismantling it by listing some flagrant historical inaccuracies, such as Molotov and Zhukov’s status at the time of Stalin’s death, the time of Beria’s eventual downfall, which took several months and not a few days, and of course the casualties during the funeral, which were the result of stampedes and not shoot-​outs (Goff 2017). The main predicament, however, according to Goff is that Iannucci fails to portray the Stalinist system because “in losing himself in these reveries of dictatorship, he forgets to say anything about the actual mechanisms of power” (2017). Similarly, in a review in The Guardian entitled “Carry On Up the Kremlin: How The Death of Stalin Plays Russian Roulette with the Truth,” Richard Overy characterizes the film as “poor history,” while admitting, however, that “the underlying truth is, of course, there” (Overy 2017). Ultimately, Overy’s quibble seems to be more about issues of style rather than historical truth when he claims that Stalin’s victims “deserve a film that treats their history with greater discretion and historical understanding” (2017). Yet how much of the interpretation of a historical film rests on stylistic preferences and personal sensibilities and how much on actual hard historical data? Presumably, it is a little bit of both, as this chapter will gradually reveal. For now, it is important to note how most reviews traditionally prioritize the question of accuracy, comparing the film to the historical knowledge that is available mainly from written sources. It is impressive that even on this rather objective count, there are such blatant discrepancies in the commentaries about The Death of Stalin, as we noticed previously. Second comes the issue of invention, a part and parcel of the historical fiction film, which is not always apprehended by the reviewers. As Rosenstone explains, the history film not only stages the past but inherently relies on compressions or condensations of characters and events, displacements and alterations, and, naturally, dialogues, gestures, and movements that bring real personalities into life on the screen (Rosenstone 2006, 39). Thus, Beria’s execution may be transferred closer to the day of the funeral and Molotov may be added to Stalin’s last dinner party 148

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with his comrades, but these liberties are expected to take place in every film that is forced to condense years or months or days of the past in a plot that can unravel within a couple of hours of projection time. The creative process entailed in the fictionalization of the past is often taken into account when the historical value of a film is weighed in its public reception but the extent to which a filmmaker needs to shape an amorphous mass of dates, occurrences, and individuals into a coherent filmic narrative is largely disregarded.5 Finally, what goes entirely unheeded, even by trained film scholars, is how the specifics of the narrational process confine the representational range of the historical film to very limited possibilities. For instance, it is a common complaint that a Hollywood film cannot portray complex historical processes and it privileges, instead, individual actions over large-​scale events. Yet if one is familiar with the narrational principles of the classical mode of narration, it does not come as a surprise that the character-​centred causality of the classical system can only represent the past from the perspective of individual human agency and not from any other impersonal or systemic forces (Thanouli 2018). What is intriguing in the case of The Death of Stalin is that two critics mentioned earlier, Norris and Goff, stumbled upon the problem of agency as they praised or condemned respectively the film’s representation of power. On the one hand, Norris focuses on the concept of the “team” as a mechanism of power in the Stalinist regime and observes the following: “The Death of Stalin in its own way captures the dynamics of a team, with references to historical contexts that help us understand how it plays” (Norris 2018, 845). On the other hand, Goff argues that Iannucci merely tells us a “story about some awful men being awful to each other. Which is fine, but just maybe, if you want to show your concern for the crimes of Stalinism, you might make some effort to understand what it actually was” (Goff 2017). Apart from a stark difference of opinion, both Norris and Goff touch upon an intrinsic element of the film’s narration, namely the uneasiness with which the characters interact within a rigid political and ideological regime that leaves very little room for human initiative and imagination. Technically, as I will try to demonstrate in my film analysis, this tension results from the strained collaboration between the classical narration and the emplotment of Satire, two separate modes that formally operate within the film in a complex configuration. In a way, both Norris and Goff are correct when they feel compelled to address the balance (or the lack thereof) between the characters and Stalinism as a power machine. At the same time, however, their entirely divergent assessment of the film’s treatment of this balance derives much less from the actual film than from their personal ideological perspectives. Overall, in the next pages I would like to reiterate the main argument put forth in History and Film, namely that any interpretation of a historical representation in the cinema needs to be premised on an excellent understanding of the formal vehicle that carries the historical meaning. The meticulous study of the narrational principles of the historical film is always the first step toward understanding the kind of history that flares up on the screen and the possible interpretations that we may build from it, as we move to higher levels of abstraction pertaining to the philosophical and ideological implications of the historical process.

Plot: characters and agency If we were to classify The Death of Stalin according to its narrational principles, it would fall under the mode of classical narration, as Bordwell initially formulated it based on the American films produced by Hollywood studios in the period from 1917 till 1960 (Bordwell 1985). The classical formula has persisted long after the golden studio era and still informs a large part of the filmic output not only in the United States but also across the world.6 Iannucci’s film adheres to a significant number of options that we find in the classical paradigm, especially when it comes to the 149

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construction of space and time.7 Apart from occasional stylistic flourishes, such as the slow-​motion and the use of intertitles for the introduction of the main historic figures, the plot and the style collaborate in order to convey as unobtrusively as possible the story of the film. The narrative logic, on the other hand, requires more scrutiny. According to Bordwell’s narrative theory, the system of narrative logic relies on motivations that are distinguished into four categories: (a) the “compositional,” which comprises the main ingredients of the plot such as characters and actions, (b) the “realistic” that justifies the filmic material according to conventions of verisimilitude, (c) the “intertextual/​generic” that allows the film to include elements that belong to certain genres or allude to other works of art, and, finally, (d) the “artistic,” which is not often encountered in the classical narration as it antagonizes all previous three by revealing the mechanics of their construction (Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson 1985, 18–​19). My focus here will fall on the compositional motivation of the plot in an effort to elucidate how the protagonists participate in the historical events around Stalin’s death and to explore how the classical motivations undergo several modifications due to the influence of satire. The opening of the film introduces three events that seem to take place simultaneously and are presented through the classical technique of crosscutting: (a) the concert, (b) the night raids of NKVD into people’s homes, and (c) Stalin’s dinner with his ministers. Stalin’s unequivocal power over all three events is presented in a subtle but definitive manner: he orders the recording of the concert that throws everyone in disarray, he oversees Beria’s death list adding Molotov’s name while he hosts the dinner controlling his guests’ behaviour down to the last comment. The cause-​and-​effect logic of this segment of the plot is tightly knit as every scene and every piece of dialogue seeks to reinforce the fact that Stalin’s authority is terrifying and absolute. For the first 20 minutes that lead up to his stroke, Stalin’s almighty power becomes palpable not through the ferocity of his commands but through everyone else’s panicky submission. As Manohla Dargis in The New York Times aptly observed, In his book “The Last Days of Stalin,” Joshua Rubenstein captures the dictator’s power over the Soviet Union in a quote: “Stalin was inside everyone, like the hammer alongside the sickle in every mind.” In Mr. Iannucci’s movie, you see the hammer and the sickle in each pale, scheming face, in every prison cell and bootlicker’s smile. (Dargis 2018) However, Stalin is not built as the key protagonist in the plot in the classical sense. Bordwell defined the classical hero as a psychologically defined individual who struggles to solve a clear-​cut problem or attain certain goals (Bordwell 1985, 157). Iannucci’s Stalin is neither a psychologically defined individual nor does he stay around enough to pursue any goals. His death in the 20th minute signals the switch of the action to the pursuit of power on the part of his comrades. This new goal is shared primarily by Beria, Khrushchev, and Malenkov, while Kaganovich, Mikoyan, Bulganin, Molotov, and Zhukov become pawns in a relentless succession race. From Stalin’s collapse onwards, the plot maintains a tight causal logic that relies on the use of crosscutting but the sheer number of the antagonists and their collaborators results in an episodic structure that features a string of events including the following: the effort to find doctors to save Stalin’s life, Beria and the reforms at NKVD, Malenkov and his performance as Deputy, the meetings of the new Committee, the preparation of the funeral, the massacres, the funeral, the coup led by Zhukov, Beria’s arrest and execution, and, finally, the new status quo with Khrushchev at the helm of the Soviet Union listening to a concert, while his future successor, Brezhnev, appears only a few rows behind him. With the closing moments in the concert hall, the narration makes a full circle after a 150

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very dense series of episodes that loosely revolves around the mission of Stalin’s succession, while the agency of the protagonists remains rather dispersed within a rigid network of power structures that leaves no room for real change in the future. This type of plot construction, which challenges the standards of classical Hollywood causality, appears to be more in line with the emplotment of Satire defined by White as follows: The archetypal theme of Satire is the precise opposite of this Romantic drama of redemption; it is, in fact, a drama of diremption, a drama dominated by the apprehension that man is ultimately a captive of the world rather than its master, and by the recognition that, in the final analysis, human consciousness and will are always inadequate to the task of overcoming definitively the dark force of death, which is man’s unremitting enemy. (White [1973] 2014, 8) As a historical representation of the events surrounding Stalin’s death, Iannucci’s film chooses to portray the political situation in the Soviet Union as a hopeless condition inhabited by individuals, like Beria and Khrushchev, whose petty plotting earns them temporary victories, while they ultimately remain slaves to their destiny. The Death of Stalin tells us a story of defeat of human action or rather of sparagmos, the tearing to pieces of the classical heroes. As Frye notes, “Sparagmos, or the sense that heroism and effective action are absent, disorganized or foredoomed to defeat, and that confusion and anarchy reign over the world, is the archetypal theme of irony and satire” (Frye [1957] 1990, 192). None of the historical figures featured in the story is allowed a taste of the hopes, possibilities, and truths of human existence bestowed upon the protagonists of Romance, Comedy, or even Tragedy. There is nothing of grandeur in Stalin’s demise or Beria’s execution, not even in Khrushchev’s ascendancy to the post of the General Secretary. Politics in the Soviet Union is merely a cynical cycle of succession of equally inept and corrupt individuals. Looking further into the formal elements of the satirical works, as they have been analyzed by literary theorists, we realize that it is not uncustomary for them to violate the classical rules. As Leonard Feinberg notes, “plot is rarely the most important component of a satire,” adding that “the satirist’s vision of the world is communicated by a number of incidents and characterizations and settings and dialogues, rather than continuously developed by a single dramatic plot line” (Feinberg 1967, 226–​227). This is most evident in The Death of Stalin, which switches from place to place and from character to character at a dizzying pace, interweaving the fictional dialogues with numerous real events, such as Stalin’s time at his dacha in the Moscow suburb of Kuntsevo accompanied by his comrades, the witch hunt against Kremlin physicians, many of whom were Jewish, known as the “Doctors’ plot,” the belated response to Stalin’s stroke, the confusion among the aspiring successors, to name only a few (Mansky 2017; Norris 2018). What also stands out is Iannucci’s portrayal of the main historical figures in Stalin’s milieu: Beria, Khrushchev, Malenkov, Molotov, Zhukov. As a historical satire, the film finds itself again in a predicament, namely that it seeks to render real personalities through the mode of Satire. Yet Satire handles its characters not as complex three-​dimensional entities but rather as types. According to Feinberg, “the Satirist tends to use types because he is usually concerned with Man rather than men, institutions rather than personalities, repeated behavior patterns rather than uncommon acts” (Feinberg 1967, 232). For the theme of Stalinism, or more generally that of communism, the satiric approach to character proves to be particularly fitting, as the core ideology of this political system relies on classes and structures instead of individuals. In other words, the film seems to suggest that there is very little difference if Beria or Khrushchev becomes the next 151

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Figure 10.2 Lavrentiy Beria and Georgy Malenkov. Lifestyle pictures /​IFC Films /​Alamy Stock Photo

General Secretary; the same system of governance based on fear and violence will remain in place. In addition to the limited agency conferred upon these political players, there is also an evident lack of character growth in the course of the action. From our first encounter with the comrades at the dinner table, each one of them is marked by a discernible behavioural pattern that remains the same until the very end: Beria’s ruthless cynicism, Khrushchev’s manipulative opportunism, Malenkov’s naiveté, Molotov’s unwavering faith in Stalin. As Arthur Pollard aptly describes the satirical character, “he does not become; he is. He does not develop… . His action will be basically repetitive…” (Pollard 1970, 55). Scene after scene, joke after joke, Iannucci’s protagonists, like most of their satiric counterparts, “evince little or no increased understanding of their identity, their kin, or their proper relations with others” (Palmeri 1990, 4). Finally, the film capitalizes on satire’s emphasis on the physical dimension of the characters and their actions. As Palmeri explains, “narrative satire reduces all that might be heroic and noble to a common level of physical experience, which it openly acknowledges, if it does not always joyously celebrate” (1990, 10). After the stroke, Stalin is discovered in a puddle of his urine and his body becomes the centre of action for several minutes, as the members of the committee struggle to decide how to carry him to his bedroom, fighting their disgust for the smell and the touch of their great leader. The functions of the body and the materiality of human existence are also highlighted on numerous occasions; for instance, we see the protagonists urinate, their clothing becomes the object of discussion, Stalin’s scalp is cut open before our eyes, or Beria’s dead body is reduced to ashes, to mention only a few notable examples. 152

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Figure 10.3 Lavrentiy Beria, Georgy Malenkov and Nikita Khrushchev over Stalin’s body. Lifestyle pictures /​IFC Films /​Alamy Stock Photo

The analysis of the film from the two perspectives, the mode of narration and the mode of Satire, indicates that The Death of Stalin is one of those cases that probes the limits of the classical narration without, however, breaking entirely away from them. The vehicle of classical narration is notable for its resilient nature and its ability to absorb the pressure from incongruent formal elements that regularly test its boundaries.8 The secret for managing the gaps, the breakdowns, and the deviations lies in the collaboration of the motivations. In Bordwell’s words: “the principle of motivation gives the classical paradigm a great range of non-​disruptive differentiation” (Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson 1985, 72). In The Death of Stalin, the deviations from the classical compositional motivation in terms of plot and character construction could be justified through the generic motivation, which draws on the conventions of comedy and satire. In other words, the classical mode is able to domesticate the archetypical mythos of Satire by transforming its key traits into generic conventions. The problem, however, arises in relation to the realistic motivation. Iannucci’s film is not a satire like any other. It is not a Monty Python film. It is a historical fiction that tackles a very serious historical issue, namely the communist political system and the regime of fear and violence that was in place at the time of Stalin’s death. Thus, realism is a key issue in this historical representation. Yet how can realism function in the film amidst other motivations that seem to work against each other? Ultimately, how realistic can this depiction of Stalinism appear to be? The discussion of the reviews, as I presented it earlier, illustrates that the responses, in fact, covered the entire spectrum; from those who found it extremely accurate to those who thought it was a complete travesty. In the next section, I would like to explore why such a polarized reception is possible or even predictable. 153

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Realism and historical truth Narrative becomes a problem only when we wish to give to real events the form of story. It is because real events do not offer themselves as stories that their narrativization is so difficult. (White 1980, 8) The problem of narrativization is key for the theorists of academic historiography and it becomes even grander for the filmic representations that are bound to openly mix facts and fiction.9 However, conceptually, both forms of history are confronted with the same question, again posed by White as follows: “Can it be said that sets of real events are intrinsically tragic, comic, or epic, such that the representation of those events as a tragic, comic, or epic story can be assessed as to its factual accuracy?” (White 1992, 38–​39; emphasis in the original). His answer, according to the theoretical edifice presented in Metahistory, is no.10 Neither of the four archetypal mythoi is either more realistic or more intrinsically connected to the real events. Thus, Iannucci’s approach to Stalinism through the emplotment of Satire does not place him any further or closer to the historical past than if he had opted for a Romantic or a Tragic take on those events. All plot structures stand an even chance of offering us an approximation of the past, despite the common impression that the deployment of satire detracts from the “realness” of the historical situation depicted on the screen. Besides, as commentators have underlined, the film stays close to the written sources (Fitzpatrick 2015; Rubenstein 2016), which include several scholarly works as well as memoirs by some of the protagonists of that era, such as Khrushchev and Svetlana Alliluyeva, Stalin’s daughter. Moreover, it was in the filmmaker’s expressed intentions to motivate the narration as realistically as possible, especially with respect to the mise-​en-​scène. As Iannucci explains, you’ve got to make them resemble the actual historical figures and the events have to start resembling what actually happened. We dug out the archival footage of Stalin’s funeral and tried to match that. We went to Moscow and looked at Stalin’s dacha. (quoted in Norris 2018, 842) In fact, when it comes to the level of absurdity of the actual events, The Death of Stalin often tries to tone it down so that the story seems plausible. Take for instance, the opening scene and the recording of the concert. Radio Moscow broadcasts a live concert of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 23, which is nearly finished when the director receives a call from Stalin who expresses his wish to receive a recording of the performance pronto. The radio station associates frantically try to force a new performance, struggling to gather the musicians, the audience, and, of course, a new conductor, as the current one faints in terror and suffers an accident. In the film, we watch a mad race to find a replacement but in reality, there were three attempts at securing one. Having consulted the historical evidence, Iannucci explains: “In reality the conductor they brought in was drunk. Number two? Was drunk. So they had to get a third conductor in. But I kept that out because I thought no one would believe it” (quoted in White 2017). Once again, both the creator and the audience come up against the paradox of Stalinist reality narrated through the mode of Satire: how do we handle the question of realism when the level of exaggeration of the actual events, be it in terms of violence or absurdity, matches the level of exaggeration which is considered as an inherent characteristic of Satire? Or, in other words, how much of what we see and hear in The Death of Stalin can be interpreted as motivated realistically and how much of it generically? 154

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Tzvetan Todorov’s discussion of verisimilitude may be illuminating at this point. He writes, …a work is said to have verisimilitude in relation to two chief kinds of norms. The first is what we call rules of the genre: for a work to be said to have verisimilitude, it must conform to these rules… . But there exists another verisimilitude, which has been taken even more frequently for a relation with reality. Aristotle, however, has already perceived that the verisimilar is not a relation between discourse and its referent (the relation of truth), but between discourse and what readers believe is true. The relation is here established between the work and a scattered discourse that in part belongs to each of the individuals of a society but of which none may claim ownership; in other words, to public opinion. (Todorov 1981, 18–​19; emphasis in the original) According to this line of reasoning, there are largely two readings of The Death of Stalin. On the one hand, the jokes, the gestures, the chaotic mess, the absurdity at the level of speech or action can be viewed as part of the repertoire of satire as a filmic genre that distorts reality and thrives on exaggeration (Nilsson 2013). In this case, the factual value of the film is significantly challenged. If, on the other hand, we interpret the characters and their actions as verisimilar because they appear to be close to what we believe to be true about Stalin and his regime of terror, then Iannucci’s film becomes a fairly accurate historical portrait. What Todorov’s passage helps us realize is that neither of the two kinds of verisimilitude is ontologically closer to the historical reality, even though the latter often claims to be. And what he describes as public opinion is none other than what in other discourses is called ideology. Thus, ultimately the interpretation of this historical representation, as with any other, is a matter of one’s ideological inclination, and in order to assess the various options we need to leave the realm of the filmic narration and take into consideration the extratextual parameters that surround the reading of the film. Although this mission far exceeds the scope of this chapter, I would like to briefly indicate the two opposing perspectives on the matter of Stalinism and its portrayal in the film. On the one hand, there is the openly anti-​communist position, which identifies in The Death of Stalin the raw image of Stalinist politics: violence, ruthlessness, and a cruel sense of humour. In fact, even the jokes that populate the film could be viewed as historically accurate, as they remind us of the famous Russian political joke, the anekdot, which is distinguished for its brutal cruelty (Adams 2005; Davies 2010). As Christie Davies observes, “the cruel humour and ridicule of socialism was but one consequence of a world in which cruelty was common-​place, the cruel and arbitrary infliction of death, torture, and exile with slavery” (Davies 2014, 6). In particular, Stalin’s wicked sense of humour would often match his ruthless policies and so would the humour of the entire Socialist elite (3). In this light, the sarcastic exchanges between the members of the Politburo throughout the film do not seem far off from what happened in reality. Even Stalin’s placing tomatoes in the wrong places to mess with his high-​brow ministers is a documented habit of his (Lauchlan 2010). To the eyes of a Westerner, this level of absurdity cannot but be fictional; yet, as Olga Reizen notes, “what a foreigner sees as ‘black’ and absurd, may for a Soviet citizen happen to be his or her everyday life” (Reizen 1993, 94). On the other hand, the reception of the film by the current Russian authorities and its subsequent ban two days before its official release in the country indicated that the government’s take on the Stalinist past and its depiction in the film were at considerable odds. The Russian Culture Ministry withdrew the distribution license two days before the scheduled Russian premiere, after the fierce criticism from a number of politicians and intellectuals, including the famous filmmaker Nikita Mikhalkov, who denounced the “extremism” of the film and argued, among other things, that “the 155

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movie was made to distort our country’s past so that the thought of the 1950s Soviet Union makes people feel only terror and disgust” (Kaganovsky 2019; Norris 2018). In this case, the historical representation of Stalin’s era is not only deemed inaccurate but also insulting; in other words, the satirical treatment of the Soviet past is inappropriate and disrespectful. And this vindicates Frye’s assertion about the role of Satire once more, namely that “to attack anything, writer and audience must agree on its undesirability”11 (Frye [1957] 1990, 224). Stalin’s historical figure remains controversial for the Russians who, to this date, struggle to fit his victory in the Second World War and his crimes within the same national narrative. All in all, the reactions to The Death of Stalin and its reading as either a mirror or a caricature of the Soviet past are entirely anticipated. The interpretation of a historical work, whether in written or cinematic form, may stem from the narration in the first instance, but eventually the historical portrait will be deemed accurate or distortive, welcome or unwanted, depending on one’s ideological perspective and the political and cultural context of its reception.

Conclusion Understanding the workings of filmic narration is of primary importance when interpreting the historical representation in a fiction film or documentary.12 This understanding is always determined by the terms and categories we deploy to describe the narrative process. I have found Bordwell’s concept of the mode of narration and the ensuing historical modes that he identified as exceptionally useful for mapping the poetics of the historical film. However, there is always more work to be done, there are always more concepts that we may consider in our effort to investigate how the textual features of a film condition the image of history that we are then invited to interpret according to our own ideological preferences. Iannucci’s The Death of Stalin is an invaluable example of a satirical historical film that allows us to illuminate how the mode of narration and the Satiric mode of emplotment created a story and a set of characters with notable deviations from the classical norms, leaving room for some brazenly opposing readings. What is also important to stress is that the use of Satire in a historical representation should not immediately debase the factual value of the film nor should it render it “counter-​historical.” “Counter-​history,” according to Marcia Landy, is “an escape from formal history to a world of affect, invention, memory, art, reflection, and action,” while the use of comedy and satire in the cinema are some of the most effective mechanisms to challenge academic history (Landy 2011; 2015). Yet as the analysis of The Death of Stalin has demonstrated, the role of Satire does not counter the sources of written history; instead, it confirms and amplifies them with cinema’s impressive power of visuality. Granted, there are conflicting interpretations but so are there in the case of historical books. Once we set aside the notion that written history tells us about the things of the past “exactly as they were”13 and only in a serious tone—​two suppositions that White’s work has allowed us to rethink—​then we will be able to embrace the fact that historical representation and Satire, whether in written or filmic form, are not necessarily at odds with each other. Sometimes, all it takes is Satire’s playful silliness to match up the insanity of the real world.

Notes 1 The term “historying” signifies the act of narrating the historical past according to certain epistemological principles. It was popularized by the British historian Alun Munslow in his effort to break the unity of the term “history” and indicate the epistemological assumptions of every historical work. See Munslow (2010).

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Satire and realism in the historical film 2 According to White, even though the historian may appear to simply describe and analyze historical phenomena, what, in fact, happens is this: the historical events are emplotted in a certain way (aesthetic operation) putting forward a certain argument (cognitive operation) to generate prescriptive statements about how the world should go about (ideological/​moral judgement) (White [1973] 2014, 26). 3 In his introductory chapter in Narration in the Fiction Film, Bordwell addresses the affinities of his theory with structuralism, noting their shared concerns but also their differences. See Bordwell (1985). 4 Phil Rosen labelled as “Everett’s Game” Hollywood’s effort to get every tiny detail right in the portrayal of the past, a process that became key to the industry ever since the 1910s and worked as proof of its authenticity and prestige. The same game in reverse is played by spectators and critics alike when they try to pinpoint every detail that a historical film gets wrong in order to disprove its historical accuracy (Thanouli 2018). 5 There are always moral concerns regarding the amount of invention that should be allowed in a historical fiction film. For instance, Natalie Zemon Davis argues that filmmakers should commit to telling the truth and that whatever invention may be necessary “should be in the spirit of the evidence and plausible, not misleading” (Davis 2000, 130). On the other hand, there can never be an objective way to measure “the spirit of the evidence” nor any absolute criterion with which we could delimit the workings of imagination. After all, as Winfried Fluck notes, the freedom fictional texts have in redefining reality is the main rationale for their existence, and the reinterpretation, distortion, or even repression of historical facts is part of that freedom, at least within the limits given by the moral and legal consensus of a society. (Fluck 2003, 216) The viewing of a historical fiction film is conducted according to expectations that are often conflicting as “history” and “fiction” generate different associations. On this conundrum, I have elsewhere suggested the following: Every image, every dialogue, every character, every action is going to be measured against our expectations to see “things as they really were” and they are always going to be found wanting. Even when the filmmakers have put their most painstaking efforts to “get things right,” the result will always be viewed with suspicion, knowing that it is merely a reconstruction, which cannot possibly amount to the things of the past. This added self-​knowingness of the cinematic medium is what shapes the expectations of all creators and spectators alike, pushing them to anticipate from historical films not their “success” but their “successful performance of failure.” (Thanouli 2018, 245–​246) 6 For the persistence of the classical norms even after the demise of the studio system in the 1960s, see Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson (1985). 7 When we perform a narrative analysis following Bordwell’s theory of narration, we analyze the film according to its three main systems, namely the narrative logic (or causality), the time, and the space. 8 Bordwell examines a series of deviations and challenges to the classical norms, such as melodrama, film noir, avant-​garde music, Soviet montage, among others. See Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson (1985, 72–​85). 9 In History and Film, I argued that historical films are “magnified miniatures” of written histories in an effort to conceptualize the complex configuration of similarities and differences between the two forms of history. See Thanouli (2018). 10 In his later work, White was confronted with the problem of representation of what he called the “Modernist events.” As he noted, the twentieth century is marked by the occurrence of certain ‘holocaustal’ events that bear little similarity to what earlier historians conventionally took as their objects of study and do not, therefore, lend themselves to understanding by the commonsensical techniques utilized in conventional historical inquiry nor even to representation by the techniques of writing typically favored by historians from Herodotus to Arthur Schlesinger. (White 1996, 21) For these events, he argued the only chance for an adequate representation comes not from the classical realist conventions but from the kinds of anti-​narrative non-​stories produced by literary Modernism.

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Eleftheria Thanouli 11 The same argument is developed by Ruben Quintero when he writes, How could we perceive something as ridiculous, monstrous, wicked, or absurd without having a comparative sense of what would not be the case? How could we believe that something is wrong with the world without some idea of what the world should be and of how it could be righted? (Quintero 2007, 3) 12 The taxonomy of the historical documentary is slightly different as I follow Bill Nichols’ categories of non-​fiction filmmaking, but the rationale is the same. See Thanouli (2018). 13 Ranke’s dream of history showing the things of the past “wie es eigentlich gewesen.” This is the most often quoted phrase of Leopold von Ranke, who is one of the most prominent historians of the nineteenth century. His phrase is often mentioned, rightly or not, as an instance of naïve realism. See Rosen (2001, 109–​110).

Reference list Adams, Bruce. 2005. Tiny Revolutions in Russia: Twentieth Century Soviet and Russian History in Anecdotes and Jokes. London: Routledge. Bordwell, David. 1985. Narration in the Fiction Film. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Bordwell, David, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson. 1985. The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960. New York: Columbia University Press. Burgoyne, Robert. 2008. The Hollywood Historical Film. Malden: Wiley-​Blackwell. Dargis, Manohla. 2018. “Review: The Slapstick Horror of ‘The Death of Stalin’.” The New York Times, March 8. www.nyti​mes.com/​2018/​03/​08/​mov​ies/​the-​death-​of-​sta​lin-​arma​ndo-​iannu​cci-​steve-​busc​emi.html. Davies, Christie. 2010. “Jokes as the Truth about Soviet Socialism.” Folklore: Electronic Journal of Folklore 46: 9–​32. https://​doi.org/​10.7592/​FEJF2​010.46.dav​ies. Davies, Christie. 2014. “Political Ridicule and Humour under Socialism.” European Journal of Humour Research 2, no. 3: 1–​27. https://​doi.org/​10.7592/​EJHR2​014.2.3.dav​ies. Davis, Natalie Zemon. 2000. Slaves on Screen. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Feinberg, Leonard. 1967. Introduction to Satire. Ames: Iowa State University Press. Fitzpatrick, Sheila. 2015. On Stalin’s Team: The Years of Living Dangerously in Soviet Politics. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Fluck, Winfried. 2003. “Film and Memory.” In Sites of Memory in American Literatures and Cultures, edited by Udo J. Hebel, 213–​229. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter. Frainier, Margaret. 2017. “Why Yorkshire, Cockney & New York Accents Aren’t Out of Place in Iannucci’s ‘The Death of Stalin’.” Creative Multilingualism, November 8. http://​cre​ativ​eml.ox.ac.uk/​langua​ges-​cre​ ativ​ity/​explor​ing-​mult​ilin​gual​ism/​yorksh​ire-​cock​ney-​new-​york-​acce​nts-​death-​sta​lin. Frye, Northrop. [1957] 1990. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Reprint, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Gessen, Masha. 2018. “ ‘The Death of Stalin’ Captures the Terrifying Absurdity of a Tyrant.” New Yorker, March 6. www.newyor​k er.com/​n ews/​o ur-​c ol​u mni​s ts/​t he-​d eath-​o f-​s ta​l in-​c aptu​r es-​t he-​t er​r ify​i ng-​ absurd​ity-​of-​a-​tyr​ant. Goff, Samuel. 2017. “The Death of Stalin: A Black Comic Masterpiece? Don’t Make Me Laugh.” The Calvert Journal, October 23. www.cal​vert​jour​nal.com/​artic​les/​show/​9122/​the-​death-​of-​sta​lin-​rev​iew-​iannu​cci-​ busc​emi-​russ​ell-​beale. Iannucci, Armando. 2018. “Armando Iannucci on ‘Death of Stalin,’ Jeffrey Tambor, and Satire in the Age of Trump.” Interview by Andy Crump. Hollywood Reporter, March 10. www.hollyw​oodr​epor​ter.com/​heat-​ vis​ion/​arma​ndo-​iannu​cci-​death-​sta​lin-​jeff​rey-​tam​bor-​sat​ire-​age-​trump-​1093​479. Kaganovsky, Lilya. 2019. “Review of The Death of Stalin, La mort de Staline by Fabien Nury and Thierry Robin by Armando Iannucci, David Schneider, Ian Martin, Peter Fellows.” Slavic Review 78, no. 1 (Spring): 210–​213. www.jstor.org/​sta​ble/​26644​443. Landy, Marcia. 2011. “Comedy and Counter-​History.” In Historical Comedy on Screen: Subverting History with Humour, edited by Hannu Salmi, 175–​198. Bristol: Intellect. Landy, Marcia. 2015. Cinema and Counter-​history. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Lauchlan, Iain. 2010. “Laughter in the Dark: Humour under Stalin.” In Le rire européen /​European Laughter, edited by Anne Chamayou and Alastair B. Duncan, 257–​274. Perpignan: Presses universitaires de Perpignan.

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Satire and realism in the historical film Mansky, Jackie. 2017. “The True Story of the Death of Stalin.” Smithsonian, October 10. www.smi​thso​nian​ mag.com/​hist​ory/​true-​story-​death-​sta​lin-​180965​119/​. Munslow, Alun. 2010. The Future of History. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Nilsson, Johan. 2013. American Film Satire in the 1990s: Hollywood Subversion. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Norris, Stephen M. 2018. “Killing Stalin: An Interpretation in Three Acts.” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 19, no. 4 (Fall): 827–​847. https://​doi.org/​10.1353/​kri.2018.0047. Nury, Fabien. 2017. “The Death of Stalin Graphic Novel Inspires Film, Makes Russia Nervous.” Interview by Alex Dueben. CBR, October 2. www.cbr.com/​death-​of-​sta​lin-​fab​ien-​nury-​interv​iew/​. Overy, Richard. 2017. “Carry On up the Kremlin: How The Death of Stalin Plays Russian Roulette with the Truth.” The Guardian, October 18. www.theg​uard​ian.com/​film/​2017/​oct/​18/​death-​of-​sta​lin-​russ​ian-​roule​ tte-​with-​truth-​arma​ndo-​iannu​cci. Palmeri, Frank. 1990. Satire in Narrative: Petronius, Swift, Gibbon, Melville, and Pynchon. Austin: University of Texas Press. Pollard, Arthur. 1970. Satire. London: Methuen. Quintero, Ruben. 2007. “Introduction: Understanding Satire.” In A Companion to Satire: Ancient and Modern, edited by Ruben Quintero, 1–​11. Oxford: Blackwell. Reizen, Olga. 1993. “Black Humor in Soviet Cinema.” In Inside Soviet Film Satire: Laughter with a Lash, edited by Andrew Horton, 94–​97. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rosen, Philip. 2001. Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Rosenstone, Robert. 1995. Visions of the Past: The Challenge of Film to Our Idea of History. Boston: Harvard University Press. Rosenstone, Robert. 2006. History on Film/​Film on History. Harlow: Pearson Education. Rubenstein, Joshua. 2016. The Last Days of Stalin. New Haven: Yale University Press. Stubbs, Jonathan. 2013. Historical Film: A Critical Introduction. New York: Bloomsbury. Thanouli, Eleftheria. 2009. Post-​ classical Cinema: An International Poetics of Film Narration. New York: Columbia University Press. Thanouli, Eleftheria. 2018. History and Film: A Tale of Two Disciplines. New York: Bloomsbury. Todorov, Tzvetan. 1981. Introduction to Poetics. Translated by Richard Howard. Brighton: Harvester. White, Adam. 2017. “The Death of Stalin: What Really Happened on the Night That Forever Changed Soviet History?” Telegraph, October 19. www.telegr​aph.co.uk/​films/​0/​truth-​death-​sta​lin-​rea​lly-​happe​ned-​night-​ fore​ver-​chan​ged-​sov​iet/​. White, Hayden. 1980. “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality.” Critical Inquiry 7, no. 1 (Autumn): 5–​27. www.jstor.org/​sta​ble/​1343​174. White, Hayden. 1992. “Historical Emplotment and the Problem of Truth.” In Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution,” edited by Saul Friedlander, 37–​53. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. White, Hayden. 1996. “The Modernist Event.” In The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television, and the Modern Event, edited by Vivian Sobchack, 17–​38. New York: Routledge. White, Hayden. [1973] 2014. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-​ Century Europe. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press.

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PART III

Representation, race, and identity

11 COUNTER-​T EMPORALITIES AND DIALECTICAL IMAGES IN THE MASS CULTURAL REWRITING OF US RACIAL HISTORIES Alison Landsberg

Many film scholars and historians, myself included, have argued for the power of the cinematic medium to represent, perhaps even to write, history (Rosenstone 1988, 1995, 2017; Burgoyne 2010; Davis 2000; Hughes-​Warrington 2006; Landy 2000, 2015; Landsberg 2015). What I would like to focus on here is a very specific form of history writing emerging in contemporary American mass culture, a kind of unconventional, radical history writing aimed at challenging some of the well-​worn, comfortable, and thus far intractable narratives about racial progress in the United States. To challenge such narratives requires on the one hand a radical form of history writing that resists the progressive logic of historicism by deploying a different temporal schema, and on the other, formal and generic innovations/​interventions aimed at making the unthinkable thinkable.

Post-​postracial America Despite daily evidence to the contrary, one of the most powerful national narratives in the United States is that the racialized violence upon which the nation was founded, violence that was constitutive of chattel slavery and that was perpetuated in the racial terror of lynchings of the Jim Crow era, has been gradually overcome by the long Civil Rights Movement culminating in a postracial America, evidenced most forcefully by the election of Barack Obama, the first Black president of the United States. The idea of a postracial America, of a nation that had finally transcended racial division, was at best a convenient and comforting story most Americans were all too happy to embrace, and at worst a cover story, which enabled the undoing of affirmative action, and the unravelling of voting rights protections. Of course, the hollowness of the “postracial,” that it was, in the words of Catherine Squires, nothing more than a “mystique” (2014), was made clear with the election of Donald J. Trump in 2016, and the subsequent rise of overt racism in popular discourse in the public sphere. And yet, the narrative of America as a nation built on the premise of freedom and equality for all, a nation in which the worst forms of racialized violence have been relegated to a shameful past, endures as a key component of our national narrative, what Caroline Guthrie has called the “American historical imaginary” (2022).

DOI: 10.4324/9781003263234-15

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What I want to suggest here is that at the current conjuncture, mass culture—​film and television, in particular—​has become a significant and productive site for challenges to that narrative. Scholars of history on film, many of whom appear in this volume, have long argued for the power of the medium to shape and inform the way people think about the past. What I will point to here is the emergence of what I see as a novel form of history writing on film and television: a form of history writing that on the one hand is not premised on the conventions or temporality of historicism, and on the other is enabled by the formal, generic, narrative, and, most significantly, temporal possibilities of these audiovisual media. These formal innovations are indeed of apiece with a more ambitious style of television writing and narration that has been referred to variously as the Golden Age of Television, or simply Peak TV. Much of this history writing has been undertaken by African American producers, writers, directors, and actors, and aims at challenging what has become a hegemonic narrative of racial progress in the United States, one that has remained largely intractable in the popular imagination. This work is occurring alongside, and in dialogue with, scholarly work of academics like Saidiya Hartman and Christina Sharpe, the groundbreaking work of the 1619 Project, undertaken by Nicole Hannah-​Jones and others (first as the special edition of the NYT Magazine [Hannah-​Jones et al. 2019] and then as a book [Hannah-​Jones et al. 2021]) and amid the creation of new museums and memorials, such as the Legacy Museum and the Memorial for Peace and Justice, created by the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama, all of which share the goal of centring the role of racialized violence in the US national narrative.

Challenging the “culture industry” thesis Mass culture is usually theorized in the terms set out by Frankfurt School theorists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in the 1940s—​as a site of mass deception (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002). Under industrial capitalism, cultural products, too, are industrially produced, and are themselves commodities. Such industrially produced culture—​radio, film, and television—​Adorno and Horkheimer argue, homogenizes audiences, all the while indoctrinating them with capitalist ideology in order to reproduce both the means and the relations of production. In this account, a commodified mass culture always and tirelessly reproduces its own logics: its products (film, television, radio, popular music) inevitably bear and disseminate dominant ideologies and preserve the status quo. But this totalizing account of mass culture as a site of capitalist indoctrination was not the only position advanced by theorists of the Frankfurt School. Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer saw mass culture and its effects in more nuanced terms. As Marxists, they understood that mass culture was thoroughly saturated with the logics of capitalism, but instead of assuming, like Horkheimer and Adorno, that its products only ever monolithically reproduce those logics, sought to theorize instead the ways in which the products of mass culture might render those logics and structures of oppression visible. For Siegfried Kracauer, mass culture, all cultural surfaces really, provide access to the material “truths” of society: “The position that an epoch occupies in the historical process can be determined more strikingly from an analysis of its inconspicuous surface-​level expressions than from that epoch’s judgments about itself” (Kracauer 1995, 75). He saw in these new visual technologies of modernity their potential to alter visibility, to render that which was previously obscured or unseen, discernable, as did his friend and interlocutor, Walter Benjamin. Photography, about which Benjamin wrote extensively, was a technology of the visible with vast implications for the very category of art on the one hand, and for politics on the other. Photography and film, he believed, might retrain vision, enable the masses to see that which was 164

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hidden or obscured by reification: to see, in other words, the very structures of oppression that for Adorno and Horkheimer are only every consumed and internalized by unthinking, passive audiences. Toward this end, Benjamin theorized what he called “the optical unconscious” (2008, 37): the capacity of the photograph to make visible to viewers that which remained invisible to the naked eye. For him this was both literal and metaphorical. Photography and film, he believed, could reveal entirely new structures of the subject in a scientific sense—​like the microscope—​but it might also make visible aspects of the social world that we do not see because they have become reified, second nature. He saw, in other words, the revolutionary potential of photography and film to explode the present: Our bars and city streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our rail-​road stations and our factories seemed to close relentlessly around us. Then came film and exploded this prison-​world with the dynamite of the split second, so that now we can set off calmly on journeys of adventure among its far-​flung debris. With the close-​up, space expands; with slow motion, movement is extended. And just as enlargement not merely clarifies what we see indistinctly ‘in any case,’ but brings to light entirely new structures of matter, slow motion not only reveals familiar aspects of movements, but discloses quite unknown aspects within them… . Clearly, it is another nature which speaks to the camera as compared to the eye. (Benjamin 2008, 37) For Benjamin, in other words, instead of only ever indoctrinating audiences, mass culture retained a utopian potential precisely because it might make that which has been unseen, newly seeable—​ and on a mass scale. This investment in the visual, as I will explain shortly, manifests itself as well in Benjamin’s conceptualization of materialist history, and in its centrepiece, the dialectical image.

Materialist history and dialectical images To understand why the narrative of racial progress in the United States has been so intractable also requires an examination of the methodological commitments of a conventional form of history writing, one that Benjamin describes as historicism, and which in his words, “contents itself with establishing a causal nexus of various moments of history” (2003, 396). Historicism, in this sense, has methodological, temporal, and narrative requirements—​critical distance from the object of inquiry and change over time, among others—​which, when taken together, emphasize the difference between the past and the present. Historicism is premised on a temporal structure in which the present is distinguished from the past. Even those historians whose research is motivated by a desire to understand the present tend to rely on a methodology premised on rigorously separating the present from the past. Fundamental to the discipline’s methodology is a belief that to achieve something like objectivity requires critical distance, a temporal break between the past and the present (Novick 1988). Indeed, the idea of the past as distant and unfamiliar is central to David’s Lowenthal’s well-​established conceptualization of it as “a foreign country” (1999). This methodological move also has epistemological implications: it renders the present as telos. By relegating to the past dynamics that may be ongoing, history is less adept at making visible the continued presence of those “historical” dynamics that continue to animate and exert pressure on the present. And these methodological imperatives have political implications: Berber Bevernage, for instance, has pointed to the ways in which “Modern historical discourse,” is taken up “in the language of truth commissions primarily in order to support the national project of simultaneity 165

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by insisting on the modernist rupture between past and present” (2010, 121). In other words, he is arguing that as long as state-​sponsored racialized violence remains a topic of history, it can be considered over and done, safely in the past, and thereby unavailable for political projects in the present.1 I am suggesting that the powerful national narrative of racial progress in the United States is undergirded by the logics, conventions, and structure of historicism. Against historicism, Walter Benjamin theorized what he called a materialist history, which has an altogether different temporal structure from historicism. He theorized this materialist history against the rise of fascism in Germany, and as such it reflected what he understood as an urgent need for a political form of history. This was a counterhegemonic practice of history built on what he called dialectical images: constellations of the past and present that appear in a flash. In opposition to a form of history writing that rigorously separates the past from the present, Benjamin understood them to be dialectically engaged with one another. Of his version of materialist history, he writes, “Articulating the past historically does not mean recognizing it ‘the way it really was.’  It means appropriating a memory as it flashes up in a moment of danger” (2003, 391). There are three significant dimensions to this claim for the argument that I am making about contemporary history writing in mass culture: first, that the temporality of materialist history is neither linear nor monodirectional; second, that there is a visual dimension to this radical form of history writing; and third, that the project of articulating the past historically, and producing historical knowledge, does not require that we recognize it “the way it really was.” The centrepiece of materialist history, as he articulates it, is the dialectical image, a striking and unexpected constellation of the past and the present. This juxtaposition of past and present is meant to offer a radical reframing of the “now,” one that reveals the “real state of emergency” (Benjamin 2003, 392). The dialectical image, as he conceives of it, posits a dynamic relationship between the past and the present, rejecting the linear, mono-​directionality of historicism, along with its implicit narrative of progress. In articulating the dialectical image, Benjamin writes, It is not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather … what has been comes together in a clash with the now to form a constellation. In other words: image is dialectics at a standstill. For while the relation of the present to the past is purely temporal, the relation of the what-​has-​been to the now is dialectical: not only temporal in nature but figural bildich. (1999, 463) The dialectical image also constellates the past and the present as mirror images of one another, instead of as origin and telos. Furthermore, Benjamin is suggesting here that the temporality of the constellation is reversible: an image from the past erupts in the present, and in this moment, in this standstill, what was past sheds light on the now, and the now sheds light on what was. And it does so in the service of a potentially different future, as it represents, in Benjamin’s words, “a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past” that once recognized, might “blast a specific era out of the homogenous course of history” (2003, 396). The dialectical image thus reframes both the past and the present, each rendered visible in a way that might enable a change of course, a different future. It is in this sense that Benjamin’s materialist history is a politically motivated form of history, geared to waking us to the reality of the present that we have been unable to see. The second important aspect of Benjamin’s formulation is that he imagines the dialectical image in explicitly visual terms. The relation of the “what has been” to the now, he says, is “figural bildich.” One cannot help but understand this in relation to his interest in, and hopes for, the visual 166

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technologies of modernity—​photography and film—​to bring about social change. He understood and theorized their potential to retrain vision, to wake people up. It is therefore not surprising that his theory of history has a visual dimension, and that these visual technologies might be a privileged arena for the construction and apprehension of dialectical images. And third, in positing that the project of articulating the past historically does not require that we recognize “the way it really was,” Benjamin suggests that the dialectical image might be “genuinely historical” in his words, even if it’s not predicated on the logics or conventions of literary realism. In each of the texts I consider, there is some combination of realism and science fiction or fantasy in the construction of dialectical images, which form the basis of their materialist history. Indeed, we might consider the use of science fiction and fantasy elements in these representations as techniques to foster what Benjamin has described, in relation to Brecht’s dramatic theory, as “crude thinking,” stylistic techniques that are artificial, overt, rather than subtle (2002, 7). While Brecht relies on strategies that are obvious, that call attention to themselves in order to dispel illusions, the strategies deployed here are often fantastical, implausible—​the appearance of monsters, of travel through the multiverse—​and yet have the similar effect of calling attention to themselves, forcing the audience to think in a manner that is decidedly political and geared toward action. “Crude thoughts,” writes Benjamin, “have a special place in dialectical thinking because their sole function is to direct theory toward practice…a thought must be crude to find its way into action” (2002, 7). Here the overtly unreal works in the service of producing the “genuinely historical.” What I am proposing here is that we are witnessing radical and political history writing on film and television, and that these media might be a privileged site for this kind of history writing: their modes of narration and editing enable them to stage complex temporal relations, bringing unexpected and forgotten pasts into contact with the present, creating “dialectical images,” upon which a materialist history might be constructed. These dialectical images, constellations of past and present, are, in the cases I will consider, instances of the eruption of violent racial histories in the present that serve as interruptions of triumphalist racial histories, reframing both the past and the present so that we see them not as origin and telos, but as mirror images of one another, dialectics at a standstill—​in order to open up the possibility of a different future. By means of both the narrative possibilities of film and television, which often eschew linear chronologies, and the temporal possibilities enabled by editing, these media are adept at staging temporal confrontations, as many scholars of film have described (Bordwell 1985; Deleuze 1989; Turim 1989; Mroz 2012). Practices of editing, for example, allow temporal flashbacks, in which the past quite literally appears present, fully visualized. With the flashback, viewers see the past in relationship both to a cinematic, diegetic present, and to their own nondiegetic, real-​world present. In the cases that I will consider, a traumatic or violent past “flashes up” in a moment (both diegetic and nondiegetic) of danger, a constellation of then and now that freezes, and shatters, the present. As I will suggest shortly in my three cases, the flashing up of “memories” of racialized violence aim to reveal the ways in which the persistence of racialized violence in the United States is not actually of the past but ongoing in myriad ways in the present.

Seeing the Past as Present: The Need for Revision Saidiya Hartman, a preeminent scholar of race in the United States, has pointed to what she calls “the afterlives of slavery” (Hartman 1997), a conceptualization meant to engage a complex register that, like Benjamin’s dialectical image, rejects the inherent progressivism of historicism. 167

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Her formulation is aimed at making visible the ways in which aspects and aftershocks of slavery live on in the present. In the same vein, Christina Sharpe has elaborated what she calls “the wake” (Sharpe 2016), the track left on the water’s surface by the slave ship. The “wake” is also meant to invoke a palpable, affective experience of the trauma even after the ship has long passed. And yet, these echoes in the present are not, nor have they ever been, equally visible or palpable to all; indeed, the popular and deeply entrenched triumphalist narrative of racial progress in the United States has attempted to obscure and overwrite those afterlives, the wake. What is required, then, is a re-​vision—​and I am intentionally emphasizing the word vision here—​of the national narrative. Because filmic and televisual texts are formally adept at constructing alternative temporal relations—​relations that the standard narratives of racial progress in the United States, and the temporal logic of historicism more generally, elide—​they might stage this complex temporality. By bringing unexpected pasts into contact with both the diegetic and nondiegetic present, these media might force a reckoning with a “past” that is animating the present. By way of example, I will touch down briefly in three texts: Get Out (Jordan Peele 2017), Watchmen (Lindelof 2019, HBO), and Lovecraft Country (Misha Green, 2020, HBO). Because each is rich and complicated, I will limit my focus to the ways in which each construct dialectical images in the service or a radical, counterhegemonic history.

Get Out Jordan Peele’s acclaimed 2017 horror film, Get Out, revolves around a weekend trip the main characters, Rose Armitage (Allison Williams) and Chris Washington (Daniel Kaluuya)—​a hip, interracial couple—​take to Rose’s family’s home in upstate New York, where her parents meet Chris, her African American boyfriend, for the first time. What we learn over the course of this trip home is that despite Rose’s “woke,” social-​justice-​warrior pose, she and her parents are actually sadistic racists who sedate and then sell the African American men she lures to the family home for economic gain. Elsewhere, I have called this film an example of “horror verité,” in that it deploys the standard cinematic conventions of horror—​strong sound and visual cues that shock and unsettle the viewer, editing that creates surprise and shock, a plot that involves either supernatural or science fiction elements, the struggle for survival of a person who is being chased by a psycho-​killer, and/​ or a haunted house—​but in the context of revealing very real material and historical circumstances (Landsberg 2018). Rather than analyze the entire film, I will here focus on the scene that most powerfully constructs a dialectical image aimed at bringing the present to crisis. In this scene, the Armitage family is hosting their annual garden party. There are a series of clues that something is off, as the guests are inappropriately over-​interested in Chris, commenting on how handsome he is, touching his body, gushing about how much they admire Tiger Woods. But the full horror of the situation only gradually unfolds. After food and drink have been served and casual conversation shared, the guests take their seats outside, before a gazebo, for what appears to be a game of bingo. The master of ceremony, Rose’s father Dean Armitage (Bradley Whitford), however, calls out prices, like an auctioneer, rather than bingo numbers. In response, the party guests, seated in rows, raise their cards to bid. At first, the viewer cannot see what they are bidding on, but eventually the camera pulls back far enough to reveal a portrait of Chris, propped up on an easel, beside Dean. What on the surface has appeared to be a bourgeois garden party is revealed to be a modern-​day slave auction. In this scene, Chris is sold to a blind gallery owner, whose consciousness will be transplanted into Chris’s body—​so that he might see again. Importantly, this scene is crosscut with one of Rose and Chris out by the lake discussing Chris’ desire to return to the city. The crosscutting here emphasizes the coexistence of these two events, 168

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an ordinary relationship discussion and the live auctioning of a human being, underscoring that this auction is literally happening within, and is perhaps a central facet of, liberal White society. The shocking revelation of a contemporary-​day slave auction is a visceral shock to the audience. It freezes the present and asks viewers to fundamentally reconsider the contemporary landscape and what they think they know about it: in this scene viewers literally witness a modern-​day slave auction in a supposedly liberal, bourgeois America. Importantly, the slave auction is here conjured up not as it “actually was,” but in a meaningful relationship to the present. In this way, the film literalizes a science fiction version of enslavement in which White people steal Black bodies and use them for their own purposes and profit. By setting this “enslavement” in the present day, the film forces a reckoning with the violence still perpetrated against African Americans even by supposedly liberal White people. By depicting a slave auction—​White people at a garden party, literally bidding on a Black body—​the film performs a radical form of history writing, bringing the present into contact with an unexpected past precisely to interrupt the present, to serve as a wake-​up call. In this moment, “what has been”—​the White exploitation of Black bodies in the United States—​“comes together in a clash with the now to form a constellation” (Benjamin 1999, 463). This dialectical image of Chris, an African American human being for sale in 2017 New York, is in Benjamin’s (1999, 463) words, “genuinely historical” in that it is an image that becomes legible “in the now of its recognizability.” The slave auction in the present forces us to re-​read the present in a radically different way, forcing White viewers to see the present in a new and more troubling way.

Watchmen (HBO) The HBO series Watchmen, created by Damon Lindelof, was imagined as a sequel to the Marvel comic of the same name; however, unlike its predecessor, this iteration foregrounds White supremacy and racialized violence, beginning, as it does, with the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921. This text, like the previously mentioned contemporary films, museums, and television shows, forces a collective reckoning with a submerged “history” of racialized violence in the United States, which I put in quotation marks to indicate that this “history” continues to animate the present. To centre race and racialized violence as it does requires the Watchmen series to depart in significant ways from the original narrative of the comic book. As creator Lindelof said in an interview with NPR: At the time that I was sort of approached to consider rethinking Watchmen, I had to answer the question, ‘What is the pervasive sort of anxiety in America right now?’ And it was impossible, as all these things were happening—​not just Charlottesville but everything was happening through the lens of race and it felt like there was a great reckoning happening in our country, overdue and necessary… And I started to feel like it was incredibly important to tell a story about race. (NPR 2019) That the HBO sequel represents a thematic departure from the earlier iteration is clear from the outset. Lindelof’s Watchmen is set in Tulsa, in 2019, in an alternative present from our own in which the liberal President Redford’s administration approved reparations for victims of racial injustice and their descendants. This controversial policy led to a backlash, in the form of extreme and racialized violence, which we learn is erupting again in the series present. By beginning the first episode with the Tulsa Race Massacre, Lindelof centres its importance for the story that will unfold. 169

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The opening scene of the pilot is set in Tulsa, Oklahoma, during the violent and devastating, and yet (until recently) largely unremembered race massacre of 1921. Here, in the opening moments, a memory “flashes up” in a moment of danger: in an almost-​empty Tulsa movie theatre a young African American boy watches a silent film about Bass Reeves, the first Black Marshal of Oklahoma, moments before the devastating violence and destruction of the Massacre causes the ceiling of the theatre to come crashing down. Importantly, the appearance of an unexpected image from the past, on the screen, is constellated with a present, both diegetic (for the boy in the cinema) and nondiegetic (for the viewing audience in their present). Importantly, the very first image the viewer sees is a movie screen. In this self-​reflexive gesture, the series foregrounds the significance of cinematic spectatorship, and of the possibilities opened up by an encounter with images from the past in a time of danger. Indeed, the opening scene is set in an empty movie theatre just moments before the massacre begins. But before we even see the space of the theatre, we see the movie theatre screen nearly filling our own television screen. On it, a black-​and-​white film plays, depicting what appears to be a generic chase scene on horseback. A figure dressed in all white and riding a white horse is chased, and finally lassoed and knocked to the ground by a figure dressed in all black and riding a black horse. This scene unfolds in front of a small one-​room church, and those inside, all White parishioners, along with the White pastor, rush out to see what is happening. The lassoed man, White and dressed in white, is the local sheriff. The pastor, outraged by what he thinks he sees, demands of the figure in black, via intertitle “Ho! What have you done to our Sheriff?” The figure in black shakes his fists and declares, “Your Sheriff is the SCOUNDREL who has stolen your cattle! He does not deserve to wear the badge!” The perplexed pastor responds, “And who might you be, STRANGER?” The figure in black, who is here unmasking corrupt law enforcement, removes his hood, revealing himself to be an African American man. A White boy from the church enthusiastically proclaims, “Dontcha know who this is? BASS REEVES! The Black Marshal of Oklahoma!” The boy points to the star on the man’s chest and the camera zooms in on the badge allowing us to see it in close-​up, confirming the man’s identity: “U.S. Marshal Deputy Oklahoma Territory.” Importantly, it is not just the television audience watching this scene unfold. The camera pans back to reveal an African American boy in an empty theatre. On the screen before him a past flashes up with ramifications for his present and future. This moment constellates multiple temporalities, both diegetic and nondiegetic. The encounter between an African American boy, who’s about to live through the Tulsa Massacre, with an unremembered historical figure, Bass Reeves, the first black marshal of Oklahoma, will be formative for him, riveting. After surviving the race massacre that kills his parents, he takes on the marshal’s name and mission, calling himself Will Reeves and becoming “Hooded Justice,” a masked vigilante. The boy’s encounter with this unexpected past, coming as it does in this moment of danger, sets the boy on a trajectory in which he will try to change the future. But this is a dialectical image for the viewers as well, who are made to see the scene, on the diegetic screen, of the Black marshal, Bass Reeves, advancing the cause of justice by bringing to light police corruption, in relation to the series present, Tulsa 2019. Later in the opening episode, we learn that the seemingly sympathetic chief of police, who professes to be a mentor and ally of the African American protagonist Angela Abar (Regina King), is a racist, a secret member of the KKK, and like the sheriff in the black-​and-​white film, corrupt. Constellating the Tulsa past and present as a dialectical image presses the viewer to recognize that “the past” is alive in the present, that they are mirror images, dialectics at a standstill. But the viewer is also forced to see the moment in which the image of a Black marshal of Oklahoma exposes police corruption, seconds

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before the ceiling comes crashing down around the African American boy in the theatre, amid graphic, sepia-​toned depictions of the violence and destruction of the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921, in relation to the epidemic of racialized violence inflicted by the police on people of colour of the viewing present: the murders by police of Michael Brown, George Floyd, Eric Garner, Sandra Bland, Breonna Taylor, Tamir Rice, and so many others. This dialectical image freezes the present and has the effect of popping the viewer out of the series to reckon with this “past” in the present, the systemic racism that continues to ravage Black communities in the United States. With the graphic images of the destruction of businesses and homes in the Greenwood section of Tulsa, the film asks viewers to see the connection between the racialized violence of that past and the racialized violence of the present, both the literal violence directed at African Americans in the contemporary United States, but also the systems of racism and the perpetuation of inequalities, the ongoing processes of dispossession. This dialectical image, like the one in Get Out, is meant to break the present, and to radically undermine the popular progressivist account of a nation overcoming its racist past.

Lovecraft Country I turn now, and briefly, to the HBO television show Lovecraft Country, created by Misha Green and based on the novel by Matt Ruff; like the novel, the series borrows some of the fantasy elements from the writings of HP Lovecraft (a renowned racist), but in the service of an engagement with critical histories of racialized violence in the United States, “histories” which we are meant to see as animating not just the past, but the show’s present (the 1950s), and the viewer’s present as well. As with Get Out and Watchmen, in Lovecraft the writing of history is not premised on the logics of realism—​and in fact uses fantasy and science fiction in its creation of historical knowledge and in the construction of dialectical images. Lovecraft County is an ambitious and inventive television series set in Chicago and Massachusetts and Oklahoma in the 1950s, but with multiverse travel to other temporalities and locations as well. The narrative is set in motion by a letter that Atticus Freeman (Jonathan Majors) receives from his estranged father Montrose (Michael Kenneth Williams), asking Atticus to join him on a mission to uncover his dead mother Dora’s (Erica Tazel) ancestry. However, when Atticus arrives in Chicago, he discovers that Montrose has gone missing. In what ensues, he teams up with his old friend Leti (Jurnee Smollett) and his uncle George (Courtney B. Vance) to locate his missing father. Over the course of the series, they travel across 1950s America, through the height of the Jim Crow era, and encounter the literal and metaphorical monsters of racist White America. Atticus and Leti, like Uncle George and Aunt Hippolyta (Aunjanue Ellis), who publish the Safe Negro Travel Guidebooks, work to create spaces of safety and community for African Americans in the face of rampant and virulent racism in 1955 Chicago, the year in which Chicago native, Emmett Till, was murdered. Once again, rather than analyze the series in its entirety, I focus on two instances in which Lovecraft constructs dialectical images, requiring the viewer to rethink past and present, and their relationship to one another. In Episode 8, “Jig-​a-​Bobo,” the storylines of the characters intersect with the open casket funeral of Emmett Till, who in the diegetic world of the series was a friend of Hippolyta’s daughter, Dee (Jada Harris). The episode begins in medias res: slow moving crowds of well-​dressed African Americans fill the streets and sidewalks, their movement directed by White police. The camera finally lands on Dee, who is shot in close-​up with a canted camera angle, suggesting that something is amiss. She begins to cry. There is a cut to a woman emerging, agitated, from a building;

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she vomits into a trash can held by a man just outside the door. We see people fanning themselves, wiping their brows with handkerchiefs. We catch a bit of a speech from a man who appears to be a member of the Nation of Islam, speaking to a crowd around him: “They are butchering our children without consequence.” There is a cut back to Dee, disgusted; she asks her Aunt Ruby what the smell is, and Ruby responds, “It’s gotta be one of the hottest days of the year, and…” Dee cuts off her aunt’s explanation, saying, “It’s him, isn’t it?” Thus far, this scene largely relies on the conventions of realism to evoke in a multisensuous way the horror of the day of Emmett Till’s open casket funeral, bringing viewers into proximity with the heat, the noise, the sorrow, and the smell. Unable to bear the scene any longer, Dee slips away, roaming the deserted streets, when she is approached by a squad car with two White cops in search of her mother. As the car slows, she feels their gaze on her and stiffens. Hoping to elude them, she turns into a dark alley. What follows is horrifying to watch. One of the police catches up to her, gruffly asking, “Are you Diana Freeman?” The other moves behind her, in effect trapping her between them. They question her aggressively about her mother’s whereabouts, and she tells them that Hippolyta is on a trip for her job. They mock her mother’s name, and press Dee to reveal what she knows about magic. In close-​up we see the cop’s angry face, and then hers in terror. The officer standing behind her marks the ground on either side of her feet with chalk. The other officer begins chanting in “the language of Adam,” which in the world of the series is the language of magic. And then he laughs. In this and in other instances in the series, magic functions as a potent metaphor for White privilege, the ability to achieve things in the world, to act with impunity and without fear of consequences.2 The camera pans back and we look on as the White, uniformed cops kick her, knocking her to the ground. The incantation, it seems, conjures up a grotesque swarm of insects, which emerge from the ground. In what is perhaps the most shocking and jarring moments in a series filled with jarring images, the other cop grabs her in a chokehold. “I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe,” she utters. They spit on her, throw her to the ground, and leave. The viewer is meant to connect this scene of White violence against an innocent African American child with the brutal murder of Emmett Till, whose funeral we have just glimpsed; it serves also as a visual echo of the line, “They are butchering our children without consequence.” But when the White cop puts her in a chokehold, the lines she utters, “I can’t breathe” takes our breath away, as it carries us to 2014, to the final words of Eric Garner, murdered by police officers in NYC. Here, in this moment, the past and the present are fused, mirror images of one another. This is dialectics at a standstill, once again, popping the viewer out of the series to contemplate this historical conjuncture. Here the past—​a long history of systemic, institutional violence against African Americans—​casts light on the present. But the present—​the current epidemic of police violence against African Americans, including the brutal murder of children like Tamir Rice—​casts light on the past. In this scene, on the day of Emmett Till’s funeral, Dee’s words, “I can’t breathe,” connect her to Eric Garner of the future, and George Floyd, whose death catalyzed an international movement, a future which is our present, a constellation, a dialectical image: from Emmett Till, to Dee in a chokehold, to Eric Garner whose last words were “I can’t breathe.” Another dialectical image is constructed later in the series, in Episode 9, “Rewind 1921,” when Leti, Atticus, and Montrose travel in the multiverse machine to 1921 Tulsa, arriving hours before the massacre, to rescue “The Book of Names,” a spell book that belonged originally to Titus Braithwaite, the White patriarch of the family, but which was preserved by Atticus’ African American ancestor, an enslaved woman, Hanna, and passed down in her family where it was kept in the family home in Tulsa. Leti, who in 1921 Oklahoma appears as a strange visitor from the 172

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future, races against time to convince the matriarch of the home, Hattie (Regina Taylor), to hand over “The Book of Names” before the fire that will destroy the family home; toward this end, Leti recounts for Hattie the family history that only a descendant would know: Dora escapes with your cousin Ethel, she grows up. She marries Montrose Freeman. Together they have a beautiful baby boy. We call him Tic because Atticus is really a mouthful. And I fell in love with him. I am in love with him. I don’t want him to not exist. But we can’t change any of it, because of the future, my baby. Hearing this, Hattie understands that she and her family in 1921 are about to die; with this realization she decides to save the book by passing it on. There is a cut to Leti walking down the burning street, clasping “The Book of Names” to her chest, and then to Montrose, gazing soberly out a window at the destruction on the street below him; night has fallen and fires burn, White men shoot at unarmed African Americans. With the camera fixed on his face, he begins a recitation of names of those killed: Peg Leg Taylor’s last stand on Standpipe Hill. Oh, that was something. Still, they burned down Byar’s Tailor Shop. Dr. Jackson, best Negro surgeon in all America… Shot in the face. Mrs. Rodgers lost her invalid daughter. White Phelps took in Negroes, hid ‘em in the basement. Commodore Knox. They did him in the worst. As he speaks their names, the names of those murdered in the Tulsa Race Massacre, they come almost as an echo of the recitation of the names, in the nondiegetic present, of African Americans murdered by White police, victims of White supremacy. His words conjure the work of the Black Lives Matter movement to name those killed, and of #SayHerName, demanding, in response to the murder of Sarah Bland, a public naming of those African American women who were victims of racialized violence. Montrose’s recitation of names reaches out to our present, and once again, the past and the present fuse, mirror images of one another, frozen, held together in a dialectical image: the past casting light on the present and the present casting light on the past.

Conclusion This “past” is not behind us. This “past” of brutal, systemic, racialized violence is our present. And yet the powerful national narrative of an overcoming of racial injustice has long been the story America tells of itself. That narrative, as I have argued, is inadvertently bolstered by the conventions of historicism: history as linear, progressive, and premised on change over time. That form of history writing, I have suggested, relies on a temporal schema in which the present is severed from the past, and as such is less able to articulate a “past” ongoing or alive in the present. I have pointed to the ways in which mass culture has become an unexpected and yet powerful site for an unconventional, radical form of history writing, in part because it can stage a complex depiction of the relationship between past and present. And because these media are mass media, with broad appeal and large audiences, they have the potential to chip away at the deeply entrenched narratives of racial progress in the United States, to counter those narratives that place racial violence safely in the past. These dialectical images—​the slave auction, the choke hold, #SayHerName—​are shattering, they sear through the now, a present in ruins, and reject a teleology of progress, offering the possibility of, or perhaps even demanding, a different future. 173

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Notes 1 Leanne Simpson and Glen Sean Coulthard both point to the ways in which settler colonial states offer apologies and regret for past actions, and in so doing are able to sidestep the persistence of those injustices in the present. See Simpson (2012) and Coulthard (2014). 2 At another moment, Christina Braithwaite (Abbey Lee), who is carrying out her father’s pursuit of immortality through magic, explains to Ruby, Dee’s aunt, that “When her father or the members of the order discussed magic—​it wasn’t particular. They—​they spoke of it as they would money or politics, or any other means for bending the world to their will” (Episode 9: Rewind 1921).

Reference list Benjamin, Walter. 1999. The Arcades Project. Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Benjamin, Walter. 2002. “Brecht’s Threepenny Novel.” In Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, 3: 1935–​ 1938, edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, 3–​10. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Benjamin, Walter. 2003. “On the Concept of History.” In Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, 4: 1938–​1940, edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, 389–​400. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Benjamin, Walter. 2008. “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, Second Version.” In The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, edited by Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin, 19–​55. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Bevernage, Berber. 2010. “Writing the Past Out of the Present: History and the Politics of Time in Transitional Justice.” History Workshop Journal 69 (Spring): 111–​131. https://​doi.org/​10.1093/​hwj/​dbq​008. Bordwell, David. 1985. Narration in the Fiction Film. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Burgoyne, Robert. 2010. Film Nation: Hollywood Looks at the US History. Revised Edition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Coulthard, Glen Sean. 2014. Indigenous Americas: Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Davis, Natalie Zemon. 2000. Slaves on Screen: Film and Historical Vision. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 1989. Cinema 2: The Time-​Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Guthrie, Caroline. 2022. The American Historical Imaginary: Contested Narratives of the Past. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Hannah-​Jones, Nikole, et al. 2019. “The 1619 Project.” New York Times Magazine, August 14. Hannah-​Jones, Nikole, et al. 2021. The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story. New York: One World. Hartman, Saidiya. 1997. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-​Making in Nineteenth-​Century America. New York: Oxford University Press. Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor Adorno. 2002. “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception.” In Dialectic of Enlightenment, edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, translated by Edmund Jephcott, 94–​136. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Hughes-​Warrington, Marnie. 2006. History Goes to the Movies. New York and London: Routledge. Kracauer, Seigfried. 1995. “The Mass Ornament.” In The Mass Ornament, edited and translated by Thomas Y. Levin, 75–​86. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Landsberg, Alison. 2015. Engaging the Past: Mass Culture and the Production of Historical Knowledge. New York: Columbia University Press. Landsberg, Alison. 2018. “Horror Vérité: Politics and History in Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017).” Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 32, no 5: 629–​642. https://​doi.org/​10.1080/​10304​ 312.2018.1500​522. Landy, Marcia. 2000. The Historical Film: History and Memory in Media. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Landy, Marcia. 2015. Cinema and Counter-​History. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Lowenthal, David. 1999. The Past Is a Foreign Country. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Counter-temporalities and dialectical images Mroz, M. 2012. Temporality and Film Analysis. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Novick, Peter. 1988. That Noble Dream: The ‘Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical Profession. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. NPR. 2019. “ ‘Watchmen’ Creator Damon Lindelof: Not Talking About Race Felt ‘Irresponsible’.” NPR, Morning Edition, October 22. www.npr.org/​2019/​10/​22/​771998​690/​watch​men-​crea​tor-​damon-​linde​lof-​ not-​talk​ing-​about-​race-​felt-​irresp​onsi​ble. Rosenstone, Robert. 1988. “History in Images/​History in Words: Reflections on the Possibility of Really Putting History onto Film.” American Historical Review, 93, no. 5 (December): 1173–​1185. https://​doi. org/​10.2307/​1873​532. Rosenstone, Robert. 1995. Visions of the Past: The Challenge of Film to Our Idea of History. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Rosenstone, Robert. 2017. History on Film/​Film on History, 3rd ed. New York and London: Routledge. Sharpe, Christina. 2016. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham: Duke University Press. Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake. 2012. Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back: Stories of Nishnaabeg Re-​Creation, Resurgence, and a New Emergence. Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring Publishing. Squires, Catherine R. 2014. The Post-​Racial Mystique: Media and Race in the Twenty-​First Century. New York: New York University Press. Turim, Maureen. 1989. Flashbacks in Film: Memory and History. New York: Routledge.

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12 HISTORY AND HINDI FILM William R. Pinch1

In what follows, I reflect on my 30-​plus years’ experience with “historical film,” particularly historical film in Hindi.2 I should note at the outset that I am a historian, mainly of South Asia. My interest in Hindi film began, as I note later, as a way to introduce mainly north American students to the (mainly north) Indian past. Over the past three decades, I have also developed an interest in theory and philosophy of history. Though I frequently caution my students that chronology is not destiny, this chapter proceeds more or less chronologically; but it also moves from a relatively straightforward utilitarian approach to film as a tool for teaching history in the classroom, to what I hope is a more nuanced approach that highlights film’s explicitly historiographical qualities, and finally to film as a comment on history itself—​film as ontological reflection, as it were. My journey with film took a happy turn in 2017, when I was asked to comment on a screenplay for a period drama whose central character was a Hindu warrior ascetic (though what constitutes “Hindu” in the film—​and in warrior asceticism—​is by no means straightforward). I have written extensively about warrior ascetics in Indian history over the past two decades, so it was a pleasure to review and comment on the screenplay, to visit with the director Navdeep Singh and his team in 2018, and (especially) to view the film itself—​Laal Kaptaan—​upon its release in October of 2019. I discuss the film and what I take to be its significance toward the end of this chapter. Like many, and perhaps most academic historians, my initial interest in film came through teaching—​beginning with a visiting lectureship at William & Mary in 1990, but mostly over the last three decades at Wesleyan University. I was drawn to cinematic representations of the past to help illustrate for students the period and place we were addressing in the syllabus—​in my case, early modern and modern South Asia. My hope was that the visual medium would bring to life, in a way scholarly books usually do not, the drama and emotional impact of events in the past. In other words, I used films in a fairly straightforward (and no doubt naïve) way as a basic teaching aid. However, as much as I enjoyed turning to film to supplement my lectures and readings, I would inevitably experience nagging pedagogical doubts while watching (with the students) the films I had assigned. This was not simply due to the occasional cringe-​worthy moments when a director might play fast and loose with the facts. Rather, as the credits rolled I could not help but feel I had handed the reins to an unvetted instructor with markedly different historiographical 176

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sensibilities. In response, I gradually shifted my pedagogical approach by structuring our viewing of films so as to prompt discussion about the historiographical dimensions of the choices made with respect to direction, cinematography, screenplay, scenery, sets, costumes, language, etc. It was with the accumulation of such classroom discussions that I began to have a greater appreciation for film as a way of teaching not simply about the past the film purported to portray, but about the time and place, and people by whom, the film was made. Indeed, the more I did this the more convinced I became that the main value of film for history was as a primary source rather than as a representation of the past (which corresponds to the tension between an “explicit” vs. “implicit” understanding of the challenges and opportunities of film for history; [Rosenstone 1995, 48]). My methodological objectification of directors and films had obvious problems of its own, however. First, all texts function simultaneously as both primary and secondary sources. The line between an implicit and explicit approach to film, as noted by Rosenstone, is not so easily drawn. Second, most filmmakers would probably resent the kind of objectification and instrumentalization in which I was engaged. Despite my early classroom faith in films, I was not taking film sufficiently seriously as a genre for historical representation, to say nothing of directors as historians. My unease over these issues was accentuated by a dawning awakening—​mainly from teaching in Wesleyan’s required course (for History majors) in method, theory, and philosophy of history—​to the potential that film offers historians as a mode of (and not simply source for) historical representation and, further, as a reflection not only on the constant interplay between past and present but on the nature of history itself.

History on film When I began teaching in 1990, the films that I found to be pedagogically useful were classified in the United States as “art films,” what in India was referred to as “parallel cinema”—​which existed alongside (or “parallel” to) the “Bollywood” industry.3 These included works like Garam Hava (1973), about Partition as experienced by a well-​to-​do Muslim family in Agra faced with the choice of whether to migrate to Pakistan; Shatranj ke Khilari (1977), about the annexation of the kingdom of Awadh by the British in 1856 set alongside a (mostly) friendly chess rivalry between two members of the Awadhi aristocracy; Junoon (1979), about a high-​status Afghan’s obsession for a Eurasian girl set amidst the turmoil of the 1857 Mutiny/​Rebellion/​War; Umrao Jaan (1981), about the tragic life and times of a Lakhnavi (Lucknowi) courtesan in the years leading up to, during, and just after 1857; and Mirch Masala (1986), about the sexual exploitation of village women by a local tax collector in the early 1940s and the conflicted (and gendered) agrarian response thereto. What made these films pedagogically appealing was the fact that, apart from Mirch Masala, there was readily available supplementary textual material that could be assigned to deepen students’ collective engagement with the films. For example, UC Berkeley’s Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies Department had self-​published (in mimeograph) a screenplay of Garam Hava for language instruction that included the Urdu and Hindi as well as an English translation. Similarly, the screenplay for Shatranj ke Khilari (released as The Chess Players for Western audiences) had been translated by one of the actors, Saeed Jaffrey, and published by Faber in 1989. Further, Shatranj ke Khilari was adapted from a 1924 short story by the Hindi-​Urdu writer Premchand, a translation of which was readily available in English. Likewise, Umrao Jaan was based on the Urdu novel Umrao Jan Ada by Mirza Ruswa (1905), also available for students in English translation; and Junoon was based on the English-​language short story, A Flight of Pigeons, by Ruskin Bond (1978). 177

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A virtue of these films, as has recently been explored by Rochana Majumdar, was that they anticipated themes that would emerge in postcolonial scholarship in the 1970s and after (Majumdar 2021), including a concern for the downtrodden and marginalized in Indian society—​whether via caste, occupation, race, religion, gender, or sexuality—​as well as the conflicted fate of subalterns, including subalterns among the elite (captured best in the films of Satyajit Ray; in addition to Shatranj ke Khilari, see his Bengali film Ghare Baire [1984] released internationally as Home and the World). Another attractive feature of parallel cinema, to my early pedagogical sensibilities at any rate, was the evident attention to historical detail. The directors made every effort, it seemed, to get things right—​the costumes, the language, the sets. Often they were filmed on location, e.g., in Lucknow (Umrao Jaan and Shatranj ke Khilari) and Agra (Garam Hava). There was no superfluous (or what I took to be superfluous—​which was really a reflection of my own superficial understanding of how film might engage with history) song and dance, which reduced the run time to just over two hours which, from a logistical angle, was useful. There were exceptions, of course, but they generally proved the rule. For example, Umrao Jaan had several song and dance numbers, but the lead character of Umrao Jaan was a courtesan whose very livelihood was singing and dancing, along with lovemaking and the other courtly arts—​including most notably, in her case, the composition and recitation of poetry. So the inclusion of song and dance in the film was integral to the plot. And the songs themselves, based on the Urdu ghazal form, earned the writer Shama Zaidi much deserved acclaim. Mirch Masala also included a brief musical number, but it was a village dance scene during which the dreaded tax collector leered at the object of his lascivious desire (played by Smita Patil, in one of her final roles before her tragic death at the age of 31, just prior to the release of the film). Another very different kind of film that I found useful for teaching purposes, not surprisingly, was Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi (1982). Though not, strictly speaking, a Hindi film, Gandhi was produced in both Hindi and English and, in fact, premiered in Hindi in most theatres in New Delhi (including the one I attended) just prior to its release in the West.4 Winner of eight American Motion Picture Academy awards, among numerous other accolades, Gandhi shared many of the virtues of the previously mentioned films—​even if it approached “Bollywood” standards in length, at 3 hours and 11 minutes. The film offered many useful points of departure for classes on British imperialism and Indian nationalism. Though the director was British,5 the film was a joint Indo-​British production (as was true, it may be argued, for Gandhi himself, to say nothing of the actor who played Gandhi, the mixed-​race Ben Kingsley [born Krishna Pandit Bhanji]) that took many years to come to fruition. A significant difference, however, is that whereas the previously mentioned films were based on works of historical fiction, Gandhi was a biopic and claimed, with the usual opening-​credit caveats, to be a true work of non-​fiction. This did not mean, of course, that the film lacked moments of invention. The film was inspired, in large part, by Louis Fischer’s admiring biography (Fischer 1954) and as a result verges uncomfortably on hagiography.6 Gandhi is presented as a fully formed “mahatma” (Great Soul) from the outset, whether he is wearing a loincloth or the garb of a high-​priced Victorian attorney. Naturally this also makes for much useful classroom discussion. Also useful from a pedagogical angle was that the film generated much in the way of commentary by the director as well as scholarly reflection by historians and scholars of religion and politics—​not least in the pages of Commentary, which published a lengthy, hostile review by Richard Grenier (1983), followed by numerous letters in response and Grenier’s lengthy reply (“Letters from Readers” 1983). The huge success of Gandhi in the West, including especially in Britain, reflected the degree to which an ethic of nonviolence had been embraced by mainstream Anglo-​American society, fueled

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by the rising opposition to the Vietnam War in the 1960s and early ’70s, the Civil Rights Movement (and especially the attraction of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., to Gandhian tactics), heightened anxieties about the nuclear arms race and the prospect of global annihilation, and popular dissatisfaction with the ego-​centric “me-​generation” in the 1980s. It is arguable that the film’s popularity also reflected an emerging ambivalence about Britain’s imperial past: audiences were drawn to the painstaking recreation of the Raj era (the “Rage for the Raj,” as Anita Desai termed it [Desai 1985]) even as they partook of and celebrated the Gandhian critique thereof. Insofar as he had an argument, Attenborough’s aim was not simply to recount the life of the Mahatma, but to convince the viewer of the continuing moral legitimacy and political efficacy of Gandhian nonviolence—​in short, to see the world through Gandhi’s eyes long after Gandhi’s death. The cinematography reflects this: the film begins with Gandhi’s assassination as seen through the eyes of his killer, Nathuram Godse; it ends, three hours later, with a return to the moment of killing, but seen through the eyes of Gandhi. The audience watches as Godse lifts and points his gun directly at the screen, at point blank range. We see the flash from the barrel of the gun and hear the bullets firing, and we hear Gandhi’s voice pronounce “Hé Rām” (translated into English in the film as “Oh God”) just as the screen goes dark. The message: At the beginning we are Godse. By the end we are Gandhi. Indian directors were quick to respond to Attenborough’s film. Shyam Benegal’s The Making of the Mahatma (1996) examined the crucial South African years (1893–​1914) that are given extremely short shrift in Attenborough’s epic. Gandhi, My Father (2007) by Feroz Abbas Khan examined the Mahatma’s tortured relationship with his eldest son Harilal, shedding light on the subtly manipulative and patriarchal side of the Mahatma that is unexplored in Attenborough’s portrait (save for a brief argument between Gandhi and his wife Kasturba in South Africa). The intriguing comedy Lage Raho Munna Bhai (2006) by Rajkumar Hirani, set in early twenty-​first-​ century Mumbai, revealed a much lighter side to Gandhi, to say nothing of postcolonial India’s bizarre relationship with his legacy as “Bapu” (papa or dad)—​and much else besides. (I will have more to say about this film later.) There was even a Pakistani-​British answer to Attenborough’s Gandhi in the form of Jamil Dehlavi’s Jinnah (1998), which sought to correct the laughably demonic portrayal of the “Quaid-​i Azam” (Great Leader) by Attenborough.7 Despite the diametrically opposed politics of Jinnah and Gandhi, the two films share much in common. Both start with the death of their protagonists in 1948, then jump back in time and trace their way forward to 1948. Both directors also place the responsibility for Partition squarely on Jinnah. For Attenborough this occasions dismay; for Dehlavi, celebration. Most interesting of all the responses to Attenborough’s Gandhi, to my mind, was the big-​ budget Hey Ram (2000) by the South Indian director Kamal Haasan (who also starred in the film), released in both Tamil and Hindi, which offered a surprisingly sympathetic (and consequently controversial) psychological study of the Hindu nationalist rage that contributed to the carnage of Partition and led, ultimately, to the murder of the Mahatma. Of all the responses to Gandhi, this is the film that routinely made it onto my syllabus—​mainly because it offers a glimpse (and an unsparing one at that) of the reappraisal of Gandhi (and Partition violence) that was taking place in India after about 1990, even if by the end of the film it fell back on a fairly conventional Gandhian message of nonviolence. Another film that found its way onto my syllabus, for a few years in the 1990s, and which also served as a useful counterpoint to Gandhi and nonviolence, was Shekhar Kapur’s Bandit Queen (1994). Also a biopic, the film told the life story of Phoolan Devi, a low-​caste woman who had exploded onto popular consciousness in the early 1980s as the head of an outlaw gang that operated in the ravines of Bundelkhand. A sort of Robin Hood figure and deemed “the Bandit Queen” by an increasingly adoring press, Phoolan Devi became the target

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of a massive police “manhunt” in 1981 in the wake of her having executed 22 Rajput men of Behmai village in retaliation for the murder of her lover and her own brutalization and rape in the village several months earlier. Her exploding popularity, particularly among the “Backward” and “Scheduled” Castes, enabled her to choreograph her own quasi-​cinematic surrender to the Madhya Pradesh state authorities in 1983—​in front of a portrait of Mahatma Gandhi and an image of Durga. During her subsequent imprisonment, a biography by Mala Sen was published (Sen 1991), based on extensive interviews in Hindi smuggled out of prison. This became, loosely, the basis for the film—​which, incidentally, both Mala Sen and Phoolan Devi repudiated, mainly for the way the director reduced its heroine to a one-​dimensional victim obsessed with sexual and caste violence (see the discussion in Roy [1994] 2019).

History in film The inclusion of Bandit Queen on my syllabus reflected, and in some ways prompted, a temporal shift in my teaching. Whereas I had tended to avoid the decades after Independence in my courses when I began teaching in 1990, by the mid/​late 1990s I was increasingly drawn to the more recent past. Further, the lack of a South-​Asia specialist in the Political Science Department at Wesleyan at the time (who could offer a comparative government course) coupled with the rising profile of postcolonial theory convinced me that the cutoff date of 1950 was pedagogically and historiographically untenable. So my “Modern South Asia” course, which had earlier begun in the nineteenth century—​usually with the War of 1857—​and ended in 1950, gradually evolved into a course focused on the twentieth century as a whole: as it stands now, the syllabus begins with Partition in 1947 and then works its way both backward and forward in time.8 The wisdom of this pedagogical shift was confirmed by the release of the Pakistani-​French production, Khamosh Pani (2003), directed by Sabiha Sumar, about the painful memories and tragic fate of a Sikh woman who had remained (as a Muslim) in Pakistani Punjab after Partition. (Set in the late 1970s, the film recounts the rising tide of “Islamization” under General Zia-​ul-​Haq.) My “Early Modern South Asia” survey course, by contrast, which initially had as its temporal framework the period 1500 to the 1850s, and included (naturally) the Mughal Empire, the eighteenth-​century transition, and the rise of the Company, has accordingly morphed into a course on the long and turbulent relationship of India and Britain, entitled simply “The Raj.” It was also around this time that the 2001 blockbuster film Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India exploded onto Indian movie screens, at home and abroad. Directed by Ashutosh Gowariker and wildly successful, Lagaan is set in a fictional small village in central India in 1893 and tells the story of a charismatic villager, “Bhuvan,” who not only (spoiler alert!) beats the British at their own game, cricket, and humiliates the sneering commandant of the local British-​Indian regiment, but wins a cancellation of three years of punishing agricultural tax (lagaan). In the process, Bhuvan unites his fellow villagers despite their caste and religious prejudices (there is a subplot about a marginalized Dalit—​named Kachra, or “garbage”—​whose deformed arm happens to render him an excellent “googly” spin bowler, and another about a “betrayer” Muslim who rejoins the villagers’ team after secretly conspiring with the British,9 and to redeem himself with his friends makes a crucial, game-​saving catch). Bhuvan also unwittingly wins the heart of the commandant’s sister visiting from England, aptly named Elizabeth. Appalled by the racist cruelty of her brother, Elizabeth decides to even the playing field and conspires to teach the villagers (and, inter alia, non-​Commonwealth audiences) how to play cricket. The events of Lagaan are, of course, entirely fictional: the plot is a sugary sweet morality tale of Indian unity in diversity set in an idyllic village10 at the height of British power in India. Still, 180

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for this historian, it possessed two intriguing features. First, it succeeded (where many have failed) in managing to instruct uninitiated audiences in the rules of cricket, the importance of which, for modern Indian culture, cannot be overstated. (Elizabeth, despite a painful-​to-​watch song sequence in which she gives herself up to her passionate love for Bhuvan, turns out to be an excellent teacher.)11 The second intriguing feature of the film is that it nicely dramatizes the Janus-​faced nature of British attitudes toward India, which can best be described as a kind of love–​hate obsession.12 This is best captured by the contrasting characters of Captain Russell, who has nothing but contempt for Indians, and his sister Elizabeth, who ultimately returns to England to live out her life as a “spinster,” haunted by the memory of her unrequited love for Bhuvan. In short, the film (and its wildly successful reception, both in India and among Indians abroad) suggests a perceptual shift occurring among Indians, or middle-​class Indians at least, in their historical apprehension of the British Raj era: India may have been under the British boot for two centuries, but it was ultimately Britain that suffered more—​emotionally, in terms of a damaged psyche—​in the long run. This is, coincidentally, the argument of Ashis Nandy’s influential 1983 psycho-​historical study, The Intimate Enemy, in which he argued (following Fanon and Cesaire, and Gandhi and Freud) that the true victims of colonization are the colonizers (Nandy 1983). Like Gandhi, then, Lagaan revealed as much if not more about the present than it did about the past. In retrospect, Lagaan was an early installment in a wave of lavish, and lavishly expensive, “historical” blockbusters that began appearing in the mid-​1990s—​“historical” in quotes because they were largely fictional or, at best, legendary romances set amid the backdrop of key moments in the South Asian past. Aside from some gestures at verisimilitude and a desire to not conflict too flagrantly with the “known” past, these films had little pretension to historical accuracy. In addition to Lagaan, three other “historicals” were directed by Gowariker himself: Jodhaa Akbar (2008), about the legendary sixteenth-​century romance between the (Hindu) Rajput princess of Mewar, Jodhaa,13 and the up-​and-​coming (Muslim) Mughal emperor, Akbar (more on this film later); Mohenjo Daro (2016), a romance set amidst the mysterious Indus Valley Civilization in “2016 BC,” in many ways derivative of Jodhaa Akbar (and not simply because Hrithik Roshan plays the lead in both); and Panipat (2019), about the cataclysmic battle at Panipat in 1761, which pitted the (mainly Hindu) Marathas against the Afghan (and Muslim) emperor Ahmed Shah Abdali and his mainly Muslim north Indian allies. Additional new-​wave “historicals” of this sort by other directors included three by Sanjay Leela Bhansali: Devdas (2002), based on the celebrated (and much filmed) tragic early twentieth-​century romance of the same name by Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyaya, featuring a heady admixture of class pride, prostitution, true love, and alcoholism; Bajirao Mastani (2015), about the controversial eighteenth-​century marriage of the Muslim warrior-​princess of Bundelkhand, Mastani, and the (Hindu) Peshwa of the Marathas, Bajirao; and Padmaavat (2018), based on the sixteenth-​century poem of the same name, about the legendary obsession of Sultan Alauddin Khilji (again, a Muslim, d. 1316), with Padmavati, the Hindu wife of Maharaja Ratan Singh of Mewar. Other moderately successful big-​budget “historicals” worth mentioning include 1942, a Love Story (1994), a star-​crossed romance set amidst the (decidedly un-​Gandhian) “Quit India” movement, by Vidhu Vinod Chopra (for which Bhansali wrote the screenplay); the aforementioned Hey Ram by Kamal Haasan, about the assassination of Gandhi from a Hindu nationalist perspective; Santosh Sivan’s Asoka (2001), about the early life of the famous third-​century BC emperor who embraces Buddhism after a particularly bloody military campaign in eastern India; Ketan Mehta’s Mangal Pandey: The Rising (2005), which elevates the revolt of Sepoy Mangal Pandey as the spark that sets India aflame in 1857; and Vishal Bhardwaj’s Rangoon (2017) about a stunt-​woman film star (loosely based on the real-​life “Fearless Nadia,” a.k.a. Mary Ann Evans) who ends up behind enemy lines with the rebel forces of the Japanese-​allied Indian National Army 181

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in Burma during the Second World War. Also worth mentioning are two recent massive-​budget misfires, Manikarnika: The Queen of Jhansi (2019) by Kangana Ranaut about the Rani of Jhansi in 1857, and Thugs of Hindostan (2018) by Vijay Krishna Acharya. A major difference between this recent wave of historicals and the earlier “parallel” cinema historical films, aside from the big budgets and song-​and-​dance extravaganzas of the former, is the treatment of religion, especially the relationship of Hindus and Muslims. Religious politics were not entirely absent from the earlier films, of course—​particularly in Garam Hava and Khamosh Pani about Partition and its aftermath. But in general, these earlier “parallel cinema” excursions treated religion as one among many factors in the unfolding drama, as a feature of a complex lived experience. By contrast, the new “historicals” increasingly brought religion and, especially, its totalizing political implications to the fore. The timing of this development should be noted: Hindus were asserting themselves politically in new ways in the 1990s, manifest most dramatically in the rising fortunes of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) (see e.g., the discussion of political context in Merivirta 2016, 460–​466). Space considerations prohibit an exhaustive detailing of the treatment of religion in the recent blockbuster historicals, but Gowariker’s Jodhaa Akbar offers some useful pointers—​especially because it affords a productive comparison with a much earlier blockbuster (and budget-​busting) romance set during the reign of the Mughal emperor Akbar, namely, K. Asif’s Mughal-​e-​Azam (1960). In Jodhaa Akbar, Gowariker uses the legendary betrothal and early years of marriage of the young Mughal emperor Akbar and the Rajput princess Jodhaa,14 undertaken as a diplomatic-​ cum-​military alliance, to dramatize the development of Akbar’s famous policy of sulh-​i kul or “peace toward all,” an early modern form of secularism that has attracted the attention of numerous theorists and historians (e.g., Richards 1978; Athar Ali 1980; Streusand 1989; Alam 2004; O’Hanlon 2007; Vivekanandan 2014). The plot is structured around Jodhaa’s insistence, expressed early in the film, that she not only not be forced to convert to Islam as a condition of the marriage, but that she be allowed to openly maintain her Hindu religious beliefs, ritual practices, and day-​to-​day customs—​even to the point of constructing a shrine to her isht-​deva or “favorite god” Krishna inside the palace itself. The liberal-​minded and Sufistically inclined Akbar agrees to all this, much to the dismay of his enemies at the court (including but not limited to the orthodox ulema class of theologian-​jurists) who conspire to do away with the emperor. The subsequent action interweaves the couple’s blossoming love with the development of the imperial ethic of sulh-​i-​kul. In the final scene, after he has defeated the combined forces of religious fundamentalism, familial jealousy (involving, among other complexities, a simmering rivalry between his “wetnurse” mother and biological mother), and courtly intrigue, Akbar declares the subjects of the empire “free to worship and practice their religions,” adding: “[Though] I am a follower of Islam, a Musulmaan, I bow my head with respect before every religion… . Life’s happiness cannot be divided on religious grounds.”15 While the romance between Akbar and Jodhaa is invented, Gowarikar’s plot weaves in many well-​known historical facts about Akbar’s reign that afford the film considerable verisimilitude. These include Akbar’s marriage to several Hindu Rajput princesses and his willingness to permit their religious observances in the royal household, his more-​than-​occasional vegetarianism and limitations on animal slaughter, his abolition of the jizya tax on non-​Muslims, and his disdain for the orthodox ulema. Even small details, such as Akbar’s execution of his murderous foster brother Adham Khan by having him thrown headfirst (twice!) from a terrace in the Agra palace, and his banishment to Mecca of his regent, Bairam Khan, are deployed to good effect in the service of the plot. As Gowariker noted in an interview, “[t]‌he love and romance is my imagination, but the other 30 per cent is from history books” (cited in Merivirta 2016, 462; see also 466). 182

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Jodhaa Akbar is set in the 1560s, and mainly at the Agra fort, when the principals would have been in their 20s. By contrast, the centrepiece of Asif’s 1960 film, Mughal-​e-​Azam, is the struggle between Akbar and his son, Prince Salim (the future Jahangir), in the late 1590s and early 1600s, set mainly in Lahore. That Prince Salim did, in fact, rebel in the final years of Akbar’s reign affords the plot a modicum of historicality. But the nature of the film as sociopolitical parable is underscored, as in Jodhaa Akbar, by the fact that the central female character in Mughal-​e-​Azam is a woman of ambivalent historicity, namely, Anarkali, a “slave girl” whom Salim falls hopelessly in love with and determines—​against his father’s wishes—​to marry.16 In order to prevent this union, which (in the film) is deemed a threat to imperial stability, Akbar orders Anarkali to be walled up alive. In Asif’s film (1960), the character of Jodha17 is an important but secondary figure: she is present throughout as Akbar’s queen, but she is a matronly figure who, not surprisingly, is torn between her wifely devotion to her husband and her motherly love for her son. Whereas Jodhaa’s religious practices, customs, and beliefs are the leitmotif of Jodhaa Akbar, they serve mainly as an attractive window dressing in (and another way of shoring up the verisimilitude of) Mughal-​ e-​Azam. Thus early in Asif’s 1960 film (around minute 11) Jodha implores a golden image of the flute-​playing Krishna to protect her dissolute son, who has been sent by Akbar to harden himself in battle; later (around minute 38) we see Akbar being welcomed by Jodha to the celebration of Krishna janamashtami (the birthday of Krishna). Jodha places a ritual tilak mark on Akbar’s forehead and they feed each other ritual prasaad (consecrated sweets), after which Akbar gently pulls the ornamental rope that is tied to the swing upon which rests (in crawling position) another golden image of Krishna, as an infant.18 Much later (around 2h 32m), after the break between father and son over Anarkali has led to civil war, we see Jodha again praying to Krishna as she awaits news from the battlefield.19 Aside from these brief vignettes there is almost no other depiction of religious belief or practice in the film: the sole exception is a brief scene (2h 39m) in which Anarkali is shown performing namaaz (and thus depicted as a Muslim) while under the protection of Salim’s Rajput friend and ally, the badly wounded Durjan Singh. Durjan, upon receiving the news that Salim will be executed in the place of Anarkali, pushes aside the ministrations of his doctors and states his intention to aid his friend; before he can do so, however, he succumbs to his wounds before an image of Durga. With his last breath he pronounces the word “Mata” (“mother,” in reference to Durga) and collapses; the garland that is draped around Durga instantly falls onto the head and neck of the expired Durjan, indicating the goddess’ approval of his righteous behaviour. For Asif (1960), the religious mixing of the Mughal court was a given—​a compelling feature of late sixteenth-​century courtly culture, requiring no explanation or commentary. If anything, the occasional allusions to this mixing afforded a sense of realism to the drama. For Gowariker, by contrast, religious mixing is the central problem: it is the question that must be answered. And the answer to it is a policy of pluralism, even if it is one that implicitly acknowledges Hindus as hegemons (Merivirta 2016, 460, 466; Sreenivas 2019). What gets lost here, however, amid the benign gestures to pluralistic tolerance is the way religion is presented, and this is as true of Jodhaa Akbar as it is of all the other films that populate the recent wave of “historicals” regardless of whether the characters are celebrated for their proto-​modern secularism or demonized for their medieval fundamentalism (e.g., compare the depiction of Akbar here and Bajirao in Bajirao Mastani with the Muslim sovereigns in Bajirao Mastani, Panipat, and Padmaavat). One can only be either a Hindu or a Muslim; there can be no ambiguity, no shared ground. Thus, even though we get a glimpse of a more eclectic, religiously ambiguous Akbar at moments in Jodhaa Akbar (e.g., when he experiences a kind of inner light during the Sufi sama, or when he appears to enlist 183

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Jodhaa in a moment of sun worship), in the end Akbar must pronounce himself a Muslim, a follower of Islam, who bows his head before all religions.20 In point of fact, as numerous historians have observed, Akbar’s personal religious faith was a matter of much speculation, both during his life and for centuries after. A close reading of the sources reveals that Akbar was fascinated by an array of meditative practices and held that no one form of institutionalized religion had a monopoly on pathways to mystical awakening (Richards 1978).

Film on history In 2006 two very different big-​budget films appeared that, while not “historicals” in the conventional sense, serve (to my mind) as a metahistorical commentary on the burgeoning cinematic appetite for themes from the “known” past.21 They are Lage Raho Munna Bhai by Rajkumar Hirani and Rang de Basanti by Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra. Both films were set in the present but featured the haunting presence of the past; and both were huge hits, earning rave reviews from the critics and huge profits at the box office. The former is a delightful comedy about a Mumbai underworld don, Munna Bhai of the title, who falls for a radio personality named Jhanvi. In order to impress Jhanvi, a professed Gandhian, Munna Bhai claims to be a professor of history (and in the process offers a multilayered send up of college history professors) and an expert on Mahatma Gandhi. When Jhanvi asks him to lecture about Gandhi to a group of elders who live with her and her father at their home, “Second Innings,” a kind of informal retirement community for old men neglected by their ingrate children, Munna Bhai is compelled to embark on a crash-​course of study about the life of the Mahatma. So rigorous are his efforts (undertaken in a stately if abandoned-​ looking “Gandhi Memorial Library”) that he begins having visions of the Mahatma (who wishes to be known by the more familiar “Bapu”), who in turn assists Munna Bhai in winning Jhanvi’s heart. Soon the couple are doling out advice to callers into Jhanvi’s radio show, “Good Morning Mumbai!”, the success of which leads to ordinary people performing unilateral acts of kindness across Mumbai. This becomes popularly known as “Gandhigiri”—​a play on the term gundagiri, or thuggish (gunda) behaviour. Rang de Basanti (2006), by contrast, was a more serious film about government corruption in defense procurements—​a topic of some controversy in the decade or two prior to the film (especially during the Bofors scandal, a kickback scheme for the purchase of 410 howitzers implicating high-​level Indian and Swedish politicians)—​interwoven with a parallel plot about the pre-​Independence revolutionaries of the Hindustan Republican Army (later known as the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association), a group that was famous for being willing to undertake, contra Gandhi, acts of revolutionary violence to propel India to freedom. This parallel plot from the past is introduced via the character of a young British woman, Sue, who comes to Delhi to direct a film about the freedom fighters. Sue had earlier learned this history from the diary of her grandfather, who (despite his own personal misgivings) had supervised the capture, torture, and execution of five of the revolutionaries. Upon her arrival in Delhi, Sue gains the help of students at Delhi University who quickly warm to the history and their individual parts, so much so that they decide to avenge the sudden death of one of their friends, an Indian Air Force pilot killed due to the shoddy parts procured for his MiG-​21 (another real-​life issue). Appalled by the official cover-​up, they decide to assassinate the Defense Minister and take over a broadcast booth in the government-​run All-​India Radio in order to expose the corruption. The film juxtaposes scenes from the present, as the friendships develop and the crisis unfolds, with sepia-​tinted scenes depicting the same students as the revolutionary freedom fighters in the late 1920s and early ’30s.

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As in the pre-​Independence past, the postcolonial government orders the paramilitary forces to eliminate the young revolutionaries. Though Lage Raho Munna Bhai and Rang de Basanti are unlike in almost every way—​and certainly in terms of genre—​they share one key feature: both do an exemplary job of dramatizing how the dedicated study of history can bring the past to life and inspire action in the present. Central to both plots is the hands-​on engagement with written materials—​books and pamphlets by and about Gandhi, held in the dusty and forgotten “Gandhi Memorial Library,” in the case of Munna Bhai; the original leather-​bound diary of James McKinley, in the case of Sue. Each film also possesses a subtheme of religion: in Lage Raho Munna Bhai, this takes the form of a contest between religion (Munna’s faith in the authenticity of his visions of Bapu) and science (in the role of a psychologist who insists Munna Bhai is delusional); in Rang de Basanti, a Hindu nationalist activist-​student, who at first is hostile to Sue’s group of actor-​friends, is recruited into the film project, gradually drawn into the thespian friend-​circle, and joins in the doomed fight against corruption. All this—​the parallel cinema engagement with the history between 1970 and 2000, the rise of blockbuster historicals and their binary either/​or handling of religion from the mid-​1990s onward, and the metahistorical commentary on the past in the present in two remarkable films of 2006—​ represents the historiographical backdrop for an unusual period drama released in late 2019, namely, Laal Kaptaan by Navdeep Singh.22 Laal Kaptaan tells the story of a mysterious bounty hunter who wanders the badlands of Bundelkhand on horseback. What the audience immediately perceives of the bounty hunter from the outset is that he is an ascetic of some sort. In an early scene he is referred to as “sannyasi,” or renouncer. Further, his imposing beard and long locks of matted hair (jatha), the rudraksha beads around his neck, his meagre clothing, the ash that he smears on his face in preparation for battle, and the ash-​sandalwood-​vermillion paste insignia that occasionally adorns his forehead,23 all make clear that he is a naga sadhu.24 This is underscored by the name people use to refer to him, “Gossain.” Strictly speaking, “gosain” (as the term is usually spelled) signifies membership in an ancient warrior ascetic order that claims descent from the ninth-​century Hindu sage Shankaracharya. But this “Gossain” is no ordinary Hindu ascetic. He wears a British uniform jacket that, it is later revealed, he has taken from a British soldier he had slain. Moreover, Gossain travels alone rather than in an akhara warband. He is unusual in another way as well: we learn that he has long been in pursuit of an Afghan warlord, one Rehmat Khan, who gradually is revealed to be (another spoiler alert!) our Gossain’s traitorous older brother. Thus, by implication, Gossain is himself revealed to be an Afghan. How an Afghan (=​Muslim) could become a gosain (=​ Hindu) is revealed through a series of grim, mostly black-​and-​white flashbacks to the Battle of Buxar in 1764, when the English East India Company defeated the combined forces of the erstwhile Mughal emperor, Shah Alam, Mir Qasim the renegade nawab of Company-​controlled Bengal, and the Awadh nawab, Shuja ud-​daula (in whose service Gossain’s father and brother were enlisted). To modern eyes, Gossain would appear to represent a confusion of categories: Afghans are Muslim, gosains are Hindu. However, the terms “Hindu” and “Muslim” are never uttered in the film. Insofar as religious affiliations are invoked, it is in less abstract ways, through ordinary language and practice. Thus, when Gossain is called to the establishment of Noor Bai, a tawaif or courtesan who has been disfigured by Rehmat Khan, he remarks (around 17:50) that “a soldier of Bhole is not at the beck and call of anyone.” She retorts by asking whether he is Bhole’s soldier or Bhole’s ghost. “Bhole” is a popular name for Siva, a “down to earth” god, not interested in elaborate rituals on his behalf. When he later happens upon a warband of his fellow gosains, they greet each other with the cry, “Bhole ki fauj!” (Siva’s army) and “Karegi mauj!” (revel together)

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(1:00:52). And later, as they go their separate ways, they shout “Har Har Mahadev!”25 This phrase is subject to varied interpretations, but is essentially another invocation of Siva as the “Great Lord” (Maha-​dev).26 Similarly, we get almost no clear indication of Rehmat Khan’s religious inclinations—​and indeed it becomes clear that such were his deeds in the past that he represses any thought of religion for fear of the punishment that awaits him in the afterlife. But in a flashback scene (beginning at 1:02:40) we see him and his begam (wife) arrive at what appears to be a Sufi shrine at Banda to make offerings in the hopes of conceiving a son. Later in time (but earlier in the film, beginning at minute 39) they visit an oracle or fortune-​teller named Laal Pari to learn the destiny (kismat, mastaq) of their child. Like many of the religious overtures in the film, Laal Pari resists classification. “Pari” is a dark otherworldly being (the English “fairy” and Persian “pari” are etymologically related). Her cave-​like abode beneath a rock outcropping is decorated with small Hindu goddess images, apparently brought by supplicants; but when the begam announces that they have come to her with great hopes, Laal Pari tells them that only God (significantly, she uses the Persian “Khuda” rather than the Arabic “Allah”)27 can give hope, she only gives the truth (sach). She then prophesies Rehmat Khan’s destiny rather than the child’s, and it is a dark one. As in the parallel cinema of the 1970s–​’90s, and in Mughal-​e-​Azam, the quotidian elements of lived religion in Laal Kaptaan speak for themselves and shore up the action of the revenge quest. The difference, of course, is that the main character, Gossain, is a warrior ascetic—​a naga sadhu—​an iconic, almost timeless figure from the remembered Hindu past.28 Rather than sermonizing about religious eclecticism, Singh (and fellow screenwriter Deepak Venkateshan) provides an overarching philosophical meditation on time and death (kaal and Kaal), and history (itihaas). This meditation, developed gradually throughout the film, is introduced via a voice-​over monologue at the very outset. As men are being hanged from a massive tree in the gritty aftermath of the 1764 Battle of Buxar, the narrator intones the following lines: The day a man is born, the Lord of Death [Kaal] sets out on a buffalo to reap his soul. A man lives as long as it takes the buffalo to arrive. This land had never seen such a time [kaal] as this. Death and destruction all around, the apocalypse of Siva the Destroyer [MahaKaal]. And armies. Armies upon armies. And buffaloes upon buffaloes. Time/​Death [Kaal] eats everything. The heavens, the underworld, the gods, even Brahma. Everything is destroyed in the dance of Siva [Mahaadev]. Only to be born again. Only to die again. An endless cycle of birth and death. Man endlessly crushed by the grinding wheel of time [kaal] itself. This is your history [itihaas]. Thus it was. Thus it is. Thus it will be.29 We then meet Gossain, closing in on a bounty (9:20). His prey, on the point of death, asks him, “what kind of thing are you?” Gossain replies, laughing, that he is Kaal. Later (at 1:33:50), when Gossain has caught up with his brother Rehmat Khan and is being tortured to reveal his identity, Gossain tells him, “I am your past.” And as he remarks at the end of the film (2:21:40), “No one is ever free of the past.”30 Laal Kaptaan is a revenge drama, of course, so it is only natural that the past catches up with the present—​otherwise how would the villain get his just desserts? But there is more here than meets the eye. The past catching up with the present is a leitmotif of many Bollywood blockbusters, from the epic drama Mother India (1950) to the masala comedy Amar Akbar Anthony (1977). It is especially characteristic of the countless films of the ’70s and ’80s that begin with underworld “Dons” whose initial acts of ruthless violence set their plots moving toward an invariably delicious, and 186

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deliciously complex, dénouement (this is how Amar Akbar Anthony begins; see also, e.g., Vidhaata [1982]). Such films often include musical numbers that serve as a kind of reflexive commentary. This is perhaps best captured in Vidhaata, in which the hit song “Haathon ki Chand Lakeeron ka” (A Few Lines on the Palm) by Suresh Ishwar Wadkar features a debate over destiny and free will between the main protagonist and his lifelong friend; the latter is a firm believer in luck or fate (taqdeer), whereas the protagonist insists on “planning” (tadbeer), determining one’s own destiny. Wadkar describes destiny as a game and toward the end of the song introduces the line, “we will adopt the disguise of the fakir, and we will see the game of destiny” (ham bhes badalke fakiron ka /​ dekhenge khel taqdiron ka). The animating idea here is that the fakir (lit. “mendicant” and a generic term for ascetic), having stepped outside of conventional social and kinship ties, is better equipped to view the world as it really is, from a detached vantage point—​not the world as warped by emotional bonds. This gesture to the sharper vision of the ascetic is precisely what Navdeep Singh develops in Laal Kaptaan, as the protagonist Gossain becomes Time/​Death itself. Still, the manner in which this is expressed, via the dual nature of Kaal, death and time, as a structure of history, itihaas, points to the inescapability (and unbearable weight) of the past—​and the tendency of the past to protrude into the present—​as an abiding preoccupation of Hindi cinema. In the wake of the linguistic turn, and largely at the prompting of Rosenstone (1995) and Hayden White (1988), historians have warmed to the idea that film—​the image in motion—​has much to offer history, and not just for illustrative purposes (to make the strangeness of the past familiar for students) or even as a primary source for history (film’s “explicit” historiographical dimension), but in the hopes that it might inspire historians to think about and “do” history in a new way. This chapter has examined Hindi feature films with historical content—​though, as the discussion shifted from history and historiography to metahistory and ontology, what counted as a historical widened considerably, to include films as varied as Mother India and Vidhaata. Mother India has been the focus of much attention in film studies, and even in history (the film was a riposte to Katherine Mayo’s 1927 book by the same name, which criticized Indians, especially for their treatment of women [Sinha, 2006]). Vidhaata, by contrast—​despite its excellent soundtrack, the fact that it was the highest grossing Hindi film of 1982, and was remade in Kannada, Telugu, and Tamil—​was quickly forgotten. Few observers would regard Vidhaata as a historical film (indeed, I am willing to bet that this chapter constitutes the first time the film has received any scholarly attention), but I have included reference to it here inasmuch as it engages in nuanced reflection on the relation between past, present, and future—​on history as destiny. Are Indian audiences—​at the risk of overgeneralizing—​invariably drawn to films for what might be termed their karmic temporality, to the notion that the past action persists across time and exercises a profound influence in shaping the lives and destinies of those in the present? It is worth recalling that the song “Haathon ki Chand Lakeeron ka,” cited earlier from Vidhaata, features a debate over destiny and free will. Though the final dénouement in Vidhaata suggests that the sinews of fate are inescapable, that one must in the end pay for one’s sins (a point that the director, Subhash Ghai, underscores in his earlier “reincarnation” film, Karz [1980]), one can point to other films that emphasize the importance of determining one’s own destiny. Two such films are Baazi (1950) and Hum Hindustani (1962), and both films generated classic songs that emphasize the notion of individual agency and turning one’s back on the past—​“Tadbeer se Bigadi Hui Taqdeer” (“with forethought, overcome your ruined fate”; music by R.D. Burman, lyrics by Sahir Ludhianvi) and “Chhodo Kal ki Batein” (“Let go of Yesterday’s Concerns”; music by Usha Khanna, lyrics by Prem Dhawan), respectively. The refrain of the latter is especially evocative: “Forget

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the past, yesterday’s old. Together we will write a new story in the new era.” One can almost sense Reinhart Koselleck lurking in the wings, nodding approvingly.31 These films—​and Hum Hindustani especially—​embrace the future-​oriented Nehruvian mission of building a new India with gleaming temples to science and engineering: especially big dams, nuclear power, railways, roads, and central planning (see Khilnani 1999 for Nehru’s “idea of India”; and Srivastava 2004, 2025–​2026, for a discussion of the “Five-​Year-​Plan [or FYP] Hero”).32 The neuzeit (Nehru-​zeit?) temporal registers of “Chhodo Kal ki Batein” notwithstanding, there can be no denying that films with karmic plots exercise significant and, arguably, growing popular appeal in India. Indeed, the “reincarnation film”—​arguably the epitome of karmic temporality33—​though it has its origins in the gothic noir of the 1940s and ’50s (see Waheed in particular), has become a genre unto itself in recent decades. Noteworthy offerings under this heading are Mahal (1949), Madhumati (1958), Neel Kamal (1968), Mehbooba (1976), the aforementioned Karz (1980), Karan Arjun (1995), Om Shanti Om (2007)—​the title of which gestures to a hit song of that name from Karz—​and Ek Paheli Leela (2015). Some of these are romances and feature long-​dead lovers discovering each other’s reincarnated selves in the present, usually with a dose of unbelieving rationalism that ultimately withers in the face of incontrovertible evidence of reincarnation. The more usual plotline, especially in recent decades, is centred on a reincarnated protagonist righting a grievous past wrong—​though these films too invariably involve a romantic angle. Either way, Sarah Waheed’s temporal observation for Mahal seems broadly applicable: “[u]‌nlike much of the Nehruvian-​socialist inspired dramas of the 1950s, its resolution is not found in the pursuit of progress, for there is no moving forward when return of the dead is imminent.”34 The appeal of karmic content in Hindi film will come as no surprise to many readers, given the prominence of karma (especially in the West) as a concept indelibly imprinted on India.35 Should historians take an “implicit” cue from Hindi film and begin reimagining history in terms of karmic temporality—​even at the risk of introducing a new, negative historicism? Alternatively, operating on a historiographical register, should historians explore the appeal of karmic temporality for what it “explicitly” reveals, or at least suggests, about shifting understandings of the past in India? Pushing this further, how might the popular appeal of karmic temporality be understood in relation to developments in theoretical-​cum-​philosophical circles over the past two decades regarding the ability of historians to experience (or re-​experience) the past in the present, whether through “acting out” or “working through” trauma, or through the “presence” of the past (“sublime” or otherwise) transmitted miraculously (or quasi-​mystically) in the surviving traces of past actions and events (Spiegel 2019, S17). More broadly still, is karmic temporality yet another instance of the challenge to “the notion of the necessary rupture between past and present that Michel de Certeau stipulated as the founding gesture of modern historiography.”36 On multiple registers, then, Hindi film is trying to say something about Indian history and the relationship of past and present. It remains to be seen whether historians will listen.

Notes 1 I wish to record my thanks to the editors of this volume as well as Aparna Vaidik Navdeep Singh, and Kailash C. Jha for their valuable comments and suggestions on an earlier draft of this chapter. 2 As the title of this chapter indicates, I will not be discussing the other major regional film industries of South Asia, including in Tamil, Telugu, and Punjabi. Nor will I take up television, where there has been abundant growth in recent decades, including serials with significant historical (and religious) content. By “historical film,” I mean films that seek to portray important episodes in history. I include “period drama,” where the narrative is explicitly fictional but situated in the past.

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History and Hindi film 3 “Bollywood” is, not surprisingly, a contested term, since it rhetorically implies that the Hindi film industry, centred in Bombay (now Mumbai), is creatively derivative of Hollywood. See Ganti 2013, introduction. The same holds for Tollywood, Kollywood, Lollywood, etc. 4 My main recollections of the audience reactions were, first, the astonished laughter occasioned by Kingsley’s muscular Gandhi when he first appeared bare-​chested in the Motihari jail cell during the Champaran Satyagraha; second, the annoyance with the on-​screen prominence given to the array of Westerners who swarmed the mahatma from start to finish—​in part, a directorial choice that reflected the desire to connect with Western audiences; and third, the widespread dissatisfaction with the choice of Roshan Seth in the role of the dazzlingly handsome Jawaharlal Nehru, and the whimsical Saeed Jaffrey as Vallabhbhai (“Sardar”) Patel, the “Iron Man” of India. 5 Attenborough had, it should be noted, played the role of James Outram in Satyajit Ray’s previously mentioned Shatranj ke Khilari, so he was no stranger to the parallel cinema scene in India. 6 Whether this is how Gandhi might have wanted his life story to be told is another matter. The bare-​all quality of his autobiography (first published in serial form between 1925 and 1929) was designed to convince the reader that even the weakest and most cowardly person could find courage and purpose through a commitment to satyagraha and nonviolence. 7 One suspects this caricature was a requirement of the Indian government, which heavily funded the project; ironically and perhaps intentionally, Attenborough gives Jinnah a shock of white hair that is reminiscent of non-​other than Indira Gandhi. 8 Historians only began working in earnest on Partition in the mid/​late 1980s, partly as a result of how the anti-​Sikh violence (especially in Delhi) in the wake of Indira Gandhi’s assassination on October 31, 1984 drew attention to the unresolved legacy of 1947. See e.g. Butalia (2000), Menon and Bhasin (1998), and Pandey (2001). 9 He even takes refuge in the village mandir when his fellow villagers learn of his treachery, a scene that can only be read as a filmic sermon on the capaciousness of Hindu charity and forgiveness. Betrayal and redemption by a Muslim character has become something of a trope in recent Bollywood films, part of a broader marginalization of Muslims in culture and politics since the 1980s. See Sreenivas (2019). 10 The name of the village, “Champaner,” is likely a play on “Champaran,” the Bihar district where Gandhi mounted his 1917 indigo satyagraha. I’m grateful to Aparna Vaidik for mentioning this, and for the reference to Raval (2001). 11 It is worth noting, in this context, that the psychology and history of cricket in India had attracted the attention of two of India’s leading public intellectuals-​cum-​historians: Ashis Nandy (1990) and Ramachandra Guha (2003). Nandy’s sly claim that “Cricket is an Indian game accidentally discovered by the English” may have inspired Guha’s later work, but unquestionably it lurked at the heart of Lagaan as well. 12 For more on this dynamic, see Said (1978 and 1993). 13 As noted later, the exact identity of Jodhaa became the topic of much discussion. 14 Though Jodhaa is regarded as Akbar’s wife in popular culture and oral tradition, possibly due to a casual reference in James Tod’s influential Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan (Tod [1829] 1902, 691), numerous historians and commentators (e.g. Khan 2011, 137; Merivirta 2016, 456–​461), and indeed the filmmaker himself in the obligatory opening historical disclaimer, have pointed out that while Akbar married several Rajput women, none of them was named Jodhaa. Rather, it was Akbar’s son, Salim (Jahangir), who married one Jodha or Jodh bai of Jodhpur, better known as “Manmati” and “Jagat Gosain,” the daughter of “Motaraja” Udai Singh of Marwar. This gave rise to some controversy on the eve of Gowariker’s film’s release in 2008—​though it occasioned no controversy in the 1960 film by Asif, which also featured a “Jodha” as Akbar’s Rajput wife. 15 The quotes provided here, it should be noted, are based on the English subtitles to the film, provided by Nasreen Munni Kabir. Not surprisingly, the Hindi-​Urdu is subtler, particularly with respect to the phrase in the final sentence that is translated as religious grounds. The original Hindi-​Urdu is: “zindagi ki khushiyon ko batwaaraa shankh aur aazaan ki aawaaz se tay nahin hota,” for which a literal translation would be, “the partitioning of life’s happiness cannot be arranged according to the sound of the aazaan or the conch” (emphasis added). 16 Like Jodhaa, Anarkali is widely believed to have existed—​though intriguingly (especially given the confusion surrounding the precise identity of Jodhaa in relation to Akbar’s son Salim/​Jahangir) insofar as evidence exists regarding the legend of Anarkali, it suggests that she was one of Akbar’s favourites and that she was punished by the emperor for having glanced lovingly at or even strayed into an affair

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with his son. See the early seventeenth-​century reports of palace rumour by the East India Company indigo merchant William Finch, as well as that by Edward Terry, chaplain to Thomas Roe’s diplomatic mission to the Mughal court (Foster 1921, 166 and 330, respectively). Attesting to the historicality of the legend and punishment, the location of the subterranean chamber supposedly containing Anarkali’s body is marked by a famous tomb named “Maqbarah Anarkali” (the tomb of Anarkarli). Allegedly built by Jahangir in the early seventeenth century, the structure was later, under British rule, used as a church and subsequently turned into the Punjab State Records Office. According to hearsay, the grounds are still frequented by star-​crossed lovers—​of which there is apparently no shortage in modern Pakistani–​Punjabi society. Departing from the legend, Asif has his cinematic Akbar secretly release Anarkali on the condition that she is banished from the realm: the film ends as an emotionally shell-​shocked Anarkali and her devoted mother, also a servant-​slave of the court, emerge from a deep subterranean passage into a verdant, almost heavenly landscape, far from the cutthroat duplicity of the Lahore palace. See Waheed (2017, 5–​6) for a discussion of Anarkali in the context of Muslim entombment and the memory of female abduction during Partition. 1950s–​60s spellings generally eschewed the second “a” that was later adopted for Jodhaa’s name. Notably, Anarkali herself contributes to this scene by singing a popular Hindu devotional thumri featuring an encounter between Radha and Krishna, “Mohe Panghat Pe” (“seduction at the well”). See Dwyer (2006, 116). Earlier (at 2h 12m), when called upon to ritually present her husband with his sword as he departed for the battlefield, Jodha had wavered, torn between her role as mother and as wife—​or, as Akbar angrily phrased it, between aulaad (from Persian, meaning children) and suhaag (from Sanskrit, connoting the auspicious state of Hindu wifehood). Confronted by Jodhaa’s indecision, Akbar wiped the sindoor from her forehead, signifying her happily married status. The shock of this gesture by her husband brings her to her senses. She picks up the sword, runs to Akbar, and hands it to him, instructing him to happily slay their son and that when he returns he can restore her sindoor with drops of Salim’s blood. Discussions of Jodha in Asif’s film include Dwyer (2006, 115–​116); Khan (2011, 141); Merivirta (2016, 459–​460). Similarly, in Bajirao Mastani, the plot (and the political cultural context of the early twenty-​firstcentury) requires that Mastani be depicted as a high-​status Muslim princess of Bundelkhand—​even though there is little known about her religious beliefs and considerable uncertainty as to her social status and place of origin (Rao 1940). What is known is that she (1) was a skilled rider and performer; (2) was considered Muslim by the brahman orthodoxy at Pune; which (3) engendered much scandal in the empire and heartache for the couple in the late 1730s; and 4) that she and Bajirao gave their son, born in 1734, a Hindu name, Krishnarao. It is unclear when the Persianate title “Shamsher Bahadur” was bestowed upon the child. These films differ from the “metahistorical film” discussed by Burgoyne insofar as they rely on an entirely fictitious plot layered onto the actions and/​or philosophical prescriptions of prominent historical actors. But I would argue that they share the “revisioning” goal of Rosenstone (1995) in that they explore new ways to calibrate the relationship between past and present, and thus offer a new way of engaging with history as vision. The act of seeing, it should be noted, is key to both Lage Raho Munna Bhai and Rang de Basanti. See the useful discussion in Burgoyne (2008, 125–​147). As noted in the introduction, I was tangentially involved in the film, having been asked by the director’s team to comment on the screenplay, mainly on the strength of my 2006 book, Warrior Ascetics and Indian Empires. Sometimes a tripundra, sometimes urdhvapundara, and sometimes—​during the flashbacks that punctuate the action and slowly reveal his backstory—​a combination of both. Naga comes from the Sanskrit nagna, naked; and sadhu from sadhana, to concentrate, self-​discipline. This is a common war cry among gosains, and is also used later in the film by Maratha warriors while attacking the camp of Rehmat Khan and a Company detachment under the command of Munro. I am grateful to Navdeep Singh for clarifying the specific wording of the call-​and-​response greeting, especially “karegi mauj.” One prominent interpretation is that har comes from harana, to destroy, and refers to Siva’s role as the creator-​destroyer of the universe. Mahadev, meanwhile, is another name for Siva, the greatest of the gods. The phrase har har Mahadev is thus usually taken either as an invocation of “Siva the destroyer” or as a plea, “Siva, destroy our sorrows.” A third common translation is based on a more ordinary meaning of har as “all” or “everyone.” Here the phrase would proclaim, “Lord Siva, lord of all.”

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History and Hindi film 27 On the politics of the semantic shift toward Arabic terminology among many Muslims in India and, especially, Pakistan in recent decades, see Ahmed (2016). 28 Space does not permit a detailed discussion of this point, but for an example of the prevailing understanding, see the coffee table book, Bedi (1991). The rhetoric is captured in the following excerpt in India Today: For over 2,500 years the country has been the home of the largest body of organized monks. Known as sadhu (the Hindu nomenclature for monk) or as sanyasi, yogi, muni, swami, rishi, tapasvi, tyagi, baba and guru, they are the votaries of the Vedic spiritual heritage and represent the essence of Hindu spiritualism. (Bedi and Bedi 1992) For discussion, see Pinch (2006, esp. 189). 29 This mainly follows the Hindi rather than the English subtitles, which necessarily elide the usage of kaal for both time and death, and Siva as the Lord of Death/​Time (Mahakaal). It is also worth noting that the more technical meaning of the term itihaas, which is usually translated as “history,” is “thus it was.” This signals, to this viewer at least, that the screenwriters were consciously making a point about the ontology of history. 30 The term for “past” in these phrases is “bita hua kal” and “ghuzare hue kal,” lit. “spent yesterday” and “past yesterday.” Kal can mean either tomorrow or yesterday, depending on the verbal context, and is related to the abstract noun, kaal. 31 Koselleck (1985); and for a lucid discussion of Koselleck’s understanding of temporality, periodization, and modernity (neuzeit), see Rosen (Chapter 2 in this volume). 32 I am grateful to Aparna Vaidik for sharpening the points raised in this and the following paragraph, correcting my occasionally errant translations, and for suggesting films and film criticism. 33 On the development of rebirth in karma, see Obeyesekere (2002, esp. chap. 1). 34 Waheed (20017, 7); emphasis added. Waheed contrasts (11) the inexorable gravitational pull of the past at work in Mahal with Nehru’s 1947 “Tryst with Destiny” speech, especially: “A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance.” 35 But see Obeyesekere (2002, esp. chap. 2), for a persuasive case for multiple origins. 36 Spiegel (2019, S17). Spiegel is referring to de Certeau’s L’écriture de l’histoire (1977), translated into English in 1988 as The Writing of History.

Reference list Ahmed, Alia P. 2016. “Islam’s Lesser Muslims: When ‘Khuda’ became ‘Allah’.” Lobe Log, September 2. https://​lobe​log.com/​isl​ams-​les​ser-​musl​ims-​when-​khuda-​bec​ame-​allah/​. Alam, Muzaffar. 2004. The Languages of Political Islam. India 1200–​1800. London: Hurst and Company. Athar Ali, M. 1980. “Sulhi kul and the Religious Ideas of Akbar.” Proceedings of the Indian History Congress 41: 326–​339. Bedi, Ramesh. 1991. Sadhus: The Holy Men of India. New Delhi: Brijbasi Printers. Bedi, Ramesh, and Rajesh Bedi. 1992. “Sadhus: Ramesh and Rajesh Bedi Unravel the Mystique that Surrounds the Sanyasis of India.” India Today, January 31. www.ind​iato​day.in/​magaz​ine/​soci​ety-​the-​arts/​ books/​story/​19920​131-​sad​hus-​ram​esh-​and-​raj​esh-​bedi-​unra​vel-​the-​mysti​que-​that-​surrou​nds-​the-​sanya​ sis-​of-​india-​765​773-​2013-​06-​27. Bond, Ruskin. 1978. A Flight of Pigeons. New Delhi: Penguin. Burgoyne, Robert. 2008. The Hollywood Historical Film. Oxford: Blackwell. Butalia, Urvashi. 2000. The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India. Durham: Duke University Press. de Certeau, Michel. 1988. The Writing of History. Translated by Tom Conley. New York: Columbia University Press. Desai, Anita. 1985. “The Rage for the Raj: How the Festival of India lost India.” New Republic 193, no. 22 (November 25): 26–​30. Dwyer, Rachel. 2006. Filming the Gods: Religion and Indian Cinema. London: Routledge. Fischer, Louis. 1954. Gandhi: His Life and Message for the World. New York: Penguin, Mentor.

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William R. Pinch Foster, William, ed. 1921. Early Travels in India, 1583–​1619. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ganti, Tejaswini. 2013. Bollywood: A Guidebook to Popular Hindi Cinema. London, New York: Routledge. Grenier, Richard. 1983. “The Gandhi Nobody Knows.” Commentary 75, no. 3 (March): 59–​72. www.com​ ment​ary.org/​artic​les/​rich​ard-​gren​ier/​the-​gan​dhi-​nob​ody-​knows/​. Guha, Ramachandra. 2003. A Corner of a Foreign Field: The Indian History of a British Sport. London: Picador. Khan, Shahnaz. 2011. “Recovering the Past in Jodhaa Akbar: Masculinities, Femininities and Cultural Politics in Bombay Cinema.” Feminist Review 99: 131–​146. Khilnani, Sunil. 1999. The Idea of India. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux. Koselleck, Reinhart. 1985. Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. Translated by Keith Tribe. Cambridge: MIT Press. “Letters from Readers” (with Grenier’s reply). 1983. Commentary 75, no. 4 (July): 10–​23. www.com​ment​ary. org/​artic​les/​rea​der-​lett​ers/​gan​dhi/​. Majumdar, Rochana. 2021. Art Cinema and India’s Forgotten Futures: Film and History in the Postcolony. New York: Columbia University Press. Menon, Ritu, and Kamala Bhasin. 1998. Borders and Boundaries: How Women Experienced the Partition of India. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Merivirta, Raita. 2016. “Historical Film and Hindu–​Muslim Relations in Post-​Hindutva India: The Case of Jodhaa-​Akbar.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 33, no. 5: 456–​477. https://​doi.org/​10.1080/​10509​ 208.2015.1094​331. Nandy, Ashis. 1983. The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism. Delhi: Oxford University. Nandy, Ashis. 1990. The Tao of Cricket: On Games of Destiny and the Destiny of Games. New York: Oxford University Press. O’Hanlon, Rosalind. 2007. “Kingdom, Household and Body: History, Gender and Imperial Service under Akbar.” Modern Asian Studies 41, no. 5 (September): 889–​923. Obeyesekere, Gananath. 2002. Imagining Karma: Ethical Transformation in Amerindian, Buddhist, and Greek Rebirth. Berkeley: University of California Press. Pandey, Gyanendra. 2001. Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and History in India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pinch, William R. 2006. Warrior Ascetics and Indian Empires. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rao, Vasant Dinanath. 1940. “Historical Setting of a Grievous Episode—​The Tragedy of Mastani.” Indian Historical Records Commission: Proceedings XVII (December): 47–​51. Raval, Sheela. 2001. “The Nuts and Bolts of the Epic–​Lagaan.” India Today, June 25. www.ind​iato​day.in/​ magaz​ine/​cover-​story/​story/​20010​625-​the-​nuts-​and-​bolts-​of-​the-​epic-​lag​aan-​774​998-​2001-​06-​24. Richards, J. F. 1978. “The Formation of Imperial Authority under Akbar and Jahangir.” In Kingship and Authority in South Asia, edited by J. F. Richards, 252–​286. Madison. University of Wisconsin South Asian Studies. Rosenstone, Robert A. 1995. Visions of the Past: The Challenge of Film to Our Idea of History. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Roy, Arundhati. [1994] 2019. “The Great Indian Rape Trick.” Later published in Arundhati Roy, My Seditious Heart: Collected Nonfiction. Chicago: Haymarket Books. Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon. Said, Edward. 1993. “The Pleasures of Orientalism.” In Culture and Imperialism, by Edward Said, 132–​161. London: Chatto & Windus. Sen, Mala. 1991. India’s Bandit Queen: The True Story of Phoolan Devi. London: Pandora/​HarperCollins. Sinha, Mrinalini. 2006. Specters of Mother India: The Global Restructuring of an Empire. Durham: Duke University Press. Spiegel, Gabrielle M. 2019. “David Carr’s Theory of Experiencing the Past.” History and Theory 57, no. 51 (January): S15–​S19. https://​doi.org/​10.1111/​hith.12095. Sreenivas, Deepa. 2019. “The Muslim ‘Other’: Figures of Evil and Charisma from Popular Visual Culture in India.” Tasveer Ghar: A Digital Archive of South Asian Popular Visual Culture, December 8. www.tasve​ ergh​arin​dia.net/​essay/​mus​lim-​other-​vis​ual-​india.html. Srivastava, Sanjay. 2004. “Voice, Gender and Space in Time of Five-​Year Plans: The Idea of Lata Mangeshkar.” Economic and Political Weekly 39, no. 20 (May 15–​21): 2019–​2028. Streusand, Douglas E. 1989. The Formation of the Mughal Empire. Delhi: Oxford University Press.

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History and Hindi film Tod, James. [1829] 1902. Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan, or the Central and Western Rajpoot States of India. Coronation Edition. Vol. 1. Calcutta: Society for the Resuscitation of Indian Literature. Vivekanandan, Jayshree. 2014. “Strategy, Legitimacy, and the Imperium: Framing the Mughal Strategic Discourse.” In India’s Grand Strategy: History, Theory, Cases, edited by Kanti Bajpai, Saira Basit, and V. Krishnappa, 63–​85. New Delhi: Routledge. Waheed, Sarah. 2017. “Beyond the Wounded Archive: Partition’s Hauntings and Bombay Cinema.” Postcolonial Text 12, no. 1: 1–​19. White, Hayden. 1988. “Historiography and Historiophoty.” The American Historical Review 93, no. 5 (December): 1193–​1199. https://​doi.org/​10.2307/​1873​534.

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13 HORRIFIC HISTORY AND BLACK ALIVENESS Travel and Liberatory Loopholes in Lovecraft Country Lisa Woolfork

“Black history is black horror,” observes Tananarive Due, professor of Horror and Afrofuturism at UCLA (Burgin 2019). And indeed, Black horror permeates the HBO television series Lovecraft Country (2020), a multi-​layered, culturally rich production adapted from Matt Ruff’s dark fantasy novel of the same name. The series is a radical reinterpretation of the pioneering early twentieth-​century horror fiction created by self-​proclaimed White supremacist HP Lovecraft. However, the series subverts its source material even as it inverts Lovecraft’s vitriolic racism. That racism is well documented, beyond Lovecraft’s 1912 poem describing the origins of Black people as: A beast they wrought, in semi-​human figure, Fill’d it with vice, and call’d the thing a NIGGER. “Science fiction horror” or “cosmic horror” are hybrid genres used to categorize much of Lovecraft’s work (Emrys 2018; Littman 2018). The Lovecraft Country series leverages conventions of multiple genres1—​horror (including Lovecraftian), history, and sci-​fi/​fantasy—​to tell a story through a distinctly Black creative and reflective lens. This treatment informs historical understanding through multiple concepts and critical approaches: pleasure activism, Afro-​nostalgia, Black aliveness, otherwise possibility, Afro-​pessimism, and Afrofuturism. In particular, the story reveals the liberatory possibilities of Black women from dual marginalization, realized within and beyond convention. A project driven by Black writers and creatives on both sides of the camera, Lovecraft Country places a Black family at the centre of an epic quest that takes place across geography, time, and space. It uses the exact menagerie of phantasmic and destructive beasts for which Lovecraft himself was best known. However, the monsters in Lovecraft Country do not stand in for White supremacists as much as they stand alongside them, in a grim yet expansive account of Black life in 1950s America.

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A framework for surpassing horror Lovecraft Country’s depictions of Black embodiment invite a reconsideration of the explicit physical violence it depicts. Bloody horror genre conventions are abundant in the series. Scenes of torture and abuse include mutilation carried out by fictional Lovecraftian monsters and Harriet Beecher Stowe caricatures, ritual evisceration, racist medical experimentation, and bloody body swaps. Characters are destroyed under conditions of war, beaten and burned by White racists, and slowly exsanguinated. As one might expect of a horror series produced in part by Jordan Peele, creator of the popular Black horror films Get Out (2018) and Us (2019), bloody, gore, and spectacular violence are depicted in vivid and chilling detail. Yet even as the show employs a Black-​centred narrative to depict racial terror—​quotidian, extreme, and phantasmagoric—​it also draws on perspectives collectively described as “pleasure activism.” This critical approach was first developed by Joan Morgan in her 2015 essay Why We Get Off: Moving Towards a Black Feminist Politics of Pleasure, and further explored by adrienne maree brown in her 2019 collection, Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good. Pleasure activism shifts attention to Black women’s pleasure, and shines a revitalizing light on a previously neglected aspect of Black women’s lives. The concentration on Black women’s pleasure offers a counterpoint to narratives about Black women’s abjection. Applied to Lovecraft Country, it enables a fruitful reading of the series’ depiction of the Black body against and beyond the generic expectations of the horror genre. In this light, Lovecraft Country is as invested in illustrating Black liberation from racist terror as it is in depicting it. A Black feminist liberationist lens can help us recognize the ways in which readings of the Black body as metaphor can shift from the grim reality of oppression toward the possibility of escape. The Black body is the site of viscerally depicted physical violence (both spectral and systemic). But the series also offers a more holistic view of Black life in 1950s Chicago, a community that Saidiya Hartman calls a “black city-​within-​the-​city” (2019, 17). It is quite possible to imagine, for instance, Gwendolyn Brooks’ Maud Martha and her ordinary beauty flourishing in a city rife with the feelings of Black intimacy. Scholarship that examines Black pleasure and nostalgia is helpful in extending a liberatory-​ centred interpretation of the Black body. In addition to the work of Joan Morgan and adrienne maree brown, Badia Ahad-​Legardy’s Afro-​Nostalgia: Feeling Good in Contemporary Black Culture is particularly pertinent. This groundbreaking study considers the ways in which scholarly interpretations of Black history have been overdetermined by trauma and tragedy. As Ahad-​ Legardy argues, historical nostalgia is not possible for Black people because “centuries of racial violence, from which no period can be culled to inspire good feelings in the present” seem to deny Black people that very opportunity (2021, 2). At the same time, though, nostalgia is a vital component of Black interiority, and Ahad-​Legardy posits that “afro-​nostalgia” can be used as a tool to excavate “the seemingly dissonant concepts of historical memory, blackness, affect, joy and thriving” (4). The goal of her study is to “unfold the capacious ways that historical nostalgia is fully operative in contemporary black cultural life as a means of historical pleasure” (5). Ahad-​Legardy’s distinctly Black articulation of nostalgia resonates with Lovecraft Country. Set in the summer of 1955, the series is a rich admixture of intergenerational, speculative, horror, and travel fiction. It centres on Atticus Freeman, a young Black man visiting Chicago to find his missing father, Montrose, who has disappeared in mysterious circumstances. Atticus enlists the support of his uncle George and aunt Hippolyta, who are occupied in the production of The Safe Negro Travel Guide, a publication to assist Black motorists in navigating the country’s segregated

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accommodations. The mystery involves sorcery, rape, White supremacy, ghosts, monsters—​and the additional quotidian oppression Black people endure. Lovecraft Country is a lush historical series that rewards careful viewing. For example, scenes in the Freeman home or garage include a variety of artefacts placed to evoke Afro-​nostalgia among astute viewers. Yet it is no easy task to undertake a nostalgic or joyous approach to a historical period when Black people were formally denied full rights and consistently deprived of equality. As Ahad-​ Legardy notes: While historical nostalgia in its more conventional form leaves little in the way of romantic recall for the African-​descended, Afro-​Nostalgia calls for its own redemptive remembrances, rooted in the imaginative landscape of the historical and the pleasure-​seeking desires of the present. (26) A form of this “redemptive remembrance” emerges in Lovecraft Country. The series year 1955 was one of significant trauma for Black American communities, as the tragic murder of Emmett Till galvanized a new wave of Black civil rights activism and advocacy. Lovecraft Country piqued the curiosity and interest of a Black viewing audience intrigued by “the seemingly dissonant concepts of historical memory, blackness, affect, joy and thriving” (4) that Ahad-​Legardy describes in her work. Black-​crafted resources like the Lovecraft Country Syllabus (a digital project that included study guides for each episode), and Black-​led podcasts like For All Nerds and The Black Girl’s Guide to Menopause exemplify works that view the Black past with enthusiasm and celebration. Such Black-​led initiatives illustrate what scholar Grant Farred terms vernacular intellectualism: “a complex representation of the voices from below the margins speaking at once to, within, and against the hegemonic order” (2003, 10). These are examples of how digital media has made the ivory tower more porous, releasing its scholarly tools for popular use. The Langston League’s Lovecraft Country Unofficial Syllabus2 exemplifies the intellectual ferment thriving outside the academy. Similarly, For All Nerds, a weekly audio podcast celebrating “Blerdery” (Black nerdery) created The Safe Negro Podcast Show, a series that paralleled the ten episodes of Lovecraft Country. These two vernacular intellectual expressions walk curious Black viewers through the door that Lovecraft Country opens. The series is designed to relish Black America’s history and witness its horrors, encouraging a view of the past that can be gazed upon in joy or wonder rather than shame. In this way, the series is aligned with Ahad-​Legardy’s “afro-​nostalgia” which “functions as a form of memory work in the service of creating a public affective archive not generally assigned to black subjects” (2021, 21). The syllabus and podcast guide the inquisitive viewer in interpreting the signs that they may have first overlooked on the screen. They model, generate, and reward a type of curiosity about the Black past, even if one must sift through on-​screen horrors to find its treasures. While the series underscores the racist horrors of 1950s America, Black people are also shown to thrive. By means of historical embellishment, the series invites viewers to peer into a loophole and engage in the pleasures of Afro-​nostalgia as they simultaneously witness Black bodies suffer physical, social, and emotional violence on the broader stage of the series. The seventh episode, “I Am,” exemplifies this dual perspective. The grotesqueries of quotidian anti-​Blackness are coupled with those of imaginary creatures in the body of a middle-​aged Black woman who is at once wife, mother, guide, and discoverer. “Loophole” seems an appropriate term that combines the fugitivity of Harriet Jacobs’ “loophole of retreat” (in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl) and 196

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the Afrofuturist wormhole (a portal to another dimension) that transports the episode’s protagonist into the multiverse. In Lovecraft Country the loophole is both a space and a representational strategy. As Michelle Burnham notes in her essay “Loopholes of Resistance,” the loophole as Jacobs describes it: provides a strategic site for concealment even as it masks its own location. This spatial loophole becomes for Jacobs a means for escape from slavery, and her manipulation of textual loopholes in dominant discourse allows her narrative to escape, as well, from the constraints which her culture necessarily imposes on it. (1993, 53) Jacobs’ narrative loophole explores the simultaneity of physical confinement and fugitivity both within (as she becomes captive in her grandmother’s home) and just beyond (unbeknownst and inaccessible to those seeking to capture her) slavery’s reach. Similarly, this loophole serves multiple functions within Lovecraft Country. It is the wormhole/​portal to alternative worlds, and also the indirect means through which the Black body can be seen to physically index the contours of abstract and tangible violence while celebrating Black aliveness. Corporeality and the physicality of flesh are invoked throughout the series as modalities to process meanings of and for liberation. The representations indicate an alternative possibility (to borrow from Ashon Crawley) of Black embodiment beyond the violence typically meted out to Black bodies in the horror genre. Lovecraft Country works to enlarge this loophole as a viewing praxis: an arrangement to merge pleasure and terror, and connect history and horror through the Black body, which acts as a hinge between brutality and balm. Historical fiction is a popular vehicle for nostalgia. Its representations can offer a return to an idealized time via language that suggests a degree of aesthetic, and authentic, primogeniture. Words such as “vintage” or “classic” are used to describe objects and aspects of a bygone era, uncontaminated by contemporaneity. Use of these terms is often an index for sanguine narratives of the past. We can escape from the complexity of our current moment by using historicity to imagine an earlier time as a source of pleasure or fantasy. For Blacks, Chicago in the 1950s can provide a particular form of memory practice rooted in an idealized culture of sociality and reciprocity. Michelle Boyd calls this phenomenon “Jim Crow nostalgia.” In her words, the segregation era articulates a broader uncertainty about, and dissatisfaction with, the fruits of the civil rights movement. It celebrates the image of insular black communities in segregated spaces during a time when racial boundaries were less frequently crossed in work and social life. It therefore functions as an implicit criticism of civil rights strategies and integrationism and expresses a conservative racial separatism that emphasizes self-​help and racial uplift rather than demands on the state. (2018, 158) This idealized representation of an era of segregation characterizes Lovecraft Country’s approach to historical fiction. Levity and joy emerge from exclusively Black spaces, such as the block party in the opening episode with its lively scenes of singing, dancing, and children at play. The series offers intimate depictions of life in Black private homes, apartments, and Black-​owned businesses—​especially the garage from which the Freeman family produces The Safe Negro Travel Guide. The guide itself “emphasizes self-​help” rather than the inconceivable idea that the state might make its public roads safer for Black travellers. 197

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While Lovecraft Country is a form of speculative horror, it is also speculative historical fiction, and its hybrid nature only adds to its seductive charm. The show eschews the literal mimesis that often characterizes narrow historical fiction, and instead revels in free-​flowing heterodoxic representation. Though the show’s rendering of historical events is carefully anchored in meticulously crafted period costumes, archivally researched set design, and what appear to be vintage props, the episodes themselves frequently feature music, characters, and conveyances (such as an alien spaceship) from far beyond the 1950s. This playful toying with anachronism begins with the opening sequence. Its splashy first scene features alien spacecraft and otherworldly creatures alongside historical figures including Jackie Robinson and helmeted soldiers of the Korean War. This flash dream sequence sets the tone for a unique blend of historical speculative horror fiction with Black aliveness as anchor and catalyst. The episode “I Am” vividly illustrates a unique praxis of Black aliveness as a hinge between history and horror, ultimately leading to joy, fulfilment, and liberation. The episode focuses on Hippolyta Freeman (played by Aunjenue Ellis), aunt of the protagonist Atticus Freeman (Jonathan Majors) and widow of his uncle George; her family produces The Safe Negro Travel Guide. In the course of the episode, Hippolyta embarks on a journey that transcends time and space, while also leading her to healing, catharsis, and a fuller and more complete version of herself. Hippolyta’s interdimensional travels illustrate the expansive scope of the series’ narrative arc. That arc tells us the story of a Black family impacted by racist and anti-​Black violence over generations. Violence also emerges through recurring motifs of Black travel and Black mobility. Throughout the series, racist violence is a means of exerting control over the social and physical movement of Black people. For example, the Freeman family’s female progenitor, Hannah, is an enslaved woman held captive and raped by the family’s White male progenitor, who also happens to be the leader of an all-​White all-​male wizard cult. Although Hannah’s movements (or ability to travel) are controlled by her enslaver, the fantastic nature of the series allows Hannah to appear in dreams and visions to guide Atticus, her descendant. Similarly important is the Safe Negro Travel Guide, which provided advice for Black tourists. Travel and mobility become linked to Black aliveness, to use the term of Kevin Quashie (2021). And Quashie’s poetics are particularly relevant to this television series because the impacts of aliveness are viewed through a Black feminist lens. Similarly, the Black women showrunners and writers of Lovecraft Country are invested in a narrative that is undergirded by the perspectives of Black feminist liberation. This is why Hippolyta’s journey is a standout episode for the series. Her movement beyond the limitations imposed by patriarchy and White supremacy is made possible in a story that explores both the horrific history and the jubilation of Black people as twin elements of an ontological fact. Black aliveness is the force that animates the connection between past and present, tragedy and triumph, history and horror. Hippolyta’s automotive and interdimensional travels convey fugitivity (the escape, or deliberately refusing the call to order), a form of Black aliveness that serves to move her toward her fuller self. Quashie also connects Black aliveness to the concept of “towardness.” Towardness is the practice of reaching for or relating to a hitherto unimaginable mode of Black being; of moving toward what Ashon Crawley describes as the “otherwise possibility,” a life-​affirming deliberately Black modality of being. As Christina Sharpe put it: In the midst of so much death and the fact of Black life as proximate to death, how do we attend to the physical, social and figurative death and also to the largeness of Black life, Black life insisted from death? (2016, 17) 198

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The Lovecraft Country Syllabus builds upon Sharpe’s claim when it describes specific scenes of Black aliveness as a means to insist on Blackness beyond suffering, beyond the quotidian horror of Black history. The series’ concentration on the liberatory aspect of travel and physical mobility is the vehicle for its radical reclamation of Black aliveness. Lovecraft Country demonstrates Black aliveness at its every level. From story and design and monster-​making, the producers and writers invest in notions of Black movement, travel, play, and joy. Showrunner Misha Green explains her ideal outcome: I want them to take away that you can be joyful, even in the parts that are hard. I think that was important to see and understand. Yes, it can be hard and it’s an uphill battle, but that battle can be won if we stick together and we can continue to reclaim our legacy, and what we were given and born with. That, I would love them to take away from the series. And enjoy the fucking monsters, too. (Radish 2020) The keywords in Green’s claim—​“joyful,” “battle,” “reclaim,” “love,” and “enjoy”—​traverse the genres of history and horror. If we accept Tananarive Due’s claim that “Black history is horror,” then Black aliveness is that which animates and restores. Green’s comments find purchase in Kevin Quashie’s claims about Black aliveness that announce its resistance to Afro-​pessimism. Quashie relies upon Terrion L. Williamson’s view that Black aliveness is: the register of black experience that is not reducible to the terror that calls it into existence but is the rich remainder, the multifaceted artifact of black communal resistance and resilience that is expressed in black idioms, cultural forms, traditions, and ways of being. (Williamson 2016, 9) The “rich remainder” is that which is irreducibly Black and alive. As Quashie explains: It may be true that subjection prefaces everything in an antiblack world, but in thinking through a black world, I am trying to surpass terror as the uninflected language of black being, as well as to suspend the anti/​ante position of blackness. In that surpassing and suspending, I am trying to articulate the aesthetics of aliveness. (Quashie 2021, 9–​10)

Hippolyta’s journey, part one: terrestrial To begin the powerful transformative journey of the “I Am” episode, its protagonist must first leave home, no easy feat for a middle-​aged widow and mother of a young girl. With maps and other travel gear, Hippolyta embarks on a drive in “Woody,” the family’s 1948 Packard. Woody is a classic wood-​accented 50s station wagon, with northern-​birch panelling, a solid-​wood tailgate, and a cormorant hood ornament. Hippolyta claims the vehicle for herself, to take a solo trip to the destination she believes holds the truth about her husband’s death. Atticus, who has his own plans that require his aunt’s vehicle, intervenes. Leaning into the driver’s side window as Hippolyta puts the car into reverse, Atticus stops her to talk. After each states the importance of their own trip, Atticus follows up with: “We just sent out a new print, and Uncle George would not want you driving around here.” Hippolyta responds by asking if George put Atticus in charge of the guide. When Atticus says no, Hippolyta brings the exchange to a close: “Then I sure as hell 199

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don’t need your permission to do guide work. Back up!” Hippolyta exits the driveway and quickly accelerates, ignoring the stop sign at the corner, the car’s tires squealing as if in rebuke. Up to this point, Hippolyta Freeman has been a compliant wife and dutiful mother. She has provided domestic support, and has been a subservient partner in fulfilling her husband’s vision of producing The Safe Negro Travel Guide. Though the business is a family operation, George’s portion of the labour involved travel, while her tasks were publication and distribution. This brief conflict reflects the ways in which Hippolyta’s former role had been to accommodate the needs of the male members of her family; even a new arrival like her nephew can assume authority over a vehicle that he does not own. In this scene, Atticus’ interruption of Hippolyta’s departure for her own trip serves as a loophole. It is a space through which we can see the degree to which patriarchy and familial obligation operate in concert to keep Hippolyta in her place for the convenience of other family members (and in service to a larger social arrangement that limits what’s possible for Black women). Hippolyta has already made the necessary arrangements for her daughter’s care. In a test of her new independence, Hippolyta flatly rejects Atticus’ request to borrow Woody. She refuses to consider that her nephew’s “important” plans should be prioritized over her own. When Atticus fails to persuade Hippolyta of the urgency of his errand, he tries another line of argument: work on the Guide does not need her to be on the road. When Atticus tells Hippolyta, “We just sent out a new print,” it reveals a subtle yet important shift in his position within the family and, by extension, at least from his perspective, within the family’s business. Though Hippolyta has long held the responsibility for administering the distribution of the publication, Atticus’ use of the word “we” here paradoxically strips away the term’s communal aspect. The “we” implies that it is his place to step into his uncle’s position of authority. He informs his aunt of their recent publication not to cement a relationship as collaborators on the guide, but to sway Hippolyta. According to Atticus, there is no need for her journey. Atticus’ final gambit to control Hippolyta’s use of her own car takes the form of exerting patriarchal authority. In a cautionary, almost chiding, tone of voice Atticus declares, “Uncle George would not want you driving around here.” Atticus seems intent on reminding Hippolyta that even though her husband has died, she should continue to live her life by the rules that he had established. When alive, George had not let Hippolyta take any solo research trips. As early as the first episode, viewers see George clip his wife’s wings, refusing her request to join him on a research trip for the guidebook. He believed that a Black woman would be uniquely vulnerable driving alone on America’s racist roadways. Atticus recalls these prohibitions and wants to be certain that Hippolyta does too. He is an agent of the patriarchal social order, as well as family tradition, because they directly benefit him. Atticus and Hippolyta’s conversation takes place while she is attempting to exit the garage’s driveway. It is useful to imagine the driveway as the threshold to Hippolyta’s larger journey. Atticus’ attempt to detain Hippolyta exposes the power relations that have restricted her, and from which she will liberate herself by the close of the episode. It highlights her social confinement—​a confinement imposed by the interlocking systems of oppression that exerted an outsized influence over the lives of Black people in the Lovecraft Country era. Even beyond the south in 1950s America, social arrangements of enslavement were transformed into the formal and informal strictures of segregation. The combined forces of racism, patriarchy, anti-​Blackness, capitalism, and other examples of what Audre Lorde calls “master’s tools” substantially shaped the daily lives of Black people (1984, 110). For Black women, public marginalization is multiplied in private by family responsibilities and expectations. In Episode 4, “A History of Violence,” Hippolyta and her daughter visit a science 200

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museum’s exhibition on the night sky. Hippolyta points to a comet named “Hera’s Chariot” explaining that Hippolyta herself named the constellation when she was a child, winning a contest intended to encourage children’s interest in science. However, the prize and credit were given to the niece of a Swedish astronomer when, as Hippolyta explains, “the astronomical society who held the naming contest didn’t want a little colored girl to be the face of their competition.” This rejection is emblematic of the ways in which Hippolyta’s life has been marked by denials that have circumscribed and narrowed her ability to fully inhabit her life. The state and its entities are arrayed against her by de facto and de jure segregation. And within her own household, she must defer to her husband’s preferences and prohibitions. We have seen how the scene between Atticus and Hippolyta drew attention to the power relations that shaped their banter. It is also important to consider the driveway itself as a setting. The driveway is the literal launching pad for Hippolyta’s transition, catharsis, and healing. The depths of feeling and Black feminist cultural sensibility invested in this episode, as revealed in interviews with episode writer Shannon M. Houston, generate echoes of meaning within each of Hippolyta’s subsequent scenes. It is significant to note that where the car is stopped—​specifically, the space between the garage and the street—​is called an “apron.” An apron is laden with domestic meanings. A ubiquitous garment for women during the 1950s, it protected their clothing from the by-​products of their household labours. To don an apron was to signal membership in the domestic labour sphere, most typically as a “housewife.” The significance of Atticus and Hippolyta’s conversation taking place on the garage’s apron lies in the transition encapsulated by the liminal space itself. This apron connects the garage (an extension of Hippolyta’s family home/​work space) to the street (the access to the freedom of the open road). This site, which both connects and separates the public and private spheres, is analogous to the way that Black aliveness operates within the representational strategies of Lovecraft Country. Black aliveness joins and divides the series’ depictions of history and horror. Often, the pleasure of nostalgia is withheld from Black viewers, who might avoid the depictions of anti-​Blackness that characterize many narratives of Jim Crow America. In Lovecraft Country, however, there remains an emphasis on Black joy and Black aliveness. So even as Hippolyta is reminded of her responsibilities to her deceased husband (by a nephew who has only been staying with her for a few weeks), she is able to seize the reins of control over her own movements by moving past the apron. The beginning of Hippolyta’s journey is marked by a sense of flight, a fugitive heading out of bounds, of doing that which is neither encouraged nor allowed. In her final words to him, Hippolyta tells Atticus to “Back up,” effectively ending his attempt to thwart her travel plan. In a clear rebuke, she exits the garage, enters the road, and speeds off. The effort Atticus exerts to stop his aunt from taking her independent voyage suggests the degree to which she has transgressed the patriarchal order of her family. George’s prohibition against Hippolyta’s traveling was so strictly obeyed by everyone that Atticus acts as if those rules had been permanent. As Tatiana King observes on the Safe Negro Podcast Show: [Think] about how George was really dictating all of that. Remember when George was still alive, it was always ‘well, when George says we can go out and we can do this.’ With him not being there to take those reins, she has to assume that and essentially have the freedom to do what she wants to do. (King, BenHaMeen, and Patterson-​Hurst 2020) Hippolyta’s solo road trip is a new venture, motivated by her intellectual curiosity (particularly her study of astronomy), and spurred on by her determination to learn the truth behind her husband’s 201

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murder. She has established her right to personal bodily autonomy by launching herself beyond the garage apron and the domestic apron strings previously held by Atticus. The highway is a path to discover the complete story of George’s murder, which Atticus and others are deliberately withholding from her. Along the way, she will uncover a more complete version of herself. The writers and showrunners lay the groundwork for this discovery/​recovery by putting Hippolyta behind the wheel of the family/​business car, with no passengers. Piloting Woody without other passengers is exceptional. Throughout the series’ early episodes, Woody had been occupied by George, Atticus, and Letitia, a family friend. In Episode 4, Hippolyta and their daughter Dee accompany Atticus, Lettie (another family friend), and Montrose (Atticus’ father) on a trip to Boston. Before they can exit the garage’s driveway apron, however, Tree, a neighbour who has heard that the family is driving to the east coast, steps in front of the car with suitcase in hand. The young man adds himself to the travelling party to save himself the bus fare from Chicago to Philadelphia. While Montrose and Atticus argue about whether Tree should be allowed to come along, Hippolyta ends the debate by shouting “Get in!”, noting that “George always said big ol’ Woody could fit the South Side of Chicago if it had to.” Thus Woody provides a space that transcends individual boundaries. Hippolyta, by offering a ride to Tree, affirms that the car has the capacity to comfortably convey a community member, and by extension, the community itself. At the same time, her invitation manifests Hippolyta’s sole control over the vehicle. Hippolyta’s solo use of Woody emphasizes the solitary nature of her quest. This is a powerful transformation. It is the first time in the series that she steps out from the shadows in which she has been kept by her husband, and from the domestic limitations set by her nephew and brother-​in-​law. Even before she enters the multiverse, Hippolyta Freeman is a woman transformed, who can make and act upon her own choices. As she follows the coordinates on the map, Hippolyta listens to the car radio playing Josephine Baker’s 1953 rendition of Bobby Capó’s “Piel Canela,” a Spanish-​language love song whose title means “cinnamon skin.” The song signals an important shifting of perspective. Its lyrics extol the beauty of cinnamon-​brown skin, a significant contradiction of the conventional White beauty culture of the 1950s. At the same time, the song celebrates Black aliveness and non-​White beauty, where a starless infinity or a disappearing ocean are prices willingly paid to never lose the ebony glimmer of her eyes and the lovely brown hue of her skin. Tatiana King comments: “If you equate that with…just, just loving the skin you’re in particularly if you’re black, what we talked about, about the vastness of the universe and the galaxy, all of that all corresponds. So I thought that was cool” (King, BenHaMeen, and Patterson-​Hurst 2020). Similarly, in Josephine Baker’s rendition of “Piel Canela,” a Black woman sings about the beauty of that which is nonWhite and of the cosmic possibilities of that beauty. Thus Black aliveness is linked with the life force of the cosmos. For the singer, the abiding affection for the brown-​skinned lover parallels celestial phenomena—​a powerful foreshadowing of Hippolyta’s journey through the multiverse which occupies much of the episode. Another illustration of Black aliveness occurs as Hippolyta, singing along with Josephine Baker while navigating the nearly open road, is passed by a Black woman driving a light blue Harley Davidson motorcycle. Hippolyta, initially taken aback, gleefully smiles and waves at the woman, who returns her smile before speeding ahead. This encounter further illustrates Lovecraft Country’s navigation and celebration of Black aliveness, hovering above horror and history. Just as Misha Green encourages viewers to recognize the resilience that America’s history has demanded of Black folks, she also advances her view of Black life as more than a bitter struggle against racist oppression. As she observes, “you can be joyful, even in the parts that are hard” (Radish 2020). 202

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Joy unfolds for Hippolyta as a character and for attentive viewers conversant with African American history. The Safe Negro Podcast Show establishes the historical link between the Black woman on the motorcycle and a Black woman who made history: Tatiana King: You see, when Hippolyta’s first driving to Kansas, you see her very delightfully surprised to see a Black woman on a motorcycle that rides past her. Black woman riding solo, uninhibited by anybody else. It’s a form of freedom. And when I saw this again, Ben, you mentioned the Black history that’s super rich in this series. That woman is probably Bessie Stringfield. BenHaMeen: Oh, damn. Sure is. Tatiana King: This is a real life person first of all. Yeah. So she was the first African American woman to ride across the United States solo on a motorcycle. And she was one of the few civilian motorcycle dispatch riders for the US Army during World War Two. And she rode her own blue Harley Davidson. And as you saw in that scene, the woman she had…she had…she had her little, little outfit on. She’s looking all cute, hair laid and she had the blue Harley, and I was like, “holy shit.” (King, BenHaMeen, and Patterson-​Hurst 2020) Bessie Stringfield’s appearance is an example of Lovecraft Country’s historical references and allusions to real people and events. Such moments ground the series in a nexus of social relations that present-​day viewers have already seen unfold as history.3 Stringfield was a historical figure, and as Tatiana King noted, the motorcycle is a solo conveyance. Its operator can move “uninhibited by anybody else,” and experience autonomy that has been limited for Black women. Notably, it was only a few minutes before this scene too that Atticus had tried to stop Hippolyta from driving her own car. Stringfield was as devoted to motorcycling as Hippolyta was to astronomy—​ pursuits in which were subject to rejection and inequity. Stringfield would compete against men in flat track motorcycle races, defeat all competitors, yet be denied the prize once she removed her helmet. Just as Hippolyta, once her race was known, was denied the chance to name a constellation as a junior astronomer, Stringfield encountered racism and sexism but refused to be diverted from her motorcycling. Bessie Stringfield and Hippolyta’s encounter is a vital reminder: Black women can have the joy of solo travel and the freedom of the open road.

Hippolyta’s journey, part two: celestial Hippolyta arrives at the orrery’s coordinates as indicated on her map to discover a small, seemingly abandoned, observatory. Her knowledge and study of astronomy provide her the necessary skills to operate the large decrepit-​looking apparatus inside the neglected building. After she enters the orrery’s coordinates and key into the machine, it whirs brightly to life. She is interrupted by two White policemen (who are part of the cult) who were alerted to her presence by the lights gleaming from the usually dormant observatory. The men begin to question her, then turn to physical assault when her answers fail to satisfy them. Atticus rushes in and a four-​way struggle begins as Hippolyta and her nephew defend themselves from murderous intent. In the scuffle, an officer’s stray bullet hits the whirring machine opening a portal to another dimension. Hippolyta is sucked into the gaping cosmic maw. Throughout the remainder of the episode, Hippolyta travels through the multiverse, a theoretical premise that encompasses multiple parallel realities that transcend the known patterns of space and time. In her writing, adrienne maree brown describes it thusly: 203

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The multiverse (or meta-​universe) is the hypothetical set of finite and infinite possible universes, including the universe in which we live. Together, these universes comprise everything that exists: the entirety of space, time, matter, energy, and the physical laws and constants that describe them. The various universes within the multiverse are called “parallel universes,” “other universes,” or “alternate universes.” (2017, 16) Although Episode 7 is titled “I Am,” many consider it the “Afrofuturism” episode. The episode’s lead writer, Shannon Houston, confirmed the considerable scholarly reading undertaken to craft this groundbreaking television spectacle. HBO developed an official podcast for the series, Lovecraft Country Radio. Each podcast episode features a list of recommended works that informed and extend the meaning for the on-​screen images. The recommended citations for “I Am” include Afropessimism by Frank Wilderson III (2020), “Fugitivity Against the Border: Afro-​Pessimism, Black Feminist Fugitive Thought, and the Border to Social Death” by Paula von Gleich (2022), Beyoncé’s Lemonade (2016), and Pleasure Activism by adrienne maree brown (2019). Taken together, these works reflect important elements that provide a type of superstructure that frame the series’ representation of cosmic travel. But it is the work of adrienne maree brown and Beyoncé that provide the episode with a philosophy of Black womanist liberation through an Afrofuturist lens. In her book Emergent Strategy, brown offers the following interpretation that aligns with the ways in which the episode unfolds. We say, Black lives matter! An afrofuturist assertion. Because we see something other than the normative truths of this place…we see something that is not here… We see the future, cast over this devastating present moment. We see, And we believe. We know, And we bend the world to assert and embody that Black lives matter. That, to me, is the heart of afrofuturism, as I choose to understand it. Labels don’t excite me so much, but concepts turn me on. The concept of seeing and creating the future from a perspective that has the lineage of an African seed, of something older and other than western, feels healing to me. (2017, 21) brown’s interpretation of Afrofuturism is guided by her commitment to social justice organizing and to the belief that a better world is possible. Hippolyta’s journey to and through the multiverse is propelled by the series’ representation of otherwise possibilities that align with a Black liberatory vision. When the machine inadvertently pulled Hippolyta into a series of alternative universes, we too get to that otherwise possibility. In our first view of the other side of the dimensional portal, two cybernetic figures walk toward the camera and the screen fades to black. These two anonymous figures are anachronistic in the larger narrative set in 1955. In the For All Nerds podcast, BenHaMeen describes the two figures that Hippolyta first meets as “celestials”: 204

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[These] two-​celestial looking beings approach her and in that term “celestial,” we’re talking about like two different ways since celestial refers to the order of angels and God is the highest part of in Christianity, right? And so Seraphim are the highest order of angels in this order. They’re right below God. So Serafina is the feminine word of Seraphim. So that’s one instance. And then we’re also talking about celestials from like Marvel comic books, which when Serafina is in her full armor, and the other one who’s next to her they greatly resemble Celestials for those who know Marvel comic books, and celestials are also like what Marvel usually referred to as like space gods. (King, BenHaMeen, and Patterson-​Hurst 2020) BenHaMeen’s analysis contextualizes the presence of the cosmic figures within two familiar realms of American culture. By connecting these new celestials within an already understood frame of reference, either Biblical or Marvel canon, Lovecraft Country’s projection into an alternative reality for the series is now made familiar but with a difference: there is a clear commitment to unburdening Black women of the double-​bind of racism and sexism in this future. The final part of Hippolyta’s radical transformation begins with unsettling encounters with these Black cosmic deities. Though she is initially distraught by them, those moments set her on the path to full liberation. One of the seraphim is a tall, slim, dark-​skinned Black woman with a massive, natural afro blowout cut into a triangular bob. The character is credited as “I am”/​“Beyond C’est” which is a clear reference to Lemonade’s influence on the storytelling (as indicated in HBO’s official Lovecraft Country podcast). Naming this character “I am” which is consistent with a West African linguistic tradition called “nommo” where naming a thing can bring that thing to life. In addition, “Beyond C’est” sounds very much like “Beyoncé.” Not unlike the superstardom of Beyoncé Giselle Knowles-​Carter, Lovecraft Country’s Beyond C’est dwells in the celestial realm of infinite possibility. And she has brought Hippolyta Freeman to this space and time to fully inhabit all the contours of the possible lives. Hippolyta is able to name herself and exist in any point in space or time. She travels to the immediate past to dance onstage with Josephine Baker, then to the ancient past to fight with Dahomey Amazon warriors, and finally to a realm where George is still alive and can be held accountable for the restrictions he placed upon her life. The two reach a peaceful resolution and spend time travelling the galaxy with Hippolyta in the lead. As Alan Sepinwall observes, the episode: not only offers its heroine a chance to live the life (or lives) denied to her in 20th century America, but suggests a wholesale rewriting of pop-​culture history, where of course African warrior women would do widescreen battle with Confederate soldiers, while Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon would be replaced by people who look like Hippolyta and George. (2020) The “wholesale rewriting” that Sepinwall attributes to the series’ depiction of pop culture iconography also applies to Hippolyta’s transformation itself. These elements of Hippolyta’s journey shape the examination of how the character slips through liberatory loopholes to recover the best version of herself. Hippolyta makes a vital leap when she first escapes the apron of her domestic life and of her garage driveway. Her fugitivity ultimately steers her toward the liberatory potential of Afrofuturism. Once Hippolyta realizes that she is without limits, she can transcend the urgency of fugitivity and move into a space of completion.

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Conclusion: reclamation and infinite possibility On Founders’ Day, April 11, 1987, at her alma mater Spelman College, Alice Walker addressed the assembled students. Like Sun Ra, whose voice-​over appears in Episode 7, she spoke to a group of young Black women assembled to learn from a wise elder. Fresh from the stratospheric fame of the film version of her novel The Color Purple, Walker departed from the topics that had become her most recent talking points. As she explained, “It may surprise you that I do not intend…to speak of war and peace, the economy, racism or sexism, or the triumphs and tribulations of black people or of women. Or even about movies” (1988, 70). Instead, she offered an exploration of her own spiritual growth which had been unduly circumscribed by her hair. Speaking to the group of young Black women students, Walker shared that as she navigated various seasons of her life, her hair seemed to demand more than she would be willing to give on the path of spiritual wholeness. The talk would ultimately be published as “Oppressed Hair Puts a Ceiling on the Brain.” Its presentation by the newly celebrated Walker would be meaningful to a group of Black women students who have already had their own hair challenges. It is known that for Black women, our hair can seem like a problem in need of a solution, a common consequence of being inundated by a White supremacist standard of beauty from infancy. Alice Walker describes the threshold of her own discovery that it was her attachment to her hair that was holding her back from a fuller spiritual development. She observes, “I seemed to have reached a ceiling in my brain. And under this ceiling my mind was very restless, although all else about me was calm” (71). After contemplating, she decides to let her hair grow naturally into dreadlocks without constant manipulation. Walker’s choice to accept her natural hair was an embrace of her whole self and a refusal to conform to the limited expectations of an anti-​Black dominant culture. Her liberation felt as if, “the ceiling at the top of my brain lifted; once again my mind (and spirit) could get outside myself. I would not be stuck in restless stillness, but would continue to grow” (74). Thanks to the liberatory power of the multiverse, Hippolyta Freeman has had the ceiling removed from the top of her brain. Hippolyta’s journey is a unique television spectacle that blends the study of African American history and culture with the powerful revision and reclamation of the horror genre. Lovecraft Country deploys a visual production style that literalizes the narrative it tells. On screen, viewers witness racist White wizards torment Black people until a Black descendant figures out how to take away White people’s magic totally. Similarly, the virulent bigotry of HP Lovecraft has been inverted to reveal itself as perversion, the quotidian horror for Black people. This is why the intergalactic journey of Hippolyta Freeman is such a racial depiction. Despite the daily humiliations, the confines of patriarchal mandates and maternal expectations, Hippolyta gets to explore her infinite possibility. As Tatiana King notes, “she’s infinite, she’s as large as the galaxy, and her dreams and wishes and abilities and her potential to be more than she is, comes to fruition” (King, BenHaMeen, and Patterson-​Hurst 2020). “I Am” is popular with a segment of Black audiences because of the triumphant exploration that Hippolyta undertakes. It is as poet Lucille Clifton wrote in her poem, “won’t you celebrate with me,” that Black women’s liberation can occur in a celestial plane, despite the dual marginalization: “both nonwhite and woman/​what did i see to be except myself?/​i made it up/​here on this bridge between/​starshine and clay” (1993, 25). Hippolyta Freeman, a middle-​aged widow and mother, moves beyond the liminal domestic spaces of her life. As a result, she is able to access the liberatory properties of Afrofuturism while remaining grounded in the story’s present, a beacon to Black women in their current reality that there are otherwise possibilities.

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Notes 1 For further reading on Black horror, see Coleman (2011). Additionally Altman (1998) offers a broad critical theory on genre. 2 Each syllabus focuses specifically on the Black history and innovations referenced in a given episode, reinforcing the theme of reclamation. “We uplift the labor of Black authors, Black musicians, Black filmmakers, Black podcasters, Black artisans, Black leaders, and all the Black people creating mirrors” (Langston League, 2020). 3 For instance, in the first episode, the series introduces us to a young background character called “Bobo.” He is a neighbourhood friend of Diana’s. Viewers who study African American history know that a young Black boy from Chicago, nicknamed Bobo, visited relatives in Money, Mississippi in the summer of 1955. He was murdered there. His name was Emmet Till. His mother, Mamie Till, agitated for justice for her son and thus galvanized the second wave of the Civil Rights Movement.

Reference list Ahad-​Legardy, Badia. 2021. Afro-​Nostalgia: Feeling Good in Contemporary Black Culture. Champaign: University of Illinois Press. Altman, Rick. 1998. Film/​Genre. London: Bloomsbury. Boyd, Michelle R. 2008. Jim Crow Nostalgia: Reconstructing Race in Bronzeville. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. brown, adrienne maree. 2017. Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds. Chico: AK Press. brown, adrienne maree. 2019. Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good. Chico: AK Press. Burgin, Xavier. 2019. Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror. Philadelphia: Stage 3 Productions. Burnham, Michelle. 1993. “Loopholes of Resistance: Harriet Jacobs’ Slave Narrative and the Critique of Agency in Foucault.” Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory 49, no. 2: 53–​73. Clifton, Lucille. 1993. “Won’t You Celebrate With Me.” In Book of Light. Port Townsend: Copper Canyon Press. Coleman, Robin R. Means. 2011. Horror Noire: Blacks in American Horror Films from the 1890s to Present. New York: Routledge. Emrys, Ruthanna. 2018. “HP Lovecraft and the Shadow over Horror.” NPR. www.npr.org/​2018/​08/​16/​638635​ 379/​h-​p-​lovecr​aft-​and-​the-​sha​dow-​over-​hor​ror. Farred, Grant. 2003. What’s My Name?: Black Vernacular Intellectuals. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hartman, Saidiya. 2019. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. King, Tatiana, D.J. BenHaMeen, and Porshéa Patterson-​Hurst. 2020. “I Am–​The Safe Negro Podcast Show (LoveCraft Country Review S01 E07).” For All Nerds Show, September 28. Podcast, MP3 audio, 1:28:27. https://​sou​ndcl​oud.com/​fanb​ros/​i-​am-​the-​safe-​negro-​podc​ast-​show-​lovecr​aft-​coun​try-​rev​iew-​s01-​e07. Langston League. 2020. Lovecraft Country: An Unofficial Syllabus. https://​langst​onle​ague​llc.squa​resp​ace. com/​popcu​ltur​epd. Littman, Greg. 2018. “HP Lovecraft’s Philosophy of Science Fiction Horror.” In Proceedings of the 2018 Science Fictions & Popular Cultures Academic Conference, edited by Timothy F. Slater and Carrie J. Cole, 60–​75. Laramie: Pono Publishing. Lorde, Audre. 1984. Sister Outsider. Berkeley: Crossing Press. Lovecraft, H.P. 1912. “On the Creation of Niggers.” In Howard P. Lovecraft Collection. Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library. https://​rep​osit​ory.libr​ary.brown.edu/​stu​dio/​item/​bdr:425​397/​. Morgan, Joan. 2015. “Why We Get Off: Moving Towards a Black Feminist Politics of Pleasure.” Journal of Black Studies and Research 45, no. 4: 36–​46. https://​doi.org/​10.1080/​00064​246.2015.1080​915. Quashie, Kevin. 2021. Black Aliveness, or A Poetics of Being. Durham: Duke University Press. Radish, Christina. 2020. “ ‘Lovecraft Country’: Misha Green, Jonathan Majors, and Jurnee Smollett on How the HBO Series Reclaims Horror.” Collider, August 18. https://​colli​der.com/​lovecr​aft-​coun​try-​hbo-​interv​ iew-​jur​nee-​smoll​ett-​jonat​han-​maj​ors-​misha-​green/​.

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Lisa Woolfork Sepinwall, Alan. 2020. “ ‘Lovecraft Country’ Recap: Shoot the Moon.” Rolling Stone, September 27. www. rolli​ngst​one.com/​tv-​mov​ies/​tv-​movie-​rec​aps/​lovecr​aft-​coun​try-​recap-​epis​ode-​7-​i-​am-​1066​810/​. Sharpe, Christina. 2016. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham: Duke University Press. von Gleich, Paula. 2022. “Fugitivity Against the Border: Afro-​Pessimism, Black Feminist Fugitive Thought, and the Border to Social Death.” In The Black Border and Fugitive Narration in Black American Literature, 4:12–​63. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter. Walker, Alice. 1988. “Oppressed Hair Puts a Ceiling on the Brain.” In Living by the Word: Selected Writings, 1973–​1987. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Wilderson, Frank B. 2020. Afropessimism. New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation. Williamson, Terrion L. 2016. Scandalize My Name: Black Feminist Practice and the Making of Black Social Life. New York: Fordham University Press.

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14 PASTS REFRACTED Indigenous histories on film beyond the cinema Christine Sprengler

In Arts of Engagement: Taking Aesthetic Action in and Beyond the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Dylan Robinson and Keavy Martin ponder what can be done to achieve justice, to see real material change and reparations for the Indigenous peoples of so-​called Canada after centuries of devastating colonial practices, ones that continue in myriad institutional and structural forms today. They wonder what actions are possible to put an end to pipelines, to restore treaty rights, and to return stolen land. Some of these actions need to be grand decolonizing endeavours, but they also argue that “even small, symbolic, and everyday actions are significant” (Robinson and Martin 2016, 2). They maintain that “micro-​actions” have the capacity to “ripple, to erode, and to subtly shift” ways of thinking (2). They call these smaller gestures “aesthetic actions,” which they define as a “range of sensory stimuli—​image, sound, and movement—​[that] have social and political effects through our affective engagements with them” (2). Their focus is on these actions in the context of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) proceedings. In other words, they are concerned with the capacity for art, in all its manifestations, to enable embodied experiences and affective connections with the histories being documented and archived as part of the TRC process.1 For them, these aesthetic actions can “have enormous influence on our understanding of the world” (2). In 2015 one series of such aesthetic actions came to fruition. The National Film Board of Canada (NFB) commissioned a series of four short films from four filmmakers, including three Indigenous artists: Caroline Monnet, Kent Monkman, Jeff Barnaby, and Michelle Latimer.2 They were asked to mine the archives of the NFB to create works that would be screened under the “Souvenir” series banner at the Aboriginal Pavilion at the 2015 Pam Am Games. These films showcase the power of art, in this case short experimental film, to critically intervene in representational histories and colonial image-​making practices that constitute a significant component of the NFB’s own history and archival mandate. This chapter will focus on one of these films, Caroline Monnet’s Mobilize (2015), to consider the ways in which it can influence our understanding of the world, specifically history and its representation, as well as the questions we ask ourselves about the past and our access to it. In what follows, I will first consider a range of terms proposed to help make sense of creative film and video practices by Indigenous artists invested in confronting historical representations of

DOI: 10.4324/9781003263234-18

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Indigenous peoples and ethnographic cinematic archives specifically. This section, which briefly introduces a few works aligned with Monnet’s film in historiographical intent, will be situated in recent scholarly work on the archive that interrogates it as a repository of history and as source material for creative intervention. From here, I turn to an analysis of Mobilize itself that considers one of its key reception contexts (i.e., the NFB website) and the way in which it refracts existing footage, complicating notions of history and temporality in the process. The result is a work that not only showcases in a nuanced way what Monnet hoped to celebrate, namely Indigenous labour and knowledge, but also reveals a number of pertinent historiographic questions that emerge out of a confrontation with the limits imposed by the NFB’s commission of this film. In other words, Mobilize highlights the nature of the parameters instituted for this project in ways that challenge viewers to consider history and its filmic representations, state archives, historicity, and a range of historiographic issues surrounding access to and commemorations of the past. In this respect, Mobilize offers a form of historical scholarship in its own right, generating knowledge in ways that written records cannot through its affectively charged interrogation and recalibration of archival images.

From revisioning to refracting: Indigenous film and video practices and the archive The prefix “re” finds itself attached to a number of verbs that, of late, have been deployed to explain the nature and force of works by Indigenous artists and filmmakers who engage with archives, expanding conceptions of what the “revisioning” of history, as defined by Robert Rosenstone, might look like (1995). State archives, of course, have long been—​and continue to be—​complicit in colonial practices as instruments of power, violence, knowledge formation, and historical narrativization. Creative works that challenge the archive, and especially the structure, uses, and content of moving-​image archives, have been labelled acts of remediation, remixing, restorying, reframing, or rememory.3 “Re,” etymologically speaking, proposes a number of actions including “back,” “again,” “once more.” It also suggests the concepts of undoing, against, and anew (Oxford Lexico, n.d.a.). These latter meanings are particularly apt for describing the wide range of approaches taken by the creators of feature-​length fiction film, documentary, and short experimental video to the photographic and filmic archives that constitute histories of ethnographic representation of Indigenous peoples in so-​called Canada and Turtle Island (North America) more broadly. All of these “re” terms have tremendous purchase and there is great value in deploying them liberally to see what insights the frameworks they provide might yield. I would add into the mix one more, not with any expectation that it be developed into a concept in its own right, but to float amongst the others and offer a slightly different inflection, and perhaps frame the formulation of analytical questions pertinent to this chapter. For me, “refraction,” too, has some explanatory power. In physics, refraction refers to the process by which light or sound is “caused to change direction or to separate when it travels through water, glass, etc.” (Cambridge Online Dictionary, n.d.). With origins in Latin that refer to the process of “breaking up,” some definitions describe refraction in a way that harnesses a vocabulary equally suited to media studies: a “phenomenon of light, radio waves, etc. being deflected in passing obliquely through the interface between one medium and another” (Oxford Lexico, n.d.b.). In this way, it speaks to how creative interventions into the archive take representations of the past—​written, visual, sometimes aural records often treated as unproblematically indexical, ordered, explanatory—​and splinter them, fracturing their very materiality in ways that enable these ruptured components to enter into new configurations. 210

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This not only undermines the historicity of the images or texts themselves, but the historical narratives in whose service they have been deployed. As such, this process or way of engaging the archive is rife with historiographic potential, with the possibility of generating new questions and new knowledge about the past as well as our modes of accessing it. It also makes manifest the possibilities for history’s visual and aural fragments to be used in ways that question—​if not indict—​ their own authority, turn against the forces that generated them in the first place, and confront the temporal coherence imposed by Enlightenment models of thinking on memory and history itself. Before turning to how Caroline Monnet refracts the past in Mobilize, I want to start with a few other “re” terms that have been used to analyze creative practices by Indigenous artists and filmmakers centred on the archive. For instance, Jackson Leween 2bears, a Kanien’kehaka performance and installation artist, describes his approach, as evidenced in Heritage Mythologies (2010), as one informed by a type of “remix theory” that demonstrates the power of archival images to “haunt the lives of the living.”4 For him, technology is “something alive and filled with spirit” that can be harnessed in ways to bring the past into collision with the present (2bears 2014, 19). Heritage Mythologies is a “live cinema/​scratch video” performance (documented as a video) in which 2bears remixes footage from the now iconic but also deeply problematic CBC initiative Heritage Minutes (1991–​) and, predominantly, in this iteration, from the Jacques Cartier minute, with a vast range of other footage, primarily sourced from news media. Images of protest dominate, though interspersed with other brief references to popular culture, particularly television advertising. Throughout the 12-​minute performance, images of Indigenous resistance challenge the signifiers of nation while visual glitches, colour infusions, superimpositions, and sound and image repetitions rupture the spatial planes and temporal sequencing of clips. The soundtrack, which also samples various sources from Rita McNeil to Classified’s renditions of the national anthem, underscores the fast-​paced explosion of images that are all, in some way, geared toward upending nationalist narratives of state-​building history. The result is a strident critique of the archival materials put into the service of settler-​state initiatives that uphold colonialist projects and practices. The effect that 2bears creates in Heritage Mythologies is akin to what Karyn Recollect identifies as a type of remixing in Skookum Sound System’s video for “Ay I Oh Stomp.” She offers the term “glyphing” to describe the “ways that music, dances, and other forms of persistent Indigenous motion activate specific spatial/​temporal cartographies in much the same way that petroglyphs activate Indigenous presence on land/​sky spaces” (Recollet 2016, 91). For Recollet, “Ay I Oh Stomp’s” recourse to superimposition of images past and present generates the conditions for “radical relationality and remembrance” and, specifically, opportunities to bring a sense of futurity into interrogations of history and to enable the ancestors to speak to the present (93). In other words, she shows how the activation of archival images in relation to other temporalities are central to a decolonial aesthetics that can “gesture towards creative, desirous futures, practicing an active ongoing refusal of dispossession and erasure” (93).5 For Miranda J. Brady and John M.H. Kelly, the multimedia and video practices of 2bears, Dana Claxton, and Kent Monkman are a form of “remediation,” one that shows the historical imbrications of photography and film with colonizing endeavours (2018, 82). They adopt Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s term that accounts for how the content of older media are repurposed or refashioned by newer technologies (1999). For them remediation has long been a “tactic used to assert Indigenous presence, often with ‘vital irony’ ” (Brady and Kelly 2018, 82).6 This vital irony is indeed at the heart of 2bears’ intervention into the Heritage Minutes archive, as it is in Kent Monkman’s practice, arguably both his video work as well as his substantial body of paintings that insert his alter ego, Miss Chief Eagle Testicle, into large-​scale canvasses that 211

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appropriate the canon of Western academic painting. In Sisters and Brothers (2015), also part of the Souvenir series, Monkman remediates black-​and-​white footage of bison herds and children at residential schools, repeating certain images and juxtaposing sequences in ways that enable the images to speak to the violent and genocidal consequences of colonialism.7 Dana Claxton’s works, including Buffalo Bone China (1997), Waterspeak (2000), and Anwolek Regatta City (2005), have received much scholarly attention for the ways in which they critically intervene in various image archives. For Carla Taunton, Claxton’s approach generates a “rememory of the past and the creation of new stories in the present [that] reframe settler /​Indigenous histories in North America” (Taunton 2010). The “rememory” work that defines Buffalo Bone China, for example, uses archival footage to activate awareness of its colonizing impetus as well as its contemporary significance in the articulation of history. It brings such images into collision with the present through performative acts that establish the significance of Indigenous modes of knowledge transmission, thereby demonstrating how the practices of history that privilege the written record have “rendered invalid, silent and forgotten” oral histories (Taunton 2010). For Janice Hladki, Claxton’s Anwolek Regatta City proposes a challenge to official history and thus warrants use of the prefix “counter” rather than “re,” another oft used linguistic turn to signify ways of confronting the archive. Specifically, Claxton’s work defies the “authority and continuity” of the city of Kelowna’s archive, “mobilizing and then reconstituting the memories of the colonizers” (Hladki 2014, 108). It is one of many moving image works by Indigenous artists that demonstrate how film and video have the capacity to “think,” as Mieke Bal (2002) or Hubert Damisch (2002) would argue, to theorize, to generate new knowledges in ways that written records fail to do. For Hladki, such work functions in a “counter memorial” fashion by critically exploring nation-​state sanctioned commemorative practices, ones that, historically, have centred on the white settler experience. Claxton’s counter-​memorial thrust, for Hladki, is in part achieved through a manipulation of time, through editing techniques that interrupt the flow of the appropriated footage.8 The effect is a “deeper perusal of memory and history, problematizing and theorizing concepts of time and its association with Western globalization discourses of mastery, progress, and prosperity” (Hladki 2014, 109). In other words, the work itself thinks through temporal modes governing archival practices, records, and images, opening up opportunities to consider what such structures obfuscate by way of colonial violence and Indigenous histories. These interventions, achieved by subjecting archival moving images to new temporal formations, enable viewers to see and experience the “histories” contained and manufactured by such footage in a manner that undermines the ideological impetus behind their initial creation. They are rallied to great effect in Claxton’s work and, as we shall see, in Monnet’s Mobilize, a film that also challenges what Mark Rifkin calls the imposition of “settler time” on Indigenous histories, presents, and futures (2017, 11). But as much as these works and their analyses highlight the critical possibilities for marshalling archival footage, Tyson Stewart, in his analysis of New Wave Indigenous filmmaking, also raises a potential problem. By looking specifically at the incorporation of residential school imagery in films like Rhymes for Young Ghouls (2013), Savage (2009), Indian Horse (2017), The Grizzlies (2018), and Monkman’s Sisters and Brothers, he attends to the ethical considerations and consequences for doing so.9 He argues that when dealing with representations of victims of trauma, one needs to question precisely how such images and recordings have been—​and ought to be—​ used for different kinds of storytelling: both photographic and filmic records produced by colonial structures to colonizing ends as well as the testimonial archives generated through the “artificial narrative of reconciliation” by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Stewart 2021, 166). These contexts, ones that shape the images they hold, are key, as are the subsequent storytelling 212

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endeavours that involve such representations anew. For Stewart, creative re-​mobilizations of residential school imagery have the potential—​though not always—​to subject them to “restorying.”10 Restorying, according to Stewart, entails “performances that explore, challenge, and critique” history rather than simply recirculating “ideological and propagandistic images—​the ones being archived so intensely” (172). It allows for a range of possibilities for playing “within the imagery” and permits the subjects represented within archives “to breathe.” Although he admits such reanimation is, of course, an “impossible task,” Stewart suggests that engaging in such creative play “denies the grip of official, transparent history” (168).11 Many of these analyses are grounded in scholarly work that has explored the vicissitudes of the archive more generally, including research that attends to its myriad pasts, presents, and possible futures in light of shifting technological, political, and social terrain. I do not wish to return to the roots of these re-​evaluations, namely their foundation in the writings of Derrida and Foucault, for there are many in-​depth accounts that comprehensively extend and adapt their thinking on the matter.12 Instead I want to briefly survey a few recent studies that account for how Indigenous artistic practices are central to efforts to rethinking the archive in relation to ethics, knowledge, representation, and power. In The Archive Effect, Jaime Baron calls for a “reformulation of ‘the archival document’ as an experience of reception rather than an indication of official sanction or storage location” (2014, 7). This renders a document “ ‘archival’ only insofar as the viewer of a given film perceives certain documents within that film as coming from another, previous—​ and primary—​context of use or intended use” (7). She is interested in how “we invest archival documents with the authority of the ‘real’ past, but also with the feeling of loss” (7). And with appropriation films specifically, ones that enable us to consider the audiovisual material’s more “unruly” and varied indexical relations to the past, we can then examine how such works are “engaged in a form of digital historiography” (143). In other words, she considers how such films “theorize and enact the problems we currently encounter as we confront the digital archive in the pursuit of some form of historical understanding” (143). While the historiographic potential of appropriation films that make use of archival footage was a structuring concern of Baron’s first book, her second considers the ethical implications of using found or archival images. Her very first case studies offer a comparison between the different ends to which archival images can be “misused” through an analysis of white settler filmmaker Dominic Gagnon’s Of the North (2015), comprised entirely of clips featuring Inuit people on YouTube and Cree artist Kent Monkman’s incorporation of archival images of residential school students in Sisters and Brothers. Gagnon’s film generated immediate controversy for the way in which it used decontextualized images, without permission, edited together in ways that crafted racist misrepresentations of Inuit life. Monkman, on the other hand, uses archival images in a critical way that intervenes in history and historical representation itself. However, for Baron, both are ultimately “misuses” of the images, in terms of their mobilization to ends not intended or perhaps even imagined by the creator (2020, 8). In Monkman’s case, this “misuse” reveals the colonizing impetus behind the original production of the images, but also the moments of resistance that some contain and that can be released through creative mediations. Specifically, she cites Monkman’s extraction and repetition of certain images from residential school footage to reveal alternate meanings, the agency of those represented, and how new perspectives enabled by cinematographic reframings can also alter the narratives advanced by the source film. For instance, Baron notes how Monkman harnesses the power of the returned gaze of a young girl in a residential school classroom through frequent returns to this image that “assert her individuality and presence, which the Canadian colonial government tried so hard to erase” (2020, 5). 213

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Some of these same ethical questions underpin Catherine Russell’s book, Archiveology: Walter Benjamin and Archival Film Practices. In this study, Russell tracks how the (cinematic) archive has transformed from a repository of material into a “mode of transmission” that enables those who mine and work with its images “unique means of displaying and accessing historical memory, with significant implications for the ways that we imagine cultural history” (2018, 1). For Russell, this is a dynamic practice, an artistic practice or type of “research-​creation,” one she terms “archiveology.” In this formulation “the author is not only a producer; she is also a builder and destroyer, constructing new work out of old and making new ways of knowing out of the traces of past experiences” (2018, 9). Russell also argues for how archiveology, as a mode of film practice, has the capacity to interrogate and produce insight into the ways in which history itself has been constructed and represented (2018, 22). This is a key historiographical question that can yield analysis of not just the archival images appropriated but also about the particular archive from which such images have been wrested, both of which are evident consequences of Caroline Monnet’s approach in Mobilize.

Caroline Monnet’s Mobilize Caroline Monnet (Anishnaabe/​French) is a Montreal-​based multidisciplinary artist whose work in film, video, sculpture, and installation explores Indigenous identity and methodologies, the impact of colonization, and the intersection of cultures, histories, and media. Most recently, her work considers reserve housing and land topographies through both independent and collaborative practices. She has exhibited internationally and is the recipient of numerous awards including the REVEAL Indigenous Art Award, the Hopper Prize, and Sobey Art Award. Mobilize is an experimental film approximately three minutes in length. It is comprised entirely of footage mined from the archives of the NFB and, specifically, a corpus of films featuring Indigenous peoples, traditions, and everyday life shot by white settler filmmakers. Mobilize was commissioned by the NFB for its “Souvenir” series. Produced by Anita Lee, this series, which includes four films by Indigenous artists, was intended for presentation as part of the “Gazing Back, Looking Forward” exhibition curated by Rhéanne Chartrand for the Aboriginal Pavilion at the 2015 Pam Am games in Tkaronto (Toronto). Other films in the series include Kent Monkman’s Brothers and Sisters, Jeff Barnaby’s Etlinisigu’niet (Bleed Down), and Michelle Latimer’s Nimmikaage (She Dances for People). The intent, according to Chartrand, was to “curate an exhibition of contemporary Indigenous art as a counterpoint to the more traditional forms of cultural expression that visitors would see at the Aboriginal Pavilion (i.e., pow wow dancing).” She explains that it “was about confronting and moving beyond stereotypical representations of Indigenous peoples derived from the idea of the Imaginary Indian, which is in no way reflective of how contemporary Indigenous peoples see themselves or the diversity of Indigenous nations” (quoted in David 2018). Mobilize is a fast-​paced work which, thanks to rapid and rhythmic editing, juxtaposes images of different types of labour and transportation. The first part of the film privileges footage from Boyce Richardson and Tony Ianzelo’s Cree Hunters of the Mistassini (1974) and Bernard Gosselin’s César’s Bark Canoe (1971). The former, part of the “Challenge for Change” documentary series initiated by the NFB, follows three Cree families for several months as they set up their winter camp to hunt their lands around James Bay and Ungava Bay.13 It foregrounds the travels and work of Sam Blacksmith, who also features most prominently in Mobilize, but includes footage of the hunting expeditions and daily life of the Jolly and Voyageur families as well. The latter film, César’s Bark Canoe, charts the process of building a birch bark canoe from start to finish by showcasing the work performed by César Newashish (Atikamekw). Here, the camera records 214

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César harvesting the bark, preparing the materials, and constructing the canoe. The film includes no narration, only sporadic and brief intertitles that provide minimal information about the steps involved in this labour—​and time—​intensive process. Images of Sam Blacksmith and César Newashish working (e.g., building a cabin and canoe, respectively, but also constructing snowshoes, hunting, chopping wood) and travelling (e.g., by snowshoe and canoe across flatwater and down rapids) are intercut with other images of labour and movement. Labour here involves work with babiche, boiling sap, chopping firewood, hanging laundry, and smoking meat while movement is represented by people travelling by float plane, snowmobile, snowshoes, motor boat, and, primarily, canoe. Intermittent images of children playing (string games and on a playground structure) suggest imbrications between these actions: play as children’s work and play as a form of mobility. Although shots last rarely for more than a few seconds, Sam Blacksmith occupies the most screen time during the first two minutes of the film due to the frequent injection of footage of him expertly navigating fast flowing rivers and creeks. Shot with a steady cam mounted to the bow of his canoe, we see him steer through narrow stretches of whitewater, avoiding branches, rocks, and the snow-​covered shoreline. Much of this footage is sped up, however, and seemingly more so with each return to Sam, as if to align with the increasing tempo of Tanya Tagaq’s “Uja,” the song that supplies the entire soundtrack for Mobilize.

Figure 14.1 Sam Blacksmith in Mobilize, dir. Caroline Monnet, 2015. © National Film Board of Canada

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Toward the end of this section of the film we see images of a large-​scale construction project as a crane hoists material up for a building framed with steel I-​beams. Though the background gives no indication that the work is taking place in an urban setting, this shot acts as a teaser of sorts, indicating the focus of the final section of the film. After the camera tracks a reflection of the sun along a creek edge, the film shifts its attention to the urban. For this final minute of the film, we see, once again, alternating shots from two privileged sources: Don Owen’s High Steel (1965), representing iron workers of Kahnawá:ke building skyscrapers in New York, and Michel Régnier’s Indian Memento (1967), featuring Expo 67 hostess Janice Lawrence (Syilx). Interspersed between sequences from these two films are brief shots of hands typing on a typewriter featuring Inuktitut characters, fast moving subways, cars, pedestrian traffic, and vistas of Montreal and New York. High Steel is a short documentary narrated by and featuring Harold Macomber (Kanien’kéha) as he showcases the skills and dangers involved in constructing the frames of Manhattan’s tallest structures. Indian Memento (1967), a film to which I will return shortly, follows Janice’s journey from her home in Syilx Okanagan territory to Montreal, where she performs her job as a hostess at the “Indians of Canada” Pavilion. The film ends with her walking around Montreal, consuming the sites of the city. With Mobilize, Monnet sought to confront the long history of racist images of Indigenous people in visual culture with positive representations.14 She wanted to celebrate “a people that are constantly moving, not stagnant in time, that were active, contemporary, modern” (quoted in Morgado 2015). That is, she set out to “use archival footage to speak about the future, to express an idea of contemporaneity while still honoring the past” (quoted in Pregot 2016). She aimed to do so through images and a loose narrative structure that replicated the story of her own family’s move from rural areas to an urban centre (quoted in Cram 2016). However, she qualifies this move as one not implicated in Enlightenment notions of progress; “moving forward” does not mean leaving “the bush” for the urban, and becoming “more and more urban” does not entail assimilation or a privileging of the city as a site of opportunity (quoted in Pregot 2016). As she states, entering the urban realm “does not mean that I cannot go back to the bush” to acquire new knowledge. To demonstrate this, she interweaves images of multiple forms of labour and skill, celebrating Indigenous work in “an urban or natural setting” (quoted in Pregot 2016). Mobilize also foregrounds movement, as the title of the film suggests, but in multiple senses. The film is a “call for action,” one with a double meaning that evokes political mobilization but also with regard to the traversal of different places and by various means (quoted in Pregot 2016). As such, movement happens in space, in political terms, and through or, rather, across myriad times in ways that complicate temporality on several registers. I now turn to the origins of the Souvenir series project to attend to the limits within which artists were asked to work as well as one particular online reception context established by the NFB. In doing so, I hope to show how Monnet not only critically intervenes in a state-​sanctioned institutional archive, but its specific holdings as well. From there, I move onto an analysis of the film’s engagement with history, archives, and temporality, building on existing scholarship that convincingly argues for its decolonizing powers in this regard as well as the ways in which it engages nostalgia. Monnet—​along with Monkman, Barnaby and Latimer—​was granted access to the NFB’s archives and asked to create a new moving-​image work based on the collection in ways that would “reframe archival imagery” and thus “reframe history” (Lee quoted in David 2018). According to Chartrand, the title of the film series, “Souvenir,” is a “double edged sword” for the ways in which it alludes to how “Indigenous culture was seen as kitsch, as a souvenir, a remnant of

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the past.” This series, however, was meant to undo this notion and instead enable the artists to transform the archival footage into a “tool of empowerment” (quoted in David 2018). As much as the source of images was constrained by this conceit, so too were the options for the sound. Specifically, each filmmaker was granted access to the works by well-​known recording artists who had been successful within the mainstream Canadian music awards the year prior: Tanya Tagaq (2014 winner of the Polaris Music Prize and Juno for Aboriginal Album of the Year) and a Tribe Called Red (2014 winner of Breakthrough Group of the Year). As such, it seems as though the NFB sought to take advantage of the publicity (but also rightly earned feting) bestowed by another set of nation-​defining cultural institutions. Although the results are remarkable and powerful, activating sound and image in ways that critically confront colonial histories and settler state image practices, it is worth keeping these constraints in mind as visual and aural parameters defined by outside forces and not the filmmakers themselves. It is also worth keeping Isabella Huberman’s important question in mind in this regard, one that asks to what degree “visual sovereignty” is possible when working with state archives (2020, 90).15 Indeed, Huberman and others have rightly engaged the complicated and troubling history of the NFB with regard to Indigenous representation and filmmaking. On the one hand, the NFB is the major producer of state-​funded ethnographic films produced in the interest of colonialism and is deeply implicated in the structures, crimes, and contextualization of this force of nation building and commemorative enterprises. It also has a history of funding Indigenous films and, in the case of some of Monnet’s source material, inaugurating initiatives like “Challenge for Change” to redress the racist representations it had previously produced. However, its history in this regard remains problematic, as Chris Gittings shows in detailing the NFB’s relationship with Alanis Obomsawin. Gittings explains that despite: making acclaimed films for the NFB, Obomsawin encountered racializing, colonial attitudes within the Board in the person of NFB producer Daisy de Bellefeuille, who threatened to discontinue funding at a crucial stage in the production of Incident at Restigouche if she interviewed whites. (2018, 226) Obomsawin refused to respond to this and went ahead as planned. As Gittings reveals, “De Bellefeuille’s racist intransigence placed the film in jeopardy and ultimately delayed it for three years. In her showdown with De Bellefeuille, Obomsawin is again confronting entrenched colonialism, not out in the field but from within the NFB” (226). While Mobilize has been screened widely at various film festivals, galleries, and museums, it has found a permanent home in two major state-​run, history-​defining institutions: The National Gallery of Canada and online on the NFB website. Here, I wish to think through some of the implications and relations established by its positioning within the latter, for it opens up an opportunity to think about the NFB’s complex and problematic history with respect to how it manages, circulates, and makes available its stores of filmic representations of Indigenous peoples. Underneath the link to view Mobilize, the NFB recommends “related films,” including some that source material utilized by Monnet, specifically, Cree Hunters of the Mistassini and Caesar’s Bark Canoe. As such, the NFB is offering up its old (award-​winning) titles for renewed consumption here, re-​establishing the importance of their collection in the process. This strategy also integrates the source material as part of the reception of Mobilize, setting up something of a dialogic relationship, one that stretches across genres and temporal periods. Notably, Monnet’s two other key source films, ones

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that foreground modernity (however fraught a term) are absent: High Steel and Indian Memento. Indeed, the title of the latter alone should suggest an alliance with the “Souvenir” series. Monnet’s selection of images from these four films (and, more minimally, others too) offers a framework for returning to them and the broader ethnographic projects, initiatives, and tendencies at work at the NFB. Indeed, what she chooses to show as well as what she omits offers an incisive comment on the nature of the source material. That is, what she saves and privileges and what she discards is a form of interrogating the historical force and value of the original archival footage. Take, for instance, Michel Régnier’s Indian Memento, produced by the NFB for the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development. This 18-​minute film follows Janice Lawrence through what are ostensibly three acts: the first at home on the Syilx Okanagan Nation, the second performing her hostess duties at the “Indians of Canada” Pavilion at Expo 67, and finally, in a short third part, after work, enjoying Montreal. Monnet only takes images from this last act of the film and the effect is a powerful indictment of the original. When viewed as a whole, this final section of Indian Memento positions Janice as a tourist in Montreal, walking the streets, looking in shop windows, riding the subway and consuming new sites of the metropolis with awe. We know she has travelled far to help interpret the exhibits of the pavilion and that her life otherwise, according to the film at least, involves spending time on the land, canoeing, and performing other domestic tasks like tending to laundry. The establishing shot of the film offers scenic views of the Rockies, intercut with river rapids and then finally a train carrying logs in the foreground of majestic snow-​capped mountains. The logs are then shown in the grips of grapple skidders at work on the Expo 67 site in a transition shot. The second section of the film concentrates on Janice’s hosting duties, taking primarily white settler visitors through the Pavilion to introduce them to Indigenous culture. Janice herself is never introduced in the film, nor is her Syilx or home territory named. Doing so may well complicate the nationalist narrative of the film given that the Syilx Okanagan Nation is a trans-​boundary nation that includes land in northern Washington State.

Figure 14.2 Janice Lawrence in Mobilize, dir. Caroline Monnet, 2015. © National Film Board of Canada

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The Indigenous-​created Indian Pavilion featured incredibly important and incisive anti-​colonial critiques through exhibitions that revealed church and state-​led crimes and the impact of colonial practices. But the force of these critiques is curtailed by the film that offers only brief snapshots of some didactic texts, decontextualized and often at odds with Janice’s expression—​her warm and welcoming smile throughout.16 Indeed this smile seems to put temporal distance between Janice in the present and the pastness of events indicated by the exhibits, their entrenchment through discourse here as “history” when in fact many were not at much of a temporal remove, but still lived and felt. By omitting images from these two sections that show Janice’s home and place of work, scenes that establish a narrative of travel and the performance of a specific kind of labour, Monnet leaves only the experience of being in a city. The effect here is that Janice is simply in the urban environment, thus effacing the dualism between tradition and modernity that Indian Memento tries to establish, as Jane Griffith suggests (2015). As such, she erases the conditions that the NFB film uses to suggest that an Indigenous woman is a tourist in a so-​called Canadian city. Instead, Janice is simply part of city life. What is more, Monnet juxtaposes two cities here in rapid succession—​ Montreal and New York—​such that they seem almost undifferentiated. Indeed, their shared 16mm colour film foundation and editing in the service of Tagaq’s “Uja” renders them, at times, almost indistinguishable. This aesthetic treatment is political and makes manifest the transboundary nature of Indigenous lands bisected by the Canada–​US border, in this instance in the northeast. This is especially pertinent to the history of Expo 67 itself as a commemorative endeavour that marked the colonial theft of land, but also due to its very fraught history with the land upon which the site was constructed. Not only were 1260 acres of Kahnawake reserve land expropriated for the event, but more land was constructed by dumping the fill from excavation projects like the building of the Montreal subway (Griffith 2015, 174). As Griffiths puts it, “the creation of new land (île Notre-​Dame) to symbolize Canada during Expo at the expense of Mohawk territory… represents a deep irony” (174). In this way, Mobilize sets up an opportunity to think about land, to complicate national borders and the spaces of modernity. It generates the conditions to ask how we might read such histories of boundary formation into space. But it also does much to complicate time and, often, time in relation to place. For instance, Andrew Burke rightly observes that “Monnet structures her film as a journey from north to south.” However, the south here, aligned with urban modernity, is one that “includes Indigenous subjects, using the NFB archives to cut against the grain of the majority of images that populate them” (2019, 167). But Monnet introduces a further upending, temporally speaking, because the archival footage featuring traditional labour and knowledge was filmed later than the footage centred in Montreal and New York. As a result, the space of urban modernity is aligned with a time earlier than the footage of traditional Cree hunting practices and the construction of a birch bark canoe. Questions of time are central to some of the analyses recently published on Mobilize. For Huberman, Mobilize effectively “plays with time.” She observes that “[t]‌he effects of acceleration, simultaneity and repetition of images interrupt colonial chronological order–​and rhythm” (2020, 98). This amounts to an intervention into how such colonial timeframes have been effectively weaponized to control Indigenous subjects (92). In fact, all the contributions to the Souvenir series accomplish this in various ways, offering temporal reframings that challenge the “linearity of documentary film time” and thereby “refute the ethnographic discourse of archival films” (96). As such, they participate in the expression of “visual sovereignty” as defined by Jolene Rickard (1995) or its expanded iteration as “representational sovereignty” according to Pamela Wilson (2016), terms since adapted and developed in various ways by Karine Betrand and others.17 219

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Monnet’s particular approach also undermines the temporal structures that govern archives, ones that privilege certain chronological and classificatory modes. For instance, the process by which Monnet created Mobilize refutes such temporal orderings of the archive by appealing instead to the logic of database cinema. In her desire to avoid the kinds of images that characterize the NFB archives (e.g., black-​and-​white footage, residential schools, ceremonies, or powwows), she instead deployed a series of search terms like “build” and “move forward.” That is, she selected terms “that do not fix us in time, and that for me allow me to go against preconceptions about an endangered Indigenous culture” (quoted in Marcoux 2020, 110). This database approach aligns with what Trish Luker considers part of a basket of new technologies and, in this case, search software utilization that engenders the possibilities for a “right of reply” (2017, 114). For Luker, this right of reply, intimately connected to a “right to know,” is part of an ethical responsibility on the part of archives to both disclose fully all records and to develop systems that enable Indigenous peoples to add their perspectives, voices, and responses (115). Indeed, as much as Mobilize is a reply to the archive, it is now also part of the NFB archive as well. In addition to the specific image content parameters that governed Monnet’s search of the archive’s database, she also imposed an aesthetic limitation. As previously noted, all footage had to be in colour and shot on 16mm film. This generated a degree of visual consistency across the entirety of the film, enabling her to create moments of indeterminacy in the mind of the audiences about both their origins and historicity; she wanted viewers to wonder if she had shot the footage herself or if it was indeed found in the archives (Monnet in Pregot 2016). Complicating any sense of determinate origins of some of the images works to effectively question their indexicality and ultimately enables an interrogative approach to all of them. In this way, she challenges the positivism that undergirds the creation of ethnographic films and the stability of their significatory power as they circulate through new contexts, some decolonial in intent, others still in the service of colonizing practices. For Monnet, the decision to use 16mm exclusively adds yet another possible dimension of temporal or, more specifically, historiographical complication. For her, the look of 16mm, from the vantage of the present, adds a “level of nostalgia and warmth to the piece” (Monnet in Pregot 2016). This is a consequence of the pastness now written into the grain of the image and, especially, the circulation and uses of 16mm in various nostalgia economies that have established its relationship with this sentiment. In the case of Mobilize, it is also bolstered by the content of the images that foreground Indigenous knowledge and skill. As such, Monnet eschews the typical monochromatic archival footage associated with historical traumas for a visual register encoded instead with a degree of historical wistfulness, histories to be fondly remembered and celebrated. For Burke, this is a kind of reclamation of nostalgia (2019, 169). Monnet harnesses the critical possibilities of nostalgia itself, a potential acknowledged in recent years thanks to the conceptual extrication of the nostalgic object from the sentiment and the recognition of the critical, analytical, and political work that visual registers of pastness can accomplish. Indeed, Monnet’s deployment of aesthetics here to generate nostalgia as a mode for reflecting on the histories invoked by the images she foregrounds speaks to this power. Mobilize’s temporal disruptions also showcase its potential in reaching not just back, but forward in time as well, a point made by Monnet and one well-​attended to in the critical literature on the film. For Burke, Mobilize “draws on already existing audiovisual materials not simply to see the past differently through remix and remediation but also to harness the latent energies of the past in order to sketch out a dynamic future” (2019, 169). With echoes of André Breton’s insistence on the revolutionary energies of the outmoded, this assessment points to a critical way in

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which Monnet upends the temporal vectors aligned with experiences of archival footage or nostalgia. What Mobilize offers is a future-​oriented dynamism that uses a past refracted through rapid editing, juxtaposition, and careful tuning to the beat of Tagaq’s song. These images of history and tradition, labour and travel, knowledge and skill, reach in multiple temporal directions at once, complicating their trajectories along established image circulation vectors, but also pointing down new speculative pathways, potential future routes in the service of establishing continuities across (Indigenous) times and lands. Monnet’s refraction of archival images confirms Russell’s historiographical point that “in the archaeological record, the fragmented history is the only one we can see and hear, the evidence of a past that can be reassembled in the present so that we can try to reorder the future differently” (Russell 2018).18 This aligns with Linda Hutcheon’s argument that we can only ever know the past through its “textualized remains,” including its archival evidence and documents (1988, 96). She reminds us that despite the insistence of some historians (and we might add ethnographic filmmakers), history is accessible, representable, and thus knowable; we have never had unmediated or unfettered access to the past. Instead, we have only its remnants, incomplete, worked over, and fragmented. These “textualized remains” are what Monnet activates to reveal their status as such and to juxtapose anew to show how their formations generate meaning and historical knowledge. Mobilize makes manifest the fragmentary nature of the visual historical record, the myriad significatory possibilities of their images, and the mutability of their meaning as they enter new visual and aural constellations. But for Monnet there are still truths to be mined from these images, histories to be celebrated, and affective charges, like nostalgia, to be triggered. These have political import in working toward decolonization, in circulating as aesthetic actions with the capacity to change our understanding of the world. The past here is temporally and spatially complex, layered, and partial, and, as Mobilize demonstrates, subject to restorying, rememory, remediating, remixing, revisioning, and refracting.19 These actions or processes all may inflect the source (archival) material they engage differently, using it to various ends, but they all show the power of such creative interventions in prompting incisive questions about history and its representations.

Notes 1 This aligns with Alison Landsberg’s concept of affective historiography, which speaks to how “experiential or affective modes…play a role in the acquisition of historical knowledge” (2015, 10). She argues, however, that “in order for real historical knowledge to be produced the affective engagements that draw the viewer in must be coupled with other modes that assert the alien nature of the past and the viewer’s fundamental distance from it” (2015, 10). In the case of the “aesthetic actions” under consideration here, this distance is achieved, as we shall see, by creative editing and juxtaposition strategies that rework archival footage. 2 Although Michelle Latimer claims Métis status, her heritage was subsequently challenged by Indigenous constituencies. Funding for Indigenous cinema in Canada often comes from various governmental sources including The Canada Council for the Arts, the NFB, and Telefilm Canada. These institutions have provided funding to filmmakers through a range of specific programmes including Studio One, The Aboriginal Filmmaking Program, Featuring Aboriginal Stories Program (FASP), and the Aboriginal Media Arts Program, with the latter supporting short and experimental filmmakers. For more information see the Indigenous Film and Television in Canada: A National and International Perspective, a 2013 report commissioned by imagineNATIVE Film +​Media Arts Festival (Goulet and Swanson 2013). 3 See, for instance, the special issue of Public on reimagining the archive in which contributors offer various terms (e.g., anarchival, antiarchival, counterarchival, and activist archives, etc.) to account for new ways of thinking about archival practices and interventions.

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Christine Sprengler 4 There are multiple iterations of Heritage Mythologies, performed live twice in 2010, 2012, and 2013, and included as a video installation in various group exhibitions between 2012 and 2014. The video can be accessed here: https://​vimeo.com/​61661​549. 5 Recollet’s understanding of “decolonial aesthetics” here involves an expanded conception of the term as proposed by Jarrett Martineau and Eric Ritskes who consider how “Indigenous artists and creators are remixing media, aesthetics and modes of expression to refuse the constraints of colonial narratives on creation, production, and reorienting art-​making to effect resurgence practices and Indigenous ways of being” (Recollet 2016, 93). See Jarrett Martineau and Eric Ritskes (2014). 6 Brady and Kelly explain that this vital irony is “characteristic of what Anishinaabe writer and scholar Gerald Vizenor calls survivance, or ‘survival plus resistance.’ ” See Vizenor (2000). 7 For a detailed analysis of Sisters and Brothers, see Stewart (2021). 8 For Monica Kin Gagnon, this aligns with Claxton’s general practice of experimenting with video’s materiality, fusing “what is told from the mode of its telling playing to the veracity of both historical and aesthetic representation” (Gagnon 2005, 72). Likewise, for Lynne Bell, Claxton’s approach “liberates the Sioux from the prison-​house of the colonial photographic archive.” She does so in Sitting Bull and the Moose Jaw Sioux (2004) by “bring[ing] the photographs of Sitting Bull and the Moose Jaw Sioux to life with constant camera movement, flickering light effects, shifts in focus, and the pulsating rhythms of the soundtrack” (Bell 2005, 163). 9 With Monkman’s Sisters and Brothers in mind, Stewart asks: “How do we get the archive to perform different and inventive tasks today with the goal of truth and Indigenous resurgence in mind?” (2021, 172). For Stewart, Monkman’s film is precisely an instance of that. 10 Paulette Regan also talks about “restorying” but with respect to Canadian history more broadly (Regan 2011). 11 Stewart uses Sherry Farrell Racette’s term “photo-​colonialism” to designate the recorded images to serve colonial narratives. In the context of residential school imagery, this involves photographs that demonstrate “the effectiveness of the school’s assimilationist raison d’etre” (Stewart 2021, 167). 12 See for instance Jaime Baron’s excellent analysis of how Derrida’s archive fever and New Historicism of the 1980s were particularly apt for thinking through key historiographic questions, specifically the latter’s engagement with archives to locate forgotten histories that could assemble “counterhistories that interrupt the homogenizing forces of previous grand historical narratives” (Baron 2014, 3). 13 For a history of Challenge for Change see Waugh, Brendan, and Baker (2010). 14 Smith and Taunton see Monnet’s work in this regard as an interrogation of the archive as a “heritage form” (Smith and Taunton 2018, 329) and an attempt to transform the specifically cinematic archive “into a portal for reimaginging the current moment and troubling the past” (333). 15 However, in the Souvenir series, Huberman sees that despite the parameters imposed on the artists (i.e., to work with a pre-​selected set of films and soundtracks), Monnet and others were able to generate works that achieved a degree of autonomy and visual sovereignty (Huberman 2020, 95). Still, Huberman reminds us that the NFB remains a privileged site for Canadian cultural production, citing critiques by Crystal Fraser and Zoe Todd (2016) that argue for only the possibility of a partial indigenization of the archive through interventionist practices given the colonial structures and uses of such institutions (Huberman 2020, 95). 16 For Jane Griffiths the film reiterates the pastness associated with Indigenous peoples that the pavilion tried to combat. The film gazes carefully over the art and artefacts of the pavilion, but brushes quickly past—​sometimes excluding—​the critical placards (Griffiths 2015, 198). 17 See Wilson (2016) and Rickard (1995). “Representational” exceeds the “visual” and is perhaps a more apt term for Monnet’s work given the importance of the soundtrack to her film. Monnet explains that Tagaq’s “sound helped in adding a level of urgency and intensity and in making the footage contemporary. Her music makes up 50 percent of the experience” (quoted in Pregot 2016). 18 For Russell, “archiveology names the process by which the image bank in its fundamental contingency and instability becomes a means by which history can speak back to the present” (Russell 2018, 103). 19 Indeed, the prefix “re” makes much more sense to designate the creative possibilities of working with archives than it does in “reconciliation,” a fraught term that many have noted ought to be replaced by “conciliation” first (Garneau 2016).

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Reference list 2bears, Jackson. 2014. “My Post-​Indian Technological Autobiography.” In Coded Territories: Tracing Indigenous Pathways in New Media Art, edited by Steve Loft and Kerry Swanson, 1–​31. Calgary: University of Calgary Press. Bal, Mieke. 2002. Travelling Concepts in the Humanities: A Rough Guide. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Baron, Jaime. 2014. The Archive Effect: Found Footage and the Audiovisual Experience of History. New York: Routledge. Baron, Jaime. 2020. Reuse, Misuse, Abuse: The Ethics of Audiovisual Appropriation in the Digital Age. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Bell, Lynne. 2005. “The Post/​Colonial Photographic Archive and the Work of Memory.” In Image and Inscription: An Anthology of Contemporary Canadian Photography, edited by Robert Bean, 150–​165. Toronto: YYZ. Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. 1999. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press. Brady, Miranda J., and John M.H. Kelly. 2018. We Interrupt This Program: Indigenous Media Tactics in Canadian Culture. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Burke, Andrew. 2019. Hinterland Remixed: Media, Memory and the Canadian 1970s. Montreal: McGill-​ Queens University Press. Cambridge Dictionary. n.d. “refraction (n.).” Accessed May 9, 2022. https://​dic​tion​ary.cambri​dge.org/​dic​tion​ ary/​engl​ish/​ref​ract​ion. Cram, Stephanie. 2016. “Filmmaker Caroline Monnet Aims to Show Indigenous People ‘Kicking Ass On-​ Screen.’ ” CBC News, May 28. www.cbc.ca/​news/​ind​igen​ous/​filmma​ker-​wants-​to-​show-​ind​igen​ous-​ people​kick​ing-​ass-​1.3604​261. Damisch, Hubert. 2002. A Theory of /​Cloud/​: Toward a History of Painting. Translated by Janet Lloyd. Redwood City: Stanford University Press. David, Jennifer. 2018. “A Different Kind of Souvenir.” National Gallery of Canada Magazine, February 6. www.gall​ery.ca/​magaz​ine/​in-​the-​spotli​ght/​a-​differ​ent-​kind-​of-​souve​nir. Fraser, Crystal, and Zoe Todd. 2016. “Decolonial Sensibilities: Indigenous Research and Engaging with Archives.” L’Internationale, February 14. www.inter​nati​onal​eonl​ine.org/​resea​rch/​dec​olon​isin​g_​pr​acti​ces/​ 54_​decolonial_​sensibilities_​indigenous_​research_​and_​engaging_​with_​archives_​in_​c​onte​mpor​ary_​colo​ nial​_​can​ada/​. Gagnon, Monika Kin. 2005. “Worlds in Collision: Dana Claxton’s Video Installations.” In Transference, Tradition, Technology: Native New Media Exploring Visual and Digital Culture, edited by Dana Claxton, Steve Loft, and Melanie Townsend, 68–​81. Banff: Walter Phillips Gallery. Garneau, David. 2016. “Imaginary Spaces of Conciliation and Reconciliation: Art, Curation, and Healing.” In Arts of Engagement: Taking Aesthetic Action in and Beyond the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, edited by Dylan Robinson and Martin Keavy, 21–​41. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Gittings, Chris. 2018. “Indigenous Canadian Cinemas: Negotiating the Precarious.” In The Precarious in the Cinemas of the Americas, edited by Constanza Burucúa and Carolina Sitnisky, 221–​224. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Goulet, Danis, and Kerry Swanson. 2013. Indigenous Film and Television in Canada: A National and International Perspective (Report). ImagineNative, Ontario Media Development Corporation, Telefilm Canada. https://​telef​ilm.ca/​wp-​cont​ent/​uplo​ads/​2022/​01/​ind​igen​ous-​film-​rep​ort-​2013-​10.pdf. Griffith, Jane. 2015. “One Little, Two Little, Three Canadians: The Indians of Canada Pavilion and Public Pedagogy, Expo 1967.” Journal of Canadian Studies 49, no. 2 (Spring): 171–​204. https://​doi.org/​10.3138/​ jcs.49.2.171. Hladki, Janice. 2014. “Remembering Otherwise: Counter-​commemoration and Re-​territorialization in Indigenous Film and Video Art.” Revista de Estudios Globales y Arte Contemporáneo 2, no. 1: 93–​116. https://​doi.org/​10.1344/​regac2​014.1.07. Huberman, Isabella. 2020. “The Archives to the Test of Time: The Temporal Reframing of the Short Films of the Souvenir Series.” Canadian Journal of Film Studies 29, no. 1 (Spring): 90–​109. https://​doi.org/​ 10.3138/​cjfs.29.1.05. Hutcheon, Linda. 1988. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York: Routledge.

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Christine Sprengler Landsberg, Alison. 2015. Engaging the Past: Mass Culture and the Production of Historical Knowledge. New York: Columbia University Press. Luker, Trish. 2017. “Decolonising Archives: Indigenous Challenges to Record Keeping in ‘Reconciling’ Settler Colonial States.” Australian Feminist Studies 32, no. 91/​92: 108–​125. https://​doi.org/​10.1080/​ 08164​649.2017.1357​011. Marcoux, Gabrielle. 2020. “Dans toute son exubérance: Affirmation de soi et autoreprésentation chez Caroline Monnet.” Canadian Journal of Film Studies 29, no. 1, (Spring): 110–​121. https://​doi.org/​ 10.3138/​cjfs.29.1.06. Martineau, Jarrett, and Eric Ritskes. 2014. “Fugitive Indigeneity: Reclaiming the Terrain of Decolonial Struggle through Indigenous Art.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 3, no. 1 (May): 1–​12. https://​jps.libr​ary.utoro​nto.ca/​index.php/​des/​arti​cle/​view/​21320/​17382. Morgado, Allegra. 2015. “Former U of O Student Featured in Largest Indigenous Media Festival in the World.” The Fulcrum, October 8. https://​the​fulc​rum.ca/​arts/​mobil​ize-​shows-​a-​differ​ent-​side-​to-​ind​igen​ ous-​peo​ple/​. Oxford Lexico. n.d.a. “re–​(prefix).” Accessed March 9, 2022. www.lex​ico.com/​def​init​ion/​re-​. Oxford Lexico. n.d.b. “refraction (n.).” Accessed March 9, 2022. www.lex​ico.com/​def​init​ion/​ref​ract​ion. Pregot, Kristine. 2016. “Quick Chat from Sundance: ‘Mobilize’ Director Caroline Monnet.” postPerspective, February 3. https://​post​pers​pect​ive.com/​quick-​chat-​from-​sunda​nce-​mobil​ize-​direc​tor-​carol​ine-​mon​net. Recollet, Karyn. 2016. “Gesturing Indigenous Futurities Through Remix.” Dance Research Journal 48, no. 1 (April): 91–​105. https://​doi.org/​10.1017/​S01497​6771​5000​492. Regan, Paulette. 2011. Unsettling the Settler Within: Indian Residential Schools, Truth Telling, and Reconciliation in Canada. Vancouver: UBC Press. Rickard, Jolene. 1995. “Sovereignty: A Line in the Sand.” Aperture 139: 51–​59. www.jstor.org/​sta​ble/​ 24474​915. Rifkin, Mark. 2017. Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-​ Determination. Durham: Duke University Press. Robinson, Dylan, and Martin Keavy, eds. 2016. Arts of Engagement: Taking Aesthetic Action In and Beyond the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier Press. Rosenstone, Robert, ed. 1995. Revisioning History: Film and the Construction of a New Past. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Russell, Catherine. 2018. Archiveology: Walter Benjamin and Archival Film Practices. Durham: Duke University Press. Smith, Sarah E.K., and Carla Taunton. 2018. “Unsettling Canadian Heritage: Decolonial Aesthetics in Canadian Video and Performance Art.” Journal of Canadian Studies 52, no.1 (Winter): 306–​341. https://​ doi.org/​10.3138/​jcs.2017-​0053.r2. Stewart, Tyson. 2021. “Truth and Reconciliation Cinema: An Ethico-​political Study of Residential School Imagery in Contemporary Indigenous Film.” AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples 17, no. 2 (May): 165–​174. https://​doi.org/​10.1177/​117718​0121​1012​450. Taunton, Carla. 2010. “Indigenous (Re)memory and Resistance: Video Works by Dana Claxton.” Post-​Script 29, no. 3 (Summer): 44–​57. www.proqu​est.com/​schola​rly-​journ​als/​ind​igen​ous-​re-​mem​ory-​res​ista​nce-​ video-​works-​dana/​docv​iew/​849558​322/​se-​2. Vizenor, Gerald. 2000. Fugitive Poses: Native American Indian Scenes of Absence and Presence. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Waugh, Thomas, Michael Brendan, and Ezra Baker, eds. 2010. Challenge for Change: Activist Documentary at the National Film Board of Canada. Montreal: McGill-​Queen’s University Press. Wilson, Pamela. 2016. “Indigenous Documentary Media.” In Contemporary Documentary, edited by Daniel Marcus and Selmin Kara, 87–​105. London: Routledge.

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15 THE NEW CIVIL WAR CINEMA John Trafton

The American Civil War has been refought on film since the dawn of the twentieth century, part of a consistent desire to see the past and use historical reenactment to illuminate hidden aspects of present-​day life. The recurring choice of the Civil War as a filmic subject appears to affirm Gilles Deleuze’s view that “American cinema constantly shoots and reshoots a single fundamental film, which is the birth of nation-​civilization” (Deleuze 1986, 148). Several factors, operating simultaneously, ensured that the Civil War would remain, directly and indirectly, a popular cinematic topic: the death of 620,000 and the freedom of four million, the elevation of Abraham Lincoln to an iconic status unsurpassed by any other president, and the accessibility of the war’s photographic images to “those who strive to understand its significance and meaning today” (Barrett 2009, 2). Yet, Civil War films, as is the case with any genre or film category, have evolved at various stages throughout the twentieth and twenty-​first century in response to generational change. Films such as Gone with the Wind (1939), Shenandoah (1965), Glory (1989), and Gangs of New York (2002) reveal, through their formal strategies and production conditions, the “social and political contradictions around which our society has been structured” (Slotkin 1991, 120). The 2010s is a unique site for exploring these contradictions on film and in real life, a vantage point of nearly one hundred years after D.W. Griffith’s controversial, racist epic The Birth of a Nation (1915). For example, two events occurred within two weeks of each other in 2015 that recall what historian Barbara Fields describes as the war’s unfinished work: “The Civil War is not over until we today have done our part in fighting it… . The generation that fought the war… established a standard that will not mean anything until we have finished the work” (1990). On July 10, 2015, the Confederate battle flag was removed from the South Carolina Statehouse, where it had flown since the war’s centennial in 1961. The flag was passed on to the South Carolina Confederate Relic Room and Military Museum a few blocks away. A few weeks earlier, a 21-​year-​ old White South Carolinian named Dylann Roof murdered nine African American churchgoers at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston. The Confederate flag featured prominently in Roof’s social media photographs, and his selection of a church founded by slaves in 1816 was also symbolic. Both events seem to echo Fields’ view that the war is “still to be fought, and regrettably…can still be lost” (The Civil War 1990).

DOI: 10.4324/9781003263234-19

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Figure 15.1 Newton “Newt” Knight, portrayed by Matthew McConaughey in Free State of Jones (Director Gary Ross, Bluegrass Films, 2016). © Bluegrass Films/​Entertainment Pictures/​ZUMAPRESS.com/​Alamy Stock Photo

That same year Gary Ross (director of The Hunger Games) filmed Free State of Jones (2016), the true story of a band of Confederate defectors and escaped slaves, led by Newton “Newt” Knight (Matthew McConaughey), who established a separatist community in Jones County, Mississippi. Based largely on Victoria E. Bynum’s book The Free State of Jones: Mississippi’s Longest Civil War (2016), Ross’ film follows Knight and his “Knight Company” through the Civil War years, the Reconstruction period, and the anti-​miscegenation trial of Knight’s great-​ grandson Davis Knight (Brian Lee Franklin) during the 1940s. Though derided by critics as a “mechanical…history lesson” with stilted performances and “cornball sermonizing,” Ross’ film provides a striking example of Civil War cinema genre revision, a new direction that Civil War cinema has taken in the twenty-​first century in response to previous cycles of Civil War films.1 This chapter will look at how Free State of Jones is part of a cycle of films that I will refer to as “the New Civil War cinema.” Emerging around 2002, this new wave of Civil War films proposes new modes of remembering the Civil War and evaluating its position in the story of American nationhood and national belonging. Ross’ film reveals, in a deliberate and self-​conscious way, the social mechanisms that vitalize the Lost Cause mythology: a historical framework that positions the Confederacy as a “noble experiment in nation-​building” and as “an admirable struggle against hopeless odds” (Gallagher 2008, 2). In Free State of Jones, the Lost Cause is destabilized through reframing this mythology as a privileged position of the Southern elite, a “war for cotton” for which there was little material benefit for the Southern proletariat. Through narrativizing the mythology’s origin story, the Lost Cause is further cast in the film as a false consciousness that 226

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continues to define national identities in the present-​day. At the same time, the film rehearses the influence of pre-​cinema visual culture, a defining characteristic of Civil War films since the days of early cinema. The traditional panoramic vision of combat in Civil War films, a by-​product of large-​scale paintings of the conflict produced in the decades following the war, is revised using digital photography and documentary framing. War trauma and graphic violence intersects with the legacy of Civil War photojournalism in Free State of Jones, with moments in the film that could be lifted from the death harvest images of Civil War photographers Matthew Brady, Alexander Gardner, and Timothy O’Sullivan.

“Seeing the elephant”: the influence of pre-​cinema visual culture “Civil War cinema” is a constellation of different films that, directly or indirectly, address the war and its impact on the American landscape from a variety of perspectives. Jenny Barrett identifies three sub-​categories of Civil War films: the Civil War melodrama, the war-​western, and the Civil War combat film. In the Civil War melodrama, the “main action…is located away from the primary battlefields of the Civil War,” and the “resolution of moral conflict” is played out “within the domestic or private sphere of relationships” (Barrett 2009, 28). Barrett notes that some of the most well-​known Civil War films fall under this category, including Gone with the Wind (1939), The Beguiled (Don Siegel, 1971; Sofia Coppola, 2017), and Little Women (2019). War-​westerns repurpose the frontier space as a site for the war’s lingering impact on the American psyche to be played out and renegotiated through the conventions of the western genre. Films like She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), Dances with Wolves (1990), and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007) reference the Civil War in a manner that provides “the dichotomies of North versus South and East versus West” with new narrative dimensions (Barrett 2009, 64). In Civil War combat films, a significant portion of the focus is on the battles and the individuals who fought in them. Scenes of battlefield carnage, sacrifice, and survival are foregrounded in these films, placing this category of Civil War cinema in dialogue with the larger war film genre. With films such as The Red Badge of Courage (1951), Glory (1989), and Gettysburg (1993) as notable examples, this sub-​genre, according to Barrett, accounts for the smallest portion of Civil War films (95). Going beyond Barrett’s categories, recent films about slavery can also be considered part of the broader Civil War cinema, as even films that are set before the Civil War—​Django Unchained (2012), 12 Years a Slave (2013), The Birth of a Nation (2016), and The Good Lord Bird (2020), for example—​engage with the broader historical legacy of the Civil War. Despite these delineations—​proposed by Barrett and others—​it is important to remember that Civil War films often do not fit exclusively into one sub-​category. Generally speaking, films participate in multiple categories, and fastidious taxonomies, while appearing to produce knowledge, can create nominal fallacies—​a network of name games. For example, combat trauma may play a significant role writing in the characters of a war-​western, and the story that unfolds becomes a site for excavating melodrama from history. Free State of Jones is no exception, as Ross’ film draws on elements of the Civil War combat film, the Civil War melodrama, and slavery films to revise Civil War cinema as part of a larger historical memory project, informed by the war’s sesquicentennial and shifting geo-​political currents. Additionally, Ross’ film and other Civil War films from the twenty-​first century find their politically conscious footing through their crystallization of Civil War sub-​categories and through directly challenging prior Civil War film cycles. In this sense, Free State of Jones is highly instructive on how film genres or categories reinvent themselves through “genre memory,” a notion described by Mikhail Bakhtin: genres change slightly 227

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with each use, remembering past usage while at the same time acquiring new modes of expression drawn from the present.2 In Civil War cinema of the last decade, or films that Malcolm Scott describes as the “New Wave of Civil War films”,3 the “past usage” is remembered two fold. First, these films are in dialogue with four prior traditions of Civil War films, spanning from Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation to the end of the twentieth century: the Lost Cause tradition, the Union Cause tradition, the Emancipation Cause tradition, and the Reconciliation Cause tradition. Momentarily, I will sketch out defining characteristics of each of these traditions, which have been written on extensively by Gary W. Gallagher, Robert Brent Toplin, and others. In the meantime, I would like to highlight the second cinematic recovery performed by these films: the influence of pre-​cinema visual culture on the formal strategies of Civil War cinema. The Civil War was vividly documented through pre-​cinema art and narrative forms that cemented an enduring set of codes and strategies for reimagining combat on screen: notably large-​ scale panorama paintings, war photography, and written testimonials from soldiers.4 The earliest Civil War films (roughly 1907 through the 1920s) found inspiration in the way these pre-​cinema forms captured the war’s impact on the cultural landscape, and in doing so provide exceptional case studies in how genre memory operates in the broader war film genre. In The Birth of a Nation, cinematographer Billy Bitzer panned his camera across a Civil War battlefield in a manner that recalls the scope of Paul Philippoteaux’s Gettysburg Cyclorama (1883), pushing the scale of filmmaking beyond the boundaries of the Biograph one-​reelers that Griffith and Bitzer started with years earlier; 15 years later Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet on Western Front (1930) would transport this panoramic vision to the First World War trench warfare, achieving these shots with a “rotoambulator” (a camera crane attached to a dolly with three wheels) invented for the film’s production. Images from films like The Honor of His Family (1910) and The Drummer of the Eighth (1913) echo photographs of battlefield carnage and camp life from Matthew Brady, Alexander Gardner, and Timothy O’Sullivan—​images of the Civil War that, after the war’s conclusion, were largely forgotten by the public until the mid-​1890s when cinema emerged alongside a renewed interest in this visual historical record (Morris 2007, 138); nearly a century later, images of dead soldiers rocked back and forth by blood-​coloured waves in Saving Private Ryan (1998) can be read as part of the legacy of “death harvest” photography from Brady, Gardner, O’Sullivan, and others. The influence of soldier memoirs on the narration in films such as Apocalypse Now (1979), Full Metal Jacket (1987), and Jarhead (2005) can be traced back to Griffith and Ince’s silent Civil War films, which, in turn, are rooted in the popularity of books like Campaigning with Grant (1897) and Battles and Leaders of the Civil War (1888). Reading Civil War cinema through the echoes of these pre-​cinematic modes allows one to chart the evolution of Civil War cinema’s audiovisual codes, particularly how these formal elements are used to mediate a cultural memory of the Civil War. Free State of Jones retrieves a discernable narrative-​of-​nation from the war’s photographs, acknowledging their emotional, narrative power and recalling their use in prior Civil War films. In Gangs of New York (2002), for example, the threat of conscription looms over New York’s poor Irish immigrant community in 1863. In one scene, immigrants fresh off the boat in New York harbour are immediately recruited into the Union army, a supreme test of their loyalty to a newly adopted country. A sweeping, over-​head crane shot moves from one side of a vessel, where newly minted, blue-​uniformed soldiers are boarding, to the other side of the vessel where coffins are being off-​loaded, placed in rows on the dock for burial. This moment is bookended by the New York City Draft Riots (July 13–​16, 1863) during the film’s climax, ignited by the news of the Battle of Gettysburg and announced through editor Thelma Schoonmaker’s inclusion of Timothy O’Sullivan 228

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and Alexander Gardener’s “death harvest” photographs. The use of these photographs dials into an audience familiarity with Ken Burns’ popular PBS documentary The Civil War (1990), a film that uses each of these photos cinematically. The repurposing of these images within this context pierces Lost Cause narratives by placing stories of ethnic and class struggle at the forefront. In Free State of Jones, war photography is also used to reinforce the film’s critique of prior traditions of Civil War cultural memory: a montage of war photographs is juxtaposed against images of the thirteenth and fifteenth constitutional amendments; the end of The Siege of Vicksburg Mississippi (July 4, 1863) is shown through photography, serving as both narration of events and tapping into an audience familiarity with the Burns documentary. Both moments also recall Spielberg’s Lincoln (2012), a film that uses these photographs as crucial props, a direct acknowledgement of the ability of these photographs to “render the traumatic experiences of the past palpable” and to present the past as a haunted site (Burgoyne and Trafton 2015, 533). What is also striking is how still photography and moving images in Free State of Jones exhibit what Hermann Kappelhoff describes as the “shell-​shocked face”: a close-​up in which the totality of war’s destruction is written into a single image (Kappelhoff 2012, 43). Knight carries the scars of battle with him throughout the film, transmitted through a shell-​shocked face known in Civil War-​era parlance as “seeing the elephant.” Jeff Rosenheim notes a striking difference between soldier photographs taken at the beginning and at the end of the Civil War. The soldiers photographed at the end of the war had “seen the elephant”; their faces do not show fear or pain but rather a hollowness, eliciting a sense of shared suffering (Rosenheim 2012). This empty gaze has a distinct presence in war cinema throughout history: for example, First World War soldiers giving an accusatory backward glance at the audience in the final shot of All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), and Tom Hanks’ Captain Miller witnessing the horror of the Normandy Landing in Saving Private Ryan (1998). In The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007), part of the “war-​western” sub-​genre, trauma is wedded to desires for avenging Southern humiliation, visually presented through James’ shell-​shocked face from the outset. Throughout Free State of Jones, the thousand-​yard stare on Newt’s face, as well as other soldiers and Knight Company members, leaves the viewer with the same hollowness and lack of triumphalist zeal or patriotic remembrance. As the end credits roll, Lucinda Williams sings a song titled “I’m Crying,” a sorrowful lament for all the war’s victims, over a montage of old photographs of the Knight Company, many of whom also break the fourth wall with their shell-shocked faces (Williams 2016). In these moments, “seeing the elephant” drives the point home that no heroes are to be held aloft at the end of this Civil War story and that images in Ross’ film are orchestrated toward myth-​piercing. The influence of panorama paintings throughout Civil War cinema is also felt strongly in Free State of Jones, but in a way that replicates the immersive experience of contemporary war films about other conflicts. The cinematography of the film’s opening sequence, the Battle of Corinth (October 1862), strongly highlights this new engagement with the legacy of panoramic vision. The first shot is at feet level: rows upon rows of grey-​clad Confederate troops marching up a grassy hill, stepping over (and on) corpses. Shallow focus is used—​the faces of the dead are visible, whereas the marching soldiers are kept slightly out of focus. As the Confederates approach the ridge of the hill, the viewer is given a more privileged perspective with which to navigate the ensuing action: the Union army slowly emerges into view, yards away with rifles and cannon at the ready. The film then shifts perspective over to the Union side, as a navy-​blue line of troops kneel with their rifles aimed. We cut back to a reverse shot: from the Confederate’s perspective as they emerge from the other side of the hill. During the exchange of fire that ensues, the editing simultaneously overwhelms the viewer and places them in a privileged vantage point through which 229

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they can navigate the action. If the Corinth battlefield was, during a pre-​production planning stage, rendered as a large-​scale panorama painting (on par with the Gettysburg Cyclorama painting), Ross and cinematographer Benoît Delholmme allow for the camera lens to enact what art historians have referred to as the panorama’s paintings pathos formula: an aesthetic organization designed to mobilize emotions and to provide the spectator with a vantage point to experience chaos and take part in remembrance. In preparation, Delhomme initially immersed himself in the historic photojournalism of Mathew Brady and planned the sequence’s choreography with Ross to employ a 1.85:1 framing ratio and multiple ARRI Alexa cameras, fitted with a mixture of Panavision Primo, Primo Zoom, and Vintage spherical lenses. “Gary wanted the camera movements to be as straight and as simple as possible,” recalls Delhomme in an interview with British Cinematographer, no cranes or dollies, just tripod and handheld–​a lot of long lens shots, no flares, no pretty or dirty foregrounds. He was constantly avoiding too complex shots and effects that would make the movie look too much like we were ‘making cinema’. (Prince 2016) Later during the film’s opening act, Newt and his nephew Daniel are forced to navigate their way through a series of trenches on the Corinth battlefield that eerily foreshadow the “no-​man’s land” of First World War films such as All Quiet on the Western Front and Paths of Glory (1957). A Steadicam tracking shot follows the two at a low angle, keeping the viewer from having an

Figure 15.2 Newt Knight carrying his nephew Daniel off the Corinth battlefield in Free State of Jones (Director Gary Ross, Bluegrass Films, 2016). © Bluegrass Films/​Entertainment Pictures/​Alamy Stock Photo

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advantaged field of vision. Occasionally pausing to look up, down, and side-​to-​side, the Steadicam provides an immersive perspective within the film’s battlefield panorama that recalls the panorama optics of spherically designed diorama exhibition halls from the nineteenth century. In his Handbook of Aesthetics in 1807, J.A. Eberthardt describes two gazes employed by panorama paintings: rundblick (a circular gaze along a horizonal axis; literally meaning “panoramic view”) and überblick (gaze from above) (Comment 1999, 97). While both rundblick and überblick gazes are employed by Delhomme in this sequence, there is a third gaze used here that completes the film’s immersive vision of Civil War combat: aufblick (gaze from below). These three gazes operating in concert, captured through takes that often ran 20 minutes in length, place the film’s action in dialogue with the panorama painting’s cinematic legacy, as well as contemporary war films about modern-​day conflicts (The Hurt Locker, for example) that revise the traditional war film panoramic vision through the aesthetics of documentary filmmaking and combat zone journalism. “[Gary]…wanted it to look very real, nearly like a National Geographic documentary in a way,” notes Delhomme in an interview with Panavision. “My first inclination was to shoot with anamorphic lenses…[but Gary] decided he wanted to shoot 1.85 and spherical to keep that idea of documentary style” (Panavision 2016). Beyond these opening scenes, this immersive documentary style would be used in battles fought in Mississippi swamps (images bathed in blue-​tone that recall the mangrove swamps of Apocalypse Now) and on town streets throughout Jones County. This revised influence of the panorama painting allows for Free State of Jones, and other works of New Civil War cinema, to participate in a continued legacy of pre-​cinema visual culture on the one hand and distance themselves far from the epic allure of Griffith’s battle scenes and the Technicolor dreamland of Gone with the Wind on the other hand.

“A war for cotton”: the Lost Cause and Union Cause traditions Returning to the four traditions of Civil War cinema: the Lost Cause tradition, according to Gallagher, offers “a loose group of arguments that cast the South’s experiment in nation-​building as an admirable struggle against hopeless odds” (Gallagher 2008, 2). Though Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation is not the only Lost Cause film by any reasonable standards, the film’s legacy and mode of address set a tone by which other Lost Cause films would be measured. The Union Cause tradition attempted to reframe the Civil War as an effort to preserve the union “in the face of secessionist actions that threatened both the work of the Founders and, by extension, the future of democracy in a world that had yet to embrace self-​rule by a free people” (2). The Emancipation Cause tradition, informed by a memory of the Civil Rights Movement and Vietnam War protests, returned the issue of slavery to the forefront of the discussion, reframing the war as a crusade to “remove a cancerous influence on American society and politics” (2). The fourth tradition, the Reconciliation Cause, “represented an attempt by white people, North and South, to extol American virtues both sides manifested during the war” (2). This last tradition was largely possible, according to Toplin, in an America that was more homogenized by mass media and a common culture toward the end of the Cold War (Toplin 1997). Additionally, Toplin and Gallagher attribute the emergence of this fourth tradition to the initial run of Ken Burns’ The Civil War (1990) PBS documentary series and its subsequent popularity. Though many works of Civil War cinema, in particular films produced after the Vietnam War, are not fastidiously wedded to one of these traditions over the others, it is crucial to become acquainted with signature films and styles of each of these traditions to consider how Free State of Jones constitutes a new, twenty-​first century tradition. The most well-​known Lost Cause tradition film, The Birth of a Nation, exhibits the influence of panorama paintings and war photography, plus the influence of soldier writings on the 231

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formation of war movie narration techniques during early cinema. As mentioned, Griffith’s film employs the panoramic vision of nineteenth-​century large-​scale paintings, with wide shots from cameras perched atop a California ridge capturing vast scenes of combat. Yet the film also draws on Civil War epistolary traditions to pioneer early crosscutting narrative techniques: the film’s “Little Colonel” Ben Cameron (Henry B. Walthall) communicates with his family through letters, bridging the emotional struggles taking place both on and off the battlefield. The influence of war photography is also present in the staging of battlefield camp life and the aftermath of carnage, recalling the work of Brady, Gardner, and O’Sullivan in varying degrees, bring the “the viewer into the experience of war in a very immediate and powerful ways” (Davidson 2007, 231). Yet, the influence of each of these forms are mobilized toward the film’s unabashed endorsement of the Ku Klux Klan as crucial figures in the American story and its presentation of the Old South as a paradise lost. As discussed earlier, Free State of Jones draws on the influence of the panorama and war photography to construct a different visual interpretation of the Civil War’s cultural significance. Ross’ film, however, engages with another Lost Cause tradition trope, originating with Griffith’s “Little Colonel”: the Johnny Reb character, or what Paul Haspel describes as “the ordinary Confederate soldier” as “the original good soldier in a bad cause” (Haspel 1996, 131). Johnny Reb is generally portrayed as good as “his blue-​coated counterpart,” fighting the war “on limited resources and against great odds” (1996, 131). Free State of Jones complicates this trope on two levels. First, Ross’ film foregrounds class distinctions between the people of Jones County and Adams County (the plantation region of Natchez). The film’s references site (freestateofjones. info), the first of its kind to accompany a major Hollywood motion picture, describes Jones County as “populated by yeoman farmers” with no “personal stake in the war,” in contrast to Natchez with plantations in Adams County owned by “the Silicon Valley billionaires of their day”.5 After the film’s opening battle scene at Corinth, Newt asks Jasper Collins (future member of the Knight Company, portrayed by Christopher Berry): “You know they got [houses] in Natchez with gold doorknobs? Not gold looking. Gold, real gold.” Jasper responds: “But all their gold and all their silver shall not protect them from the laugh of the Lord.” Second, the Johnny Reb trope is destabilized through the characters of Colonel Elias Hood (Thomas Francis Murphy), inspired by the real-​life Major Amos McLemore (believed to have been killed by Newt Knight), and the dandy Lt. Barbour (Bill Tangradi), a fictionalized composite of several Confederate officers charged with tracking down the Knight Company. Hood and Barbour raid and brutalize homesteads, summarily execute Knight Company members, including young boys, and overall blur the boundaries between the battlefront and the home front through acts of cruelty. Free State of Jones’ broader dialogue with twenty-​first-​century Civil War films, such as Gangs of New York, also extends to Anthony Minghella’s Cold Mountain (2003), a film that anticipates Free State of Jones’ disavowal of the Johnny Reb trope and whose narrative is framed against the anxieties of an Iraq War generation. Cold Mountain begins at the Siege of Petersburg (1864–​ 1865) with the Battle of the Crater: an attempt by the Union army to dig a tunnel under the Confederate trenches, pack it with explosives, and blow a crater in the Southern lines for a Union assault. Following the attack, shell-​shocked Confederate Private W.P. Inman (Jude Law), a carpenter by trade who sees no nobility in the Southern cause, deserts to make the long trek across an American landscape stripped of humanity and fraught with treacherous people (trackers of deserters that are echoed in Free State of Jones by Hood and Barbour). Like Newt Knight, Inman is brutally awakened to the fact that Southern victory has nothing to offer him, and after being wounded by friendly fire, finds himself a casualty of Lost Cause mythology. Inman’s journey to his sweetheart Ada (Nicole Kidman) at Cold Mountain, North Carolina, serves as an anti-​Lost Cause

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metaphor: the mythology of the humble Confederate soldier fighting not for slavery (that he cannot afford) but for hearth and home is dispatched by the realities of scorched earth and class politics. Perhaps the most explicit undermining of the Lost Cause tradition in Free State of Jones is achieved through its unambiguous linking of secession with maintaining the institution of slavery, with no attempt to rehabilitate the Southern cause for contemporary audiences. While encamped near the Corinth battlefield, Newt and Jasper discuss the Conscription Act (or the “Twenty Negro Law”) that exempted slave owners and their sons from the draft—​directly framing the war as a conflict whose outcome would only benefit the Southern wealthy elite.6 In response, Knight quips: “If we all chip in and buy us one Negro then we get a couple weeks off? I’m tired of it, Jasper. I’m tired of helping ‘em fight for their damn cotton.” In some respects, this conversation echoes a New York Times article that appeared on the eve of the war’s sesquicentennial (“Gone with the Myths”) in 2010, which anticipated the “whitewash explanation for secession and the Civil War” that the author was certain would accompany the retrospectives on the war over the ensuing years. The article brings South Carolina’s 1860 “Ordinance of Secession” and “Declaration of the Immediate Causes” into the public discourse of the war’s cultural legacy, noting that the language of these documents (and those produced by other seceding Southern states) clearly state’s the Southern “position [as] thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery” (Ball 2010). Bringing this explicit defense of slavery, or what Knight’s native Mississippi declared in its secession ordinance as “the greatest material interest in the world,” into public discourse is one of the chief concerns of the New Civil War cinema and adjacent historical memory projects, part of a refighting of the war on screen and off screen. The Lost Cause tradition, according to Toplin, was wedded as much to “regrets about American involvement in World War I” as it had been attributed to ideas about race and national belonging (Toplin 1997). Yet, changes in opinion toward US military intervention after the Second World War gave rise to the Union Cause tradition, which held that “America’s fight for freedom against fascist oppression evidently had its impact on the interpretations of history.” In this regard, John Huston’s 1951 adaptation of Stephen Crane’s 1895 novel The Red Badge of Courage is a particularly striking example of a Union Cause film and offers an illuminating counterpoint to how elements of the Union Cause tradition are articulated in Free State of Jones. Though Huston’s film elevates the importance of Union victory, war trauma is foregrounded as a discernable narrative device, recalling Huston’s documentary about trauma-​stricken Second World War veterans, Let There Be Light (1946). The noir lighting of Let There Be Light features in moments from Red Badge of Courage to foreground the inner conflict felt by Union private Henry “The Youth” Fleming (Audie Murphy). Forcing himself to overcome cowardice and humiliation, The Youth transforms himself into a fearless fighter for the Union, though Huston complicates these expressions of heroism with scenes that highlight the psychological degradation that Second World War veterans could identify with. For example, a scene during the film’s midpoint has The Youth encountering a line of wounded and shell-​shocked soldiers marching away from the battlefield, exhibiting the thousand-​yard-​stare made famous at the end of the Second World War by artist Tom Lea’s 1945 illustration for Life magazine of a traumatized marine after the Battle of Peleliu. In Red Badge of Courage, battlefield violence and “seeing the elephant” are a both a transformative process under the sign of American virtues and a grim reminder of war’s corporeal reality. By contrast, Free State of Jones, while employing elements of the Union Cause tradition, does not employ violence as the site of symbolic transformation, nor is war trauma mobilized toward this narrative end. Rather, the film’s combat brutality is in service of the film’s overarching anti-​ war critique, an issue to which I will later return. In Ross’ film, the Union Cause is articulated

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through a disavowal of Confederate identity, both literally through the characters’ actions and through symbolic visuals. In one striking moment of the film, the Knight Company takes control of Jones County and, to mark their establishment of the titular Free State of Jones, removes a Confederate battle flag from a town square and replaces it with the Stars and Stripes. Punctuated by Nicholas Britell’s score, this scene echoes the removal of the Confederate flag from the South Carolina Statehouse in 2015, and as a result the scene becomes a symbolic reversal of the Confederate flag raisings that took place upon state declarations of secession in 1860 and 1861. As part of the larger class of New Wave Civil War films, Free State of Jones anticipates the removal of Confederate flags and memorials in the wake of the 2020 #BlackLivesMatter protests, fusing elements of the Union Cause tradition with the Emancipation Cause tradition’s Civil Rights and social justice focus.

Emancipation, reconciliation, and disenchanted violence in Free State of Jones Returning to Bakhtin’s notion of genre memory: genres change slightly with each use, remembering past usage while at the same time acquiring new modes of expression drawn from the present. Here, I would like to turn to a “new [mode] of expression drawn from the present” crucial to the film’s critique of the Lost Cause mythology. Ross’ film is based largely on Victoria E. Bynum’s7 The Free State of Jones: Mississippi’s Longest Civil War (2016), a book that begins with the argument that there was “far more reverence for the Confederacy” in the American South by the mid-​twentieth century than existed in the 1860s, a by-​product of “many decades of ‘Lost Cause’ education” (Bynum 2016, 3). The film follows this premise largely through its structural use of flashbacks and flashforwards: the primary action of the film centres around the story of the Knight Company, intercut with the miscegenation trial of Newt’s grandson Davis Knight in 1948. Written through this adaptive process, Free State of Jones is what Robert Rosenstone calls a “serious biofilm,” in that the director has worked closely with a historical consultant (in this case, Victoria Bynum). This approach by no means makes a biopic impervious to criticism, as these films “can still be debated for their overall portraits,” which end up being “less over the accuracy of individual bits of data than over the whole interpretation” (Rosenstone 2006, 90). The film is also not unique in having a historical text as the basis for the screenplay, as much can be said about several of the films mentioned in this chapter (and many that are not mentioned). What is worth noting, however, is the historical moment surrounding the release of Bynum’s book that established some of the frameworks for crafting the New Civil War cinema. The late 1990s saw a reinvigorated cultural memory of the Second World War’s “greatest generation,” shaped largely at the end of the twentieth century by Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998), and the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, which ushered in new subjectivities that would reshape the cultural landscape (Auster 2005, 205). Just as the previous Civil War traditions responded to conflict (First World War, Second World War, and the Vietnam War), social history (the Civil Rights Movement), and mass media culture, the New Civil War cinema contended with a sense of national identity reshaped by a War on Terror, competing histories, and internet technology. In contrast with Free State of Jones, let’s consider the latter two Civil War film traditions, films that also responded to shifting cultural contexts and evolving media landscapes. A national repulsion over the Vietnam War, coupled with the impact of the Civil Rights Movement, gave rise to the Emancipation Cause tradition during the 1980s (Gallagher 2008, 54). Glory, a film alluded to in several moments in Free State of Jones, serves as a prime example of this tradition. Zwick’s film chronicles the history of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw (Matthew Broderick) 234

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and the ill-​fated African American 54th Massachusetts regiment. Though far removed from The Birth of a Nation thematically, Glory draws on the three pre-​cinema modes in service of its anti-​ Lost Cause critique: Kevin Jarre’s screenplay is based on Colonel Robert Gould Shaw’s personal letters, which feature in the film as a voice-​over narration; the film’s battles employ a panoramic vision of battle lifted from nineteenth-​century large-​scale paintings; and the death harvests after these battles, fields and beaches strewn with corpses, eerily echo the war’s haunting photographs. What is striking about Glory is that it complicates the cultural legacy of previous Civil War films through evoking Vietnam War films and the lingering after effects of the Vietnam War itself by foregrounding PTSD as a discernable narrative device and pointing toward the futility of war. This is crystalized in an exchange between Shaw and former-​slave Trip (Denzel Washington) in the film’s third act. In this scene, Trip declares to Shaw that he will not serve as colour guard in the impending assault on Battery Wagner (July 1863), the film’s climax during which Shaw and 40% of the regiment are lost. “What’s the point?” Trip asks Shaw, “Ain’t nobody going to win. It’s just going to go on and on.” In some respects, this sentiment appears to anticipate the anti-​war attitudes found in the New Civil War cinema. By wedding the cultural memory of Vietnam to Civil War historical memory, Glory positions war as endemic to the human condition, constantly cycling forward. Free State of Jones, arriving in the wake of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, argues alongside Glory that the Civil War never ended completely. The graphic violence in Free State of Jones is, in many respects, a nod to the same brutality in Glory. The opening battle scenes from both films feature exploding heads from cannon ball fire, signalling to the viewer that what they are about to see is not their parents’ or grandparents’ Civil War cinema. At Corinth, cannister fire demolishes rows of soldiers instantly, with blood splattering across the faces of survivors. We are later treated to close shots of corpses, bloodied and some with faces destroyed and concave, swarming with flies. A hand clutches a photo locket of his sweetheart (or mother), drowned in blood. A horrifying detail about the Battle of Shiloh (April 1862), described in Ken Burns’ The Civil War, is transported to the Battle of Corinth in Free State of Jones: wild hogs feeding on the corpses strewn about the battlefield. When Knight delivers the wounded soldier to the hospital, the viewer is treated to brutal scenes of amputation that recall a similar scene from Glory: after the Battle of Antietam (Sharpsburg, Maryland—​September, 1862), Shaw, while undergoing treatment for a minor shrapnel wound (with attentive care), watches in horror as a young private’s leg is amputated sans anesthesia, a subtle underscore of class distinction that Free State of Jones amplifies. Violence in Zwick’s and Ross’ films are what Sarah Cole calls “disenchanted violence,” in which the violated body is not a “symbol of historical transformation and renewal”—​as has been the case in previous cycles of Civil War films—​but rather a gruesome reminder of war’s cruelty (Cole 2012, 43, 81). Disenchanted violence is defined through its lack of redeemable qualities and through its precipitation of “total degeneration and waste,” and, in the context of Civil War cinema, undercuts the regenerative properties of the Lost Cause mythology. In Free State of Jones, disenchanted violence is used not only to deglamorize Civil War memory (deflating the nostalgic glances of prior cycles of Civil War films), it is also used to compound the class politics that are employed by the film to dismantle the Lost Cause mythology. When Knight takes a wounded soldier to be treated, he first moves him behind the hospital tent and, knowing full well that officers would be treated first, removes the soldier’s private uniform, and then takes the soldier into the hospital, shouting: “Captain Jeffrey Baylor here, 10th Tennessee, Minié ball, left eye!” Amidst the chaos of screaming patients and blood-​drenched wooden floors, the private-​ turned-​captain is predictably treated rapidly. Later, when his nephew Daniel is wounded, Knight has no such luck in passing the boy off as an officer to receive immediate care. “I got officers I can’t even get to,” a medic tells Newt. When Newt takes Daniel out of the hospital to die under 235

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the shade of a tree, in peace and tranquility, it is not a symbolic national sacrifice that one would find in a Union Cause tradition film. Rather this moment empties the Civil War combat film sub-​ category of battlefield valour. After the battle, Newt deserts with the body of his dead nephew Daniel slumped over a stolen mule. As he leaves, a fellow soldier suggests that Knight’s nephew died an honorable death, to which Knight responds: “No. He just died.” Lastly, the Reconciliation Cause tradition maintained a strong presence through the 1990s through their appeals to new formations of collective national identity that were largely defined through new media. The Civil War (1990) embodies the Reconciliation Cause tradition largely through how it orchestrates images of the conflict for the viewer, creating what Alison Landsberg termed “prosthetic memory”: an encounter with the past through mass media technology that leaves the viewer with personal memories of the past that they did not actually live. While it is true that any historiography that enjoys wide circulation enables the viewers and participants to “suture” themselves into a larger history and acquire memories of a past, what makes prosthetic memory a distinct concept is that the personal memories created are not “privatized” but rather they “open up the possibility for collective horizons of experience and pave the way for unexpected political horizons” (Landsberg 2004, 15). Prosthetic memories are specifically the product of engaging with media: they are sensuous in nature, they benefit largely from a mass culture that expands media literacy beyond boundaries (race, class, age, etc.), and are utilitarian in nature (prosthetic memories “might be instrumental in generating empathy and articulating an ethical relation to…other[s]‌”) (150). Burns’ film largely creates a prosthetic memory of the war by presenting photographs and paintings of the war in a process known as “the Ken Burns Effect”8: the camera would pan across photographs and zoom in or out at varying speeds (often to the rhythm of the music) to produce the illusion of motion, as if the micro-​histories encapsulated in these photographs were coming to life. The series is narrated by author and historian David McCullough and by notable actors and actresses portraying the voices of the war’s salient figures (Morgan Freeman as Frederick Douglass, for example); the letters, journal entries, personal diaries, and famous speeches are used to recreate the war for the viewer as if it were their real memory of the past.9 The prosthetic memory generated by The Civil War would prove to be enduring, setting the stage for a revival of Civil War films during the 1990s that would also follow the Reconciliation Cause tradition. Two notable Reconciliation films from 1993 would feature traces of the Lost Cause and Union Cause traditions and attempted to reconcile the two traditions for an audience that mass media had made less provincialized. The made-​for-​television film Class of ’61 (1993) tells the story of two West Point cadets who find themselves on opposite sides of the war, culminating in a showdown between them at the First Battle of Bull Run. While both Lost Cause and Union Cause ideologies are articulated through these characters, the Emancipation Cause is expressed through a parallel storyline of an escaped slave named Lucius (Andre Braugher). In a crucial moment of the film, Confederate officer Shelby Peyton (Dan Futterman), while walking amongst Union corpses, says in a voice-​over letter to his lover: “My darling Shannon, I have seen the elephant—​the horrible specter of war as it tramples men to death.” While not a popular success, Class of ’61 serves as an early attempt following the release of Burns’ documentary to advance the Reconciliation Cause tradition cinematically; both Burns and historian Shelby Foote (featured heavily in The Civil War) served as consultants on Class of ’61. Additionally, cinematographer Janusz Kaminski’s work on the film would catch the attention of its executive producer, Steven Spielberg, and the two would begin a collaboration that continues to the present day.

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The other film, Ronald Maxwell’s Gettysburg (1993), based on Michael Shaara’s 1974 novel The Killer Angels, presents the events surrounding the battle (June 30–​July 3, 1863) on an epic scale. Maxwell’s film falls strongly into Bennett’s sub-​category of Civil War combat films, though moments of melodrama (notably the friendship between two generals, one Confederate and the other Union) are used to foreground its Reconciliation Cause ideology. Though Class of ’61 is anti-​war in its orientation, both films depart from Glory’s post-​Vietnam reappraisal of Civil War history, and Gettysburg only lightly interrogates issues of race in one short scene featuring an African American (with no spoken lines), a runaway slave named John Henry given shelter by the 20th Maine early in the film. This Reconciliation Cause tradition flaw becomes even more pronounced in Maxwell’s follow-​up film, Gods and Generals, a film which chronicles the rise and fall of General Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson (Stephen Lang) from the war’s beginning to his death at the Battle of Chancellorsville in 1863. Framed as a Reconciliation film, Gods and Generals’ incorporation of Lost Cause tropes proved to be a miscalculation on the part of the filmmakers: through its uncritical stance on the Southern cause and a side-​stepping of the brutality of slavery, the film, as Jenny Barrett describes, reinforces old myths about the Civil War despite Maxwell’s efforts to go beyond them (Barrett 2009, 157). In a scene between Jackson and his Black servant Jim (Frankie Faison), Jackson proclaims that one day “your people will be free…and in so doing seal a bond of enduring friendship between us,” perpetuating the myth of the nobility of the White Southerner and obscuring attempts to place slavery at the centre of Civil War history. Civil War cinema from the ’90s may have been an early indication of the flaws in the Reconciliation Cause and the durability of the Lost Cause mythology, which William E. Huntzicker attributes to the idea that the South never really lost the war (they just simply could no longer withstand the North’s military might) and Hollywood’s penchant for making clear us-​versus-​them narratives (Huntzicker 2007, 236). Added to this, another part of the failure of the Reconciliation Cause films, according to Paul Haspel, is their attempt at consensus-​building over the historical and cultural legacy of the Civil War in a way that has “left African-​Americans out of the consensus-​ seeking process” (Haspel 1996, 140). Rather than making another attempt at a Reconciliation film, Free State of Jones indirectly acknowledges how the rise of White nationalism during the Obama years (cresting with the presidency of Donald J. Trump, elected the year of the film’s release) had posed a crisis for the Reconciliation Cause. In this sense, it is altogether telling that the behind-​the-​ scenes featurette for the film’s Blu-​ray release begins with a quote from William Faulkner: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Free State of Jones answers Barbara Fields’ figurative call-​to-​arms and refights the Civil War in the era of the Black Lives Matter movement and debates over the notion of a post-​racial America. Victoria Bynum suggests that the war’s meaning and legacy are still being debated, as so much of regional and political identity in the United States remains attached to it. Dismantling the Lost Cause mythology—​which Bynum explicitly links to Southern journalists, novelists, historians, and eventually Hollywood in the early twentieth century—​is therefore a crucial component of an American progressive project (Bynum 2016, 196). It is perhaps for this reason that the Civil War has a way of cycling back into media, adding to Jenny Barrett’s view that Civil War cinema is an exceptional case of “stimulating an imagining of nation” (Barrett 2009, 14). Free State of Jones is part of this continuing cycle through participating in a deconstruction of the Lost Cause mythology, maintaining components of the Union and Emancipation causes relevant to contemporary culture, and offering a corrective to the shortcomings of the Reconciliation Cause (though still acknowledging the prosthetic memory propped up by the Burns’ series). Through engaging with

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each previous tradition of Civil War cinema, Free State of Jones also continues the enduring influence of pre-​cinema visual culture, revised in Ross’ film to construct a new narrative of the Civil War to a generation shaped by Iraq and Afghanistan War films. Ultimately, Free State of Jones affirms Barbara Fields’ view that the “war is not over until we today have done our part in fighting it,” and the film also eerily suggests that “regrettably it can still be lost.”

Notes 1 Joe McGovern’s review for Entertainment Weekly contrasts Free State of Jones with 12 Years a Slave, arguing that Ross’ film “attempts to shake up the format” but the result is a “way-​too-​long-​history-​lesson” (Govern 2016). 2 For further reading, see Morson and Emerson (1990). 3 For further reading, see Scott (2021). 4 In The American Civil War and the Hollywood War Film (Trafton 2015), I argue that these pre-​cinema modes can be read as a rehearsal for the war film, as each of these forms employ what art historian Aby Warburg called “formulas of pathos”: aesthetic organization designed to mobilize emotions and to provide the spectator with a vantage point to experience chaos and take part in remembrance. 5 The website provides several historical references in support of this description, including, but not limited to, William C. Davis’ Way Through the Wilderness: The Natchez Trace and the Civilization of the Southern Frontier (1996), W.E.B. Du Bois’ John Brown (1909), and Victoria E. Bynum’s influential work The Free State of Jones: Mississippi’s Longest Civil War (2001). 6 Collins would later go on to play a significant role with Knight in founding the Free State of Jones and then co-​found the Ellisville Patriot, a newspaper that directly criticized the nascent Lost Cause mythology. For further reading, see: https://​renega​deso​uth.wordpr​ess.com/​2009/​03/​11/​jas​per-​coll​ins-​and-​the-​ ell​isvi​lle-​patr​iot/​. 7 In addition to serving as the film’s historical consultant, Bynum has a small role as a field nurse. 8 This technique is available as an option in Final Cut Pro and other editing software (labelled as the “Ken Burns Effect” in these programs—​a testimony to its legacy). 9 The film’s soundtrack, containing some of the most popular songs of the war, is most famous for an original composition: “Ashokan Farewell,” a Scottish lament written by Jay Unger that would later be viewed as the documentary’s signature piece and the soundtrack to the prosthetic memory of the war that the film creates.

Reference list Auster, Albert. 2005. “Saving Private Ryan and American Triumphalism.” In The War Film, edited by Robert Eberwein, 205–​213. London: Rutgers University Press. Ball, Edward. 2010. “Gone with the Myths.” New York Times. The Opinion Pages, December 18. www.nyti​ mes.com/​2010/​12/​19/​opin​ion/​19B​all.html?_​r=​0. Barrett, Jenny. 2009. Shooting the Civil War: Cinema, History and American National Identity. London: IB Tauris. Burgoyne, Robert, and John Trafton. 2015. “Haunting in the Historical Biopic: Lincoln.” Rethinking History 19, no. 3 (September): 525–​535. https://​doi.org/​10.1080/​13642​529.2015.1006​865. Bynum, Victoria E. 2016. The Free State of Jones: Mississippi’s Longest Civil War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Cole, Sarah. 2012. At the Violet Hour: Modernism and Violence in England and Ireland. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Comment, Bernard. 1999. The Painted Panorama. London: Reaktion Books. Davidson, Phebe. 2007. “History with Lighting: The Legacy of D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation.” In Memory and Myth: The Civil War in Fiction and Film from Uncle Tom’s Cabin to Cold Mountain, edited by David B. Sachsman and S. Kittrell Rushing, 221–​234. Indiana: Purdue University Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 1986. Cinema 1: The Movement Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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The new Civil War cinema Gallagher, Gary W. 2008. Causes Won, Lost and Forgotten: How Hollywood and Popular Art Shape What We Know About the Civil War. North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press. Govern, Joe. 2016. “Free State of Jones: EW Review.” Entertainment Weekly, June 21. www.ew.com/​arti​cle/​ 2016/​06/​21/​free-​state-​jones-​ew-​rev​iew. Haspel, Paul. 1996. “From Hero to Villain to Unknown Other: The Confederate Soldier in American Film.” Studies in Popular Culture 19, no. 2 (October): 131–​140. Huntzicker, William E. 2007. “Hollywood Themes and Southern Myths: An Analysis of Gone With the Wind.” In Memory and Myth: The Civil War in Fiction and Film from Uncle Tom’s Cabin to Cold Mountain, edited by David B. Sachsman and S. Kittrell Rushing, 235–​242. Indiana: Purdue University Press. Kappelhoff, Hermann. 2012. “Sense of Community: The filmic composition of a moral feeling.” In Representations of War: Emotionalizing Strategies in Literature and Audiovisual Media from the 18th to the 21st Century, edited by Soren R. Fauth, et al., translated by the author, 43–​57. Göttingen: Wallstein. Landsberg, Alison. 2004. Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture. New York: Columbia University Press. Morris Jr., Roy. 2007. “One Whose Responsibility? The Historical and Literary Underpinnings of The Red Badge of Courage.” In Memory and Myth: The Civil War in Fiction and Film from Uncle Tom’s Cabin to Cold Mountain, edited by David B. Sachsman and S. Kittrell Rushing, 137–​150. Indiana: Purdue University Press. Morson, Gary, and Caryl Emerson. 1990. Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of Prosaics. Redwood City: Stanford University Press. Kindle Edition. Panavision. 2016. “Gary Ross and Benoit Delhomme Conceive an Organic Look for Free State of Jones.” www.pan​avis​ion.com/​gary-​ross-​and-​ben​oît-​delho​mme-​conce​ive-​orga​nic-​look-​free-​state-​jones. Prince, Ron. 2016. “Noble Intentions: Benoit Delhomme AFC/​Free State of Jones.” British Cineatographer. https://​bri​tish​cine​mato​grap​her.co.uk/​ben​oit-​delho​mme-​afc-​free-​state-​jones/​. Rosenstone, Robert. 2006. History on Film/​Film on History. UK: Pearson Education Limited. Rosenheim, Joe. 2012. “Seeing the Elephant: Photography and the Civil War.” Effects of the Civil War and American Art series, December. Ross, Gary. 2016. Free State of Jones. STX Entertainment. Scott, Malcolm. 2021. Hollywood’s Long Civil War. Oxford: Peter Lang. Slotkin, Richard. 1991. “What Shall Men Remember?: Recent Work on the Civil War.” American Literary History 3, no. 1 (Spring): 120–​135. https://​doi.org/​10.1093/​alh/​3.1.120. Toplin, Robert Brent. 1997. “Ken Burns The Civil War as an Interpretation of History.” Ken Burns The Civil War: Historians Respond, edited by Robert Brent Toplin. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition. Trafton, John. 2015. The American Civil War and the Hollywood War Film. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Williams, Lucinda, Nicholas Britell, Caitlin Sullivan, Tim Fain, and Shawn Conley. 2016. “I’m Crying.” Free State of Jones: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack. Sony Music Entertainment.

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PART IV

Evolving forms and formats

16 PUBLIC HISTORY ON SCREEN From broadcast and network TV to the Internet era, an evolutionary approach Ann Gray

It has often been acknowledged that most people get their understanding of the past from popular forms of representation such as literary fiction, cinema, and, in particular, television (Edgerton and Rollins 2001; De Groot 2009). This realization is behind my interest in how and in what ways television, its economies, institutional organizations, professions, crafts, and technologies involve the fashioning of historical material into public knowledge about the past (Gray and Bell 2013). My aim in this chapter is to explore how and in what ways these changes can be detected in popular, new media representations of the past as produced and disseminated in the forms and networks of the digital era of the internet. Before we begin, it is important to clarify the technological changes which television has undergone in the decades since its inception. Catherine Johnson’s work focuses on the institutions and organization of television and has produced a useful timeline (Table 16.1) categorizing successive eras of television relating specifically to technological developments in distribution, production, and viewing. In Table 16.1, we can see changes in television delivery, moving from mass networks to niche channels, from pay-​per-​view through to video on demand. Content is now delivered digitally to a range of new devices for collective, individual, and mobile use. Thus, audience experience options have expanded from simply viewing to surfing, buying, playing, curating, sharing, uploading, downloading, liking, commenting, and rating (Johnson 2019, 8). In the Broadcast era, television networks (public service or commercial organizations) chased a mass audience. Success was expressed through ratings and in the commercial case, the number of viewers for advertisers. Television networks aimed to attract and keep viewers watching their channel for as long as possible, to count “the bums on seats.”1 In the Digital and Internet era, television and new visual media continue to aim at engaging and holding the attention of viewers but do so in an increasingly competitive and saturated market (Evans 2020). Significantly, in the Internet age, the professional producers from the Broadcast era are now joined by semi-​professional, pro/​amateur, and amateur originators of content. All this content is delivered to a range of new devices for collective, individual, and mobile use. Predictably, perhaps, since the eras that introduced satellite, digital channels and now the internet, it is often claimed that we are witnessing the end of television. These claims are based

DOI: 10.4324/9781003263234-21

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Ann Gray Table 16.1  Era

Categorization

Technologies

1930s–​1970s 1970s–​1990s 1990s–​2000s

Broadcast era Broadcast +​Cable & Satellite era Digital era =​Broadcast +​Cable & satellite +​Digital Internet era =​Digital +​Broadband/​4G/​ Wi-​Fi

TV set Remote Control, VHS player DVD player, set top box, personal video recorder Cloud computing, Smart TV and desktop, laptop, tablet, smartphone

2010s–​

Source: Adapted from Johnson 2019, 8.

on the perception that technological developments have challenged the common definition of television as a medium of predominantly national broadcasting. However, as several scholars have insisted, if we take a more comprehensive view of television, as Amanda Lotz proposed, this broader view includes “textual characteristics, industrial practices, audience behaviours, and cultural understanding,” that reveal how we are able to observe some continuities that are carried forward from the practices of linear television (2017, 3). Indeed, M.J. Robinson suggests that television, since its inception, has always been in the process of evolution—​what she describes as a “liminal” state (2017, 7–​10), what Lotz describes as the “fluidity of the medium’s use” (2014, 276). This fluid and liminal state can be noted in relation to history on television. Although the “history boom” or rise of commissioning of history programmes during the broadcast, cable, and satellite eras may have peaked, this does not mean that audiovisual history is on the wane. On the contrary, as the examples we will examine demonstrate, history is finding its place on other platforms, carrying forward its influence into new territories. Whilst television has seen massive changes, especially since 2010, there are continuities carried through from prior, established organizations and working practices that are resilient and detectable within newer forms of media.

Televising History 1995–​2010 My examination of what new forms of media offer for doing history expands on key elements emerging from my earlier “Televising History” project (Gray and Bell 2013). Set within the context of national broadcasting and its role as public historian, the findings of this earlier work inform the understanding of generic developments of national histories, commemoration and “living histories,” as well as the notable absences that arise in television histories. The project began in 2006 and was interdisciplinary from the start. Working alongside my co-​ author, historian Erin Bell, we conceived of history on television as programming about the past which, unlike fictional genres, grounds its claims to authenticity through recourse to documentary and/​or experiential constructions of events and life in the past. Our main focus was on terrestrial networks in the UK. Additionally, where relevant, we included satellite and digital channels alongside co-​produced British programming with an international scope (for example, Discovery and BBC World). Our approach explored the production environment, engagement with historians, and an examination and analysis of programme output. Prior to 2006, a dialogue between historians and media professionals in the UK had already begun, largely inspired by the increasing success of history programming on television. Attitudes had changed since the 1980s when historians were concerned with whether television was an appropriate or sufficient medium for “good” history. For example, at the conference History and 244

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the Media (Institute of Historical Research 2002), historians and media professionals appeared to agree that debates on the subject must go beyond such earlier questions. However, it must be said that this attitude among professional historians does continue (Cannadine 2004). Importantly, drawing on Benedict Anderson’s notion of “imagined communities,” Jordanova links much public history output to the development of “nationhood” (Jordanova 2006, 136). The BBC within its public remit presents itself as a relatively easy fit within this understanding of the role of public history. Here the output of a public service broadcaster, universally available, defines the nation’s past through large-​scale landmark series and the commemoration of significant national historical events. In this way, through broadcast television, specific genres are woven into the nation’s past to provide what Jordanova describes as the “backdrop” to “general cultural uses of the past” and “specific displays that relate to history” (2006, 136). However, other, more radical definitions of public history insist its work should challenge dominant versions of a nation’s past, serving specific localities, communities, or groups. Hilda Kean, working within the History Workshop tradition, argues that public history in practice should not take history as a given, but should rather reveal the processes of how the past becomes history (2010, 26). Thus, for Kean, a sharing of conceptual and not only content-​based knowledge is a crucial part of the practice of public history. Throughout our study, the development of different genres and hybrids were examined within the context of changes to the media ecology. Such developments created constraints to, and potential for, creativity. We noted that the shaping of history output across the main broadcast channels in Britain was done by a relatively small cohort of media professionals, mostly known to each other and from similar social and cultural backgrounds (Gray 2010, 62–​63). Professionally, the social and to an extent informal aspects within the processes of commissioning and production significantly shaped the development of history programming. This revealed tendencies toward safe and familiar programming and the absence of unknown or ignored history. For example, Black histories, imperial histories, women’s history and other aspects of social history, industrial and regional history were relatively invisible in television history between 1995–​2010. In relation to women’s history, there was an absence of women, not only as historical figures and agents, but as presenters, producers, and historical advisers in the overall output. The historical academy has been suspicious of more popular forms of history programming on television. The inclusion of celebrities and “ordinary people” in popular genres who were encouraged to express emotion and feeling in response to memories, self-​revelation, and recognition of material, economic, and social hardship experienced in the past, did not sit well with more traditional historians. However, television, especially, but not only, public service broadcasting, played a role as public historian in relation to national events. It created a more popular approach to engagement through, for example, family genealogy of audiences new to history.

From linear TV to online Already by 2010, a fragmentation of audiences was already happening through provision of satellite channels and, in the UK, developments within the BBC were precursors of changes to come within the Digital and Internet eras. Maintaining a focus on history programming, the BBC provides a significant example of an evolutionary response to new technological and cultural challenges. In 1997 the BBC launched its website and in the same year established a slate of channels, under the UKTV brand transmitting BBC content. UKTV History content was offered and re-​branded in 2009 as Yesterday “where the past is always present.” Digital channels followed—​BBC News 24 in 1997, BBC Choice in 1998 (re-​branded as BBC Three in 2003), and in 1999 BBC Knowledge 245

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(re-​branded as BBC Four in 2002), with the children’s channels, CBeebies and CBBC, following in 2002. Thus, the BBC, through re-​packaging its programmes for discrete channels, acknowledged the broader trend toward identifying and serving smaller audiences with specific interests. Alongside these developments in channels, the BBC was actively engaged in developing digital technologies. The BBC website provides an interesting example of the employment of history programming in its commitment to encouraging audience engagement with its online activities. As part of the commemoration of the D-​Day Landings and Dunkirk in 2004, the BBC transmitted two historical event programmes: D-​Day 6.6.44: The Dramatic Story of Ordinary People in Extraordinary Times (BBC 1) and Dunkirk: We’ll Meet Again (BBC 1). In addition, the related People’s War website2 was launched which, amongst other things, invited viewers to upload their own memories of the events depicted saying, “Your memories are part of our history, please share them with us, lest we forget.” Over 125,000 contributions were made to the website with 91% of these from people over 65 (Bennett 2008, 289). This combined the conventional and familiar marking of national commemoration by the BBC on television with developments in internet technology which invited viewers to add their personal memories to those of the nation. It was a precursor to the 2006 Government (Department of Culture Media and Sport) remit that the BBC should “build digital Britain” leading up to the digital switchover in 2012 (Bennett 2008, 280). The 2004 commemorative season addressed the nation through linear programming with an interactive application linking to the BBC website and inviting personal testimonies, encouraging audiences to become internet users. This example is indicative of a gradual process of transformation of what we understand by television and, furthermore, it reveals how traces of the linear broadcast system are carried through into the digital age. For public history, it is relevant to remind ourselves of Ralph Samuel’s famous assertion that “History is the work of a thousand different hands” (1994, 17–​18). In the digital age, the potential for an increase of those different hands has risen exponentially, especially beyond the domains of academia and other organizations dealing in representations of the past. The combination of dedicated channels, standalone apps about history, and the potential for user-​generated content on sites such as YouTube has opened the floodgates for new kinds of history content. This applies to professionals in the field of television history and amateur creators keen to reach audiences and build communities with specific interests. In producing content, professionals and amateurs alike are now using smart phones which give high quality cinematic images, along with easily accessible, relatively cheap, and simple to use editing software. There is therefore an ever-​increasing number of amateur but skilled producer/​creators who now have access to platforms through which to reach viewers and users.

History TV in the Internet era Using four carefully selected examples, I will demonstrate both the continuing influence of linear television, specifically in the UK, in production practices, and the opportunities offered by the new environment for professionals and amateurs alike, including an example from the US. In a limited qualitative study such as this the selection of examples is critical as each is required to stand as a case study through which to explore different elements of practice. The key here is to focus on difference and depth rather than similarity and breadth which would only be possible in a larger study. A carefully selected case study presents a vantage point from which it is possible to explore the levels of complexity at work in that specific and contained example. For my purposes here, this includes questions of production: how is content made, in what form, employing what technical

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means and human resources? Circulation: by what means is content delivered and promoted? Consumption: for whom is the content produced and what relationship is fostered between producer and consumer? I employed two main criteria for selection: (1) the professional vs. amateur divide, and (2) distinctions between different basic economic models, including: subscription through an annual fee; YouTube channels with the YouTube Partnership Programme which remunerates, via advertising, creators whose channels meet specific viewing and subscription targets; and YouTube channels within the Partnership Programme plus money raised through the membership system software provided by Patreon.3 TikTok creatives receive no remuneration from advertising but TikTok claims to recognize the essential role played by the creators encouraging them by providing tools and services in the creative marketplace such as sound and visual effects, e.g., music and green screen in addition to Gifs, all of which enhance the creation of videos. Three of my examples are delivered on YouTube, all of which originated in the UK, and one on TikTok located in the US. The first two examples were British-​based channels initiated by already established media professionals, History Hit TV, a subscription channel launched in 2017 by Dan Snow, and Epic History, launched in 2015 by Toby Groom, both producing original content for their sites. Second, I selected two examples of non-​professional user-​generated content. One UK-​made, on YouTube, Catherine Warr’s Hidden History of Yorkshire launched in 2018 and the other, the US-​based Taylor Cassidy’s TikTok account launched in 2019, into which she inserts her “Fast Black History” short videos. Whilst all four evidence the desire to attract and build a community of subscribers and/​or followers, both Catherine Warr and Taylor Cassidy’s offerings are grounded in their locations and experiences, and as such, they are part of the community they seek to serve. In a virtual world, their sites attract followers from across geographical boundaries but the sense of belonging to place and shared social and cultural experience affords their presentations and postings a sense of grounded authenticity, albeit delivered on virtual platforms.

Media professionals History Hit TV | https://​acc​ess.his​tory​hit.com | Subscription website channel Dan Snow first appeared on television screens, fresh from graduating with a degree in Modern History, as co-​writer and presenter with his father, the journalist and broadcaster Peter Snow, for the BBC 2002 programme El Alamein, which commemorated the 60th anniversary of a battle in the North African Campaign, often referred to as Britain’s first real victory of the Second World War. Snow senior was not especially known for history programmes but for his appearances on the coverage of General Elections, and in particular his use of maps and charts in presenting voter activity. In 2004, they co-​presented a series called Battlefield Britain in which the pair examined battles which, in their view, shaped Britain. Dan Snow went on to become a familiar face on British television across different genres of programming: for example, individual documentaries, appearances as a historian on BBC commemoration of state events, and on daily magazine programmes promoting the importance of history and an understanding of the past. Many of his contributions were concerned with the nation’s history and ranged across historical periods, but he also became known for “adventure” and “expedition” quest programmes. For example, recreating John Wesley Powell’s journey down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon in Operation Grand Canyon with Dan Snow (BBC 2 2014). Dan Snow’s career development spans British television output across different genres of programming during the period of the history boom.

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He takes his place alongside other established figures such as Simon Schama, David Starkey, and Michael Wood, with authored books accompanying several of his programmes. In addition to the BBC, Snow also made and presented programmes for the History Channel, Discovery, and UK Channel 5. In 2015 Snow ventured into the online world with the launch of his History Hit Podcast and in 2017 he launched, as Chief Creative Officer, the crowd funded History Hit TV platform. He was clear as to his aims and objectives in launching the channel, “I started History Hit TV because I believed that there was an audience for high-​quality history, told by the world’s best historians, which was not being served by the traditional media” (Sweney 2020). The motivations and reasons given are interesting in that they are symptomatic of the vicissitudes of the demands of linear television. Snow began his career at the height of the TV history boom when commissioners across the channels were commissioning factual history programme ideas, coinciding with, as I have noted, the period of commemoration in British history and television output. Other producers also saw a decline in narrative history programming and, as Snow suggests, the move toward a more popular address through, for example, genres such as reality history. Snow’s expressed desire to provide serious content for “history buffs” who are passionate about the past suggests that he is taking on the mantle of provision of a service expected from a public service broadcaster. Snow has been true to his word. Between 2017 and 2020, he and his small team originated content, mostly 30-​minute films, several of which involve professional historians as presenters or consultants. Snow’s presentational style is at once enthusiastic, passionate, and informative with a more informal and spontaneous feel than his former broadcast output. There is a sense of urgency and dynamism as new topics and material are added to the site which can be triggered by current events. For example, History Hit responded to the 2020 pandemic by conducting interviews with medics and historians on the subject. The periods now listed on his subscription channel are Ancient, Medieval, and Early Modern, and outputs are also organized under categories such as: Women’s History, WWI, WWII, Veterans, Napoleonic Wars, Science & Technology, 20th Century, Victorians, Africa, Slavery and Empire, and the 1066 Collection. In addition to the documentaries there are interviews posted regularly with, for example, veterans and historians as well as the continuing output of audio and podcast material. Publicity and marketing for the platform, online via social media, have been key to its success in building its community of subscribers. For example, History Hit “Know the past. Define the future” posts, on average, ten daily Tweets promoting podcasts and videos, marketing discounts to historic sites, guided tours, etc. available through shop.historyhit.com. There are also reminders of anniversaries of battles and other historical events usually well illustrated. For its followers it has a constant daily visible presence. Dan Snow, under his username @thehistoryguy, is also a prodigious tweeter, promoting new podcasts and live-​stream events as well as drawing historical comparisons to current events. He also expresses his personal views on contemporary issues and gives us some insight into his working life. By 2020 the podcast arm of the History Hit network averaged around three million listens per month and the SVOD (Subscription Video On Demand) service had more than 100,000 subscribers. At that point, in August 2020, Snow sold History Hit to Little Dot Studios, part of the large UK/​ European All3Media group. According to their website, Little Dot Studios manages nearly 600 YouTube channels, which include several history channels, Facebook pages, and social video content. At the time of the take-​over Little Dot’s co-​founder Andy Taylor said, “As factual history programming has fallen out of favour with some traditional broadcasters it has boomed on digital platforms across all age groups” (Sweney 2020). In the last decade the take-​over of successful

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independent television production companies by larger conglomerates is, in the UK, a familiar story. Two of the independents we featured in our Televising History study, Lion TV and Wall to Wall, have been taken over by All3Media and Warner Bros. TV Studios UK, respectively. Thus, Dan Snow’s journey from broadcaster on terrestrial channels to subscription video on demand into a liaison with a multi-​channel network affiliating with other history channels demonstrates a similar pattern in the Internet era. History Hit continues its success and in January 2022 appointed Bill Locke, from Lion TV, who, according to Snow, has “a rich background steeped in traditional broadcast,” as Head of Original Programming, aiming to increase their original programming to more than 60 hours per year (Creamer 2022). The subscription model represented by History Hit does not aim at an audience of millions, a scope afforded by platforms such as YouTube, but rather sets its sights on audiences who are not, according to Snow, being served by recent developments in linear history programming. Snow, drawing on his reputation as a broadcast presenter and programme maker, in competition with History and other established online subscription channels, has built a community of “history buffs” who want “serious history” content.

Epic History | www.epic​hist​ory.tv | YouTube +​Patreon On a much smaller scale, Toby Groom, a former documentary producer on the History channel who is “passionate about history,” launched Epic History on YouTube in 2015. After 13 years of working in the television industry he decided to go freelance, breaking with the channel because, as he put it, the trend toward commissioning was “ice roads and swamp people,” a reference to the History Channel’s two most popular reality series, Ice Road Truckers (2007–​2017) and Swamp People (2010–​), rather than “actual history” (Military History Now 2016). Groom has an MA in History from Edinburgh University and in addition to creating documentaries for Epic History he has also been involved in programmes for UKTV and Channel 5. As his comments suggest, he found working in conventional television frustrating as, according to him, “narrative history has fallen out of fashion” with the emphasis being placed on “making the past relevant” through “personalizing and dramatizing history.” He noted the trends toward biography and history “from the bottom up” and regretted the absence of the “big, epic narrative history series” which you are now less likely to find on the network channels. In this, he was inspired by his own viewing of Ken Burns’ documentaries, especially The Civil War (1990), Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985), and Jeremy Isaac’s The World at War (1973) (Military History Now 2016). Like Snow, he bemoans the trend in linear television toward “micro-​history” told through personal and family history in genres such as reality television, genealogy, and “history from below.” According to the Epic site, Groom seeks to “offer a new kind of history documentary, aimed at today’s online audience—​short, dramatic, and full of facts, for fellow history nerds, students and casual viewers alike” (2016). He also declares that he wants to share his passion with “as wide an audience as possible” (2016). The 80+​ offerings currently listed on Epic History include Greek and Roman History, Napoleon’s Marshals, Napoleonic Wars, Alexander the Great, Medieval History, World War One, History of Russia, Suez Crisis 1956, Naval History, and American Presidents. Groom is mostly the sole originator of these films, researching and writing the scripts, locating visual material, e.g., film and photographic archive, landscape, genre and portrait paintings, music and sound effects, producing his own graphics and animation all of which he edits. The voice-​over, as is common in this form of documentary, is that of a professional radio broadcaster.

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Groom’s Epic History has a Twitter account with 9000 followers. It is an active account promoting new videos with striking visuals as well as “on this day” items and general points of interest for the followers. As in the case of History Hit, visibility on social media is crucial to attracting and engaging current and new followers to the site. At the time of writing, the Epic History channel has 1.73 million subscribers and 1325 Patrons who contribute to the cost of each video. His rate of production is, under the circumstances, impressive at an estimated one every four or six weeks. The Epic History channel is now, through Patreon, seeking member subscriptions and offering perks such as previews of new videos, the opportunity to feedback and suggest new topics of interest, access to other online activities, and credited with support on videos. Dan Snow and Toby Groom are committed to producing “serious” history in order to establish and maintain a loyal following. Thus, they are breaking with the constraints imposed within the linear television organizations whose prime motive, as they see it, is to seek large audiences for their channels. When applied to history programming this leads to, as Snow says, the “dumbing down” of history content. Toby Groom clearly relishes his freedom as individual originator of his videos and the opportunity to reach his desired audience. Snow has taken the online opportunity of being able to commission and produce short history programmes for his growing community of subscribers, avoiding the often cumbersome and time-​consuming process involved in gaining a commission. This, as Cunningham et al. suggest, saves Snow and others like him valuable time which can be “spent creating their own proprietary content and fostering further engagement with their fans” (2016, 386). In their study of the place of YouTube in the new screen ecology, Cunningham and his co-​authors insist that online video should not be seen merely as a steppingstone on the path to entering the professional media organizations, pointing to many talented and skilled online creators who, when working for traditional media, often give up the “virtually absolute control they have over their own work” (386).

New creatives Yorkshire’s Hidden History | https://​cat​heri​newa​rrsh​isto​ryto​urs.com | YouTube Partnership Programme +​Patreon In 2017, Catherine Warr launched her YouTube channel “Yorkshire’s Hidden History.” At the age of 22, she had graduated from the University of Bradford with a degree in Peace Studies and had no previous experience in video production. She was born, and still lives, in a working-​class area of Leeds, a large city in Yorkshire. Her passion for history comes mostly from her parents, their book collection, and family visits to historic sites in Yorkshire, but also from television, in particular Fred Dibnah, a Lancashire-​born steeplejack turned TV presenter for the BBC in series such as The Industrial Age (1999), The Building of Britain (2002), and The Age of Steam (2003), and, by contrast, Horrible Histories (2009–​2014), a popular television series for children based on the successful book series. Catherine Warr expresses a fierce pride in her northern roots and, in starting her own YouTube history channel, wanted to make history accessible to the lay person. As a university student, she marvelled at her access to exciting new research in the university library. On her site she rails against the academic paywall which excludes such access to the public. As she told a local journalist, she believes that history is for everyone and “I’m showing that actually it’s for everyone. As someone who’s very working class and I talk with quite a broad accent, I’m trying to change the narrative that presenting documentaries is for the institutional historians” (Meek 2020). 250

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Since launching her channel, she has produced 110 videos and has 6.1K subscribers. In its third anniversary year, Yorkshire’s Hidden History was featured in YouTube’s UK 2021 national campaign showcasing British creators. This comprised full-​page advertisements in newspapers and street-​side posters in British cities depicting Warr as Amy Johnson, the Yorkshire-​born aviator who in 1930 was the first woman to fly solo from England to Australia, and was my own introduction to her channel. In the same year, Warr was made the Engagement Fellow of the British Association for Local History (2021/​2022). She considers the reach of YouTube to be an excellent route into new audiences, especially, but not exclusively, the young. She recognizes the appropriateness and relevance of short, informative yet entertaining visual communication in reaching publics who can find her on a platform crowded with other offers. Her belief is evidenced in that, although based in a specific region of England, “Yorkshire’s Hidden History” has drawn subscribers from the US, Canada, and Australia, some of whom, as migrants, have ancestral roots in that area. Her videos, all of which have links to Yorkshire, can be divided into the following categories: Military; Folklore & Myth; Religion; Industry, Science & Technology; Emigration, Expeditions, Pilgrims; Social and Political Change; Topography; Literature and Film; Sport; Catherine: rants, reviews and reflection. Several themes can be detected across these categories, for example, women and the working class, but her priority is to search for historical narratives of the past which have been ignored, excluded, or where the contribution of Yorkshire, as a geographical location, a county, and its people, is underestimated. In this way she celebrates the overlooked and the marginalized both within the official versions of the dominant narratives which are reproduced in, amongst other things, the heritage industry, unearthing and airing these stories from a different perspective. She has a healthy scepticism of the work of the heritage industry, especially as it has encroached on her home county, and many of her projects challenge the dominant ideas and beliefs of Yorkshire custom and tradition. Warr is the originator and sole producer of the videos. She is not trained in video production and, in a workshop for members of the Local History Association, she emphasized the importance of “trial and error” and “practice, write, rehearse” (Warr 2022). Most of the videos are filmed on location using a smart phone and external microphone with tripod and ring light for (rare) indoor shooting. In addition to her original footage, she draws on visual material such as portraiture, archival film, photographs, lithographs, and maps, and began editing with the free Videopad NCH software, later progressing to the pro-​version. Warr researches and writes her own scripts and presents without notes or auto-​cue directly to the camera in a no non-​sense, authoritative, and often humorous way. Her presentational style is immediately striking in that she wears period-​appropriate clothing for each subject. For her video about the Victorian Yorkshire mill owner and philanthropist Thomas Salt, she wears a stove-​pipe hat, waistcoat, cravat, and jacket. Indeed, she favours waistcoats, jackets, trousers, boots, and has an impressive collection of hats, most of which, as she sometimes demonstrates, are a bricolage gathered from her dressing-​up box. Her clothing lends her a cavalier quality as she strides around the locations speaking with a straightforward authority. In her videos she appears in a room set dressed in the style of an eccentric antique and curios collector’s home. Shelves and glass fronted cabinets display an eclectic range of china and the walls are covered with prints and paintings and on every other surface there are heaps of mostly old and well-​worn books. Warr addresses us from her chair, often wearing a burgundy velvet jacket in the style of a “gentleman” historian or storyteller. Similarly, her mode of operation across social media, Twitter and Facebook, and her own YouTube channel, invites the follower into her life and her passion about the past and the work of 251

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history. She is open about her approach and expresses a healthy cynicism for the work of other historians and, especially, as mentioned earlier, that of the heritage industry. I would argue that, through her YouTube channel, Catherine Warr is performing the role of public historian. During the live streamed discussion referred to earlier, one of the participants asked her “why haven’t you considered academia for your work?” She replied that “proper” historians with whom she had been in contact had dismissed her work because she did not have a PhD (catherinewarrshistorytours. com). In his 2012 article in The Public Historian entitled “Passionate Histories: ‘Outsider’ History-​Makers and What They Teach Us” by Benjamin Filene, the then Associate Director of Curatorial Affairs at the National Museum of America echoes Warr’s views in noting that the academy in general sees “amateur” historians as “outsiders” and he challenges academics to reach an understanding of the passion those outside the academy have for their subject (Filene 2012, 14). Warr appears to be inhabiting the position of Filenes’ “outsider” for exactly the reasons he describes. She does not claim to be a historian, regularly reminding her followers of the joys of researching. She often posts from Leeds City Public library, one of the main sources for her research, where she searches for fascinating subjects from the past, shaping those subjects into short narratives, writing her own script, finding the locations, visual and other material, and making the short videos. The purpose behind her work is to share this historical knowledge gleaned from a public city library with anyone out there who might be interested. According to Filene, so-​called amateur historians do not consider themselves as outsiders but as those intimately wrapped up with their subject, for example, but not confined to family and local history, imparting their knowledge, many through a more personal address, which evokes emotional responses in their audience. Being inside their chosen subject and sharing their knowledge with others is what they do and how they do history (Filene 2012, 14). In addition, the “amateur aesthetic” of social media such as YouTube—​which, according to Arthurs, Drakopoulou, and Gandini is a signifier of “authenticity” (2018, 8)—​brilliantly captures the candour that disrupts the smooth veneer of professionally produced work. This is not to say that her videos are unprofessional. They are highly professional examples of online communication, as are her appearances in the support material. As a public historian she demonstrates a pride in her community. This is not, as she constantly reminds us, in the marketed images which circulate about “God’s own County” but in aspects of Yorkshire which are not commemorated or celebrated. Her subscribers and followers, who are relatively small in number, get what she is about. For example, one of her local viewers after watching one of her videos posted “you showed me that history is right on our doorstep…but the teachers at school didn’t tell us about it.”

Taylor Cassidy | www.tik​tok.com/​@tay​lorc​assi​dyj | TikTok I was first alerted to Taylor Cassidy’s activities on TikTok by a BBC radio programme about social media (BBC Radio 4 2021). Richard Waterworth, CEO for TikTok UK and Europe, confirmed the increased take up of TikTok in the UK during the pandemic with its main USP enabling families and friends to share short videos having fun, singing, dancing, laughing, and connecting with necessarily distanced loved ones. Talking about the creative potential for its users, which the increase of video time from 5 seconds to 3 minutes affords, he gushed that he had learnt something about US history that he did not know from one of Cassidy’s short videos on her TikTok site. I then became one of her 2.2 million followers. In February 2020, she was named one of TikTok’s “Voices of Change: most impactful voices” and the same year joined the TikTok Black Creatives Programme, all captured on TikTok.

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Taylor, born in St Louis in 2002, expresses pride in her Black roots. Throughout her upbringing in St Louis her parents “made it really important for us to know our Black history.” In an interview for Variety magazine, she said “[o]‌n Fridays, the family would watch episodes of Roots together, and her mother quizzed us on Black history in the car. I grew up with that as a staple” (Spangler 2021). As a teenager Cassidy joined TikTok in 2019 “just for fun” creating short-​form videos for the platform of general interest to its teenage users. Her posts became popular, and she soon realized that she could include more serious items on her platform. Like most teenagers, she already had an Instagram account and had occasionally delivered what she refers to as “motivational pep talks” (quoted in Sing, Kim, and Yang 2020) about her views on race and the Black experience in the US. She then decided to experiment with the longer form on TikTok, establishing a thread called “Fast Black History” covering a range of topics from famous and lesser-​known figures in Black history, the topic of slavery, the absence of Black history in the school curriculum, and more general histories of the United States. In February 2020, as part of Black History Month, she posted daily shorts on “Fast Black History” which were delivered in an entertaining way with clever graphics and edits. In addition to these videos, she discusses and recommends books about Black history and encourages her followers to read them and take them into school. She looks at popular culture, for example, in a video on the so-​called Blaxploitation genre of movies, to the influence of Black music in the US and other modes of representation in the Black community. Cassidy’s presenter style is informal, chatty even (where appropriate), jokey, and compelling. In common with other TikTokers, she speaks from her own domestic space creating the atmosphere of a friendly gathering and, as followers, we become part of her crowd. The “Fast Black History” short films are interlaced with fashion, reflections on life, hanging out with friends in a constant flow of postings and appearances. In the summer of 2020, her Black history videos took on a new resonance after the murder of George Floyd which ignited global racial justice protests around the world. She says of this time that “Americans had an opportunity to come face to face with racism that has been there all along” (Sing, Kim, and Yang 2020) and she created several videos on the topic, one of which explained the difference between “All Lives Matter” and “Black Lives Matter” and another looking at police brutality in the US. She declares that she “wanted to use [her] platform to be a home for people to have a better understanding of these issues” (2020). For her, the representation of Black creators on the app were giving authentic information “so that people don’t mistake the Black Lives Matter movement as something that it’s not” (2020). Later, her “Black Girl Magic Minute” features Black creators with a regular “Creative of the Week” and “Follower of the Week,” all featuring on upbeat videos. In addition, she shares short items such as “The Unknown Della Reese” and one of my favourites, “Maya Angelou on the US Quarter”—​Taylor uses this hook to shower praise on Maya Angelou and welcomes the fact that she is now nationally recognized on coinage. However, adding a sharp sting in the tail, she links the quarter dollar to a graph showing the consistently low rate of pay for Black women workers in the US. This example typifies her approach and demonstrates her ability to place contemporary events within a wider, and often historical, context. Cassidy now has a YouTube channel (@taylorcassidy5498) and has recently been signed by William Morris Entertainment Talent Agency (WME), the long-​established agency which merged with Endeavor (Digital) in 2009 providing, according to their website, a digital arm for “disruptors who are setting the new world order” (WME Agency n.d.). This has led to more public appearances for her such as hosting the Disney Dreamers Event on her first visit to Disney World where she commented on her video on the “shortage of Black people in the ‘Disney Influencer World’ ” (https://​youtu.be/​tHlh​tPLy​Htw). Her rise across and through the platforms—​Instagram, TikTok,

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and YouTube—​indicates that she successfully identified an unfulfilled potential offered by the sites and developed a strategy and style through her original presentations. Cassidy’s TikTok followers are mainly in the US, but her timely Black History Shorts have found followers in Europe and beyond. As discussed earlier, she has developed and built a participatory culture through direct address and encouraging her followers to join her on TikTok. Her design and creation of regular postings to do with Black history and, later building on that success, Black experience in the US, especially but not exclusively in the entertainment industry, have made her a TikTok celebrity. Like Warr, Cassidy admits that “I am not a historian–​I ask questions and it is this mode of enquiry and questioning which engages the audience,” and “the passion I bring to the table for Black history. I’m not just talking at you; I’m talking to you like I’m your friend” (Spangler 2021). Passion and engagement with the emotional lives of her followers are an important part of her success, appealing as she does to their emotions and imagination.

Conclusion I hope to have demonstrated, through these examples of the presentation of popular history, that the transition from the Broadcast to Internet era has been evolutionary rather than revolutionary, particularly in connection with the changing nature of relationships between programme makers and broadcasting institutions. The consequence is that there are traces of the influences of earlier television eras in the continuing practice of visual representations of the past and in their contribution to public and popular history. Through their online activities, Dan Snow and Toby Groom have rejected what they see as the constraints of Broadcast era television, and in different ways, provide examples of modes of transition from linear to digital. They obviously carry with them considerable experience at the most professional levels of television history programming and speak with a kind of nostalgia for what they would probably consider to be the “golden age” of television history. For them the more conventional modes of narrative—​closely linked with, but not exclusively, a national history—​are what they consider to be serious history which, in their view, is what a more informed and sophisticated audience wants. Perhaps they see the development of televised history as a victim of its own success in its populist and, possibly, democratizing genres. By launching their own channels, they are free to produce the kind of history programming they and their subscribers value. For several reasons, the chances of Catherine Warr and Taylor Cassidy gaining positions within the highly competitive markets of conventional media organizations are very low. Warr speaks of the situation in the UK where young people from lower income and less privileged backgrounds are unlikely to be able to secure the all-​important entry point into media professions, that of the internee. These posts are often secured through existing contacts, are predominantly in London, and mostly poorly paid, thus requiring, usually, family support for living costs which is out of the reach of most people. As history creator producers on YouTube and TikTok, their voices can be heard. Cassidy aims to convince her young Black followers of their individual potential to make the most of themselves through her “Yes We Can” motivational postings but also by giving them access to aspects of their own history of which many are unaware. In the Televising History study, women of all backgrounds were underrepresented in history on television, but especially those from working class and minority ethnic backgrounds. As we have also noted, Black history was almost totally absent from screens during our study and remains scarce across the channels. Warr and Cassidy in their presence and activity online are challenges to the “dominant regimes of visibility” (Arthurs, Drakopoulou, and Gandini, 2018) and the cultural formations of the Broadcast era of television in the UK and the US. 254

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Warr and Taylor are millennials who, having grown up during the “demotic turn” on television (Turner 2010), are used to seeing ordinary people on the screen and are able, with confidence, to capture the potential offered to them as young women providing in both cases useful knowledge for their online communities. They have developed their skills on the job. In Warr’s case, capturing modes of performativity drawn from TV, and for Cassidy by adapting the more confessional modes of Instagram and TikTok. In their outputs they blend their personal selves with their professional personas. With reference to the aesthetics of online performers, Arthurs et al. speak of the rise of video blogging styles, identifying wider changes across visual media seen first on reality television programmes. For example, the global impact of Big Brother (de Mol 1997) and its innovative style, especially the direct to camera “diary room,” has been adopted by vloggers, Instagram and TikTok users across the globe, and, in addition, YouTube and TikTok now offer a “The Diary Room” identifier. Whilst other commentators have emphasized the confessional mode of this trope (e.g., Biressi and Nunn 2005), it also connotes a sense of intimacy and the power of direct communication. Thus, new generations of online content creators are incorporating these well-​tried television tropes into their own work. Warr and Cassidy are amongst millions of creators of content about the past for two of the most populated social media platforms. However, unlike the pre-​established professional identities of Snow and Groom, they are both highly ambitious to develop their careers in more traditionally professional spheres. Warr is currently working on her second book, was one of 12 emerging filmmakers in her region selected by the BBC Centenary Project “Make Film History” to produce a short film, and is keen to secure a television commission. Cassidy has already been signed up by a large talent agency and in September 2022 gave a Ted Talk from Georgetown University about TikTok (Cassidy 2022). It is worth reflecting on their considerable efforts within the context of talent management which is a big industry in Hollywood but also in the world of television, epitomized by the plethora of talent shows where, for some hopefuls, opportunity knocks. In 2015, the then Head of Digital Media, United Talent Agency, commented: The mentality of a digital creator is the exact opposite [of the talent show]… . They’re not preparing for an opportunity; they’re creating it themselves…these digital stars are more proactive and more aggressive about taking their careers into their own hands than any generation we’ve ever seen before in the video business. (Weinstein quoted in Cunningham, Craig, and Silver 2016) Returning to the question of public history, Benjamin Filene, reminds us of the 1998 survey conducted by David Thelen and Roy Rosenzweig which suggests that “although people may have negative associations with the term ‘history’, they embrace ‘the past’ which they define in highly personal and familiar terms” (2012, 12). As we have seen, Warr and Cassidy have exactly this approach to their relationship with the past. It holds a fascination for them both and has done so since their childhood and they are now able to express their serious passion via the affordance of digital platforms. The relatively open environment offered to creators and users alike by social media platforms has caused much concern, as in debates about “fake news,” or the dark web. As history and knowledge about the past circulate on these sites, the more interesting questions, I would suggest, concern the breaking down, or at least weakening, of the silos of knowledge. Kenneth Cmiel and John Durham Peters define the digital age as one of “promiscuous knowledge,” noting that an important trend in recent decades has been “the blending and blurring of the line separating popular knowledge from 255

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expert knowledge” (2020, 223). This they see not as cut and dried but as the “ongoing negotiation between elite knowledge producers and those outside the formal systems” (223). Popular history had wide circulation through the novel, for many years, while film, magazines, and television provide evidence of the close, if not always acknowledged, relationship between the expert and the popular producers. What I hope to have demonstrated here is that free-​to-​access distribution platforms, eager for marketable content, afford media professionals and new digital creators who can rapidly develop and adapt relevant technical and creative skills, a potentially valuable forum for the growth in the practice of public and popular history.

Notes 1 This is a British colloquialism with no specific origin. 2 www.bbc.co.uk/​hist​ory/​ww2peo​ples​war. 3 Established in 2013, Patreon is a platform designed to raise money for creatives through a membership system.

Reference list Arthurs, Jane, Sophia Drakopoulou, and Allesandro Gandini. 2018. “Researching YouTube.” Convergence 24, no. 1: 3–​15. https://​doi.org/​10.1177/​13548​5651​7737​222. BBC Radio 4. 2021. “The Unstoppable Rise of TikTok.” The Media Show, BBC Radio 4, July 7. www.bbc. co.uk/​pro​gram​mes/​m000x​m79. Bennett, James. 2008. “Interfacing the Nation: Remediating Public Service Broadcasting in the Digital Television Age.” Convergence 14, no. 3: 277–​294. https://​doi.org/​10.1177/​13548​5650​8091​081. Biressi, Anita, and Heather Nunn. 2005. Reality TV: Realism and Revelation. New York: Columbia University Press. Cannadine, David, ed. 2004. History and the Media. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan. Cassidy, Taylor. 2022. “TikTok Fame Doesn’t Always Means Impact.” TED, September 10. www.ted.com/​ talks/​taylor_​cassidy_​tiktok_​fame​_​doe​sn_​t​_​alw​ays_​mean​_​imp​act. Cmiel, Kenneth, and John Durham Peters. 2020. Promiscuous Knowledge: Information, Image and Other Truth Games in History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Creamer, Jon. 2022. “History Hit Hires Bill Locke as Head of Original Programming. Televisual, November 1. www.tel​evis​ual.com/​news/​hist​ory-​hit-​hires-​bill-​locke-​as-​head-​of-​origi​nal-​prog​ramm​ing/​. Cunningham, Stuart, David Craig, and Jon Silver. 2016. “YouTube, Multichannel Networks and the Accelerated Evolution of the New Screen Ecology.” Convergence 22, no. 4: 376–​391. https://​doi.org/​ 10.1177/​13548​5651​6641​620. De Groot, Jerome. 2009. Consuming History: Historians and Heritage in Contemporary Popular Culture. London and New York: Routledge. Edgerton, Gary R., and Peter C. Rollins. 2001. Television Histories: Shaping Collective Memories in the Media Age. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Evans, Elizabeth. 2020. Understanding Engagement in Transmedia Culture. London: Routledge. Filene, Benjamin. 2012. “Passionate Histories: ‘Outsider’ History-​Makers and What They Teach Us.” The Public Historian 34, no. 1 (Winter): 11–​33. https://​doi.org/​10.1525/​tph.2012.34.1.11. Gray, Ann. 2010. “Contexts of Production: Commissioning History.” In Televising History: Mediating the Past in Postwar Europe, edited by Erin Bell and Ann Gray, 59–​76. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Gray, Ann, and Erin Bell. 2013. History on Television. London: Routledge. Institute of Historical Research. 2002. History and the Media Conference, London. December 16–​18. Johnson, Catherine. 2019. Online TV. London: Routledge. Jordanova, Ludmilla. 2006. History in Practice. London: Hodder Arnold. Kean, Hilda. 2010. “People, Historians, and Public History: Demystifying the Process of History Making.” The Public Historian 32, no. 3 (Summer): 25–​38. https://​doi.org/​10.1525/​tph.2010.32.3.25. Lotz, Amanda D. 2014. The Television Will Be Revolutionised, 2nd ed. New York: New York University Press. Lotz, Amanda D. 2017. Portals: A Treatise on Internet-​Distributed Television. Michigan: Maize Books.

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Public history on screen Meek, Natasha. 2020. “Catherine Warr on her YouTube ‘Yorkshire’s Hidden History.’ ” Telegraph & Argus Bradford, August 24. www.thete​legr​apha​ndar​gus.co.uk/​news/​18668​380.cather​ine-​warr-​yout​ube-​yor​kshi​ res-​hid​den-​hist​ory/​. Military History Now. 2016. “Back to the Future–​How Epic History TV is Re-​inventing the War Documentary.” January 11. https://​mil​itar​yhis​tory​now.com/​2016/​01/​11/​back-​to-​the-​fut​ure-​how-​epic-​hist​ory-​tv-​is-​re-​ invent​ing-​the-​war-​docu​ment​ary/​. Robinson, M.J. 2017. Television on Demand: Curatorial Culture and the Transformation of TV. London: Bloomsbury. Rosenzweig, Roy, and David Thelen. 1998. The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life. New York: Columbia University Press. Samuel, Raphael. 1994. Theatres of Memory: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture. London: Verso. Sing, Ashan, Deborah Kim, and Allie Yang. 2020. “How Young TikTok users are making their activism go viral.” ABC News, July 23. https://​abcn​ews.go.com/​US/​young-​tik​tok-​users-​mak​ing-​activ​ism-​viral/​ story?id=​71950​082. Spangler, Todd. 2021. “Taylor Cassidy, Rising TikTok Star.” Variety, February 26. https://​vari​ety.com/​2021/​ digi​tal/​featu​res/​tik​tok-​tay​lor-​cass​idy-​black-​hist​ory-​podc​ast-​123​4916​204/​. Sweney, Mark. 2020. “Dan Snow Sells History Hit Network to Little Dot Studios.” The Guardian, August 11. www.theg​uard​ian.com/​tv-​and-​radio/​2020/​aug/​11/​dan-​snow-​sells-​hist​ory-​hit-​netw​ork-​to-​lit​tle-​dot-​ stud​ios. Turner, Graeme. 2010. Ordinary People and the Media: The Demonic Turn. London: Sage Publications Ltd. Warr, Catherine. 2023. A Yorkshire Year: Folklore, History, Traditions. Lancaster: Palatine Books. WME Agency. n.d. “Digital.” Accessed March 23, 2023. www.wmeage​ncy.com/​expert​ise/​.

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17 LIVE DOCUMENTARY Social cinema and the cinepoetics of doubt Kim Nelson

Making sense of the past is meaningful and freighted. As Frank Ankersmit attests with more than a dash of angst, “[y]‌ou can approximate objectivity only as long as you sincerely despair of approximating it” (2012, 244). Similarly, Natalie Zemon Davis claims that history is only pursued through “struggle” (1987, 459). Live Documentaries are in-​person spectacles that present images on a predominant screen with the author or co-​author addressing the audience. A practice that merges old forms with new technologies, the Live Documentary weaves the despair and struggle required of any committed truth-​seeking quest into the presentation of the work itself. The form offers a compelling model to pursue history, performing the search for historical truth with curiosity, complexity, and reticence while making narrative uncertainty palatable for broad and diverse audiences. Live Documentaries, as exemplified by the work of Sam Green, depicted in Figure 17.1, are an intriguing part of the palette of cinematic engagements with actuality. Live Documentaries respond to the challenge forwarded by Hayden White in his essay, “The Burden of History,” which calls upon historians to get creative, employ contemporary art practices, and embrace innovative models and expressions (1966). The open and malleable form of Live Documentary responds to pressing concerns about the mediation and reception of popular history in moving images, staging a collective historicity by revisiting and digitizing practices from film’s deep past. They re-​expand cinema into previously explored territory from the origins of film exhibition, reengaging the components of an entertainment designed to introduce the invention of screen technology to an audience. This chapter explores the Live Documentary as a crucial intervention in the expression of history in moving images, interrogating its brand of historiophoty through the work of its twenty-​first-​century pioneer, Sam Green. Finally, it will describe the unique character of Live Documentary’s embodied spectatorship and its increased resonance in an age ruled by binary codes that foster binary points of view. Live Documentaries extend specific benefits to the exploration of the past via the moving image, modelling a metamodern historiophoty that reenergizes communal spectatorship while reclaiming and renegotiating our access to truth in a supposedly “post-​truth” world.

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DOI: 10.4324/9781003263234-22 This chapter has been made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND license.

Live documentary

Figure 17.1 Sam Green performs Utopia in Four Movements, which includes the core elements of a Live Documentary: a narrator, musical accompaniment, a commanding screen, and a live audience.

Terms of art Live Documentaries combine moving images with live narration to explore real events of the past for an audience in-​house. They stage a highly accessible form of Expanded Cinema that subverts and “expands” mainstream film practices by recounting the past through story and constructing a discernable but ruptured linearity and argument. In the process, Live Documentary contributes to the project of public history, decades into our experiment as a “society of the spectacle,” by breaking down silos and bringing people together physically and psychically (Debord 1994). Stan VanDerBeek coined the term Expanded Cinema in the 1960s, describing it as an experimental film practice defined by blurring or blowing out commercial and conventional boundaries (Tate n.d.). Francesco Casetti quotes filmmaker Valie Export’s definition of Expanded Cinema as a mode in which “the film phenomenon is initially split up into its formal components, and then put back together in a new way” (2015, 91). While this explains the fundamentals of the form, Shana MacDonald turns to the function of the audience, delineating Expanded Cinema as operating by “situating viewers as a corporeal witness to nuanced iterations of time and space” that “addresses audiences less as spectators and more as collaborators…construct[ing] liminal, intermedial, affectively oriented spectatorial environments” (2018, 17). Live Documentaries belong to an accessible subset of Expanded Cinema. They offer a salve in our fractured political moment, swapping virtual space for a physical place, setting out in pursuit of historical truth by assembling a communal search party.

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A mode of cinema-​verité in its dissemination, Live Documentaries spotlight the role of the author in constructing meaning in post-​production. They expose authorship in the editing process of assembling meaning from audiovisual materials rather than showing us a director traipsing before the camera in the material-​gathering phase. Such authorial openness is crucial for history, committed to the complex, slippery, and vital concept of truth. Live Documentary cultivates critical engagement, which is invaluable to history for mass and diverse audiences. They foreground their mediation through the author’s spectral presence manifested on stage and reveal aspects of historiographical process while simultaneously signalling their contingency as channelled through a narrator’s perspective. Transporting the rhetoric and address of traditional documentary films to a live experience with an audience, they invert the captivating power of the screen by presenting the director as a corporeal body on stage—​a subjectivity that does not need to be explained to be understood. All edited documentaries forward arguments and perspectives about the real; therefore, they negotiate truth by addressing the past; they historicize (Nichols 1991, x). As such, they benefit from historiographical analysis. Hayden White proposed the term historiophoty as a project for media scholars to tackle and deal with the specifics of historiography in popular moving-​ image media (1988). Robert Berkhofer defines historiography as attending to (i) the history of historical practices, (ii) theories, and (iii) methods of history (1998, 227–​228). It follows that historiophoty pertains to popular moving images and film history, as it relates to (1) the history of history expressed in moving images, (2) theories, and (3) methods of historicization in the moving image. Given that the terms film, video, cinema, and television are each too specific to describe the medium that propels history in moving images, I propose the term moving histories to describe popular works in moving images about real events in the past (Nelson 2022). A platform-​agnostic concept, it refers to moving images, whether in cinemas or installations, on televisions or makeshift screens, computers, or mobile phones. Moving histories concern real events that: (a) ended before production began, (b) impact people beyond the community of participants, (c) reveal social or political aspects of culture in the past, and (d) align with at least one of Robert Burgoyne’s genres of the history, either epic, war, biographical, topical (about a particular event), or metahistorical film (to some extent concerned with the representation of history) (Burgoyne 2008, 3). A strength of Live Documentaries is that they are intrinsically metahistorical. As part of an appeal to wide audiences, moving histories make truth claims through adherence to conventions of dramatic storytelling and cinema realism. Unlike avant-​garde or experimental works, they do not subsume narrative logic, structure, and flow to subjectivity and contingency. Moving histories may or may not express a sense of despair and struggle for objectivity, but they always make a historical argument as part of a sensual, visceral portal for time travel (Nelson 2022, 311–​313). Their greatest strengths and weaknesses are bound in their mimetic properties. Moving histories deliver mesmerizing audiovisual hallucinations with absolute ease of access, rendering the past in such fine detail that they bury and belie the instability, supposition, and presentism wrapped into their constructions. Unlike written histories that demand much of their readers’ imaginations, spectators slip into moving histories as mute, invisibility-​cloaked witnesses. Live Documentaries temper the overwhelming power of moving histories to project history without disrupting their magic.

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Sam Green and the invention of the contemporary practice of Live Documentary Sam Green began his career in traditional documentary. His first feature-​length film received an Oscar nomination. That documentary, The Weather Underground (2002), presents the eponymous group of student protesters from the University of Michigan, who formed in 1969 to resist the Vietnam War and policies of the American government. Seven years after making that first film, Green conceived the format of the Live Documentary from a creative block as he was crafting Utopia in Four Movements (2010), a feature-​length documentary fuelled by intellectual ideas about “the history of the utopian impulse” (“Sam Green” n.d.). Friends who viewed early cuts of the documentary-​in-​progress confirmed his impression that the edit was not working. To fix it, he organized a screening with the film’s clips loaded onto PowerPoint slides. He coaxed friends to play live music as he presented the work in progress for feedback. The reaction to the experiment was resoundingly positive, but rather than focusing exclusively on content, the spectators also applauded the form, encouraging him to continue to develop the piece in the way he had presented it (Sam Green, interview with author, 2019). The result, co-​directed by Dave Cerf performing the soundtrack, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2010. Green has performed across North America, Europe, and beyond. In most cases, his staging includes a proscenium stage with a large screen at its centre. Live music plays from one side as he narrates from the other. Since his first Live Documentary, he has continued working in traditional and emerging forms of documentary while also creating more feature-​length Live Documentaries, including The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller (2012), a collaboration with music group Yo La Tengo that presents a brief history of the architect, futurist, and 1960s celebrity; The Measure of All Things (2014), a light-​hearted reflection and compendium of entries from the Guinness Book of World Records performed with the band yMusic; A Thousand Thoughts (2018) a history of the Kronos Quartet featuring live accompaniment by the group. COVID-​imposed workarounds forced an online exhibition of the Live Documentary 32 Sounds (2022) with music by JD Samson at Sundance in January 2022. Green describes 32 Sounds as a “meditation on the power of sound to bend time, cross borders, and profoundly shape our perception of the world around us” (Green, n.d.). Although online screenings drain the true liveness of the experience, it was accompanied by an outdoor rooftop performance in Los Angeles on January 29, 2022 (Sam Green, email with author, 2022). The focus of Green’s Live Documentaries spans moving histories in the biographical genre, including The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller and A Thousand Thoughts, to topical projects like Utopia in Four Movements, The Measure of All Things, and 32 Sounds. Of interest to historiophoty and this chapter are the historiographical affordances of the form rather than the specifics of content. Green’s Live Documentaries are always metahistorical. They stage subjectivity and probe the narrative process while disentangling the functions of structure, argument, and music in moving images for scrutiny by the audience. As a narrator, Green approaches each subject with verve and humour. He self-​reflexively engages the concerns of historiography by touching upon the research process in the archive. His works include both archival imagery and depictions of Green in the archive. He expresses a metamodern sensibility as he embeds his own questions, concerns, desires, failures, and qualifications about the narrative into the performance in progress. Live Documentaries enact what Alun Munslow describes as the true sense of history by highlighting the historian’s perspective as the adjudicator of “evidence selected, sources chosen,

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concepts and theories applied” (2010, 110). They also fit Berkhofer’s definition as a new form of historicization, as they: breach paradigms and problematics; cross epistemic, interpretive, and political communities; and invent new forms of expression, critical reading and reviewing can foster reflexive contextualization and multicultural ideals as they (re)construct and (re)construe what a textualization achieved and how. Ultimately, the task of the active reader and the critical reviewer is to exhibit the same reflexivity that any new historicization ought to manifest. How did they themselves put it all together? (1998, 282) Live Documentaries do this by making a show out of the assembly of a documentary, foregrounding and performing their mediation.

Metamodernism and the human scale of history The thrall of history in moving images is key to their allure—​and the problems they pose for historiography. Assessing the role of the historian, author, or maker is complicated by the multisensorial spectacle of history in moving images. As Burgoyne explains, films without an on-​screen or off-​ screen narrator present the world as “unmediated” (Burgoyne 1990, 4–​5). They present history as revelation and all that implies rather than as a story told and a world explained. The inclusion of the author as the source of the cinematic reality, materializing and co-​present alongside the audiovisual evidence, characterizes Live Documentary and serves as a visceral reminder of the channelling of a historical argument through an often earnest but always fallible individual. Emile Zola’s brilliant and concise description of art as “a corner of nature seen through a temperament” (Morgan 1934) applies equally well to history. Live Documentary foregrounds that temperament. In Live Documentary, however, audience members need not remind themselves of the imprint of the author on the argument; they cannot forget it. The isolation and spotlighting of the author as director, editor, and presenter is essential to the practice. A traditional film’s power to convey a world with incredible scope and fine detail, to speak in overwhelming, larger-​than-​life close-​ups, in captivating tracking and drone shots, crossing boundaries of time and space in a single cut, is held in check in Live Documentary. First, the director, as author and orchestrator of the world of the screen, stands beside it, acknowledged as the font of the creation. First-​person digressions of the narrator allow audiences access to the maker’s thought process. Second, as attendees at a public event, Live Documentary spectators are hyper-​aware of their physical surroundings and their co-​presence with the narrator as part of a community of eavesdroppers shut out from the screen. Archival imagery appears all the more foreign, presenting exotic cultures and mores separated in time and space. One example from The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller shows Buckminster Fuller in 1967 wearing a wool suit in a park on a hot summer day, holding forth with a congregation of gritty and authentic San Francisco hippies. In 32 Sounds, black-​and-​white footage depicts Annea Lockwood experimenting with sound, performing her avant-​garde composition “Piano Burning,” literally the sound of a piano on fire, in 1968. Scenes like these offer distinct and impenetrable pasts that audience members observe rather than enter. Third, the audience’s physical and psychological awareness of the distance between the historicality of what is within the frame versus the creation, transmission, and reception of the spectacle in the shared, unfurling now emphasizes history as imprinted by the present. As ephemeral events held in constantly rotating venues, Live Documentaries emphasize the play of time 262

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between the footage captured, ordered, arranged, and presented by the performer for the audience. As a mix of projection and performance delivered in ever-​shifting times and spaces, no two Live Documentary performances are ever the same. In emphasizing the role of the author of a moving history, the Live Documentary captures the spirit of metamodernism, the long-​awaited theoretical successor to postmodernism. The metamodern offers a moderating and conciliatory philosophy that “oscillates between a modern enthusiasm and a postmodern irony, between hope and melancholy, between naïveté and knowingness, empathy and apathy, unity and plurality, totality and fragmentation, purity and ambiguity” (Vermeulen and van den Akker 2010, 5–​6). It mollifies previous excesses, deploying postmodernist irony and its “nihilism, sarcasm, and the distrust and deconstruction of grand narratives, and the singular truth” to temper modernism’s “utopianism” and “unconditional belief in reason” (Vermeulen and van den Akker 2010, 4). Postmodernism was urgent as a corrective to unreflective and overconfident histories, dubbed “grand narratives” (Lyotard 2002). But its ideas became corrosive. It is the teenager whose distrust of authority, rules, and institutions serves as an essential stage necessary to understanding the complexity of truth, but it does not offer an endpoint. It is unstable; it asks questions while disavowing answers, asserting that the very act of looking for answers is futile. Postmodernism is a wrecking ball. It cannot build anew. The spirit of despair and struggle that Ankersmit and Davis refer to remains indispensable to historicizing in metamodernism, but it moves from text to subtext. Despair and struggle transform into humility, self-​reflexivity, and doubt. As Jason Josephson Storm explains, “[p]‌ostmodern doubt can be made to doubt itself, and when cleansed of its negative dogmatism and lingering longing for lost certainties, it can show us the way toward humble emancipatory knowledge” (Josephson Storm 2021, 4). Metamodernism salvages the best of postmodernism, purging it of its frustration born of its unrealizable goals for truth. For example, Munslow expresses a metamodern position when he writes that “no historian can make claims to objectivity and truth—​defined at any useful level beyond the statement of justified belief” and “epistemically sceptical historians do not reject realism, or the strong likelihood of the onetime reality of the past, or that we can hold to highly probable beliefs about what once happened” (2010, 10, 22). Reflexivity offers an effective way to express doubt. To be reflexive is to interrupt the persuasiveness of an argument, to either question its reliability or draw attention to the structure that undergirds it and makes it convincing. This historiographical impulse reaches back to Herodotus. Robert Stam describes reflexivity as a “dialectical struggle between realistic imitation and self-​ conscious artifice” that invites “the substitution of distanced reflection for suspenseful and empathetic involvement” (1985, 3, 6). In drawing attention from screen to stage and from narrative to its mediated frame, reflexivity acts to “solicit the active collaboration” of audience members (Stam 1985, xii). In the face of the climate crisis and increasing vitriolic partisanship about the nature of history and truth, the mainstreaming of postmodernism through the reality-​denying word games of post-​ truth has moved well past its constructive phase. Building on the work of Arran Gare, Andrew Corsa points out the necessity of grand narratives to tackle complex problems while explaining that the metamodern regime pursues a grand narrative redux, taken as “provisional,” open to refinement and reappraisal that is “polyphonic–​giving due credit to diverse perspectives” (2018, 241). Live Documentary speaks to reality in this register. Metamodernism establishes a rapprochement between historicism’s quest for meaning and postmodern relativism, seeking a knowable past while employing strategies that prod author and audience alike to remain alert and sceptical. It unmasks the documentarian in human scale next to the expansive screen like the Wizard of Oz exposed by Toto as a mere mortal behind the curtain. 263

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Like historians and filmmakers, Oz may be a “good man,” but he is a “very bad wizard” (Baum 2015, ­chapter 15). While postmodernism’s crushed idealism focuses on Oz’s failure as a magician, metamodernism accepts it and asks what Oz, the human, can do. Traditional moving histories express reflexivity through post-​classical approaches that interrupt linear plots, jarring narrative conventions through expressionistic imagery and sound (Thanouli 2009). Instead of disrupting the illusion inside the screen, however, Live Documentaries disrupt the screen’s surroundings. They deconstruct the documentary mode by erecting a set from the editing suite on the stage, inviting audiences to observe the interplay. As Jay Ruby explains of one of its antecedents, the illustrated lecture film finds its origins in the lantern slide lecture of the early 19th century. They constitute an unstudied form of cinema and have been overlooked by most histories of documentary film. However, they do contain the earliest evidence of reflexive elements in non-​fiction film. (Ruby 2000, 7) The reflexivity of this form is intrinsic to it.

Live Documentary’s family resemblances Green builds his Live Documentaries for international tours in majestic cinemas and the film festival environment. He narrates while advancing slides, including archival pictures, stills, and moving-​image sequences, with a clicker tucked into his palm. He cites a range of influences, from Bertolt Brecht’s epic theatre to the concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk as popularized by Richard Wagner. At times, he even refers to his practice as a “fancy lecture” (Sam Green, interview with author, 2016). It is extraordinarily fancy. It is an enthralling multimedia spectacle with roots in the public lecture, experimental theatre, and early film. Lecture-​Performance is a close cousin to Live Documentary. Referred to most often in European and British art contexts and in education literature, Marianne Wagner describes the practice as a “performative mode of public speaking” that combines performance with the academic lecture that may draw on a variety of artistic disciplines and practices (2009, 17, 18). It is the public presentation of information enhanced by theatricality or audiovisual accompaniment. In the notes to an exhibition on Lecture-​Performance that ran from 2013–​2014 at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León in Spain, the curator Manual Olivera describes the form as a “sub-​genre of performance” that emerged in the 1960s as an “expanded art practice” that builds upon the foundation of the academic lecture and its aim to teach that infuses theatricality to channel an “intellectual, emotive and effective” response from the audience (MUSAC n.d.). Another adjacent form of Live Documentary is Documentary Theatre. Carol Martin calls this genre “theatre of the real” and catalogues its swirl of interrelated practices, including “documentary theatre, verbatim theatre, reality-​based theatre, theatre-​of-​fact, theatre of witness, tribunal theatre, nonfiction theatre, restored village performances, war and battle reenactments, and auto-​ biographical theatre” (2013, 5). Whether based upon past events, the transcript of an interview or a trial, Documentary Theatre represents the real and performs historicity. Jenn Stephenson’s description of “Theatre of the Real” (her preferred term) illuminates its shared spirit with Live Documentary; she describes the former as animated by a “profound postmodern, poststructuralist doubt” and the “uneasy awareness that reality is a performative construction and therefore is always open to questioning, which renders it essentially unstable” (2019, 10). 264

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At the edges of each interrelated practice, the lines blur. Nonetheless, there are distinctions between Live Documentary, theatre, and lecture that rest upon whether the centrepiece is the performance or the screen. Consideration of a performer’s natural milieu as a theatre stage or film set also influences its interpretation as an expansion of cinema into theatre or the reverse. Despite its parallels to Lecture-​Performance and Theatre of the Real, Live Documentary draws its most profound inspiration from early and proto-​cinema. Green’s performance services the projected audiovisuals by electrifying the space around the screen.

Screen-​centric origins Live Documentary’s software systems and digital tools reinvigorate early film practices. In real-​ time, presenters may adapt projections at will, stopping, starting, looping, multi-​projecting, and achieving a fluidity impossible in the previous age of cumbersome, jammable film reels. It harkens back to the early years of moving pictures, as the medium was finding its way, getting onto its unsteady feet, as all new media do, through the foundations and logic of the modes that preceded it. The form with the most direct line to Live Documentary is what Tom Gunning calls the “cinema of attractions” (Gunning 2006, 384). It is a term he adapted from Sergei Eisenstein’s use of the word attractions that Eisenstein had, in turn, repurposed from his previous life as an innovator and theorist of theatre to emphasize “an aggressive aspect of theatre” and its “sensual or psychological impact,” connecting it to the experience of the fairground (Eisenstein 1974, 78). In the days of early film exhibition, the human interlocutor’s role was to serve as a bridge between the audience and this new medium. As Germain Lacasse explains, the “cinematograph, unlike the sword swallower or gladiator, was a technological attraction,” as such, it was “mediated, that is presented, introduced, announced, and familiarized by the speakers and lecturers;” intermediaries included the “barker” or “bonisseur,” stationed at the theatre door to lure people in (2006, 181). As these roles were automated, translated, globalized, and incorporated into films, editing and titles replaced the announcer while trailers and advertisements usurped the barker. As film became “auto-​mediated,” another stamp of the human and local was stripped away (Lacasse 2006, 183, 185). Lacasse points out that corporeal, live presenters lasted longer in countries that imported films requiring translation. Many local, human narrators incorporated individual and regional slants on the material, providing an anti-​colonial angle on films screened in places under the dominion of other nations. Although the stage presenter initially moderated between “tradition and modernity,” in the locations where this practice endured the longest, the role became a site of resistance to the hierarchies and assumptions embedded within the films themselves, framing them within “local, cultural elements, language, accent, practises and context” (Lacasse 2006, 181, 183). Unlike the hermetically sealed, digital product of traditional moving histories, Live Documentaries translate what Tom Gunning calls the “radical heterogeneity” of early film exposition, offering a robust historiographical methodology for documentary truth (2006, 381). As audiences are now familiar—​perhaps too familiar—​with screen technology, the human guide now functions as an interpreter and enhancer of the content rather than the medium. The host contextualizes the narrative and argument, operating as an emblem of subjectivity. Ultimately, reinventing the cinema of attractions at this moment disrupts the social isolation of pervasive moving media consumed on individual screens, a solitary encounter that, unlike the one-​to-​one experience of the nickelodeon, no longer requires any human interaction, travel, or effort to procure on a day-​to-​day, moment-​to-​moment basis. Live Documentaries evoke the spirit of Brecht’s epic theatre by partitioning narration, image, and score, thereby deconstructing the persuasive sweep of symphonic amalgamation of mainstream 265

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films and streaming series (Brecht 2003, 37). Brecht’s comparison of opera and “dramatic theatre” to modern and epic theatre offers a useful contrast between the traditional documentary and the live, as he explains that the: ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’ (or ‘integrated work of art’) means that the integration is a muddle, so long as the arts are supposed to be ‘fused’ together, the various elements will all be equally degraded… . The process of fusion extends to the spectator, who gets thrown into the melting pot too and becomes a passive (suffering) part of the total work of art… . Words, music and setting must become more independent of one another. (37–​38) Live Documentaries make legible the discrete parts of moving-​image works. Dissecting as they isolate, they distinguish the transportive force of the screen image from the emotional spell cast by music and the intimacy of the direct address by the narrator. This process of dismantling does not dilute; on the contrary, it magnifies each element as it is laid bare. The thrill of witnessing the creation of music and narration in a shared time and space under a commanding screen only multiplies the energetic dynamism of sharing an experience with a group of strangers. Unlike Eisenstein’s montage of attractions or Brecht’s epic theatre, however, Live Documentaries do not “guide the spectator in the desired direction (frame of mind)” (Eisenstein 1974, 84). Instead, they alternate between projected scenes and a direct address from the stage, inviting audiences to contemplate a given narrative as filtered through a subjectivity. With the rise of a global commercial cinema around 1907, the cinema of attractions did not become extinct; it merely transformed into an avant-​garde mode of cinema, taking its unique relationship with the spectator underground with it (Gunning 2006, 384). Gunning suggests that looking back to earlier modes of engagement and the constellation of relationships between the spectator, screen, and live-​action on stage, might be a source for the rejuvenation of a non-​commercial cinema (2006, 387). Sam Green makes this experimental art practice accessible and mainstream while its bespoke presentation subverts the mass production and consumption of industrial film. He resists mass media’s political pressures and skewed incentives that reward consistently raising the dramatic stakes and trading on emotion over introspection. Live Documentaries disentangle what André Gaudreault calls the “narrative frontiers” of text, stage, and film” (2009, 41). Rather than mix these elements into a solution as in traditional, “off-​line” moving images, Live Documentaries keep these operations suspended. They unmask the role of a film’s director as author, that “demi-​god capable of synchronizing, modulating, masterminding, and even producing a multimedia performance in which the various elements–​ images, sound, speech, text, music–​are thrown together and intermingled” (Gaudreault 2009, 148). Simultaneously, they unveil the author’s hidden tools, including lights, microphones, and projectors. This on-​stage narration emphasizes the intentional, personal, and verbalized narrative voice of history as a crafted discourse, while the stage frames and throws into high relief the pastness of even the most contemporary clips displayed on the screen as remnants of a layered and conditioned history. Live Documentaries allow historical movies to seize the power of the screen image to traverse time and space while reigning in its totalizing grasp, anthropomorphizing the author’s channelling perspective, and reminding spectators of the realities of our conditional access to the past. Although the screen launches us into the air, the figure on the stage ties us back down to the earth in the here and now. Rhetorically reflexive in its dual and duelling address, far from being a rarefied hybrid

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art model, Live Documentary presents an ideal platform for documentary film’s goal of rear-​view access and transport via critical thought and reflection.

Expanding cinema Gene Youngblood popularized the term Expanded Cinema while critiquing the popular cinema’s imperative toward entertainment, nostalgia, and history, at the expense of art, experimentation, and collaborative spectatorship. He advocated for Expanded Cinema as a practice capable of defying a mainstream media that had become irrelevant thanks to a “socioeconomic system that substitutes a profit motive for use value [that] separates man from himself and art from life” (2020, 41–​42). In this, he echoes Guy Debord’s prophetic pronouncements in The Society of the Spectacle, from a few years earlier that declared that “[a]‌n earlier stage of the economy’s domination of social life entailed an obvious downgrading of being into having that left its stamp on all human endeavour,” leading to a present state, “in which social life is completely taken over by the accumulated products of the economy” and a “shift from having to appearing” (1994, 16). One marvels to think, if this is what Debord perceived in 1967, what might he make of the digital age and social media? Expanded Cinema is grounded in the local, not part of a glossy global business cranking out products for consumer-​spectators. Although punctured by poetic narrative digressions and introspections from the narrator, Live Documentaries belong to a markedly popular genus within Expanded Cinema, set up around a proscenium stage to pursue topics through a dramatic exegesis with a clear beginning, middle, and end. They are produced as scheduled events with causal plot logic for theatrical spaces, attended by bourgeois expectations of audience behaviour: remaining attentive to the spectacle, observing from a distance rather than walking through a display, listening and watching but not touching or talking, and arriving before the beginning and staying to the end. Live Documentary occupies a space in a continuum between Raymond Bellour’s conception of traditional “cinema,” and the non-​mainstream, artist-​based installation works that he calls “an other cinema” (2008, 408). It speaks to both film worlds, the mainstream and the avant-​garde, operating between them. Sarah Atkinson’s work on experiential cinema elaborates our understanding of these hybrid engagements. She supplies a taxonomy built around temporal distinctions that are especially relevant to historiophoty, making it worth a deep dive here. She proposes the term “simulacinema” to signal the “simulated” relationship between audience member and film, citing interpolations of time to distinguish the film’s release as future, past, or present, with the terminology “Prochronistic, Parachronistic and Synchronic” (2018, 192, 193, emphasis original). The prochronistic refers to engagements with works in pre-​release. They invite the audience to look forward to a future work in anticipation. As an example, she cites Suicide Squad (2016), leaving sets in the streets of Toronto for crowds to pass through during the post-​production and pre-​release phase of the film (193). She defines the retrospective, or “parachronistic,” as audience interactions with films after they are complete (195). Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) is an archetype of this form, involving fan practices and participatory actions of dressing up, singing, speaking along, talking back in unison, or throwing things at the screen. Live Documentaries resemble her third “experiential modality,” expressing a present-​based “synchronic” temporality, a combination of theatre and cinema that exhibits the film production process as performance (192, 195). Atkinson calls this the most “sophisticated and complex” of the three types and compares the reception experience to the act of the director switching attention between performances on set and the display of recorded images on a monitor (195). She evocatively captures the active experience of the spectator in Live

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Documentary, describing it as “affectively taxing, and laborious, the viewer has to always shift focus between two realities to grasp the overall production” (201). While the dichotomy and collision of liveness with pre-​recorded screen imagery indeed mimics the attention of the film director on set, split between watching actors directly as quasi-​theatre or through the screen of a camera’s monitor, it more strongly evokes the role of editing as pageant. The crucial arbiter in documentary film, the editor orders, splices, and layers shots and sounds to create a structured whole. In Live Documentary, the narrator acts as editor, playing clips and interjecting with a direct address that sculpts the narrative. Meanwhile, the spectator also takes on another role of the film editor, parsing material created by another. Each audience member controls the cut through the direction of attention. There are as many edits of a show as audience members, each of whom may focus, at any given moment, on the narrator, musicians, or screen. Unlike the director who shoulders responsibility for the creation of the raw material of scenes on a set or location, overseeing a process with much starting, stopping, and background action, working alongside a jumble of cast, crew, cords, and craft service, where the monitors may be distanced and not within eyeshot of the set, stationed deep inside the video village, Live Documentary displays post-​production processes from the point of view of the editor, performed as a kind of ballet.

Live’s many lives Live Cinema supplies an umbrella term for the collected practices of Expanded Cinema and Live Documentary. Francis Ford Coppola and others have appropriated the term for commercial film to describe simulcasts, or in other words, the filming of a traditional scripted show in one go, like ER Live (Warner Bros. Television et al., 1997), Grease: Live (Paramount Television, 2016), or Distant Vision (Francis Ford Coppola, 2016). In these examples, the liveness applies to audiovisual recording and performances synchronous with the viewership in time but not place. Through the sharing of time, excitement lies in the question: will it come together, or will it falter? The liveness of Live Documentary flips this equation. What is live or simultaneous with the audience is not (necessarily) what is projected on screen but what surrounds it. Its thrill is wrapped in time and the possibility of witnessing failure atop the kinetic energy of sharing space with others. It presents images recorded from the past in a shared time and space with an audience. What Coppola dubs Live Cinema seems to describe a remote, recorded, on-​location theatre or a high-​stakes film shoot that owes more to live television. Philip Auslander explains that liveness is “a historically variable effect of mediatization” whose original meaning now stretches to include: happenings whereupon audiences and events share time—​but not space, for example, (i) live radio, television, streaming, (such as Coppola’s Live Cinema) to those (ii) that share a time and space with an audience but not the audience in its totality, such as live concert tapings, or sitcoms recorded in front of a live audience to (iii) so-​ called live iterations, including exchanges with online chatbots, or stretching the term even further, websites that have merely been launched and made available (2012, 3, 6). Live Documentary’s power is in providing what Auslander calls “[t]‌he default definition of live performance,” bringing spectators and performers together in time and space (5). This is the original liveness from before the advent of recording media when “live” was not a concept because live was all there was. He ultimately contends that “digital liveness emerges as a specific relation between self and other” (5). That “other” includes AI and machines. Although each new media provides expanding and proliferating levels and values of liveness, his “default” mode of the live experience comprises the increasingly rare face-​to-​face encounter between performer and audience.

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Revisiting the cinema as place Live Documentaries call strangers to assemble in darkened rooms before screen spectacles, an experience most cinephiles have a passionate nostalgia for as a rite of profound immersion. Judith Aston proposes the term “emplaced interaction” to explain the reception experience of the “live performance documentary,” heralding the form for its “potential to bring people together and to engage all the senses…a powerful way to help keep us connected both to each other and to the physicality of the world in which we live” (2017, 223). Live Documentaries grant audiences a hyperawareness of their relationship to the show, the screen, and their fellow spectators through physical co-​presence that places their bodies in an imbricated and communal relationship in ways that television and streaming cannot. While the ability to escape the crowd and the self is a concerted lure of the domestic and mobile screen, its pervasiveness has also become a trap, cutting us off from each other and our sense of reality in the lived world. In “Digital Cinema: Convergence or Contradiction?” Thomas Elsaesser considers how cinema can fortify itself against the incursions of television and the internet into its territory, citing Expanded Cinema as one possible defence. Elsaesser evocatively describes the hallmarks of TV and streaming content as interchangeable forms of “armchair theater,” consumed within the private living space as a product, accessory, and element of home décor that differs fundamentally from the delivery and experience of cinema (2013, 14, 16, 19, 23). Live Documentary necessitates the pilgrimage back to the cinema space. It rewinds time and our attention to before video killed the radio star and before broadcast television (followed by the internet and COVID) separated us into private pods, pummelling the movie palace. Describing cinema’s current state of expansion to new spaces, surfaces, and practices of screening and reception, Francesco Casetti, offers the neologism “hypertopia,” referencing and riffing on Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia (2015, 11–​12). In “Of Other Spaces,” Foucault describes heterotopia as a spin on the idea of utopia, as real locations with symbolic functions that either cordon off deviant or non-​normative behaviours (criminality) or biological processes (menstruation, sex) or that conjure other times or places, in the form of gardens, festivals, theatres, and the cinema (Foucault and Miskowiec 1986, 24). Casetti’s hypertopia denotes the transformation of cinema spaces from portals we seek out to those that meet us where we are: in our homes, along roadways, on plazas, and tagging along in our pockets. He notes that the cinema of attractions mode of presentation relates to hypertopia in another way by circumventing cinema’s call for the viewer to enter the screen world, instead meeting spectators where they are, “engulfed by stimuli wherever they find themselves” (2015, 150). He also expresses the fear that within this hybridity lurks the death knell of cinema. Laying out his concern, Casetti describes an unrealized Live Cinema experiment by Eisenstein as the essence of hypertopia. The director had initially planned that his first screening of Battleship Potemkin (1925) would conclude in a momentous climax in which the actual sailors who had experienced the mutiny would burst through the screen, tearing it asunder. Casetti cautions that as the sailors “enter into the theater [they] also spell the end of cinema” because with “the arrival of reality there is no need of images” (152). But is that the case? His position encapsulates the argument of all those who would say that Live Documentary is not cinema. A live presence on stage does not override or invalidate the wonder of the screen’s commanding address. Seeing the soldiers in the space would not undo the magic of the shots and their arrangement in the film that preceded it. What audience member would reflect, “with the soldiers here, why bother with that whole business with the baby carriage on the steps? Why not just ask these veterans to describe their experiences?” Rather than diminish the wonder of moving images, these multimodal spectacles 269

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throw the screen’s powers of enchantment into high relief, showcasing its unrivalled ability to summon sounds, visuals, characters, and stories, while bending and manipulating time and space. Live Cinematic interventions create a critical frame around the screen, expanding cinema in both its meanings: as a medium and an arena. Rather than ending cinema, it takes it back to its roots.

Where the there’s there The retro, pre-​internet, pre-​digital sense of congregation and being around other people, of taking part, doing something face-​to-​face in analogue space, is the core element of the experience of the audience-​goer in Live Documentary. It supports Thomas Elsaesser’s concept of cinema as requiring a zone of “public intimacy” with its “time regime,” its “rituals of exclusion and inclusion,” and “liminal spaces” (2013, 33). The vitality of the cinema experience is wrapped into its frictions: the effort of travel, the queuing, the exposing of oneself to the risk of other people as germ conductors (all the more threatening since 2020), dealing with the bad behaviour of strangers with their cell phones or their distracting conversations during the show. These rituals require audience effort, which in turn imparts a sense of purpose, accomplishment, and value to the cinematic encounter. This labour and the attention it privileges are distinct from the convenience and ready access of our household screen appliances, in which every screening session melts into the other, day after day, year after year. As a reviewer of Green’s most recent Live Documentary, 32 Sounds, pictured in Figure 17.2, suggests, the “savvy distributor would recognize this very special cinematic achievement as a celebration of the theatrical experience’s unique appeal, and it would be an excellent reason for people to return to it after a long break” (Erbland and Kohn 2022). The draw of the cinema as a space is beyond the lure of nostalgia. Public gatherings allow us to access ideas free from ever-​present, portable screen-​based distraction and the sorting mechanisms of corporate-​engineered algorithms, so eager to get into our heads and sell our desires back to us.

Figure 17.2 Audience participation in a five-​minute dance interlude as part of Sam Green’s 32 Sounds.

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In the internet age, theatrical space functions as more than the grounds of public intimacy. It doubles as a refuge from our phones, where our tiny screens must be darkened, their incessant rings, alerts, vibrations, and tones muted. Any discourse that requires communal engagement, thought, and connection requires a landscape not conquered by the smart phone. Aside from being a zone free of digital stalking and tracking, the sense of physical space is also essential. Channelling what Gertrude Stein might have made of the web, Andreas Huyssen declares: “[t]‌here can be no utopia in cyberspace, because there is no there there from which a utopia could emerge;” and further, at a time of “an unlimited proliferation of images, discourses, simulacra, the search for the real has become utopian” (1995, 101). Live Documentaries blow past the false mirage of the utopian, engaging the real as slippery, complex, collective, and worth the effort. They demand careful attention to contest and consider what happened, what it means, and what to do about it. They force us to intentionally locate ourselves and our bodies in a specific time and place. To think, we must put down our phones. To communicate, we need to be with others. Philosophers and historians have long issued a call to commune in response to the challenges of assessing empirical truth and reality. Reacting to the use of postmodern scepticism by the political right, cravenly deployed as a tool to undermine the mobilization of a response to climate change, Bruno Latour reappraises the work of his early career, set on questioning graspable notions of truth in our changeable and imperfect world. He notes that while the Enlightenment was powered by “debunking quite a lot of beliefs, powers and illusions,” he sees the future in shifting from critique to “assembling,” probing areas of concern and by “gathering” (2004, 232, 245). Drawing a similar conclusion, Ankersmit wagers that given that the “timelessly true rhetorical treatise is rhetorically hopeless…the good rhetorician knows that he must aim for an intensive interaction with his audience” (2012, 252). And where does this intensive interaction take place? In Experiments in Rethinking History, Robert Rosenstone champions the direct address of the reader, conjuring the metaphorical assembly on the page. He cautions that this is not a place where “wisdom is handed down” but where the “author and reader meet” (2004, 5). Live Documentary makes this meeting literal and physical. In the process, it offers a vital tool for renegotiating the concept of truth in moving images in a “post-​truth” world. While committed seekers of truth lay out their subjectivities in a tone that respectfully acknowledges truth’s contingent nature and the limits of what they can know, the post-​truther sets forth with a good versus evil worldview spurred by an ends-​justifies-​the-​means mentality swamped in cognitive bias, enclosed in social media feedback loops, detached from the humanity and physicality of others. Post-​truth returns us to the childish, fairy tale stability of right and wrong, a balm to the complicated and uncomfortable business of thinking. Live Documentary offers recourse to its threat.

Checking in The layering of displays, holding a mobile screen in front of a larger one, is something we regularly see and have all likely done. The activity differs significantly from the synchronic Live Documentary experience of shifting attention in an artistically curated environment, from stage to screen. Atkinson invokes Linda Stone’s concept of “continuous partial distraction” to describe emerging experiential and participatory forms that call on spectators to interact in specific ways with moving image media, from searching the web to using their phones (2016, 219). However, it is the ways that Live Documentary rebuffs this way of watching that are part of its strength. In the late 1990s, Linda Stone, a former executive at both Apple and Microsoft, proffered the term continuous partial distraction to describe the drive “to be a LIVE node on the network,” motivated by a fear of missing out and an attendant dread of boredom (2009). Continuous partial 271

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distraction blocks genuine social interaction and saps our “ability to reflect, to make decisions, and to think creatively and creates a state of ‘high alert,’ ” an “artificial sense of constant crisis” that distinguishes continuous partial attention from the older, unmediated inattentiveness of mere multi-​tasking (Stone 2009). This is not the distraction of the “absent-​minded” cinema-​goer ascribed by Walter Benjamin but a zone of commercial and algorithmically engineered hypnosis spiked with anger and alarm that would surely shock Benjamin, one that engenders not the state of being lost in our own fleeting thoughts but in the fleeting thoughts of others (Benjamin, Arendt, and Zohn 1986, 18). Anne Friedberg’s preoccupied wandering flâneuse, the perambulating female window shopper, was granted new freedoms in the mid-​nineteenth century to roam the streets in exchange for a Faustian capitalist bargain (1991; 1993). The pact remains and has only intensified as shop windows became cinema screens and multiplied onto the surfaces of public billboards, private televisions, computers, tablets, and phones. The history film or series offers some refuge within the frame. Confounding commodification and product placement, moving histories allow spectators to mercifully bypass what Friedberg calls the “psychic penalty” of the shopper, or in the case of mainstream moving images, the spectator who lacks the means to possess the clothes, sprawling New York apartments, and expensive holidays often on display in the direct marketing of so many commercial films and series (1991, 424). Live Documentaries go even further. They do not lure their audiences into shopping mall adjacent multiplexes or browser windows. Instead, they spring forth to reclaim the sites of our earliest projection spaces, multi-​use variety theatres, cinemas, bare black box rooms, and lecture halls.

Live Documentaries as social cinema Live Documentary exchanges so-​called social media for a truly social cinema. Addressing NECS’ in/​between: Cultures of Connectivity conference in Potsdam in 2016, Sean Cubitt’s keynote “Against Connectivity” railed against the dangers of our pseudo-​connected digital social lives, warning the crowd that “the network condition is a site of profound, even existential unhappiness” (2016, 1). His vigorous and mesmerizing lecture, replete with eminently quotable lines, inform an appreciation of Live Documentary. He wagers that in the promise of connected global commerce, we have lost both our sense of self-​reliance and place, trading both for “a marketplace of lifestyles” that perpetuates and profits from division (5). He disputes the conference’s optimistic, technophilic byline, suggesting that what we have is “connectivity against culture” (5). His warnings emphasize why the quaint and old-​fashioned practice of looking someone in the eye is so important. He exposes our misplaced “fantasies of belonging” that require “the interactions of a corporate network, whose economies, politics and cultural forms are structured by the commodification of the social good” (10). Part of the impetus for Sam Green to launch his practice of the Live Documentary was precisely to work outside commercial culture and avoid complicity in the 24-​hour hucksterism that surrounds streaming and mainstream film (Green, interview with author, 2016). With compelling verve, Alison Landsberg explains film’s power to communicate in intimate ways while displaying what is remote and other as something affective and relatable (2009, 222). Because of this, she posits that it is a medium well suited to political subject matter and advancing social justice. Historical theorist Marnie Hughes-​Warrington similarly reflects upon the possibilities of a cinema for social action and advocates the overturning of evolved conventions of cinema realism (2007). One way to mount such a challenge is by altering content; the other is through adapting form. To the former method, Walter Benjamin cautions in “The Author as Producer” that 272

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regardless of the artist’s intentions, industrial and commercial media platforms will resist progressive social change (2005). Within the machinery of mainstream film and streaming series, industrial and commercial goals of profit stubbornly contradict those of social change and human rights. Considering the role of the audience member as arbiter, Hughes-​Warrington warns that spectators often mistakenly believe themselves to be “autonomous free agents” able to separate fact from fiction based on a false assumption of “the transparency of empiricism…sustained by society to discourage true social change” (2007, 150). And to where does she point as offering one remedy? She argues that the intermixing of the cinematic with the theatrical in early cinema resulted in a more critical stance on behalf of the audience, explaining that the “juxtaposition” between the live and the projected “undermined a naïve experience of realism and fostered conscious appreciations of them as illusion” (155). Once established to exhibit a mechanical marvel, the comingling of stage and screen in the digital age exposes cinema realism as part of a magic trick. When film became the business of multinational producers, it shifted from being about and for the audience to being for and about the film. Although this led to clear benefits in the quality and craft of filmmaking, it came with inevitable trade-​offs. As film screenings overtook the variety presentation, becoming a global multireel phenomenon, audiences became almost incidental. When sound emerged as part of the show, they were silenced (Hansen 1991, 44). Looking back, it is no wonder classical moving-​image storytelling took hold. There is no arguing with the appeal and enchantment of an escape into a seamless narrative of forgetting the self as our metabolisms dip, immersing ourselves into the world of someone else’s dreamscape. Live Documentaries will not dislodge us from the joys of streaming and the convenience of our home theatres. They will not replace traditional documentaries. Nor should they. The very aspects that make Live Documentaries such a potent vehicle for historiophoty and effective critical distancing also subvert some of the joys of entering into and being enveloped and absorbed by a screen narrative. But why should it be an either/​or? Live Documentaries are less engrossing in some ways than many solo screen encounters. When we watch them, we are less likely to forget ourselves, our bodies, our place in the world, and our seats. After they are over, there is less chance that spectators might lose track of which memories are theirs and which were photographic and implanted. Live Documentary diverts attention from content to form. When spectators think back to a live show, they will often remember how they got there, where they sat, with whom, the look of the stage, the size of the screen, the frisson of the crowd, and the scene in the lobby afterwards, as much as the spectacle itself, or its story. What Live Documentaries lack in the power of forgetting oneself and transport into the world of the screen, they make up for in their expression of history as ultimately “foreign” and never fully reconstructed, represented, or known in its entirety (Landsberg 2015). There are benefits to combining new digital tools with the resurrection of a ritual of cinematic address that split off from mainstream film’s family tree more than one hundred years ago. Beyond what it offers to cinema is what it offers to the negotiation of historical truth by presenting documentary as what it truly is: a process, a construction, an argument, built from traces, and channelled through a temperament. Live Documentaries create art not from the products of history but from the act of historicizing itself.

Reference list Ankersmit, F.R. 2012. Meaning, Truth, and Reference in Historical Representation. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Aston, Judith. 2017. “Interactive Documentary in Live Performance: From Embodied to Emplaced Interaction.” In I-​Docs: The Evolving Practices of Interactive Documentary, edited by Judith Aston, Sandra Gaudenzi, and Mandy Rose, 222–​236. London and New York: Wallflower Press.

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Kim Nelson Atkinson, Sarah. 2016. Beyond the Screen: Emerging Cinema and Engaging Audiences. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Atkinson, Sarah. 2018. “Synchronic Simulacinematics: The Live Performance of Film Production.” In Image–​ Action–​Space: Situating the Screen in Visual Practice, edited by Luisa Feiersinger, Kathrin Friedrich, and Moritz Queisner, 191–​202. Berlin, Boston: Walter de Gruyter GmbH. Auslander, Philip. 2012. “Digital Liveness: A Historico-​Philosophical Perspective.” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 34, no. 3 (September): 3–​11. https://​doi.org/​10.1162/​PAJJ_​a_​00​106. Baum, Frank. 2015. The Wizard of Oz. New York: McClelland & Stewart. Bellour, Raymond. 2008. “Of an Other Cinema.” In Art and the Moving Image: A Critical Reader, edited by Tanya Leighton, 406–​422. London; New York: Tate Publishing. Benjamin, Walter. 2005. “The Author as Producer.” In Selected Writings. 2,2: Vol. 2, Part 2, 1931–​1934, edited by Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, translated by Rodney Livingstone, 768–​ 782. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Benjamin, Walter, Hannah Arendt, and Harry Zohn. 1986. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In Illuminations, 217–​251. New York: Schocken Books. Berkhofer, Robert F. 1998. Beyond the Great Story: History as Text and Discourse. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Brecht, Bertolt. 2003. Brecht on Art and Politics, translated by Laura Bradley, Steve Giles, and Tom Kuhn. London: Methuen. Burgoyne, Robert. 1990. “The Cinematic Narrator: The Logic and Pragmatics of Impersonal Narration.” Journal of Film and Video 42, no. 1 (Spring): 3–​16. Burgoyne, Robert. 2008. The Hollywood Historical Film. Malden: Blackwell Pub. Casetti, Francesco. 2015. The Lumière Galaxy: Seven Key Words for the Cinema to Come. New York: Columbia University Press. Corsa, Andrew J. 2018. “Grand Narrative, Metamodernism, and Global Ethics.” Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy 14, no. 3: 241–​272. Cubitt, Sean. 2016. “Against Connectivity.” In In/​between: Cultures of Connectivity. NECS European Network for Cinema and Media Studies 2016 Conference. Potsdam, Germany. July 28–​30: 1–​12. www. acade​mia.edu/​27430​246/​Again​st_​C​onne​ctiv​ity. Davis, Natalie Zemon. 1987. “Any Resemblance to Persons Living or Dead: Film and The Challenge of Authenticity.” The Yale Review 6, no. 4: 457–​482. Debord, Guy. 1994. The Society of the Spectacle. New York: Zone Books. Eisenstein, Sergei. 1974. “Montage of Attractions: For ‘Enough Stupidity in Every Wiseman.’ ” Translated by Daniel Gerould. The Drama Review 18, no. 1 (March): 77–​85. https://​doi.org/​10.2307/​1144​865. Elsaesser, Thomas. 2013. “Digital Cinema. Convergence or Contradiction?” In The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media, edited by Carol Vernallis, Amy Herzog, and John Richardson, 13–​44. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press. Erbland, Kate, and Eric Kohn. 2022. “Memo to Distributors: Buy These Sundance 2022 Films.” IndieWire (blog). January 31. www.indiew​ire.com/​2022/​01/​memo-​to-​distr​ibut​ors-​buy-​these-​sunda​nce-​2022-​films-​ 123​4694​372/​. Foucault, Michel, and Jay Miskowiec. 1986. “Of Other Spaces.” Diacritics 16, no. 1 (Spring): 22–​27. https://​ doi.org/​10.2307/​464​648. Friedberg, Anne. 1991. “Les Flaneurs Du Mal(l): Cinema and the Postmodern Condition.” PMLA 106, no. 3 (May): 419–​431. https://​doi.org/​10.2307/​462​776. Friedberg, Anne. 1993. Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gaudreault, André. 2009. From Plato to Lumière: Narration and Monstration in Literature and Cinema. Translated by Timothy Barnard. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Green, Sam. n.d. 32 Sounds. https://​32sou​nds.com/​ Gunning, Tom. 2006. “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-​Garde.” In The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, edited by Wanda Strauven, 381–​388. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Hansen, Miriam. 1991. Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Hughes-​Warrington, Marnie. 2007. History Goes to the Movies: Studying History on Film. London; New York: Routledge.

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Live documentary Huyssen, Andreas. 1995. Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia. New York: Routledge. Josephson Storm, Jason Ānanda. 2021. Metamodernism: The Future of Theory. Chicago; London: The University of Chicago Press. Lacasse, Germain. 2006. “The Lecturer and the Attraction.” In The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, edited by Wanda Strauven, 181–​192. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Landsberg, Alison. 2009. “Memory, Empathy, and the Politics of Identification.” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 22: 221–​229. https://​doi.org/​10.1007/​s10​767-​009-​9056-​x. Landsberg, Alison. 2015. Engaging the Past: Mass Culture and the Production of Historical Knowledge. New York: Columbia University Press. Latour, Bruno. 2004. “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern.” Critical Inquiry 30, no. 2: 225–​248. https://​doi.org/​10.1086/​421​123. Lyotard, Jean-​François. 2002. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. MacDonald, Shana. 2018. “Reimagining Public Space in Expanded Cinema Exhibition.” Canadian Journal of Film Studies 27, no. 1 (Spring): 16–​30. https://​doi.org/​10.3138/​cjfs.27.1.2017-​0012. Martin, Carol. 2013. Theatre of the Real. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Morgan, Charles. 1934. “TWO CAPITALS: BRITAIN AND CINEMA.” New York Times, May 13. Munslow, Alun. 2010. The Future of History. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. MUSAC. n.d. “New Artistic Formats, Places, Practices and Behaviours at MUSAC León–​Artmap.Com.” Accessed June 3, 2022. https://​art​map.com/​musac/​exh​ibit​ion/​new-​artis​tic-​form​ats-​pla​ces-​practi​ces-​and-​ beh​avio​urs-​2013. Nelson, Kim. 2022. “The Historian is Present: Live Interactive Documentary as Collaborative History.” Rethinking History 26, no. 3: 289–​318. doi: 10.1080/​13642529.2022.2103618 Nelson, Kim. 2024. Making History Move: Five Principles of the Historical Film. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Nichols, Bill. 1991. Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Rosenstone, Robert A. 2004. “Introduction: Practice and Theory.” In Experiments in Rethinking History, edited by Robert A. Rosenstone and Alun Munslow, 1–​6. New York: Routledge. Ruby, Jay. 2000. Picturing Culture: Explorations of Film & Anthropology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. “Sam Green.” n.d. Sam Green. Accessed June 7, 2022. https://​samgr​een.to/​. Stam, Robert. 1985. Reflexivity in Film and Literature: From Don Quixote to Jean-​Luc Godard. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press. Stephenson, Jenn. 2019. Insecurity: Perils and Products of Theatres of the Real. Toronto; Buffalo: University of Toronto Press. Stone, Linda. 2009. “FAQ.” Linda Stone (blog). November 28. https://​lin​dast​one.net/​faq/​. Tate. n.d. “Expanded Cinema.” Accessed March 30, 2022. www.tate.org.uk/​art/​art-​terms/​e/​expan​ded-​cin​ema. Thanouli, Eleftheria. 2009. Post-​ Classical Cinema: An International Poetics of Film Narration. London: Wallflower. Vermeulen, Timotheus, and Robin van den Akker. 2010. “Notes on Metamodernism.” Journal of Aesthetics & Culture 2, no. 1. https://​doi.org/​10.3402/​jac.v2i0.5677. Wagner, Marianne. 2009. “Doing Lectures. Performative Lectures as a Framework for Artistic Action.” In Lecture Performance, edited by Kathrin Jentjens and Jenny Dirksen, 17–​30. Berlin: Revolver Publishing by VVV. White, Hayden V. 1966. “The Burden of History.” History and Theory 5, no. 2: 111–​134. https://​doi.org/​ 10.2307/​2504​510. White, Hayden. 1988. “Historiography and Historiophoty.” American Historical Review 93, no. 5: 1193–​ 1199. https://​doi.org/​10.2307/​1873​534. Youngblood, Gene. 2020. Expanded Cinema, introduction by R. Buckminster Fuller. Fiftieth anniversary edition. New York: Fordham University Press.

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18 PROCESS, PEDAGOGY, PREFIGURATION, AND THE PROMISED LAND Sara Joan MacLean

Standing alone against a black background, Deanna Bowen reads on camera, with restrained, powerful emotion: First known generation: my great, great, great, grandparents. Details are few, I don’t know their names. I don’t know their parents’ names. I don’t know if they had siblings. I don’t know when they died. I do know that my great, great, grandfather was born somewhere in Africa and my great, great, great, grandmother was born in the state of Georgia. (Bowen 2010) She pieces together her “disremembered” family history, enunciating the known and unknown, as handwritten text appears on the screen tracing her family’s “geographies of belonging and displacement” (Alexander 2005, 88). No longer an abstracted official enumeration of census data, names, and vital statistics, the varied handwriting reveals acts of historical record-​keeping by specific individuals, revealing an index of co-​presence. Each name is a testament to a previous act of intonation, and then recording, by a specific person endowed with the power to name, label, and list. In this video, Bowen reclaims her family story from these partial, missing, and portentous records—​one name, one generation at a time. Her family migrates North to Canada from Georgia, Alabama, and Oklahoma. Bowen describes the climate they faced, “Prime Minister Wilfred Laurier drafted a regulation that banned Blacks from coming into Canada” (this order was repealed when Laurier was defeated in the general election), while white settlers threatened and enacted violence in response to the arrival of Black migrants (Bowen 2010). After an arduous journey, they arrive in Vancouver and Amber Valley, Alberta. Bowen announces her grandparents’ deaths and her own birth, “My name is Deanna Jean Bowen. I moved to Toronto shortly after their deaths and have lived here since August 1994. This project began in 1996. What happened between then and now is another story” (Bowen 2010). With that time folds into the present and her presence as the video fades to black, “(her) body stands as the fibrillating membrane of historic experience both border and articulator of past, present and future… danc(ing) the impossible sutures and constitutive ruptures of historical time” (Lepecki 2016, 310). Bowen, and the sheath of paper in her hand, summarize lifetimes of movement, record-​keeping, and research, simultaneously embodying and witnessing the story in its fullness and partiality, in its 276

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ongoingness, and in its endless unspoken relations. “My little Black family,” says Bowen, “could be the key to undoing an entire nation’s cultural narrative” (Bowen and Mowry 2021). Since the making of this video, Canadian multidisciplinary artist and scholar Deanna Bowen has created a growing collection of interrelated artworks and large-​scale exhibitions rooted in chapters of her family, community, and Black Canadian histories. Her starting points are fragments of records from official, private, and personal archives. Bowen began her artistic training and practice in experimental film and video, which fundamentally informs her work to date, and while her exhibitions employ a variety of still and moving documents and archives, her work with audiovisual materials is of particular interest to this study. Bowen’s archival work troubles historical narratives, not by filling in gaps within the archives themselves or providing an alternative account to the dominant narrative. The “undoing of an entire nation’s cultural narrative” (Bowen and Mowry 2021) requires far more than an insertion of erased Black histories into existing archival structures, as if they had themselves been construed as an unshakeable, immovable project. Bowen’s use of the word “undoing” is central to this chapter’s exploration, which asks three enfolded questions: what does the archive do, what does her work do and undo, and in the same spirit of accountability, what could this chapter in this very book do, in turn? These are process-​based concerns dwelling in forceful movements that seek radical change. Andrea Fatona (2006) explores the ways Black Canadian artists formally investigate experiences of belonging and alienation and argues alongside Katherine McKittrick (2021), Paul Gilroy (1993), and others that “Black diasporic sensibilities and aesthetics cannot simply place the Black subject into a narrative of nation without transforming that very narrative or questioning the legitimacy of its foundation” (Fatona 2006, 229). It is not enough to uncover the well-​known falsehoods and incompleteness of the Canadian narrative and historical archive—​its stabilizing structures must be laid bare and taken apart, leaving the mechanics of its sustaining pedagogies exposed and interrupted. Aligning Bowen’s process with other resistant and affirmative practices of Black Canadian art and Black Studies scholarship acknowledges the presence of “different modes of engagement with the archive” such as “opposition, avoidance, (and) disengagement” that have always taken place, continually “undermin(ing) many of the positivistic assumptions about the archive that recur in its alternative histories” (Azoulay 2019a, 197; emphasis mine). Bowen’s unique methodology of moving-​image experimentation, performance, and collaborative pedagogy focuses our attention on how and why these histories and moving images were created, and whose ongoing interests they serve. This will reveal the key motif of this chapter—​forms of circulation and interruption. Frameworks from feminist production study will be applied to reveal layers of Bowen’s complex process, alongside theories of Black performance study which in turn offer access to possibilities for change that are generated by Bowen’s activation of moving image history. This chapter will develop a framework that accommodates the manner in which Bowen’s work formally addresses not only the content (and absences) but the processes of Canadian historical archives, their ongoing violence and exclusion of Black bodies. These in turn underpin Canada’s treasured fictions of settler innocence (Tuck and Yang 2012), denial of our own history of slavery, and self-​serving narratives of welcome toward Black migrants, our deeply held myth of Canada as a Promised Land. Bowen’s unique process demonstrates that these narratives are not static but require continuous present-​day re-​affirmations to retain their power. Her methods are made visible through her art practice which is itself an open process. What her work does is exceed the sum of each story, artwork, exhibition, publication, performance, and conversation that she creates or initiates. It exceeds the ever-​expanding story of her own family history. It goes beyond national borders in order to trace systems of power, historical thought, and capital alongside the movements of those who they are mobilized to displace and erase. It is a pedagogical art and research practice 277

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that she consciously builds to exceed her own individual capacity and working lifetime, all the while being determinedly rooted in the possibilities of the present.

Expanded production study: Black Drones in the Hive Feminist production study offers access to tangible practicalities within layers of the filmmaking process, which makes it well suited to an analysis of Bowen’s complex practice. Paying attention to forces of labour and collaboration, material practices, economics, and distribution, results in what Miranda Banks (2018) describes as “a more prismatic approach, using unique points of entry into the production,” which can be used to “determine shifting relationships” (158) between production and industry culture, history and other relevant discourses. Production study is typically associated with film and television models, which creates a slight disjuncture in applying it here to consider forms of moving-​image work classified as multidisciplinary art and exhibited in galleries and public spaces. This friction in fact makes it all the more generative. Process-​oriented studies of contemporary art tend to be less inclined toward the nuts and bolts of moving-​image production and distribution, even when they specifically take up works on film and video. On the other hand, studies of film itself, due to its hybrid art/​industry status, popular reception, and highly specialized creative roles, is more apt to engage with the complex discussions of capital, labour, collaboration, distribution, and audience that characterize film production study. These elements can then be read as central facets of the art-​making process, with attention paid to their impact on creative decision-​ making and formal aesthetics. This approach insists that each element of the process remains indivisible from the labour of its making, and relations within its circulation. While I would suggest that this approach is fruitful within the study of media art and screen practices more broadly, it feels particularly applicable to the work of practitioners like Bowen who emerged directly from the experimental film/​video art milieu and who often still operate within its funding, distribution, and reception (both public and academic) frameworks. The typical phases of pre-​production, production, and post-​production do not apply neatly to Bowen’s practice, however, enforcing a perpetual recognition of the non-​linearity of her work, histories, and process. Procedural elements and techniques reappear outside of the usual sequence: in her exhibition Harlem Nocturne, for instance, pages of a musical score were displayed in the gallery, and a film of dancers was displayed on a Steenbeck flatbed film editor—​elements of production, and the apparatus of filmmaking made visible within the exhibition itself. Phases of production, time, and place fold into each other, as she summons history in the present. Banks (2018) outlines the working principles of feminist production studies, emphasizing that it both “highlights production at the margins” and “resists or complicates traditional power hierarchies” in order to “make visible hidden labor” which results in a more complex analysis of the “negotiations between makers and viewers” (158). Evocatively she adds that “the how of my observing cannot be disentangled from what I came to see” (157). While production study is introduced here for its utility in identifying our pathways into the layers of Bowen’s process, this statement also speaks to the how of Bowen’s own work. It allows us to imagine her practice as a form of production study as well, for which there is ample evidence. She identifies, for example, the way official archives categorize Black lives and stories both literally and figuratively as secondary “b-​roll” footage (Butet-​Roch 2019). She pulls at the fabric of Canadian narratives, revealing how they are produced and staged, undoing their tight weave though archival work, storytelling, and choreography—​her “repertoire of artistic gestures” (Bowen 2021). This chapter is also conceived as a process piece, a working through, that attempts to transparently summon a trans-​disciplinary collection of academic discourses and methods that emphasize and support 278

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Bowen’s aims for tangible change. This study is an imperfect work of solidarity that aims to remain open in its mechanics, an attempt to interrupt the academy’s own worst impulses toward disciplining, naming, discovery, and extraction. Identifying the procedures, materiality, and labour of archival erasure reveals deliberate acts in service of the construction of a particular story. It reminds us to include each production element in this portrait of the archive itself as well; since each take, shot, and frame of the historical films and records preserved therein involved practical decisions, made by specific people. They determined how bodies are framed, lit, and choreographed, how the stories are written, staged, designed, cast, and performed. The elements of moving-​image production become a lens through which to expose the mechanics and workings of national narratives and colonial archives, and the ongoing erasures and violences that create the story of Canada. This framing also sidesteps a central distinction in archival discourse between official vs. personal archival materials (both of which Bowen includes in her work), de-​emphasizing binaries such as inside/​outside, personal/​political, found/​lost—​which simplify this extraordinarily complex landscape, imposing a linear temporality, and distracting focus away from the active interplay between the archives and ever-​present resistant practices. Within feminist production study the labour is laid bare, which leads me to ask what can be accomplished by paying attention to stages of production, creative roles, forms, and technical elements, and the operation of capital, and emphasizing reception, audience, and circulation—​when applied not only to a single media artifact or film, but to an entire practice…or an entire movement? Sara Ahmed emphasizes “the importance of focusing not so much on what documents say” (and here we extend this to moving images), “but what they do: how they circulate and move around” (2012, 6). Ariella Azoulay insists that repeating the same affirmations of archival opposition can serve to further entrench a focus on the imperial archive. Within her warning to scholars against centring the very structures they intend to oppose, I single out the active word repeating for further consideration, alongside Rinaldo Walcott’s statement that “Canada continues to reproduce itself on a particular narrative of black invisibility” (2003, 18). These acts of repetition, reproduction, and movement are made concrete through the process loops of production, distribution, broadcast, and audience reception…and again the motif of circulation emerges.

Moving histories: Black Drones in the Hive To access the ways that Bowen uncovers and undoes circulations of White supremacist Canadian cultural narratives, while drawing attention to and amplifying the circulation of Black Canadian histories, I will describe how these forces move within Bowen’s award-​winning exhibition Black Drones in the Hive. Looking at two pieces from the exhibition—​the first an installation of archival documents on paper, and the other a newly made video work—​offers an opportunity to understand the mechanisms of historical circulation that this chapter seeks to highlight. Originally timed to coincide with the centenary of the Group of Seven’s first exhibition of paintings, Bowen’s 2020 exhibition Black Drones in the Hive reveals the behind-​the-​scenes workings of White supremacy and erasure that continue to position the celebrated painters at the cultural forefront of Canadian art. As curator Crystal Mowry describes: Through Bowen’s intense scrutiny, Black Drones in the Hive reveals the centuries-​long colonial project that entangles Indigenous, Black and European settler histories in this region. Bowen’s work reveals a myriad of ways in which white supremacy has shaped policy and public record. (Embury 2020). 279

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Black Drones takes aim at foundational cultural narratives of Canada as Terra Nullius, an empty expanse of land and resources for European settlers to take. M Jacqui Alexander describes the power of the perpetual “re-​articulation and recirculation” of national myths of settlement and first contact as “a rewriting of the narratives of colonization as a celebratory one of mutual consent, reminiscent of imperial travel writing and rescue narratives” (2005, 54); while Bowen refers to the iconic “unpeopled” paintings of the Group of Seven as an “ethnically cleansed leisure landscape” (Bowen 2020a). The exhibition itself traces forms of anti-​Black violence and erasure that took place alongside the Group of Seven’s rise to prominence through the use of arrangements of archival materials (which I will position here as the production materials of national narratives and historical continuity), accompanied by two new works on video. The foundational erasures and extractions that underpin both of our broader cultural narratives, and White supremacy within cultural institutions, are laid bare. “An interdisciplinary exhibition that reveals the strategic erasures which enable canons to exist without question or complication” (KWAG 2020), this is not to be mistaken for an attempt to repair the canon of Canadian art by inserting Black art histories into a pre-​existing structure. As bell hooks warns, “focus on canon formation…reinforc(es) white hegemonic authorial canonicity” (2015, 19). Instead, Black Drones in the Hive reveals the grinding mechanics of the structure itself, and the urgency of its reckoning. In one such reversal, Bowen inserts materials from the gallery’s permanent collection, including paintings by the Group of Seven, into her exhibition, where their role in Canadian history is revealed as an antagonistic and violent inversion of their typical canonical placement. Evocatively, Bowen (2019) has described her work and process as “engagements with white archives, the ways in which white people talk about Black bodies, Black pain, terrorism.” I want to underscore her use of the present tense to describe the voice of the archive, as well as the way she foregrounds the conversations that uphold anti-​Blackness rather than the objects and images themselves. There is a clear emphasis on what these archival materials, narratives, and institutions continue to do. Continually locating these forces in the present and attaching them to specific names and institutions reveals how narrative continuity1 is constructed, and the scale and scope of who and what it omits. In locating multiple entry points into this prismatic work,2 a word that aptly describes both Bowen’s multidimensional process and the constellations of archival material she presents in the exhibition, I will emphasize three themes or modes. The first takes up Azoulay’s (2019a) notion of the “imperial shutter” referring to the moment photographs are taken. The shutter is not intended to be metaphoric in her usage but refers to a tangible and intentional act of capture, editing, and erasure. These acts continue to be enacted and evidenced in historical moving images and archival materials. I will contrast this with Bowen’s own technical and creative editing labour and curatorial collaborations—​where in parallel to Azoulay’s “shutter” which refers to the mechanical processes of the camera lens, we might consider motion picture film editing’s site of selection and elision, the cutting room floor. The second theme engages with narrative and formal strategies of film continuity. These approaches, derived through attention to process and film production study, lead me to develop a motif of the circulation of “moving histories”3 as embodied in this instance by audience movements, forms of address, and response (Nelson 2022, 311, 313; 2023, 260). To enter into Bowen’s archival work, open editing process, and curatorial collaborations, let us compare them to Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s description of the skills and objectives of the institutional/​ imperial archivist. The former involves the extraction of items, followed by their “expos(ure) to certain

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procedures of recording, classifying, indexing and filming that render them into documents” as well as acts of “elimination, recycling, robbing, alongside protecting and shielding…manipulations, silences & absences predicated on the denial of the presence of others in the archives” (Azoulay 2019a, 195). In order to contrast Bowen’s process with this depiction of archival practice, and contextualize her work within the practice of Black historical memory work, I would like to introduce the way Joyce LeAnn describes her practice. A certified archivist and interdisciplinary artist, she explores “the transformative potentiality that can be found at the intersection between art and archiving” (LeeAnn 2021). Azoulay’s (2019b) question “what is an archive—​a place or a threshold, a depository of documents or an apparatus of rule?” meets LeAnn’s (2021) contemplation of the archive’s threshold as a “flower garden” in order to combat notions of “staleness.” She troubles the word “custody” insisting that Black memory workers are “not just custodians of history, not just tidying up” but are tasked with the interpretation of “fleeting, shared memories” (LeAnn 2021). I invite this comparison to colour our view of Bowen’s collaborative archival labour on this project with curator Crystal Mowry, who states: Deanna is living with the weight of this kind of work, but I think as a curator it’s really important for me to find ways to share that weight, it can’t be borne by the artist alone, especially when the subject matter is so corrosive. (Embury 2020) Bowen (2020a) notes that Black Drones in the Hive was her first time working with a Black curator in her long career, and calls it the “most enriching, and painful, collaborative research,” due in part to the confluence of high-​profile instances of everyday anti-​Black violence, police brutality, and mass protests taking place in 2020 while this work was developing. This underscores the seriousness and necessity of her archival collaborations, which she describes as forms of friendship and witnessing, naming the conspiratorial institutional archivists with “side-​angles” who contribute to her work, and family members, some of whom she “never thought would participate” (Bowen 2020a). This depiction of the intentional sharing of burden shifts the procedural emphasis from the weaponization of documents in service of power, to a communal activism and relational holding of stories that can sustain the trauma and responsibility of the work at hand. Using the language and tools of film editing, we can also access the labour of arranging these seen and unseen histories into exhibitions such as Black Drones in the Hive, as well as their roles within the larger ongoing story of Bowen’s practice. Because the “back-​end“ (Bowen 2019) of her archival and curatorial labour is visible in her work, in her exhibitions audiences are tasked with an active consideration of how these materials are “brought forward and arranged” and left to piece together the story they tell (Bowen 2020a). Bowen describes each archive in editing terms, as “a word in a sentence, another archive is another word in a sentence” and then characterizes her labour as “making it make grammatical sense” (Bowen and Phillips 2020). From a pedagogical standpoint this picks up on Alexander’s description of “relations of order,” in which we must think of “the material and discursive qualities of objects and their ordering in tandem when considering texts diffused as public symbols” (2005, 93). Archival grammar provides both a conceptual and practical approach to working with historical temporality.

Circulations of intent By locating an exploration of Bowen’s work in the present rather than the historical archive, the continuity is made explicit between narratives constructed around the Group of Seven and

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Figure 18.1 Installation view, Deanna Bowen: Black Drones in the Hive, Kitchener-​Waterloo Art Gallery, 2020–​2021. Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid, courtesy of KWAG

their peers, and anti-​Blackness in contemporary Canadian art. The piece 1911 Anti Creek-​Negro Petition, as shown in Figure 18.1, is a framed reproduction of a 4300-​signature petition demanding that Prime Minister Wilfred Laurier halt the entry of Black people into Canada for one year to interrupt the passage of migrants from Oklahoma into Alberta and Saskatchewan, a group which included members of Bowen’s own family. Lynchings were threatened if the PM did not comply with their demands. In order to “name the white people who get in the way of Black people in Canada” (Bowen 2020b), the petition is enlarged, each page framed and mounted in an arresting display within Black Drones in the Hive. At the Kitchener Waterloo Art Gallery, the registrar who was tasked with mounting the artwork read every name on the petition, and recognized Barker Fairley’s signature (Bowen 2020a). Fairley went on to become an Officer of the Order of Canada and a companion of the Group of Seven. As Bowen exposes in the pair of works God of Gods that emerged from the research that ensued, Fairley belonged to a group of powerful elites, including people like Vincent Massey. Their association with the Arts and Letters Club, ties to industry, politics, and their founding roles and influence within many prominent institutions (including the University of Toronto, where I am currently affiliated), shaped arts funding and cultural policy, the direct impact of which is still felt today (Bowen 2020a). Considering a still artwork on paper within a book about moving images may at first seem out of place, but the framework of feminist production study allows this work to be revealed as a form of script or score; a pre-​production element for narratives that it would both fuel and interrupt. Returning to our theme of circulation, Bowen refers to the petition as the “circulation of an

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intent—​for exclusion, violence, (and) terror” (Bowen and Mowry 2020). It is an intent by White settlers to stop the circulation of migrants within their territories, making the preposterous claim that Black people were poorly suited for the Canadian climate and that property values would diminish. The petition’s underlying basis, its implied claim of sole dominion of the land a mere six years after Alberta and Saskatchewan joined the Canadian confederation, and just five decades into large-​scale White settlement of the prairies, is an object lesson in White supremacy. This act of terror also demonstrates what Bowen calls a “familial issue” (2020a), overt and intentional acts committed by specific people, disallowing any tendencies to imagine colonialism and White supremacy as abstract or disembodied. While the signatories shamelessly named their own names, revealing their racist, murderous intent within this public document, Bowen enters it into an additional form of pedagogical circulation that they could not have foreseen. The temporality of the petition’s implementation is not a question of old vs. new purposes, as if the document itself is static but can now mean something different from its original intent, if we recognize that “resistance is not a consequence to power but simultaneous to power, even preceding power” (Morrill, Tuck, and The Super Futures Haunt Qollective 2016, 6). Both circulations of meaning and narrative are active, intersecting instantiations of history in movement, alive and tangible in the present.

Closed circuits and open secrets In a recent panel discussion, Deanna Bowen and curator/​educator Betty Julian (2022) described the ways these ongoing impacts on storytelling, film, and art production “created the conditions that continue to inform our [Black] absence: from funding to institutions,” from the foundational “realities embedded in how funders are structured” to the role that funders play in the ongoing segregation of Black artists, reduced to checkboxes and numeric accounting targets. “In the official history of Canada,” and the attendant narrative that holds sway over multicultural policy, Andrea Fatona explains, “alternative Black narratives often erase the complexities of Black Canadian experiences” (Fatona 2006, 227). Within Canadian artist-​run culture, independent and experimental film and video art, where Bowen spent her formative years as an artist, Cameron Bailey (1999) identified closed circuits that limit the funding and production of Black film in Canada. This formula holds equal weight over other art mediums, as amply explicated by M NourbeSe Philip (2017), Andrea Fatona (2006; 2011), Yaniya Lee (2019), Jesse Wente (Fricker and Maga 2020), and Bowen herself (Bowen and Julian 2022), amongst others: Historically all Canadian filmmaking has to one degree or another been funded by state-​run agencies…there is also the question of the closed doors of the avant-​garde. The network of art school and university film education, film co-​ops, alternative exhibition venues and art magazines that has supported Canada’s independent and experimental film movements since the 1960s has been a notoriously sealed circuit…the white ‘avant garde’ has long operated under a set of assumptions that excludes most political filmmaking, and certainly most politically engaged filmmaking by black filmmakers. (Bailey 1999, 98) In turn, they exert control over which filmmakers are supported and what types of films get made, valued, and distributed, resulting in an emphasis on tokenistic cultural representation in order to delay deeper systemic change.

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Figure 18.2 Deanna Bowen, Taps, 2020. Digital video, 1 minute, 20 seconds. Performed by Charles Ellison and filmed on location at OBORO, Montréal. Courtesy of the artist and MKG127. Installation view, Deanna Bowen: Black Drones in the Hive, Kitchener-​Waterloo Art Gallery, 2020–​2021. Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid, courtesy of KWAG

Crossing the threshhold Returning to Black Drones in the Hive and the “1911 Anti Creek-​Negro Petition,” the latter may now be envisioned courtesy of M Jacqui Alexander’s (2005) description as a continuously circulating “replication of dominant scripts” with traceable impacts in the present (88). Bowen’s work in turn “open(s) up both analytic and political possibilities” (Alexander 2005, 88) that “inhabit(s) institutional spaces in ways dominant institutions never intended” (Ferguson 2012, 14). This crossing of the archive’s threshold is not a matter of static interruption but produces and reveals oppositional circulations of narratives and meaning. The petition itself is a very imposing physical installation of 233 framed pages, which requires that gallery visitors displace their bodies to take it all in. Bowen ensures that gallery-​goers must move through the rooms of the exhibition to take in each frame of the histories that she has assembled and edited, thereby animating them at walking speed, tracing narratives as they go. As viewers move through the space, they house the continuity of these circulating myths and stories in their bodies, therein mixed with their own web of complicity or proximity to the stories of domination and opposition that the space contains. I am suggesting here that we view these audience bodies themselves as the sites of “moving histories.” Bowen positions and addresses her audience with utmost attention and specificity. The next section will focus on her engagement with the fact that the art galleries in which her work is shown draw what she characterizes as a “mostly white audience” (Mahmoud 2019). I will begin to introduce theories of Black performance studies as we turn to Bowen’s work On Trial The Long 284

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Doorway to add nuance to the consideration of her work’s impact and intention as a form of social choreography. But first, in order to speculate about what happens when dominant circulations are disrupted, and institutions inhabited in oppositional ways, I wish to consider a second piece from the Black Drones in the Hive exhibition, one which offers a moving bridge to the next work. Within the exhibition, audible throughout the gallery, a darkened viewing room contains a video featuring Montreal-​based musician and scholar Charles Ellison on trumpet. Standing alone against a black background, a timeless staging reminiscent of Bowen’s own performance in sum of the parts: that which can be named, Ellison plays a jazz-​inflected rendition of Taps in a one-​minute video loop. His sustained and insistent final note makes explicit the undercurrent of mourning that infuses the exhibition. Included as an homage to fallen and forgotten Black soldiers, Bowen explains that it extends further yet, as it marks and grieves the staggering expanse of the region’s bloodshed and death, both depicted and implicated within the exhibition (Bowen and Mowry 2020). Bowen describes Black Drones in the Hive as a curatorial act of “putting empty landscapes in relation with erased people” (Bowen 2020a). Responding to the voluminous silences in the national archives and narratives, Bowen speaks about her “need to engage with another medium to access, make overt, the tone, the emotional layer and voice” (Bowen and Mowry 2021). The trumpet music establishes the key register in the scale of Black Drones in the Hive. This mode of address can be said to draw on a definition of moving histories that evokes being changed through feeling and emotion. As a visitor, I was struck by the way this video work dominates the experience of Black Drones in the Hive as the horn cuts through the silence and weight of the gallery and provides an evocative accompaniment to our physical movements through the exhibition. The looping music comes in waves, and the rhythm of video edit creates patterns of dark and light that reach into the wider space of the gallery, enlivening the surrounding works. Bowen’s audiovisual works insist that we recognize history’s reach in the present. Bowen plans her constellations of archival images as chapters of a narrative with a form of filmic continuity supplied by audience movements through histories, creating a series of undoings and reversals. This conjures Azoulay’s description of how scholars should view the archive “not as retrieved histories but as an active mechanism that seeks to maintain the principle of reversibility of what should not have been possible, the refusal of imperial shutters closing in the first place” (2019a, 10).

Rehearsing the past: On Trial The Long Doorway Following the circulation of moving histories and modes of address, the breathing notes of Charles Ellison’s looping trumpet now move our contemplation to a different, and very necessary, register. Thomas DeFranz, in conversation with Anita Gonzalez, introduces our next framework, that of Black performance study, by way of breath: performance, as I imagine it, involves the excitement of breath to create subject or subjectivity. In other words, performance emerges in its own conscious engagement, and it is created by living people…for my sensibility, performance involves subjectivity occasioned by action born of breath. People make performances happen, whether they be in the nightclub, in church, in the classroom, on the job, or on a stage. (2014, 6) This description feels particularly trenchant as Bowen’s work takes up family members’ direct histories, and her own, of performing in each one of these venues. Our footing in production study 285

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Figure 18.3 Installation view, Deanna Bowen: On Trial The Long Doorway, Mercer Union, a centre for contemporary art, 2017. Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid

now allows us to approach the multiple layers of performance in Bowen’s work. This includes the original performances and reenactments on camera in Bowen’s videos, as well as the performances contained in audiovisual archival materials used as starting points for her work, and importantly it extends to her own performance, and her collaborators’, of the creative and ultimately spiritual labour of rehearsing and enacting Black Canadian history in the present. In order to discuss modes of performance in Bowen’s work, I will attune to forms of movement, relation, continuity, and change within her practice and process. While production study offered a non-​linear constellation of entry points into the work itself, and led to my emphasis on labour and circulation, it is performance that locates and ascribes living and breathing movement within these relations. It insists that the work (and its impact) is inseparable from agency and circulation—​from its doing. Performance study offers access to additional nuances in Bowen’s work—​its ephemerality, the non-​archiveness of it all. This includes her particular focus on live audiences’ relations with the work and the performers’ relationships with each other, which is where we can locate the force and potentiality of her work. Elements of performance study will continue to root these movements in practical questions of process and making, of pedagogy, and change—​although true to Bowen’s form, the elements imply neither a linear process, nor divided/​individual forms of labour, but instead enter into circulation, conversation, and relation with each other. In addition to Bowen’s use of staging and exhibition design to choreograph audience movement, the raw materials of scripting, scoring, choreography, and dance notation are often displayed prominently and enacted in her work. A central method of Bowen’s project development involves translation and transformation of materials between various forms, whether it be from archival 286

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documentary transcripts to staged public readings which are then filmed and exhibited as video installations (Invisible Empire), or the creation of dance notation based on an archival dance film, for both display and performance (in Harlem Nocturne). These types of working materials are typically unseen, associated with pre-​production, and utilized to shape the visible performances and films to come. Bowen provides open access to these elements throughout the life cycle and circulation of her work, however, exposing the back-​end of her process, much as she has exposed the machinations of the archive that underpin Canadian historical narratives. Her exhibition On Trial The Long Doorway (2017) is based on a teledrama broadcast by the CBC in 1956 that featured Bowen’s great uncle Herman Risby in a key role. Bowen retrieved the script by screenwriter Stanley Mann, as well as some of the original set design drawings from two separate archives. The teleplay tells the story of a young Black legal aid lawyer who represented a White student who assaulted and almost killed a Black student athlete at the University of Toronto. Created just one year after the trial for the infamous lynching of young Emmett Till in the United States, the courtroom drama provides a rare Canadian take on issues of race, class, and justice. Bowen remarks on this anomaly: “it isn’t very often that Canadian television, Canadian anything, takes up race in its own place” (Dechausay 2017). For her 2017 exhibition at Mercer Union in Toronto, Bowen constructed a minimalist set for each of the teleplay’s locations, including a legal aid office, kitchen, courthouse, and jail cell, in: spaces are not meant to create an illusion, but cue scenes of conflict, such as the inner turmoil of a character in jail, or a family dispute of values as they sit around a kitchen table. In each area, a copy of the script is available to peruse. (Park 2017) Staged rehearsals of the material were open to the public, with five Black actors playing multiple roles, while a three-​camera set-​up filmed their live performance over the course of several weeks. The exhibition also featured archival newspaper and magazine articles of the era examining race relations, including coverage of the 1955 Emmett Till murder trial. A monitor played back video of the filmed rushes from previous rehearsals, bringing that process to the foreground, and video recordings of weekly discussions between Bowen and the project’s Dramaturge and Historical Consultant Seika Boye are also screened as part of the exhibition. Boye described their collaboration: We have continued our conversation about the nuances of racism and resistance in Canada, and these conversations will become a part of the fabric of the exhibition as we discuss the weekly rehearsals on camera…The gift of Deanna’s project is the space it provides for nuance to emerge, in the rehearsals, in the conversations, and in our perceptions. (Boye 2017) The performance tapes were later condensed into two video pieces exhibited elsewhere, a four-​channel immersive installation, and a single-​channel edited film of the rehearsals. By foregrounding these documentation videos and process elements Bowen produces an exploded cross-​section of the creative process, its motivations, and impact of re-​staging this historic teleplay in 2017. A startling simultaneity is evoked between the original material and the re-​staged version, offering an unprecedented form of access to a historical film that had ceased to exist but is now restored and expressed in a more fulsome format than had previously existed in the archive. 287

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The recording of the 1956 CBC Toronto live-​to-​air tele-​drama was lost—​unlike any of the other episodes of the same series, all of which remain neatly archived. The project’s originary scenario and production history also thus contains illuminating historical loops and blockages: from Bowen’s familial connection to a fellow performer in the 1956 telecast, a form of performative reprise, to the provocative forms of circulation contained within the very format of a live-​to-​air dramatization of contemporary discussions about race relations, that were then deemed too incendiary, by virtue quite possibly of the presence of Black performers alone, for archival preservation by the very institution that produced and aired them. Then there is the absolutely ourobourosian trajectory through Canada’s national broadcaster the CBC, where the original material was funded, created, broadcast…and destroyed; then, five decades later the CBC itself provided coverage of Bowen’s exhibition under the headline “This lost 1956 CBC show about race is as relevant as ever—​so a Toronto artist is reimagining it” (Dechausay 2017; emphasis mine). The unspoken magnitudes contained in the word lost, and the deceptively benign sounding phrase, as relevant as ever, are almost too vast to engage with here.

Social choreography Here, we return once again to the place we departed from Black Drones in the Hive, where a final long note of Ellison’s trumpet was sounding, ending, and with a breath beginning another loop. That note now re-​circulates through Bowen’s approach to address an audience in On Trial The Long Doorway. Bowen’s attention to the ways audiences move through spaces, embody images, and interact with audio/​visual material and performances inform her exhibition design. She employs a form of social choreography, wherein the circulation of audience bodies perform and animate the frames of archival material on the walls, in an act of moving histories, or they dissolve

Figure 18.4 Video still from On Trial The Long Doorway, Deanna Bowen, 2017. Courtesy of the artist

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into a dark space and stillness, where a trumpet performance thrusts the conversation and circulation into a different register of moving. Now, in this work, gallery audiences enter directly into the space of the performance and rehearsals, implicated in the tension, conversation, and video recording that they have come to witness. Dance theorist Andrew Hewitt describes performance through his principle of social choreography, as “a space in which social possibilities are both rehearsed and performed” with varying degrees of aesthetization (2005, 4). Open to the public, Bowen was strategic about her positioning of the audience: Audience members and gallery-​goers were allowed to come and watch, but only if they sat within the set. We didn’t give them seats to passively watch—​the notion was that these audience members were implicated in the performance of the re-​staging… . I didn’t want to create work that made for a passive viewing experience for a white audience, who would go away and say, ‘Wow. I’ve been educated’. (Mahmoud 2019) When the piece was re-​mounted at Vancouver’s Contemporary Art Gallery in 2019, Bowen created a four-​channel edit of the videotaped rehearsals. She set up inward-​facing video monitors, which forced gallery-​goers to enter the circle and stand amidst the screens. A recurring device of Bowen’s, audiences are thrust into the midst of the performance and made aware of their own acts of looking and complicity. As Bowen describes: “a predominately white audience is witnessed as they view a conversation or a performance that speaks to blackness…anybody else who comes into the space watches you watch it as well” (Mahmoud 2019). The concept of social choreography further explicates the layers and movements of performance within On Trial The Long Doorway, where choreography operates as “not just secondary metaphor but also a structuring blueprint for thinking…effecting modern social organization” (Hewitt 2005, 15). The scale of witnessing and movement enlarges exponentially in Bowen’s outdoor public works. In her upcoming project, The Black Canadians (After Cooke), which will be displayed at the National Gallery in Ottawa from 2023–​2024, in addition to a large-​scale exhibition of archival materials and video inside the gallery, she will shroud the exterior walls of the prominent institution in a constellation of archival images of Black Canadian history. In conversation with Betty Julian, she envisioned how Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will inevitably drive past the gallery and her imposing collection of photographs on his way to work. In the realm of performance this allows us to understand that she has expanded the circulation of this work and her pedagogy to re-​cast the unwitting Prime Minister, who is, as it happens, a former drama teacher himself, already engaged in his own ongoing official performance of Canadian cultural narratives and erasures, as a recurring supporting actor charged with daily rehearsals of witnessing as Black Canadian histories consume a major cultural institution, while he moves back and forth between Canada’s Parliament Buildings and his home.

Rehearsal and the moment of creation Bowen’s approach to staging—​creating a minimalist set with furniture and lighting evocative of CBC live teledramas of the era, her approach to casting her actors in multiple roles to continually shift their perspectives, and the questions raised in the original script—​created the form of On Trial The Long Doorway’s two months of live weekly rehearsals. Bowen speaks about where the central energy of On Trial The Long Doorway resides, explaining: 289

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Figure 18.5 Deanna Bowen The Promised Land, 2019. Flocked screen print, 45” × 38.” Courtesy of MKG127, Toronto, Canada

conversation in the production of that project became the more important thing than the restaging of work itself—​that back-​end conversation: the tears, sorrow, humour, of trying to get down to figuring out how to represent Black Canadian experience, how challenging it was, and be clear about the differentiation between Black Canadian experience and Black American experience. (Bowen 2019)

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Or in a nutshell, “six of us in a room trying to figure out ‘just what is Black Canadian anyhow?’ ” (Bowen 2019). In discussion with Kara Keeling, she temporialized these acts of creation and rehearsal, “when we make, it’s in the present,” which she described as a “utopic space where Black bodies can finally be in the moment” (Bowen and Keeling 2021). In the context of work that considers “the Black body in relationship to the past and future,” her assembly of co-​creators and collaborators were nevertheless “not caught up in some other time continuum” (Bowen and Keeling 2021). If this initially may seem to pose a contradiction, she offers this important clarification: “I have an understanding about how we’re all functioning within many types of history in one moment, so there’s no such thing as just the present there are many histories going on” (Bowen 2019). This play with time and the relationship of history to possibility are guiding forces, prompting Keeling to invite us to imagine “something happening” in our present moment, in place of an always-delayed future change for which one waits. She invokes the use of “right now!” in the final stanza of The Five Stairsteps’ (1970) song O-o-h Child. (There is time here, reader, for you to hum, sing, or play the song before carrying on). O-o-h Child’s memorable refrain offers a comforting promise of healing change and ease — a moment seemingly in a future time to come. That is, until the last stanza abruptly shifts tenses, when its joyful repetitions of “right now!” place the time for change and a lifting of trouble squarely within the immediate present moment. The work is “not just about past, but the enormous possibility of present” (right now!), Bowen and Keeling (2021) agreed. I return now to Bowen’s description of her methodology as developing “a repertoire of artistic gestures, in order to define the Black body and trace its presence and movement in place and time” to highlight two key elements that manifest in her work: the association between gesture, rather than “mediums” or “forms” and performance, and her emphasis on presence, place, and time (2021). Her practice, her range of gestures, form a spectrum, as “performance may be resistant, affirmative, or several states in-​between…narratives of domination and oppression that often circumscribe depictions of black performance arrive alongside considerations of presence and activity as their own means and ends” (DeFrantz and Gonzalez 2014, 9–​10). The temporality of rehearsal moves relation and presence to the foreground. Azoulay’s use of rehearsals to describe her own work resonates with Bowen’s gestures and forms, and names an outcome, “this book is the outcome of research conducted through a series of ‘rehearsals’ in returning to the time imperial shutters opened and closed” which allows her to “rehearse ways of being with others differently” (Azoulay 2019a, 10). Performance scholar Andre Lepecki writes of an “undoing that does something else” (2016, 312) and suggests, “this is how the path to agency is carved: persistent repetition as a survival of experience” (313).

Score and script as syllabus Bowen choreographs and moves audiences, performers, communities, narratives, and histories. In so doing, as the following remark demonstrates, she offers her process, the work, scripts, and scores as a form of curriculum. When she was once asked for a closing remark summarizing her thoughts on practice, she exclaimed: “Oh. I just hope I’ve left enough clues for the next generation of researchers. I hope I’ve placed and re-​placed this Black community, given it some glory and put it back on the map” (Mahmoud 2019). Viewed as such, this conjures M Jacqui Alexander’s outline of her influential Pedagogies of Crossing, in which she draws upon her own journey “from alienation to belonging, from disrememberment to rememory” (2005, 16). Like Bowen’s layers

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of performance, enfolded temporalities, and social choreography, Alexander’s (2005) process unfolds “not in any discrete, linear way” but as the result of “being forced to enrol in the never-​ ending school where Spirit as teacher is determined to use a curriculum in which the syllabus is given at the end of each lesson and then, only partially so” (16). This evocative description conjures for me the image of Bowen’s display of choreographic dance scores in her twinned pieces Gibson Duets and Gibson Notations, in which she filmed a pair of dancers recreating three dances originally performed in the 1950s by the legendary Leonard Gibson, with whom Bowen’s great uncle Herman Risby had also once performed. In her exhibition Harlem Duets, where the dance film of the re-​performance was screened on a flatbed film editor (invoking a tool of her trade both as a researcher and editor), she also presented framed pages of notation, a score that she had created and then used to restage Gibson’s original dance many decades after his performance. This form of preservation and re-​creation, while foregrounding erstwhile pre-​production materials, moves the dance through time, between present, past, and future bodies, along with a score, envisioned here as a M Jacqui Alexander-​esque syllabus of Spirit, offered at the end of one dance for the beginning of another. Attention to these movements reveals Bowen’s own performance theory, which as Anita Gonzalez describes in conversation with Thomas DeFrantz, “can be delivered through a hand gesture or sketch, embedded in a lecture, or disseminated within the pauses of a sound score… . (t)his is theory manifest: an articulate response to a performance” (2014, 7). The expansion of our notion of the pedagogical functions of social choreography began with a consideration of the movement of White gallery audiences (and Prime Ministers), followed by Bowen’s own open processes of performance, and explosion and re-​ordering of the phases of film and television production, arriving at a re-​present-​ing of history. My insistence that the energy of Bowen’s work is located in the present, within the performances, conversations, and enactments she stages necessitated the instantiation of a pedagogical framework for these relations. This leads us to this chapter’s final emphasis, a contemplation of the impact of Bowen’s “moment of creation (with a) purposeful, intentionally crafted group of creative people” (Bowen 2019; emphasis mine), and the question of how ephemeral, relational performances and conversations enact change.

Ephemeral collisions DeFrantz and Gonzalez position Black performance study as a venue for “varied and unexpected elaborations of performance and its urgencies, capacities, and the terms of its recognition” (2014, 14). We are now at a far remove from the notions of a fixing of gaps in a static archive, or even a provision of alternative narratives. As we observe the increasing complexity of Bowen’s performance methods, her open process allows us to acknowledge their pedagogical capacities, despite the ephemerality and the at times intentional opacity of the forms of change they invoke. If our discourse is too rigid to acknowledge the terms of radical practice, the discourse itself will need to stretch and even break. Hewitt (2005), who provided the framework of social choreography, calls for an articulation of the “interactions and collisions” (17) of force and movement, the task of accessing moments of impact (between people, bodies, energy, stories, histories…) feels generative, as an access point for the tangible outcomes of these ephemeral acts of shared remembering and conversation. Bowen’s process, as with those of other Black Canadian artists working in and through history in the present, albeit non-​linear and averse to notions of progress, is without a doubt laden with movement, directionality—​the sense of a map, a threshold, and perhaps even a destination. 292

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The process and work of moving histories with its simultaneous doing and undoing, through the invocation of new circulations and through repetition and rehearsal, has a kinship with Jose Esteban Muñoz’ description of the aims of “disidentification” wherein: Instead of buckling under the pressures of dominant ideology (identification, assimilation) or attempting to break free of its inescapable sphere (counteridentification, utopianism), [disidentification] is a strategy that tries to transform a cultural logic from within, always laboring to enact permanent structural change while at the same time valuing the importance of local and everyday struggles of resistance. (Muñoz 1999, 11–​12) This provides us with an apt description of the emphasis on tangible change within Bowen’s work. I will assert a gentle resuscitation of the “utopian” from Muñoz’ formulation, however (in deference to Bowen’s own invocation of a visionary social impulse in her work). Bowen locates utopian vision in the “right now!” while she presences her family histories, explaining: “We were here. Put it another way, we were here, we have always been here, right? And this speaks to several decades of Black presence and that is what brings me here to this present day, right now” (Bowen 2020b). Placing Tina Campt’s “politics of pre-​figuration that involves living the future now…as a striving for the future you want to see, right now, in the present” (2017, 17), alongside Paul Gilroy’s (1993) “politics of transfiguration” provide companion pieces that speak to this form of utopian vision rooted in the present. Here is where we can begin to recognize Bowen’s installations, (re)staging, scripting, translations, and choreography, alongside and within the ongoing conversations between her works and collaborators, for their overarching, urgent pedagogical thrust. These are gathering places within which to rehearse and repeat both the past and the future in the present, in order to dislodge congealed Canadian cultural narratives of White supremacy. Her work offers to instantiate and recirculate what Carl Paris calls “choreographic enactment(s) of ‘spirit’ ” wherein “the performance of spirit grounds complex choreographic texts so that they might convey ashé, or the power to make things happen” (DeFrantz and Gonzalez 2014, 12–​13). Or put otherwise by Lepecki (2016), it can “open spaces, inflect times, and persist in and as history” (300).

The releasement At the time of this writing, Bowen is finalizing her largest exhibition to date, The Black Canadians (After Cooke) in which she will occupy and shroud Canada’s National Gallery in Ottawa in histories of Black Canadian presence. Mindful of the “inevitable contradiction of having to rely on the very structures of domination to bring about transformation” (Alexander 2005, 158) we may yet ask: will Canada’s circulation of White supremacist cultural narratives and the closed circuits of institutional policy crack and shift under the pressure of this highly visible aesthetic shock in the nation’s capital? Or will these structures withstand the impact, will Canada’s well-​rehearsed scripts of multicultural compartmentalization, assimilation, feigned innocence, and denial absorb these moving histories as another chapter of the dark history that it would claim resides only in the past? Describing enactments of the spiritual in Black art, in worship, and his own approach to painting, Ashon Crawley uses the phrase “a releasement into practice” (2020, 65), a communal undoing of structures of Western thought and domination: 293

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It’s a kind of theory of escape and desire and love found in a dream, though the dream itself recedes from memory as soon as the edge of the last question asked in it was felt. The last question in it was felt, but not made apparent, you have to feel its weight and texture, what was felt left an impression. It’s the ongoing question of and questing for feel. It’s a theory of the sensual that is against the enclosure of the individual, against the enclosure of possibility. (Crawley 2019, 303) It is in this spirit that I wish to end this chapter, acknowledging that Bowen’s “releasement into practice” reveals endlessly repeating forms of “performing, re-​performing, learning & memorizing, of enacting, and forgetting, and remembering, and forgetting, and inventing and returning to do it again, all day long” (Lepecki 2016, 316), which conjure both the weight of her work and our collective obligation to share the burden, and/​or get out of the way. Re-​centering this chapter in the vein of solidarity, perhaps the releasement offers a transition of the responsibility for the spiritual and embodied labour of historical re-​membering, storytelling, doing, and undoing back to the collectivity. As Alexander offers, “ending is the stuff of which beginnings are made” (2005, 133). Having conjured all manner of circuits and circulation, I offer this moment as a releasement and dissipation of those energetic movements, and of this chapter’s provisional gathering of ideas too, lest they begin to resemble enclosures. The ephemeral, the impermanent, and the inevitable forgetting makes this work, by necessity, ongoing and shared.

Going home Riding North from downtown Toronto on AGYU Gallery’s “Performance Bus” on a cold Wednesday night in January of 2013, we are en-​route to the opening exhibition of Deanna Bowen’s Invisible Empires. The exhibition features an electrically charged enactment re-​staged by Bowen of a 1965 CBC television interview from a particular broadcast of the long-​form Canadian news program “This Hour Has Seven Days.” It features a fractious conversation between two Ku Klux Klansmen, dressed in their full regalia (recreated by a tailor for the performance), and Black Civil Rights activist Reverend James Bevel. It ends with the host Robert Hoyt insisting, as if it’s all a good bit of fun, that the three men shake hands—​they refuse. Bowen’s exhibition disputes Canada’s framing of the KKK as an American problem, activating the direct evidence of their presence and impact here. As the rented school bus winds its way along the 45-​minute route to the gallery, singer and storyteller Shelley Hamilton leads the assembled riders through a series of stories and spirituals. She recounts to us the origins of Swing Low Sweet Chariot which was: first sung by a Black slave in the cotton fields. They didn’t know who that slave was, they don’t know how it originated, they know that’s how it was heard…some of these pieces are like that, we don’t know who the original artist was we just know they started in the fields and progress from the fields to the church and progressed from the church to the movement. So this is one of those songs. (Hamilton 2013) Of the lyrics she explains, “carry me ‘home’…meant carry me home to justice,” and before beginning to sing, she instructs the gathered bus riders: “It’s call and response, and it’s echo” (2013).

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In the interest of attuning to the movement and power of Bowen’s work and pedagogy, this chapter considered how expanded approaches to performance in film and television production affect historical thinking and offer to make cultural changes in the present. Like the present, the notion of home is also a moving sign, simultaneously going forward and backward, containing histories, memory, migration, community, states of rest and unrest, metaphors of justice, death, and spirit; all of which weave and circulate through Deanna Bowen’s work—​her family’s story, her purpose, and process. As Bowen concludes “it’s how I’m making my way back home” (Dechausay 2017).

Notes 1 Continuity is a principle of film editing that is used to create linear narratives and mask jumps in time and place. The pervasiveness of its use makes its manipulations and elisions all but invisible to the viewer. 2 This phrase and practice is adopted from Banks’ (2018) approach to feminist production study. 3 This term (Nelson 2022) lent its name to the symposium that initially led to the gathering of texts in this book, Moving Histories, is a provocative metaphor. A play on “moving images”—​how might it also invite a focus on forms of movement located in the making of the work itself, and the ways in turn that it can provoke a movement and shifting of entire histories? The phrase allows us to engage with the ways that Bowen’s practice and process do just that, in a larger scale pedagogical uprooting, a disruption of entire libraries and systems of knowledge that have presented themselves as the static foundations of the Canadian narrative and state.

Reference list Ahmed, Sara. 2012. On being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Durham: Duke University Press. Alexander, M. Jacqui. 2005. Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred. Durham: Duke University Press. Azoulay, Ariella. 2019a. Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism. London: Verso. Azoulay, Ariella. 2019b. “The Imperial Condition of Photography in Palestine: Archives, Looting, and the Figure of the Infiltrator.” Graylit, November 1. https://​gray​lit.org/​blog/​2019/​11/​15/​the-​imper​ial-​condit​ion-​ of-​phot​ogra​phy-​in-​palest​ine-​archi​ves-​loot​ing-​and-​the-​fig​ure-​of-​the-​infi​ltra​tor. Bailey, Cameron. 1999. “A Cinema of Duty: The Films of Jennifer Hodge De Silva.” In Gendering the Nation, edited by Kay Armatage, Kass Banning, Brenda Longfellow, and Janine Marchessault, 94–​108. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Banks, Miranda. 2018. “Production Studies.” Feminist Media Histories 4, no. 2 (Spring): 157–​161. https://​ doi.org/​10.1525/​fmh.2018.4.2.157. Bowen, Deanna. 2010. sum of the parts: what can be named. VTape. www.dean​nabo​wen.ca/​sum-​of-​the-​ parts-​what-​can-​be-​named/​. Bowen, Deanna. 2019. “Black and Formal Aesthetics.” Panel, Bodies Borders Fields Symposium, TMAC Toronto, November 24. https://vimeo.com/388354353. Bowen, Deanna. 2020a. “Berlin, Berlin.” Keynote lecture at Archive/​Counter-​Archive Symposium: Black Lives and Archival Histories in Canada. December 10. https://​vimeo.com/​489086​601. Bowen, Deanna. 2020b. “Artist Talk /​ In Conversation: Deanna Bowen and Professor Selina Madavanhu.” McMaster Museum of Art, February 6. Bowen, Deanna. 2021. “Biography/​CV.” Deanna Bowen. www.dean​nabo​wen.ca/​biogra​phy-​cv/​. Bowen, Deanna, and Crystal Mowry. 2020. “Artist Talk: Deanna Bowen.” Kitchener- Waterloo Gallery, November 26. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cf2cUIjDYxI. Bowen, Deanna, and Betty Julian. 2022. “Blackity Panel Conversation.” Artexte and Concordia University, May 27. https://​arte​xte.ca/​en/​2022/​04/​black​ity-​sympos​ium/​. Bowen, Deanna, and Kara Keeling. 2021. “Streams of Resistance: Black Bodies in Space-​Time.” Conversation, LePARC and Milieux Institute, Concordia University, March 16. https://​mili​eux.concor​dia.ca/​event/​ stre​ams-​of-​res​ista​nce-​black-​bod​ies-​in-​space-​time/​.

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Sara Joan MacLean Bowen, Deanna, and Crystal Mowry. 2020. “Artist Talk: Deanna Bowen.” Kitchener-​Waterloo Gallery, November 26. https://​youtu.be/​cf2c​UIjD​YxI. Bowen, Deanna, and Crystal Mowry. 2021. “Deanna Bowen and Crystal Mowry in Conversation.” Conversation, MKG127 & Frieze NY, May 8. https://​youtu.be/​ZdR1rD​E2_​-​Y. Bowen, Deanna, and Kimberly Phillips. 2020. “Deanna Bowen in Conversation with Kimberly Phillips: A Harlem Nocturne.” OBORO, Ada X and GIV, October 15. https://​vimeo.com/​489086​601. Boye, Seika. 2017. “Dramaturge Notes/​Historical Reflection.” Mercer Union, Toronto, Exhibition catalogue. Butet-​Roch, Laurence. 2019. “Reckoning with Canada’s History of Whitewashing: Two Artists Delve into a National Archive, Revealing a Counter-​History of Colonialism, Trauma, and Erasure.” Aperture, June 8. https://​apert​ure.org/​editor​ial/​bowen-​ngu​yen-​interv​iew/​. Campt, Tina. 2017. Listening to Images. Durham: Duke University Press. Crawley, Ashon. 2019. “And.” College Literature 46, no. 1 (Spring): 297–​303. https://​doi.org/​10.1353/​ lit.2019.0016. Crawley, Ashon. 2020. The Lonely Letters. Durham: Duke University Press. Dechausay, Lucius. 2017. “The Exhibitionists, ‘This lost 1956 CBC show about race is as relevant as ever —​ so a Toronto artist is reimagining it’.” CBC, October 2. www.cbc.ca/​arts/​exh​ibit​ioni​sts/​this-​lost-​1956-​cbc-​ show-​about-​race-​is-​as-​relev​ant-​as-​ever-​so-​a-​toro​nto-​art​ist-​is-​reim​agin​ing-​it-​1.4317​386. DeFrantz, Thomas, and Anita Gonzalez. 2014. Black Performance Theory. Durham: Duke University Press. Embury, Melissa. 2020. “Black Drones in the Hive Exhibit Explores KW’s Racist History.” Community Edition, November 5. https://​commu​nity​edit​ion.ca/​black-​dro​nes-​in-​the-​hive-​exhi​bit-​explo​res-​kws-​rac​ist-​ hist​ory/​. Fatona, Andrea M. 2006. “In the Presence of Absence: Melinda Mollineaux’s Pinhole Photography.” Canadian Journal of Communication 31, no. 1 (March): 227–​238. https://​doi.org/​10.22230/​cjc.200​6v31​n1a1​761. Fatona, Andrea Monike. 2011. “‘Where Outreach Meets Outrage’: Racial Equity at the Canada Council for the Arts (1989–​1999).” PhD diss, University of Toronto. Ferguson, Roderick A. 2012. The Reorder of Things: The University and its Pedagogies of Minority Difference. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. The Five Stairsteps. 1970. “Ooh Child.” Stairsteps. Buddha. Fricker, Karen, and Carly Maga. 2020. “Jesse Wente’s Goal as New Chair of the Canada Council for the Arts? to Reduce the Harm it Causes.” Toronto Star, August 6. www.thes​tar.com/​entert​ainm​ent/​2020/​08/​ 06/​jesse-​wen​tes-​goal-​as-​new-​chair-​of-​the-​can​ada-​coun​cil-​for-​the-​arts-​to-​red​uce-​the-​harm-​it-​cau​ses.html. Gilroy, Paul. 1993. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso. Hamilton, Shelley. 2013. “The Performance Bus: Freedom Ride.” AGYU Performance Bus, January 16. https://​agyu.art/​proj​ect/​the-​perf​orma​nce-​buses-​are-​aco​min/​. Hewitt, Andrew. 2005. Social Choreography: Ideology as Performance in Dance and Everyday Movement. Durham: Duke University Press. hooks, bell. 2015. Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics, 2nd ed. New York: Routledge. KWAG. 2020. “Deanna Bowen: Black Drones in the Hive” Kitchener Waterloo Art Gallery. https://​kwag.ca/​ cont​ent/​dea​nna-​bowen-​black-​dro​nes-​hive. LeAnn, Joyce. 2021. “Archival Alchemy® with Joyce LeeAnn.” AGYU and FADO Performance Art Centre, streamed live on September 21. https://​agyu.art/​proj​ect/​archi​val-​alch​emy/​. Lee, Yaniya. 2019. “When and Where we Enter: Situating the Absented Presence of Black Canadian Art.” Master’s thesis, Queen’s University. Lepecki, André. 2016. Singluarities: Dance in the Age of Performance. London: Routledge. https://​doi.org/​ 10.4324/​978131​5694​948. Mahmoud, Jasmine Jamillah. 2019. “To Salvage an Archive.” Canadian Art, June 6. https://​cana​dian​art.ca/​ int​ervi​ews/​to-​salv​age-​an-​arch​ive/​. McKittrick, Katherine. 2021. Dear Science and Other Stories. Durham: Duke University Press. https://​doi. org/​10.1515/​978147​8012​573. Morrill, Angie, Eve Tuck, and The Super Futures Haunt Qollective. 2016. “Before Dispossession, Or Surviving It.” Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies 12, no. 1. Muñoz, José Esteban. 1999. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Nelson, Kim. 2022. “The Historian is Present: Live Interactive Documentary as Collaborative History.” Rethinking History 26, no. 3: 289–​318. doi: 10.1080/​13642529.2022.2103618.

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19 TEACHING DIFFICULT HISTORY WITH YOUTUBE VIDEOS James Miles and Eve Herold

In what is now an outdated image, a history teacher rolls a television cart into the classroom, presses play, and sits down to work on some grading while their students endure a dry documentary or Hollywood film riddled with anachronisms and misrepresentations. Today, the use of film in history classrooms looks different. With the myriad choices available to teachers due to the rise of streaming sites and broadband internet, teachers can find the most applicable and engaging films for their lessons in seconds. And perhaps more importantly, rather than rely on full-​length films, teachers can easily stream short, free video clips on websites like YouTube, intentionally curated for educational purposes. Despite the availability of new resources, existing research suggests that Hollywood films are still popular as a teaching tool. According to recent survey studies, over 80% of social studies teachers use films on a regular or semi-​regular basis in their classrooms (Donnelly 2014; Marcus and Stoddard 2007; Russell 2012). However, little research has more thoroughly explored which films are shown, nor whether platforms like YouTube are more regularly used in history classrooms. The reality is that outside of school young people are no longer watching TV or movies in the same way they used to, with YouTube dominating the market and their attention. A 2019 study from Common Sense Media (Rideout and Robb 2019) found that 69% of teenagers are watching online videos on YouTube every day, more than any other type of media including social media, video games, music, and TV. While it is fair to assume that most of these videos are not educational or directly related to history, some certainly are. We know this because one of the most popular YouTube channels is Crash Course, whose educational videos have been watched over 1.7 billion times. The dramatic rise in YouTube educational videos’ popularity has not coincided with a growth in educational research, particularly in social studies and history education. While some studies have begun to investigate the issue (Jones and Cuthrell 2011), there is a dearth in research on how, why, and to what effect young people and teachers are using YouTube both inside and outside of history classrooms. The lack of research on YouTube videos and education is surprising given the fact that surveys regularly show that almost all (approx. 95%) secondary students in the United States have access to a smart phone, with a Pew survey in 2021 showing that YouTube was the most popular platform among teenagers surpassing Instagram, Snapchat, and Facebook, with 95%

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Teaching difficult history with YouTube videos

of respondents reporting that they use YouTube (Auxier and Anderson 2021). While these statistics may quickly become outdated as new media platforms emerge, it remains clear that young people (and teachers) are regularly watching and showing educational video clips. As a result, we can infer that YouTube videos, like the Crash Course series, are regularly being viewed by both history teachers and students. If, as the viewing figures suggest, millions of students and teachers are watching Crash Course videos, either explicitly as a teaching tool or as a personal study aid, we believe this issue requires greater attention from educational researchers. We believe this phenomenon has implications for historians, as many of these videos provide historical knowledge and are undoubtedly shaping the general public’s historical culture. Additionally, most relevant for this chapter, we have little knowledge on how these videos are shaping both student and teacher understandings of history. In this chapter, we examine the video series “Crash Course US History” to better understand what makes the genre so popular, how it relates to existing research on teaching history with films, and how it might be understood as a new form of history learning that subsequently requires a new line of research. To help us make sense of the videos, we first review literature on teaching history through film in K-​12 classrooms and the use of YouTube videos in the classroom. We then focus on how the Crash Course series engages with difficult histories of genocide, state-​sanctioned violence, colonialism, and slavery. In focusing on how these videos address historical injustice, we aim to demonstrate the problematic ways in which Crash Course encourages a disengagement and distancing from historical violence, injustice, and suffering. As Crash Course has an audience of millions, we argue that the potential impact of these videos on students’ perceptions of the difficult past and history more generally is significant and requires further investigation.

What is “Crash Course”? The Crash Course video series is an incredibly popular YouTube channel. Spanning multiple subject areas including history, biology, and astronomy, the series began in 2006, primarily as the brainchild of John and Hank Green. The brothers first came to prominence with a series of video blogs in the mid-​2000s. In 2011, YouTube approached the brothers to begin making the Crash Course series, with John Green hosting the history series, which is written primarily by his high school history teacher Raoul Meyer (Talbot 2014). The history series has grown from world history and US history “courses” to include video playlists that focus on “Big History,” European history, Black American history, the history of science, and film history. The history playlists currently contain over 300 videos, each lasting approximately 12 minutes, though the video number continues to grow. The most popular series are “US History” and “World History,” with each video in the series averaging 10 to 15 million views. The Crash Course history videos focus on host John Green, who speaks directly to camera on any given historical topic, such as the Civil Rights Movement or Reconstruction. Green’s fast-​ paced lecture is embellished by animated sequences, still images of primary sources such as maps, letters, or paintings, and a jump-​cut aesthetic which the New Yorker referred to as “the pedagogical equivalent of Red Bull shots” (Talbot 2014, para. 24). The videos are also characterized by a sarcastic and nerdy tone, with Green regularly inserting in-​jokes, memes, and silly asides. In some ways Green’s persona is reminiscent of popular science educator Bill Nye in his celebration of nerdiness, enthusiasm, and his desire to communicate complicated ideas quickly and simply to a younger audience. The videos, which are essentially content heavy lectures, also follow a repetitive and consistent format. For example, the videos for the US history course begin with Green

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lecturing at a desk with his laptop, then cut to Green lecturing over an animated “thought bubble” cartoon, followed by Green reading a primary source “mystery document” and guessing what it is, and then returning to the desk for the end of the video takeaways that tend to provide a larger lesson for the viewer about that lesson’s topic. In a social media age where attention span appears to be consistently decreasing and the volume of content is rapidly increasing, the Crash Course videos are short, fast-​paced, easily accessible, free, and entertaining. The Crash Course video series functions as an efficient study guide, encouraging the viewer to engage with the amount of content that might fill a textbook chapter in a short, 12-​minute window. Indeed, in some ways, Crash Course videos have many similarities with traditional textbooks and might be considered an updated, twenty-​first-​century version of the textbook genre. For example, the voice and tone of much of Green’s lectures are authoritative and aim to provide a largely comprehensive and impartial retelling of historical events. Furthermore, the videos do not provide any citation or references to the content in the lecture, though there are several visual cues that suggest detailed research has been conducted. For example, each video includes pop-​up animated figures and endnote type numbers that appear briefly on the screen in reference to quotes and primary sources. These cues create the perception that there is a reference page where the sources of their research can be examined; however, as far as we can tell, no such reference page exists. Additionally, many of the visuals shown in the video are primary sources like paintings, letters, photographs, maps, artifacts, and other images that would normally appear in a textbook and could likely be found with a quick Google image search. Despite these similarities, Crash Course does diverge from a textbook approach to content in important ways. Green regularly inserts irony, sarcasm, silliness, and jokes into his lectures, creating a fun, engaging, and entertaining tone that keeps viewers watching. Green also suggests through his tone that the video’s historical narrative is challenging dominant myths or stories that might be embedded in history textbooks. Finally, while the Crash Course videos function as a textbook in their efficient delivery of large amounts of content, they aim rather to do so in an entertaining but also more interpretive manner that recognizes how power shapes the production of history. They establish this by being notably self-​aware of their own role as historical narrators in relation to more traditional nationalistic or patriotic narratives, encouraging the viewer to think about how all history is constructed. There is also a sense that the videos are positioning themselves as being a counter-​narrative or offering a critical perspective like Howard Zinn’s (1980) A People’s History of the United States or James Loewen’s (1995) Lies My Teacher Told Me. While it is unclear how effective Crash Course videos are at replicating a textbook or as a study tool, they have filled a niche that few other history video creators have managed. For example, similar videos in length and focus created by the educational non-​profit Khan Academy are far slower paced, less high tech, and have garnered significantly fewer views, with numbers in the tens or hundreds of thousands, not millions. We suggest that the immense number of views that Crash Course receives alone warrants a further investigation into what these videos are saying about history and how they might function as teaching and learning tools. Furthermore, these videos directly address difficult and violent histories in ways in which textbooks do not, therefore, considering how they address difficult pasts is essential for history educators to understand. Before examining how Crash Course reflects and represents difficult histories, we first review relevant research on teaching history with films and teaching with YouTube to situate this conversation within the field of history education.

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Research on teaching history with films Early research on history films and education coincided with the increase in film production and influence in the early twentieth century (O’Connor 1988; Peters 2020). In 1988, O’Connor predicted that future people will “learn their history from films and television” rather than from historical scholarship (O’Connor 1988, 1207). A decade later, in their large-​scale study of people’s regular interactions with the past, Rosenzweig and Thelen (1998) find that, of their 1500 respondents, 81% reported viewing a film or TV show about the past within the previous year. This growing engagement with history films is connected to the advent of various at-​home movie technologies like DVDs, and internet streaming services allowed for more widespread access to films in the 1980s (Metzger and Suh 2008; Peters 2020). The ability to more widely and readily screen films increases their relevance to the public’s perception of the past, particularly young people’s historical understanding (Donnelly 2014; Metzger 2010; Metzger and Suh 2008). Many scholars suggest that young people’s perception of the past comes from movies, more-​so than schooling (Briley 2002; Marcus et al. 2018; Wineburg, Mosborg, and Porat 2001). Several studies have confirmed this supposition. In their research on students’ historical understanding of the Vietnam War, Wineburg, Mosborg, and Porat (2001) find that Forrest Gump had the most significant influence, superseding any book, documentary, or teacher. A similar finding arises from Afflerbach and VanSledright’s (2001) study on how students read historical texts. Through engaging fifth grade students in a think-​aloud as they read texts about Jamestown, the authors found that Disney films play a significant role in students’ assessment of “the veracity and accuracy of the school history text’s account” (Afflerbach and VanSledright 2001, 703). In what they dub the “Disney Effect” (703), the authors find that students use the Disney film Pocahontas to conduct intertextual analysis and determine source reliability, demonstrating films’ significant influence over young people’s perception of the past (Afflerbach and VanSledright 2001). Research on film and history education has responded to the growing influence of film on young people’s perception of the past. Researchers who focus on history film and education initially viewed history films as advantageous for content acquisition, with film acting as a stand-​in for a teacher or textbook (Peters 2020). By the 1980s, the perception about history films’ relationship to history had evolved, and approaches to film use in classrooms subsequently shifted away from content acquisition toward disciplinary engagement. Scholars today recognize history films as constructions and interpretations of history themselves and thus argue that films, therefore, should be analyzed as sources (Peters 2020; Rosenstone 1995; Toplin 1996). With this shifting conceptualization and approach, scholars have explored the ways to engage with history films in classrooms (Marcus et al. 2018; Metzger and Suh 2008; Peters 2020; Wineburg, Mosborg, and Porat 2001) Several smaller scale studies suggest the prevalence and prominence of history films as educational resources. For example, in a study using an online survey of 85 high school history teachers, Marcus and Stoddard (2007) find that 92% of teachers use Hollywood films “at least once a week” (308) with 35% of teachers using films for content and 35% to build students’ empathy or bringing the period to life (Marcus and Stoddard 2007). These results are echoed in Donnelly’s (2014) survey of Australian teachers, where the author finds that, of 202 teachers surveyed, 83% use films in their classroom. Of the teachers surveyed, 42% used films for building empathy, and 30% answered that films helped to “bring history to life” (Donnelly 2014, 19). Similarly, in a study from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum about teaching the Holocaust, survey results from 327 teachers find that 69% use films, equal to the amount that use first-​hand accounts (Donnelly 301

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2006). These studies suggest that teachers regularly and consistently use film in the classroom to educate their students on historical topics. Film and history education scholars have identified several benefits to using history films in the classroom. Film can uniquely engage students emotionally and viscerally, something that texts cannot necessarily do (Paxton and Marcus 2018; Rosenstone 1995). As such, history films have the capacity to help students build empathy for historical events and figures (Marcus 2005; Stoddard and Marcus 2006). Additionally, scholars have suggested that films can be analyzed like other historical documents and can be an engaging way for students to engage in historical thinking (Marcus et al. 2018; Metzger 2007; Stoddard 2012; Stoddard and Marcus 2006; Weinstein 2001). Metzger (2010) notes the myriad benefits of using history films intentionally, as they can help students to “apply content knowledge…recognize historical narratives” and “consider how movies about the past also are positioned as documents in the present, reflecting issues and values today” (134). However, these learning objectives must be facilitated by teachers’ purposeful planning and implementation. History education scholarship has emphasized the need for teachers to engage students in a critical analysis of film (Briley 2002; Woelders 2007). Due to a lack of historical accuracy in feature films and a tendency for history films to present a singular, hegemonic narrative of the past, scholars stress that films should not be passively consumed (Metzger 2007; Stoddard and Marcus 2006). Scholars therefore suggest applying historical inquiry tools to film analysis (Marcus 2005). Through purposeful planning, students can learn to analyze the historical narrative presented in films, consider the context of the film, compare the content of the film against other historical sources, and recognize the limitations of the film’s perspective (Marcus and Stoddard 2007; Metzger 2007; Woelders 2007). While scholars repeatedly advocate for the purposeful use of film in history classrooms, with pedagogical practices that encourage critical engagement with film, existing evidence suggests that teachers are not necessarily implementing these practices. In a comparative case study of two White teachers’ lessons on race and slavery in early US history, Metzger and Suh (2008) have found that the lessons did not successfully engage students in critical thinking about the films. Rather, the authors suggested that teachers were more focused on building empathy or “seeing history as constructed from different perspectives” (Metzger and Suh 2008, 103), than on engaging students’ critical thinking. In a later study, Stoddard (2012) conducted classroom observations, interviewed teachers, and analyzed classroom materials in two US history classrooms. Stoddard (2012) finds a disconnect between teacher belief and practice, with teachers failing to engage students in a critical analysis of the films. Thus, though empirical studies of how teachers use films are limited (Marcus and Stoddard 2007), the studies that do exist suggest that teachers are not engaging students in a critical analysis of history films. Research suggests that teachers may not be engaging students critically in their use of history films because of a lack of skill, training, and/​or comfort (Donnelly 2014; Metzger and Suh 2008; Russell 2012). Through survey results and interviews with teachers, Donnelly (2014) finds that few teachers had the training or skills to engage students in film analysis, tending to therefore “focus on the narrative of the feature films” rather than “treat the films as contemporary historical sources to be interrogated” (24). This finding is echoed in Russell’s (2012) study on how secondary teachers use film in history classrooms. Through a survey of 248 teachers, Russell finds that teachers are not engaging students in critical analysis, instead equating films to a “visual textbook,” whereby students view the film and then “take a test or answer some questions” (Russell 2012, 10). Survey data suggests that teachers fail to engage students in analysis due to a lack of training, as only 42% of teachers answered that they had “formal educational training on teaching with film” (Russell 302

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2012, 10). Without this intentional engagement, Metzger and Suh (2008) caution that films can “convey historically problematic messages to students which neither they nor their teachers are prepared or willing to confront” (103). The extant literature on film and history education reveals that, despite the ubiquity of film use in history classrooms, teachers are not necessarily implementing lessons that are intentional and rigorous. Even as scholarship emphasizes the need for critical analysis of films, empirical research suggests that both teachers and students tend to view film as a resource akin to a textbook, whereby it presents a narrative of history that is more viscerally and emotionally engaging. Moreover, despite a level of scepticism toward history films’ reliability, students are strongly impacted by the depictions of the past as presented in films, rarely interrogating film as a historical source.

Teaching and learning with YouTube While there has been research on film use in history classrooms, research on YouTube use in history classrooms is incredibly limited. Despite the massive popularity of YouTube among young people, history education researchers have not been quick to adapt and address its ubiquity. Research that does explore YouTube’s general educational potential suggests that, as a free, accessible, and engaging platform that allows for social interaction amongst young people, YouTube holds significant educational advantages (Brook 2011; Burgess and Green 2018; Chau 2010). In a review of the literature on YouTube’s educational uses, Snelson (2018) finds that YouTube is generally used either to stream videos or engage students in video creation. Within the limited research on YouTube in social studies classrooms, scholars note how YouTube offers a vast archive of historical videos, many of which cannot be found elsewhere (Jones and Cuthrell 2011; White 2009). Students and teachers can access historical footage that can help to bring history alive (Jones and Cuthrell 2011; White 2009). In their literature review on YouTube as a social studies resource, Jones and Cuthrell (2011) refer to YouTube as a “treasure trove of resources” (82). Separating YouTube’s usage in the classroom into several themes like “culture,” “individual development and identity,” and “power, authority, and governance/​civic ideals” (Jones and Cuthrell 2011, 80), the authors detail how teachers can make use of the vast archive of videos on the platform. For example, under the theme of culture, the authors index YouTube’s collection of videos that capture cultural practices from around the world. Or, teachers can stream political campaign videos to help students learn about civic ideals (Jones and Cuthrell 2011). While researchers have noted the various benefits of using YouTube in the classroom, many urge educators to be cautious with their use of the platform (Daly, del Fresno García, and Bjorklund 2020; Harris 1997; Jones and Cuthrell 2011). Daly, del Fresno García, and Bjorklund (2020) note the potential for YouTube to disseminate misinformation and thus calls for “explicit…teaching [in] how to gather, analyze, and determine the veracity of information gleaned from social media” (147). Media literacy skills, through which students assess the reliability of a source, are therefore essential for both teachers and students (Daly, del Fresno García, and Bjorklund 2020; Harris 1997).

Teaching difficult histories and film In this chapter we are most interested in understanding how one YouTube educational series, Crash Course, addresses difficult histories. The term difficult histories has been used as a broad term for teaching and learning the traumatic, sensitive, or violent past (Epstein and Peck 2017). There is not one agreed upon definition of difficult history; however, difficult histories can be characterized as historical acts, events, or structures of collective violence, injustice, or trauma that implicate the 303

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identities of students and teachers today. To guide thinking about teaching and learning difficult histories, Gross and Terra (2018) outlined five defining criteria, which we have summarized here: 1. Difficult histories are central to a nation’s history. 2. Difficult histories tend to refute broadly accepted versions of the past or stated national values. 3. Difficult histories may connect with questions or problems facing us in the present. 4. Difficult histories often involve violence, usually collective or state sanctioned. 5. Difficult histories create disequilibria that challenge existing historical understandings. Researchers who study the interaction between history education and film have explored how film can and has been used to engage with difficult histories. Film is especially relevant for teaching about difficult history given its ability to be a more vivid, engrossing, and sustaining depiction of the past (Marcus and Mills 2017; Mitoma 2017). For example, discussing how history films can be used for human rights education, Mitoma (2017) notes films’ “accessibility and efficiency” alongside the “medium’s capacity to represent the faces, voices, and life-​worlds of distant others” (Mitoma 2017, 44). Film can thus offer students “moments of understanding and glimpses that bring the past to light” (Marcus and Mills 2017, 194). The literature suggests that films that engage with difficult histories can be advantageous for students due to their ability to nuance the past and help students engage in critical thinking. Discussing the Holocaust as a difficult history, Marcus and Mills (2017) emphasize how films that seek to complicate rather than simplify the Holocaust are crucial as they can humanize the Holocaust and help students to engage with complex moral dilemmas. Concurrently, Mitoma (2017) suggests that films that deal with difficult histories in complex ways “can develop student capacity to engage in the hard work of perspective recognition, care, and structural analysis” (54). Stephens (2017) similarly stresses the ways that films can be used for skill development, suggesting that the educational purpose of films that engage with difficult subjects “is to help students develop the habits of mind that can aid them in their journey toward a proper historical skepticism” (84). Classroom-​level empirical studies on using film to engage with difficult histories is rather limited, with more research focusing on student-​teachers. In a qualitative study with White, preservice social studies teachers, Garrett (2011) uses Spike Lee’s 2006 documentary film, When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, to explore how the students engage with difficult knowledge around “loss, sadness, death, and devastation” as well as “issues of race, politics, and other social issues” (322). Using a psychoanalytic framework, Garrett (2011) analyzes participant responses. Amongst the patterns he finds, Garrett suggests that participants tend to re-​route difficult knowledge, at times onto students as part of their pedagogical plan or away from the topic at hand (race) onto an alternate focus. Buchanan (2016), on the other hand, focuses on the advantages of using documentary films to increase historical thinking and content knowledge amongst preservice teachers. Focusing on 17 White elementary preservice teachers, Buchanan (2016) explores how documentaries that offer counter-​narratives can be used alongside historical inquiry to engage teachers with the US Civil Rights Movement. The author finds the films to be especially helpful in developing teachers’ empathy due to a perceived authenticity in the film. The author finds that empathetic engagement with the past helps the teachers to engage in a more authentic discussion of difficult topics around racism (Buchanan 2016). The research thus suggests that when seeking to engage students with difficult histories, film can be an advantageous resource in the classroom. Films’ ability to be engaging, provocative, and emotionally elicit can help to develop students’ empathy and investment in historical learning. 304

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Additionally, students can develop and apply their historical analysis to films through scrutinizing the filmmaker’s perspective, tools, and context. This can help to sharpen students’ critical thinking skills, while also developing a critical perspective of how we narrate the past. While recognizing these many advantages, researchers also caution that film that deals with difficult history poses risks, as these topics are heavy, complex, and often rooted in structural realities. Recognizing the heaviness of difficult histories, research suggests that teachers take care to analyze and reflect before selecting films, and that teachers are purposeful in their planning and implementation. Using film to engage with difficult histories must therefore be an intentional practice, subject to significant reflection and analysis. As the existing research suggests that teachers are not necessarily equipped with the skills to engage students in historical literacy around films despite being used in classrooms for several decades, it is unlikely that teachers are well-​prepared to critically engage with newer history videos, including those available on platforms like YouTube. Furthermore, as far as we are aware, no research has explicitly examined how YouTube videos like Crash Course represent and engage with difficult histories. As a result, we aim to begin the exploration through an analysis of how the Crash Course series might be shaping how young people think and learn about difficult histories.

Methods This chapter is part of a larger research project that more fully investigates the Crash Course history videos series and will eventually examine teacher and student perspectives on the videos and their use in schools. In this chapter, however, we focus our analysis on the videos themselves, exploring how, why, and to what effect they engage difficult histories. To investigate these questions, we selected eight videos to watch from the US History series that specifically addressed historical topics that might include difficult or violent histories. The titles of these videos were: (a) “The Natives and the English” (2013d), (b) “Slavery” (2013f), (c) “Reconstruction and 1876” (2013e), (d) “Westward Expansion” (2013g), (e) “Age of Jackson” (2013a), (f) “American Imperialism” (2013b), (g) “The Cold War in Asia” (2013c), and (h) “Terrorism, War and Bush” (2014). While these eight videos were not the only ones in the series that address “difficult histories,” we reasoned that the subject matter of these particular videos indicated a more sustained exploration of themes we were interested in understanding. We began our analysis by individually watching the videos, aiming to identify themes or emergent codes of how language, rhetoric, tone, and visuals were used to discuss and represent difficult histories. We relied on Gross and Terra’s (2018) articulation of five aspects of difficult history as a guide for identifying these themes. We also recorded pertinent quotations from the videos and included a descriptive analysis of the visuals, including animated sequences and primary sources. We then met in collaboration to discuss the videos together and to share and corroborate our findings. We returned to the videos as necessary if there were disagreements or to refine our thematic and content analysis of the videos. We do not suggest that this content analysis presents a comprehensive or systematic approach for understanding the Crash Course series. Rather, we engage with these specific videos as being illustrative of an approach that is consistent across the series, which we have watched for other teaching and research purposes. We synthesize our discussion into three key areas. First, we discuss the ways in which the series does address different aspects of difficult history. Second, we consider the rhetorical, tonal, and visual strategies and techniques the videos use when they address difficult histories. Finally, we think through the effects and consequences of these rhetorical and visual strategies and techniques for viewers of these videos. In each area we provide representative 305

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examples from the videos. As each video in the entire series follows a similar formula with a consistent tone, we argue that these findings, while not fully generalizable, extend beyond the eight videos we discuss here.

Engaging with difficult history in Crash Course In applying Gross and Terra’s (2018) five criteria for difficult history to the videos, we are confident in saying that Crash Course videos do include difficult histories that meet all criteria. For example, in the “Reconstruction and 1876” (2013e) video, John Green highlights racist politicians, attempts to disenfranchise and suppress Black voters, and racial violence while also acknowledging the radical democratic promise of the Reconstruction era. Green also connects Reconstruction with attempts to disenfranchise Black voters today, reflecting the criterion that difficult histories tend to connect or relate “to questions or problems facing us in the present” (Gross and Terra 2018). While these types of present-​day connections are not engaged with in any great depth, they are explicitly made. The Crash Course videos also do not shy away from violence, brutality, and human suffering that many textbooks and teachers avoid. Green talks frankly about the use of rape and whippings in the “Slavery” (2013f) episode and in “The Natives and the English” (2013d) episode Green discusses the various ways violence and terror were used in the early colonial period for political purposes including attacking and mutilating animals, murdering women and children, and burning villages. When discussing these examples of brutality, mass violence, and suffering, the videos sometimes provide graphic images from primary sources like paintings or engravings. Crash Course US History is also openly attentive to the fact that it is addressing these difficult histories. In several videos, Green makes a direct case for why we should learn about brutality, violence, and suffering. For example, in “The Natives and the English” (2013d) video, Green pointedly asks the viewer: “What’s the point of even telling these bloody stories about massacres and atrocities?” In his response to his own question, Green argues that one reason we learn about history is to challenge traditional stories about US history that have been “cleaned up” to conform to “our mythical view of ourselves.” Green also argues that we learn about the violence of the colonial period because it is important to know the ways Indigenous people resisted colonization, or in Green’s words: “Native Americans were people who acted in history, not just people who were acted upon by it.” In these moral or ethical lessons that Green draws from difficult history, we can glimpse the series’ approach or philosophy to history more generally. We would describe this approach as focusing on critical thinking about power and inequality both in the past but also in how history gets written and embedded within national consciousness. While the Crash Course US History videos may present as comprehensive, neutral study guides for the entirety of US history, the videos clearly hold an interpretive stance or perspective that aims to challenge longstanding myths such as American exceptionalism. Unlike some problematic textbooks (Brown and Brown 2010), the videos do directly address racism, racial violence, genocide of Indigenous peoples, and other difficult histories. In this sense the videos offer counter-​ narratives to a hegemonic story of the United States through refuting stated national values and explicitly engaging collective and state-​sanctioned violence. Yet despite what appears to be a critical engagement with difficult history on a number of different levels, the audio/​visual techniques and rhetorical strategies the Crash Course series uses often produces a contradictory effect to this projected criticality. 306

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Disengaging from difficult history in Crash Course In the Crash Course approach to difficult history, several strategies and techniques are used that ultimately undercut their critical perspective and encourage the viewer’s disengagement and disavowal. As Green discusses difficult histories like war, imperialism, slavery, disease, and genocide, he frequently interrupts his narrative with sarcastic commentary, jokes, or outcries of frustration for the bleakness of the content. Green’s interjections, while perhaps validating the viewer’s feelings, serve as pivot-​points to navigate away from difficult content, and disengage him and his audience from the topics at hand. This is glaring in the “Westward Expansion” (2013g) video, where, while discussing Dawes Act, Green interrupts his monologue by saying to the camera sarcastically, “boy this Wild West episode is sure turning out to be loads of fun!” He later warns the audience, “this is about to get even more depressing so let’s look at some pretty mountains and western landscapes while I deliver this next bit” before proceeding to discuss the federal government’s seizure of Indigenous land. Green’s commentary in these moments connects him with his audience by verbalizing a seemingly shared emotional reaction, which can help to alleviate the viewer’s discomfort. However, while this empathetic response increases Green’s relatability, these comments hinder engagement with the elements of the past that are difficult. Rather than acknowledging the subject’s difficulty and giving the audience time or prompts with which to reflect, Green expresses a desire to move past these subjects or make them more tolerable in some way. His commentary thus implies that one must plow through the darker content in order to get to the “fun,” which is evidenced by a moment later on in the “Westward Expansion” (2013g) video when Green exasperatedly exclaims, “My god this is a depressing episode,” deciding that “we need to cheer this video up so let’s talk about cowboys!” Difficult history in this way becomes a nuisance or chore, something that must be acknowledged (and is), but also something that one need not dwell on because of an affective response that may be unpleasant or challenging. The Crash Course videos’ audio/​visual techniques during sequences of difficult history also help to further distance the viewer from any affective reaction or engagement with the content. Perhaps the most blatant evidence comes from the videos’ regular use of the “thought bubble,” during which an animated storybook offers an in-​depth look at a topic or event. During these sequences, various historical events and figures appear as cartoon characters, with accompanying audio resembling video-​game sounds used to represent action. For example, in “The Cold War in Asia” (2013c) video, the “thought bubble” depicts various key moments of the Vietnam War. In one sequence, as Green’s narrative describes the brutality of US military tactics, including the extensive bombing campaign and the use of Agent Orange and Napalm, the viewer watches an animated sequence depicting Uncle Sam acting as a conductor, waving his baton as helicopters drop bombs. With the background music of Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries,” and the animated Uncle Sam conducting, the viewer watches explosions and fire set off by the bombs. The music, the animation, and the use of video-​game-​like audio for explosions makes the whole scene simultaneously comical and morose. Rather than depicting real violence, the use of caricatures that are exaggerated and amusing makes historical events such as these seem entertaining and unrealistic. In this way, the animation and audio choices used in the “thought bubble” sequences could be viewed as a reflexive tool, encouraging the viewer to consider how the present stance may impact how we view the past. From our present standpoint, viewers may have a tendency to view the past in a way that is akin to crude animation sequences, devoid of tangible impact. Through these sequences, therefore, the stylistic choices of the “thought bubble” may act reflexively, engaging the viewer in critical thinking about their own historical perspective. 307

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However, the depiction of historical events in the “thought bubble” sequences may also serve to disengage the viewer. One need not exert any mental or emotional energy engaging with historical atrocities because the video casts them as absurd and fake. In these moments, it is easy to ignore what Green is saying and instead be entertained by the spectacle. Even without the crude animation of the “thought bubble,” other visual choices in the videos often hinder engagement with difficult histories. As explained earlier, in the “Westward Expansion” (2013g) video, Green’s narration of the Dawes Act is accompanied by photos of mountainous landscapes, acting as a distractor or glossy cover for the hard-​hitting history. The hypocrisy that the beautiful landscapes are that of Western land that the federal government seized from Native Americans is ignored, as the visuals are treated as a respite for both the audience and Green to get a break from the difficulty of the past. Though there are cases where the visuals and narration align in the series, the manner in which it is presented can also be problematic. For example, in the “Slavery” (2013f) video, images (both paintings and photos) that clearly demonstrate the horrors White people inflicted upon enslaved people flash across the screen as Green narrates. However, the audience is given little time to process. Rather, Green trudges on through the narrative, likely preventing the viewer from engaging with what flashed before them. This pacing issue is consistent throughout the videos. Seeking to cover a great deal of content in under 15 minutes, Green will often blow through horrific statistics, or make quick comments about violence and atrocities that occurred. For example, in the “American Imperialism” (2013b) video, Green shares the disproportionate number of Filipinos killed during the Philippine War (4200 Americans vs. 100,000 Filipinos). While he speaks, an image of what appears to be a mass grave flashes on the screen for a moment, but the photo is unacknowledged, and the narrative moves quickly on. The viewer has no time to actually consider how drastically unequal the death count was, nor to consider the mass graves they saw flash on screen. Similarly, in the “Westward Expansion” (2013g) video, Green uses the term “cultural genocide” to describe what happened to Native Americans at Indian Boarding Schools but does not stop to explain the term in depth, nor allow the viewer to reflect on its weightiness. His tendency to drop heavy terms into a sentence without expanding on them can not only lead to someone missing the content, but also overlooking its significance. The videos further deemphasize difficult histories due to Green’s matter of fact, often crass tone. For example, in “The Natives and the English” (2013d), Green explains that “the English went back to stealing Indians’ crops and also began stealing their lives via massacres” and then carries on without pause. This casual mention of massacres, the use of rhetorical symmetry, and the phrasing of massacres as “stealing their lives” diminishes the severity of what Green is describing. A similar issue occurs in “The Cold War in Asia” (2013c) video when Green describes how the US military used Agent Orange to “get rid of that pesky jungle” and Napalm “to burn trees, homes, and people.” The extensive damage and death caused by these chemical weapons cannot be represented through such terse, casual commentary. The viewer, though perhaps having heard the words, does not need to cognitively engage with what they are hearing, which allows for a disavowal of the atrocities committed by the United States abroad.

Discussion and implications The research on film and history education not only suggests film’s prevalence in classrooms but also its appeal. With the potential to cultivate students’ historical empathy, engage them in content, and employ their critical thinking skills, film is advantageous for classroom use (Marcus et al.

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2018; Metzger 2007; Stoddard and Marcus 2006; Paxton and Marcus 2018). The research suggests that films significantly influence students’ understanding of historical subjects and are more likely to captivate student attention (Briley 2002; Marcus et al. 2018; Afflerbach and VanSledright 2001; Wineburg, Mosborg, and Porat 2001). It is therefore unsurprising that teachers are likely to use film in the classroom (Metzger and Suh 2008; Peters 2020). Crash Course offers many of these same advantages for teachers as short-​form history content videos. With its lively and engaging presentation, its accessibility, and its ability to cover a vast amount of content in under 15 minutes, Crash Course has the potential to be a useful classroom resource. However, the research on using film in the classroom emphasizes the need for teachers to think critically and plan intentionally when using film in history classrooms (Marcus 2005; Metzger 2007; 2010; Stoddard and Marcus 2006). Students should be asked to consider, among other things, the context of and choices made when creating the film, much like one would when looking at any historical document (Marcus and Stoddard 2007; Metzger 2007; Woelders 2007). Research on YouTube in the classroom confirms this need, as researchers suggest that the openness of the platform means that teachers should be especially careful when selecting videos (Daly, del Fresno García, and Bjorklund 2020; Harris 1997; Jones and Cuthrell 2011). Nonetheless, research suggests that teachers are not engaging students in critical thinking when using film, and tend to rely on films for building content knowledge and getting students excited about a topic (Metzger and Suh, 2008; Stoddard, 2012). Social studies educators have long advocated various methods for responding to this issue, including developing and implementing curriculum that promotes historical inquiry with film (Marcus et al. 2018; Metzger, 2010) and increased teacher professional development on how to intentionally plan for teaching with film (Marcus and Stoddard 2007; Metzger 2007; Russell 2012). However, such solutions are not regularly implemented in educational settings, as extant research suggests that teachers and students engage with film uncritically (Metzger and Suh, 2008; Stoddard 2012). As previously discussed, Crash Course functions much like a textbook, with its authoritative, seemingly impartial voice and its use of common primary sources. It is therefore likely that teachers would want to use this short, accessible, and engaging video in history classrooms. Given the existing research, it is therefore possible to infer that these videos are being used consistently and uncritically in history classrooms. While the extant literature can help us think about how and why teachers may use Crash Course videos, there are limitations to the applicability of existing research. Crash Course’s model is relatively unique from other types of film due to its format, structure, and purpose. The heavy use of animation, snappy editing, jokes, as well as John Green’s position as a visible narrator and authoritative lecturer, makes for a medium that is distinct from popular history feature films and documentaries. Furthermore, the attempt to take on a critical perspective with a direct political and moral stance meant to teach its audience why history matters blurs the line between film, textbook, and educator in a way that necessitates critical examination. We argue that the popularity of Crash Course videos requires us to question what else these videos are doing when they represent history, and in particular difficult history. In other words, what are the unintended effects and consequences of these videos on student and teacher historical understanding? While analyzing the videos does not provide all the answers, looking at the rhetorical, visual, and audio techniques used by Crash Course does provide some clues. As we have shown earlier, the series uses a variety of techniques including irony, speed, tone, sarcasm, animation, and silliness to produce a sense of disengagement with the difficult past. These various techniques may make the videos entertaining, fun, and engaging for their target audience—​young

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people. This, in turn, likely increases their audience numbers and ensures their viewers continue to watch the videos. Such tactics may therefore ensure that the content reaches a greater number of viewers, which serves educational purposes. However, analysis of such tactics suggests that their disengaging effect on the content is problematic. As examples in this chapter reveal, Crash Course is not simply a twenty-​first-​century textbook; it offers a political and ethical perspective and interpretation on history. In Crash Course, there are clear lessons to be drawn from history, and many of those lessons involve challenging deeply held beliefs about the past, or dominant narratives that are prevalent in US collective memory such as American exceptionalism. The criticality of Crash Course goes beyond challenging national myths though, as it often advocates for light to be shed on historical injustices, promotes the voices and perspectives of the marginalized, and questions the power of the powerful. These goals closely align with critical approaches to history education and their efforts to dissect power relations, challenge inequity, and take action toward social justice (Martell and Stevens 2020; Santiago and Dozono 2022). However, despite this apparent alignment with critical history education, the vehicle for these messages not only distorts the message but works against it. In the Crash Course videos, difficult histories and their legacies are left as depressing blips in a fun, entertaining story. The viewer is left to feel disconnected and comforted that by simply knowing these facts they have done enough. In other words, Crash Course tells us we might learn from history, but that we shouldn’t think too hard about it because it’s “a downer.” Instead, John Green demonstrates that the easiest way to respond to this discomfort is to distance oneself, make self-​deprecating jokes, and assume a position of moral superiority over people in the present who don’t know the truth about these histories. This is a problem because meaningful engagement with difficult history requires us to feel discomfort; to recognize our debts, responsibilities, and obligations to the past; and to consider how we are implicated in history and how it might require something of us (Epstein and Peck 2017; Miles 2022). We are not suggesting that humour in history films is always a bad thing or that history films ought to be dry or emotionally disturbing affairs. However, if the goal of critical history is to encourage both empathy and action, Crash Course fails on both accounts.

Next steps In analyzing the Crash Course series, we have aimed to demonstrate why these videos are so popular, how they engage difficult history and draw ethical lessons, and why their approach to the difficult past falls short. We do not dispute that Crash Course videos are entertaining, fun, and educational, but we do suggest they need to be examined more closely. Crash Course in some ways has found a loophole around both critical source analysis in the classroom and the gaze of educational researchers. By positioning itself as a fun study guide or harmless introductory videos to historical topics, Crash Course suggests it need not be interrogated as one would analyze a Hollywood film or primary source. However, we are not advocating that students and teachers abandon or reject these videos. Not only is that unrealistic given their scale and popularity, but we also think this is counterproductive to the goal of inviting students to critically engage and analyze different sources, narratives, and interpretations of history. Therefore, one straightforward suggestion we offer is that Crash Course videos need to be taken more seriously by researchers, teachers, and students. While most research and educational resources on films have focused on important questions such as representation, accuracy, narratives, and perspective, we argue that these lenses are not sufficient for interrogating this genre of film. In many ways a more traditional critical media literacy approach (Kellner and Share 2005) might be effective in helping students 310

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and teachers think about how these films use sarcasm, humour, visual tricks, tone, pacing, and speed to communicate both explicit and implicit messages. Along with the recommendation that these films be taken seriously within academia and be critically examined, we maintain that we know relatively little about how teachers and students are using YouTube videos like Crash Course in their classrooms and beyond. A recent Spanish study (Pattier 2021) has shown that 86% of teachers use YouTube in their classroom on a regular basis (at least once a week). If this is the case elsewhere, then the question arises: what impact does this new approach to teaching history with film have on teaching, but also student understanding? We subsequently argue that more research is needed to help us understand how and why these films are used, and how they are potentially influencing, shaping, and informing students’ historical understanding. The trend toward greater use of YouTube videos in the history classroom appears only to be increasing, and while previous research in the field offers us some clues and important starting points, new directions and questions are needed.

Reference list Afflerbach, Peter, and Bruce VanSledright. 2001. “Hath! Doth! What? Middle Graders Reading Innovative History Text.” Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy 44, no. 8 (May): 696–​707. Auxier, Brooke and Anderson, Monica. 2021. Social Media Use in 2021. Pew Research Center. Briley, Ron. 2002. “Teaching Film and History.” Magazine of History 16, no. 4 (Summer): 3–​4. https://​doi. org/​10.1093/​mag​his/​16.4.3. Brook, Jennifer. 2011. “The Affordances of YouTube for Language Learning and Teaching.” Hawaii Pacific University TESOL Working Paper Series 9, no. 1, 2: 36–​56. Brown, Anthony L., and Keffrelyn D. Brown. 2010. “Strange Fruit Indeed: Interrogating Contemporary Textbook Representations of Racial Violence Toward African Americans.” Teachers College Record 112, no. 1: 31–​67. https://​doi.org/​10.1177/​016​1468​1101​1200​108. Buchanan, Lisa Brown. 2016. “Elementary Preservice Teachers’ Navigation of Racism and Whiteness Through Inquiry with Historical Documentary Film.” The Journal of Social Studies Research 40, no. 2 (April): 137–​154. https://​doi.org/​10.1016/​j.jssr.2015.06.006. Burgess, Jean, and Joshua Green. 2018. YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture. John Wiley & Sons. Chau, Clement. 2010. “YouTube as a Participatory Culture.” New Directions for Youth Development, no. 128: 65–​74. http://​dx.doi.org/​10.1002/​yd.376. Crash Course. 2013a. “Age of Jackson: Crash Course US History #14.” YouTube Video, 15:04, May 9. www. yout​ube.com/​watch?v=​beN​4qE-​e5O8&t=​1s. Crash Course. 2013b. “American Imperialism: Crash Course US History #28.” YouTube Video, 14:03, September 5. www.yout​ube.com/​watch?v=​Qfsf​oFqs​Fk4. Crash Course. 2013c. “The Cold War in Asia: Crash Course US History #38.” YouTube Video, 13:41, November 15. www.yout​ube.com/​watch?v=​Y2Ic​mLku​hG0. Crash Course. 2013d. “The Natives and the English: Crash Course US History #3.” YouTube Video, 11:26, February 14. www.yout​ube.com/​watch?v=​TTYO​Q05o​DOI&t=​198s. Crash Course. 2013e. “Reconstruction and 1876: Crash Course US History #22.” YouTube Video, 12:59, July 18. www.yout​ube.com/​watch?v=​nows​S7pM​ApI&t=​1s. Crash Course. 2013f. “Slavery: Crash Course US History #13.” YouTube Video, 14:25, May 2. www.yout​ube. com/​watch?v=​Ajn9​g5Gs​v98&t=​1s. Crash Course. 2013g. “Westward Expansion: Crash Course US History #24.” YouTube Video, 12:44, August 8. www.yout​ube.com/​watch?v=​Q16O​ZkgS​XfM. Crash Course. 2014. “Terrorism, War and Bush: Crash Course US History #46.” YouTube Video, 15:26, January 30. www.yout​ube.com/​watch?v=​nlsn​nhn3​VWE. Daly, Alan J., Miguel del Fresno García, and Peter Bjorklund Jr. 2020. “Social Media in a New Era: Pandemic, Pitfalls, and Possibilities.” American Journal of Education 127, no. 1: 143–​151. https://​doi.org/​10.1086/​ 711​018. Donnelly, Mary Beth. 2006. “Educating Students about the Holocaust: A Survey of Teaching Practices.” Social Education 70, no. 1: 51–​55.

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James Miles and Eve Herold Donnelly, Debra. 2014. “Using Feature Film in the Teaching of History: The Practitioner Decision-​Making Dynamic.” Journal of International Social Studies 4, no. 1: 17–​27. Epstein, Terrie, and Carla L. Peck. 2017. Teaching and Learning Difficult Histories in International Contexts. Taylor & Francis. Garrett, H. James. 2011. “The Routing and Re-​Routing of Difficult Knowledge: Social Studies Teachers Encounter When the Levees Broke.” Theory & Research in Social Education 39, no. 3: 320–​347. https://​ doi.org/​10.1080/​00933​104.2011.10473​458. Gross, Magdalena H., and Luke Terra. 2018. “What Makes Difficult History Difficult?” Phi Delta Kappan 99, no. 8: 51–​56. https://​doi.org/​10.1177/​00317​2171​8775​680. Harris, Robert. 1997. “Evaluating Internet Research Sources.” Virtual Salt 17, no. 1: 1–​17. Jones, Troy, and Kristen Cuthrell. 2011. “YouTube: Educational Potentials and Pitfalls.” Computers in the Schools 28, no. 1: 75–​85. https://​doi.org/​10.1080/​07380​569.2011.553​149. Kellner, Douglas, and Jeff Share. 2005. “Toward Critical Media Literacy: Core Concepts, Debates, Organizations, and Policy.” Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 26, no. 3: 369–​386. https://​doi.org/​10.1080/​015963​0050​0200​169. Loewen, James. 1995. Lies My Teacher Told Me. Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. New York: The New Press. Marcus, Alan S. 2005. “‘It Is As It Was’: Feature Film in the History Classroom.” The Social Studies 96, no. 2: 61–​67. Marcus, Alan S., and Gary D. Mills. 2017. “Teaching Difficult History with Film: Multiple Perspectives on the Holocaust.” In Teaching Difficult History through Film, edited by Jeremy D. Stoddard, Alan S. Marcus, and David Hicks,178–​196. New York: Routledge. Marcus, Alan S., and Jeremy D. Stoddard. 2007. “Tinsel Town as Teacher: Hollywood Film in the High School Classroom.” The History Teacher 40, no. 3 (May): 303–​330. Marcus, Alan S., Scott Alan Metzger, Richard J. Paxton, and Jeremy D. Stoddard. 2018. Teaching History with Film: Strategies for Secondary Social Studies. New York: Routledge. Martell, Christopher C., and Kaylene M. Stevens. 2020. Teaching History for Justice: Centering Activism in Students’ Study of the Past. New York: Teachers College Press. Metzger, Scott Alan, and Yonghee Suh. 2008. “Significant or Safe? Two Cases of Instructional Uses of History Feature Films.” Theory & Research in Social Education 36, no. 1: 88–​109. https://​doi.org/​10.1080/​00933​ 104.2008.10473​361. Metzger, Scott Alan. 2007. “Pedagogy and the Historical Feature Film: Toward Historical Literacy.” Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Film and Television Studies 37, no. 2: 67–​75. https://​doi.org/​ 10.1353/​flm.2007.0058. Metzger, Scott Alan. 2010. “Maximizing the Educational Power of History Movies in the Classroom.” The Social Studies 101, no. 3: 127–​136. https://​doi.org/​10.1080/​003779​9090​3284​047. Miles, James. 2022. “Guilt, Complicity, and Responsibility for Historical Injustice: Towards a Pedagogy of Complex Implication.” Pedagogy, Culture & Society: 1–​18. https://​doi.org/​10.1080/​14681​ 366.2022.2064​537. Mitoma, Glenn. 2017. “Teaching the History and Contemporary Challenge of Human Rights through Film.” In Teaching Difficult History through Film, edited by Jeremy D. Stoddard, Alan S. Marcus, and David Hicks, 39–​56. New York: Routledge. O’Connor, John E. 1988. “History in Images/​Images in History: Reflections on the Importance of Film and Television Study for an Understanding of the Past.” The American Historical Review 93, no. 5: 1200–​ 1209. https://​doi.org/​10.2307/​1873​535. Pattier, Daniel. 2021. “Teachers and YouTube: The Use of Video as an Educational Resource.” Ricerche di Pedagogia e Didattica. Journal of Theories and Research in Education 16, no. 1: 59–​77. Paxton, Richard J., and Alan S. Marcus. 2018. “Film Media in History Teaching and Learning.” In The Wiley International Handbook of History Teaching and Learning, edited by Scott A. Metzger and Lauren M. Harris, 579–​601. Hoboken: Wiley Blackwell. Peters, William. 2020. “Film in History Education: A Review of the Literature.” The Social Studies 111, no. 6: 275–​295. https://​doi.org/​10.1080/​00377​996.2020.1757​598. Rideout, V., and Robb, M.B. 2019. The Common Sense Census: Media use by Tweens and Teens. Common Sense Media. Rosenstone, Robert A. 1995. Visions of the Past: The Challenge of Film to our Idea of History. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

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Teaching difficult history with YouTube videos Rosenzweig, Roy, and David Thelen. 1998. The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life. New York: Columbia University Press. Russell, William B. 2012. “Teaching with Film: A Research Study of Secondary Social Studies Teachers Use of Film.” Journal of Social Studies Education Research 3, no. 1: 1–​14. Santiago, Maribel, and Tadashi Dozono. 2022. “History is Critical: Addressing the False Dichotomy Between Historical Inquiry and Criticality.” Theory & Research in Social Education: 1–​23. Snelson, Chareen. 2018. “The Benefits and Challenges of YouTube as an Educational Resource.” In The Routledge Companion to Media Education, Copyright, and Fair Use, edited by Renee Hobbs, 109–​126. New York: Routledge. Stephens, Robert P. 2017. “The Torturers Among Us: History, the Film Industry, and Its Claims to Truth.” In Teaching Difficult History through Film, edited by Jeremy D. Stoddard, Alan S. Marcus, and David Hicks, 70–​86. New York: Routledge. Stoddard, Jeremy D. 2012. “Film as a ‘Thoughtful’ Medium for Teaching History.” Learning, Media and Technology 37, no. 3: 271–​288. https://​doi.org/​10.1080/​17439​884.2011.572​976. Stoddard, Jeremy D., and Alan S. Marcus. 2006. “The Burden of Historical Representation: Race, Freedom, and ‘Educational’ Hollywood Film.” Film & History: AnInterdisciplinary Journal of Film and Television Studies 36, no. 1 (Fall): 26–​35. https://​doi.org/​10.1353/​flm.2006.0018. Talbot, Rachel. 2014. “The Teen Whisperer.” New Yorker, June 2. www.newyor​ker.com/​magaz​ine/​2014/​06/​ 09/​the-​teen-​whispe​rer. Toplin, Robert Brent. 1996. History by Hollywood: The Use and Abuse of the American Past. University of Illinois Press. Weinstein, Paul B. 2001. “Movies as the Gateway to History: The History and Film Project.” The History Teacher 35, no. 1 (November): 27–​48. https://​doi.org/​10.2307/​3054​508. White, Elisa Joy. 2009. “Coffy, YouTube, and Uncle Ben: The Use of Film and New Media in the Teaching of African American Studies at the University of Hawai’i.” Educational Perspectives 42: 47–​53. Wineburg, Sam, Susan Mosborg, and Dan Porat. 2001. “What Can Forrest Gump Tell Us About Students’ Historical Understanding?” Social Education 65, no. 1: 55–​55. Woelders, Adam. 2007. “ ‘It Makes You Think More When You Watch Things’: Scaffolding For Historical Inquiry Using Film In The Middle School Classroom.” The Social Studies 98, no. 4: 145–​152. https://​doi. org/​10.3200/​TSSS.98.4.145-​152. Zinn, Howard. 1980. A People’s History of the United States. New York: HarperCollins.

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20 WHAT IF? Experimental history on television Rebecca Weeks

The first few minutes of Amazon Prime’s The Man in the High Castle (2015–​2019) capture in microcosm what the show does so well. After opening credits, the pilot begins with a flickering projector in an opulent old-​fashioned movie palace. Mid-​century Americana images appear on the theatre screen while a voice-​over intones generic positive phrases about being stronger, prouder, and better. A figure in the audience stands, silhouetted against a familiar red and white striped flag. For a moment, nothing is obviously amiss, until the wind-​blown flag straightens out and a swastika is revealed in place of 50 white stars. “Sieg Heil,” the hearty American voice-​over concludes. The camera follows the figure out of the foyer and onto the pavement under a Rock Hudson movie marquee where a feeling of normality returns on the mid-​twentieth-​century New York street. As the figure moves down the bustling sidewalk billboards appear in the background, incongruous at first, until a sign featuring three youths in uniform, hands on heart, comes into focus: “Strong Bodies. Strong Nation.” On the surface, this looks like New York City, but odd details such as this are off. When the street scene cuts to a long shot, all ambiguity vanishes: in the centre of what is revealed to be Times Square a red building-​length neon sign proudly displays a swastika. “Work will set you free,” a sign reads at the top. “For the common good,” states another at the bottom. A title now appears, identifying this as The Greater Nazi Reich, New York City, 1962. The Nazi Reich will be known to many viewers, but not as being in existence in 1962 and certainly not in New York City. The audience is left on an uneven footing as The Man in the High Castle brings together two pasts to produce a new history, blurring the lines between fact and fiction. The familiar yet alien, comforting yet unsettling atmosphere of the opening sequence persists across the following episodes and seasons. It is in this juxtaposition of different pasts that The Man in the High Castle’s potential as a work of on-​screen history lies. The show’s science-​fiction premise of an alternate world in which the Axis Powers won the Second World War does not hinder its ability to engage in historical discourse but, instead, facilitates it. While many historians and scholars tend to be critical of film and television’s ability to sweep the audience up in the emotion and drama of the past and offer simplistic (at best) and outright inaccurate (at worst) interpretations, alternate histories like The Man in the High Castle counteract such critiques by constantly making the audience aware of the fabricated nature of what they are watching. Transporting an examination of Nazi Germany,

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Imperial Japan, and mid-​century America to an alternate reality constantly forces viewers to recall what they know and hold it up against what they see on screen. There is little chance viewers will watch the show and think this is the true version of events or what really happened in 1962. Instead, the liberal doses of fiction encourage the audience to think historically. The chronology of history—​what happened when—​is mooted and the audience must grapple with challenging questions: What is different in this version of US history and what has stayed the same? How are these ideologies able to coexist? Could history have taken a different path? How plausible are these alternatives? Such questioning highlights the complexity and contingency of history. The show deconstructs the impression that history is preordained and could have only turned out one way. In this sense The Man in the High Castle is not unique—​both popular alternate history novels and scholarly counterfactuals have a similar effect. However, the show demonstrates television’s particular ability to produce thought-​provoking allohistories built around rich audiovisual worlds that draw upon recognizable signifiers of the past. Many names are used by scholars in the discussion of alternate histories, including alternative history, virtual history, parallel time novel, uchronia, counterfactual, allohistory, and what-​if story. What-​if best captures what is at the heart of alternate histories: what if something happened that changed the course of history? As Kathleen Singles (2013) points out, the what-​if mode of thinking is something that we employ regularly as we weigh up decisions in our day-​to-​day lives. Many films and books play with what could be described as more personal what-​if questions: what if I had never lived (It’s a Wonderful Life, Capra, 1946)? What if I hadn’t missed the train (Sliding Doors, Howitt, 1998)? What-​if histories feature a nexus event (also known as a Jonbar hinge or point of divergence [Hellekson 2009]) which causes the historical timeline of the story to branch away from our own and produce an alternate series of events. It is not usually the nexus event that is the focus of the narrative, but the world that has subsequently been established (Gallagher 2007, 64). This is true of Philip K. Dick’s 1962 novel The Man in the High Castle, on which Amazon’s series is loosely based. The point of divergence is the assassination of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1933 by Giuseppe Zangara. Roosevelt’s death fundamentally changes both the course of American and world history as his successor is unable to lift the US out of the Depression and defend the country’s borders. The Second World War continues until 1947 and after surrendering the United States is separated into three zones: the Japanese rule the West Coast, the Nazi’s occupy the East, and a neutral buffer zone exists along the Rocky Mountains. The events of the novel take place in 1962, when the course of US history has been significantly altered after 15 years of occupation. A nexus event is a key feature of both popular and scholarly alternate histories, although this is often where the similarities end. The what-​if works if historians are typically referred to as counterfactuals while the works of popular authors are described as alternate histories. The terminology captures the differences in approach: for historians there are “facts” that must be precisely countered, whereas fiction writers are free to invent any alternative they wish. This is not to say that alternate history novels are not thoroughly researched; Dick engaged in years of research before writing The Man in the High Castle (Streitfeld 2015), as do many alternate history writers. Alternate histories, however, are most often explored through the eyes of invented characters and each change in the alternate world does not need to be explained, defended, and justified as plausible. At the start of Ward Moore’s classic novel Bring the Jubilee (1953), for example, a potted family history by the narrator reveals an alternate world where the South won the “War of Southron Independence” in 1864 and the North fell into economic ruin, while also hinting at a vastly different political landscape in Europe and a technologically stunted society. Moore

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quickly establishes the world in which his characters exist; why these things happened is not well documented and ultimately unimportant to the developing story and to the reader. Harry Turtledove’s Confederate victory in The Guns of the South (1992) only comes about after time travellers supply Robert E. Lee’s army with assault rifles and intelligence, not exactly a credible possibility. Of course, some alternate histories are explained in greater detail and are more plausible than others, but ultimately there is freedom and flexibility for the writer to craft the narrative. Alternate history novels appeared in Britain and France in the nineteenth century and began to flourish in the post-​Second World War period. Scholars have suggested a number of possible reasons for this, including the advent of postmodernism, changes to the publishing industry, and an increasing openness and access to information (Rosenfeld 2002, 91–​92; Schneider-​Mayerson 2009, 66–​71). Alternate histories can take many forms and multiple taxonomies have been proposed and debated (Collins 1990, 85–​86; Hellekson 2001, 5–​9; Singles 2013, 24). Some stories feature a single alternate world in which all the action takes place, others incorporate multiple worlds where alternate realities coexist, and there are those where time travel facilitates the change in historical timelines. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle is primarily set in a single well-​established world but also “posits a plurality of futures” (Adams 2016, 90). The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, a text within a text, offers characters in the novel an alternative to their own reality, albeit one that is vastly different from our own timeline. Fascinated by the alternate course of history, Juliana Frink tracks down the author of Grasshopper and consults the I-​Ching which tells her that Hawthorne Abendsen’s book is “true.” Another character, Nobusuke Tagomi, is momentarily transported to an alternate world, a version of San Francisco where the Japanese are not held in high regard and the landscape of the city is decidedly different. Dick’s novel encourages the idea of multiple realities, and it is an element that is seized upon and amplified in the television series. Whether alternate histories feature science-​fiction elements like The Man in the High Castle or fit more into the literary fiction genre, what unites the various categories is the authors’ ability to “step outside the bounds of credulity” (Hellekson 2001, 8). Indeed, for historians who employ counterfactuals, plausibility is of vital importance. Niall Ferguson (1997) acknowledges that what-​ifs make for popular narratives in Hollywood and beyond, but concludes that they are not “academically respectable” (3) and that even those that are well researched (such as Robert Harris’ Fatherland, 1992), are “irredeemably fictional” (7). E.H. Carr ([1961] 2008) famously dismissed counterfactuals as a “parlour game” (97) and E.P. Thompson (1978) described them as “unhistorical shit” (300). Philip E. Tetlock and Geoffrey Parker (2006, 29–​33) summarize that counterfactuals are regularly critiqued within the historical profession for being arbitrary, speculative, and self-​serving. Yet, since the 1960s and 1970s many historians have openly employed counterfactuals in their work, recognizing their value to test hypotheses and counteract hindsight bias and determinism. Historians develop counterfactual narratives where the cause–​effect chain of events is based on data and interpretation (as with any work of history). Robert William Fogel (1964) famously crafted a counterfactual to explore the contributions of the railways to the growth of the American economy. Fogel imagined a US with canals instead of railroads and employed advanced statistical analysis, leading him to the controversial conclusion that gross national product would have only been slightly lower in 1890 without railroads. The three scenarios explored by Geoffrey Hawthorne in Plausible Worlds (1991), including what might have happened had the United States not become involved in the Korean War, are credited with making academic counterfactuals more accessible to a wide audience, after which an increasing number appeared, including edited collections from Robert Cowley (1999, 2001a, 2001b, 2003) and Ferguson (1997) (Kaye 2010, 56). Proponents of counterfactual history

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agree that fiction and imagination should play little-​to-​no role, although the exact boundaries of what is and is not considered acceptable and plausible shifts from scholar to scholar. Martin Bunzl (2004) argues that counterfactuals must be based upon “laws, rationality, and causal analysis” (845) to be considered worthwhile. Ferguson (1997) is even more stringent in his criteria, stating that historians “should consider as plausible or probable only those alternatives which we can show on the basis of contemporary evidence that contemporaries actually considered” (86). And then, there are those historians such as Richard J. Evans (2014) who are extremely sceptical of any kind of counterfactual being employed in a historical study. Even if counterfactuals and alternate histories do not adhere to the rigorous standards of Bunzl and Ferguson, they serve as a reflection of society at the time they were made. The presentist nature of either form of allohistory is either a weakness, or, where its true value lies, depending on the interpretation. Gavriel Rosenfeld (2002), a scholar who considers both alternate history texts and their reception, stresses the fact that “nearly all alternate histories explore the past instrumentally with an eye towards larger present-​day agendas” (93). Alternate histories respond to and comment upon contemporary events and function as documents of historical memory. “By examining accounts of what never happened,” Rosenfeld argues, “we can better understand the memory of what did” (90). In a recent op-​ed for The Washington Post, Rosenfeld also linked the current explosion of alternate history television shows and books to current-​day insecurities and political turmoil.1 Amazon’s show, he stated, is “such a success partly because its counterfactual premise—​of an America ruled by Nazis and homegrown collaborators—​channels liberal anxieties about the country’s right-​wing turn under President Trump” (2019). Similarly, Zachary Michael Powell (2018) believes that alternate histories are a reaction to contemporary events and that the first two seasons of The Man in the High Castle “inspire an ethical response from viewers in the US within the contemporary political context” (151). It is certainly valid to examine presentist understandings of both Dick’s novel and Amazon’s show, but this does not preclude the television series from meaningfully engaging with the past on its own terms. For Jenni Adams (2016) there is no single correct way to interpret an alternate history text and that “rather than offering either an alternative world or a reflection of contemporary history, they oscillate between the two” (95). Alternate histories on television differ, of course, from written alternate histories as audio and visuals bring the world(s) to life in ways not possible on the page. Dick’s novel provides glimpses into the physical world its characters inhabit, but the series fills out every corner seen and heard on camera. The crew engaged in a considerable amount of research in order to build the show’s alternate world and paid close attention to how it was constructed on screen, knowing that it was streaming and that audiences would be watching and re-​watching every detail closely. As David Semel, the director of the pilot episode, explains, they “just wanted to make sure that what [the audience] did see stood up to that scrutiny” (Semel quoted in Li 2015). As one of Amazon’s first major scripted series, the streaming platform provided considerable resources to build and maintain the on-​screen historical world. Season 1 takes place in cities across the United States including San Francisco in the Japanese Pacific States, New York in the Greater Nazi Reich, and Canon City in the Neutral Zone. The creators of the show sought to create a “period drama for a period that never was,” and they achieved this by drawing upon and omitting elements from different periods in US history and incorporating ideology and iconography from the invader nations (Spotniz quoted in Egner 2015). The physical world is a constant reminder to the viewer that the narrative on screen requires constant negotiation and cannot be taken at face value. The clash of motifs is the most disruptive element but equally intriguing are the things that are missing and the things that have remained the same in this new version of history.

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Alternate histories appear in various audiovisual forms, including feature films and videogames; however, the unique features of longform television and ongoing changes to the television industry foster an environment that is particularly conducive to telling historical stories. At the most basic level, television serials have more time to develop storyworlds, more space to include a variety of characters, and greater scope to incorporate multiple storylines. The Man in the High Castle ran for four seasons resulting in approximately 40 hours of screen time. This provided the opportunity to explore various facets of the alternate historical world through the vast array of characters that inhabit the narrative. The Greater Nazi Reich is not a key location in the book but becomes one in the series through the inclusion of Obergruppenführer John Smith and his family. The Long Island scenes are a worthwhile addition to the original cast of characters and locations inspired by Dick’s novel as they mix classic Americana with Nazi imagery and produce the most startling instances of dissonance for the audience. The potential of serials to engage with history is further amplified by the evolution of television narratives. Jason Mittell (2015) argues that the past 30 years has seen the rise of “complex TV,” supported by audiences who are dedicated and proficient in decoding complex narratives. Advances in technology have facilitated this by allowing viewers to pause, rewind, and rewatch to better analyze episodes and to connect with one another online to discuss and debate favourite shows. When watching The Man in the High Castle, audiences follow elaborate personal and political storylines that are further complicated by the introduction of multiple realities that begin to overlap. The series is a pulpy, and at times, melodramatic science-​fiction serial, but it is equally a thought-​provoking history.

Juxtaposition and contingency: constructing new histories The surface details of The Man in the High Castle’s production design are an important first step that help guide the audience and stimulate historical thinking. The producers, directors, production designer, and art and sound departments did not seek to recreate a single historical place and time; instead, they extensively researched different periods and locales to create a sense of juxtaposition. Not unlike surrealist artists who create a sense of shock or unease by confronting audiences with incompatible elements, the show confronts viewers with seemingly incompatible histories, forcing a reconsideration of the history we know (rather than the nature of reality itself, as in the case of surrealists). Placing differing historical periods and iconography together creates contrast and clearly communicates the constructed nature of the on-​screen world. Not all geographic locations on the show employ the same “recipe” when it comes to creating a sense of contrast. The introduction of Joe Blake, for example, in the opening Times Square sequence, is two parts familiar Americana and one part Nazi propaganda. The next main character and city to be introduced inverts this recipe. Juliana Crane participates in an Aikido class and is asked out for tea by a fellow student (rather than for the ubiquitous coffee date) before leaving the dojo and heading out onto a sidewalk filled with Japanese signage and rising sun iconography. It is only when she crosses the street and the Golden Gate Bridge is glimpsed between buildings that the location is revealed as San Francisco. Within these two cities the individual sets conjure differing levels of familiarity which prevents the show—​and its construction of an alternate history—​from becoming one-​note or simplistic, helping to keep viewers off-​balance. The audience must negotiate between the facts of the Second World War as they know them, and what they are seeing on screen. This negotiation requires a high level of cognitive engagement, especially during the first two seasons when the alternate world, its own history, and the fact that there are multiple worlds, all with differing outcomes to the Second World War, is being

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established. For Alison Landsberg (2015), creating a sense of distance and maintaining a sense of difference from the past is crucial when constructing audiovisual histories. Viewers must not slip “into an easy identification with the characters or their situations” (80), and instead should be constantly pulled out of the narrative as they think critically about the events depicted. “The production of historical knowledge requires an understanding on the viewer’s part that the past really is distant and that it looked and felt different” (65) she explains. Audiences should be forced to think, to contemplate the differences between their time and that on screen, and to empathize rather than sympathize with the characters. Landsberg (2015) demonstrates that this distance and difference can be accomplished through audio, visual, and narrative strategies. The surface details of the past are often overlooked or denigrated in the discussion of history on screen (Weeks 2022, 26–​27, 49; Tashiro 1998, 64) but in The Man in the High Castle they play this vital role of maintaining distance. The sets, props, and costumes constantly alert viewers to the fabricated nature of what they are watching, while also prompting them to consider complex historical questions. It may be easy to get swept up in the personal and political drama of the show, but the swastika pinned to Helen Smith’s New Look inspired house dress and Thomas Smith’s Hitler Youth uniform while seated around the family dining table are unsettling to viewers and trigger reflection. For difference and distance to be maintained viewers must be familiar with the history that is being disrupted. A viewer will not be pulled out of the narrative unless they know that Germany and Japan were not the victors of the Second World War and that the United States was not occupied by these powers in 1962. “Alternate histories require a specific kind of competency,” explains Singles (2013, 9). The reader of an alternate history novel, and likewise, viewer of alternate history television show, “must be able to identify the alternative version of history as alternative and reason about the variance between that alternative and history” (9). Prior knowledge is crucial which is why alternate histories and nexus events are usually centred around well-​known historical occurrences. Gallagher (2007, 57) explains that wars are favoured events because people have a basic understanding of these moments in history and know how they turned out. Wars are also events that could have plausibly turned out differently with wide-​reaching consequences. The Second World War and the American Civil War are common backdrops in American alternate histories precisely because one does not need to be a historian to know the outcomes. The makers of The Man in the High Castle can be relatively certain that viewers will know enough history to be able to tell fact from fiction. On top of this, the category of alternative history can also impact how the audience may read and interpret a televisual alternate history. HBO’s The Plot Against America (2020), for example, based on Philip Roth’s novel, is set in a single alternate history timeline and starts during the nexus event (the rise of Charles Lindbergh and his Presidential win in 1940). Consequently, it is harder, at least initially, to identify how and where the show diverges from our own history. This is compounded by the fact that many viewers may not be familiar with the details of Lindbergh’s career and antisemitism and the general antisemitic sentiment in the United States at the time. The Man in the High Castle begins years after the nexus event when the cause–​effect chain of history has been radically altered. This, along with the show’s inclusion of multiple realities, makes it much easier for audiences to never lose sight of the fictional nature of the series and also to identify what is true to their own historical timeline, what is different, and thereby recognize the contrasts necessary to undergo cognitive processing. This is not to say that The Plot Against America cannot function the same way as The Man in the High Castle, merely that the audience capable of recognizing the differences may be smaller.

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It is in the Greater Nazi Reich, and particularly in the Smith home, that the juxtaposition of periods and ideologies is most jarring. This makes the Long Island sequences a logical starting point for a discussion of how The Man in the High Castle crafts historical storylines and prompts the viewer to contemplate the similarities and differences between this fictitious version of history and our own. After the initial Times Square opening sequence, New York City becomes decidedly more alien. The architecture is full of sharp angles, the surfaces are cold and smooth, and the colour palette is limited to skin tones, greys, and harsh blacks with the occasional pop of red. Familiar New York landmarks are only rarely glimpsed. The production designer, cinematographers, and costume designers worked together closely to achieve an ominous atmosphere, drawing upon Eastern Bloc regimes, film noir classics, and employing a more sombre and less fluid camera style than that used in other parts of the show (Grobar 2016; Consoli 2019; Hemphill 2020). When John Smith ventures home to suburban Long Island in seasons 1 and 2, however, the look and feel changes drastically, mirroring the American post-​war urban/​suburban divide.2 Colour and sunshine returns, along with familiar silhouettes and warm and inviting spaces. Although the show is set in 1962, the Long Island mise-​en-​scène is much more reminiscent of the mid-​1950s. Indeed, the creative personnel drew heavily upon 1950s films, catalogues, and technologies when crafting the look and feel of the show, particularly for this location. “Our” 1960s would never have occurred in this version of America, and thus it would not have made sense to draw upon it for inspiration in designing the main reality of the show. These differences become clear in season 2 when Mr. Tagomi travels to a different reality—​our 1962—​and the mise-​en-​scène has a distinctly sixties feel that is missing from his world. The Long Island sequences are reminiscent of mid-​century American sitcoms centred on White, middle-​class suburban families and generate a strong sense of nostalgia. The viewer’s nostalgic gaze, though, is constantly complicated though by the addition of Nazi iconography, actions, and figures. As Christine Sprengler (2009) notes, the 1950s enjoy “a privileged status in the nostalgia industry” (39), more so than any other decade, which is what makes these scenes particularly powerful and affecting. Nostalgia is the longing for the past, often for a simpler time that is now irretrievable. While there is no single nostalgic vision of the 1950s—​many can coexist in popular culture—​an enduring image is of the nuclear family living on a tree-​lined street with mother in the kitchen and father reading a newspaper. This mythologized narrative is in large part shaped by domestic sitcoms such as Leave it to Beaver (CBS/​ABC, 1957–​1963), The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet (ABC, 1952–​1966), The Donna Reed Show (ABC, 1958–​1966), and Father Knows Best (CBS/​NBC/​CBS, 1954–​1960) (Sprengler 2009, 50). Even if one has never seen an episode of these shows, the iconography will be familiar to viewers as it gets recycled repeatedly in popular culture. Texts generate nostalgia through “an attention to period detail,” creating “surface realism” captured in the clothes, props, sets, and performances of the actors (Le Sueur 1977, 189). The Man in the High Castle’s Long Island is carefully curated and designed to capture the surface details of not just the 1950s, but the 1950s immortalized in family sitcoms. The inclusion of Nazi symbols, such as the swastika, upsets this nostalgic idyll. The swastika is “a visual obscenity” and has become “the graphic embodiment of intolerance” (Heller 2019, 1) while the American suburban home is symbolic of individual freedom, prosperity, and stability. The drawing together of these two powerful sets of iconographies is shocking to audiences. Although not the first introduction to the Smiths, episode 6 of season 1 does a particularly good job of evoking the series’ unique “dystopian nostalgia” generated by the juxtaposition of mid-​century America and Nazi Germany. The episode starts with a black screen and the jazzy opening beats of Bobby Darin’s “Mack the Knife” (1959). A high-​angled long shot reveals a picturesque suburban street bathed in sunlight, complete with leafy trees, manicured hedges, and 320

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impressive homes. The music continues as Joe Blake walks down the street, the faint calls of children and ringing of bicycle bells adding to the wholesome family atmosphere. One would be forgiven for believing Joe had walked into the American Dream were it not for the Nazi insignia dotted about—​the “AmeriNazi” flags on lawns and swastika-​laden bunting being erected around the neighbourhood. Joe stops in front of one house, a respectable white colonial with shutters, bunting hanging from its windows too. John Smith swings open the front door dressed in slacks, a crisp white shirt, short tie, and fatherly cardigan (it’s also around this point that the lyrics to “Mack the Knife” kick in, serving as an ominous warning for Joe in this episode). Once again, the nostalgic gaze is interrupted as Joe pauses on the path to perform a formal Sieg Heil in greeting. John is all smiles as Joe enters the home, clapping him affably on the back and calling cordially to his neighbour across the street. Smith, as played by Rufus Sewell, is usually cold and calculating in his demeanour, but here he is laid back and approachable in both his speech and body language. His performance is accentuated by the costume, which Audrey Fisher designed to be “friendly,” based on mid-​1950s catalogues, advertising, and street photography (Tyranny of Style n.d.). Once in the house Joe is introduced to John’s stylish wife Helen (tea towel in hand), the three Smith children who obediently line up for introductions, and adorable dog Max. It is the absolute picture of 1950s domesticity. This sequence is a pastiche, drawing upon not only 1950s sitcoms, but other texts that reference them. In particular, the scene where John opens the door, is framed by the doorway, and calls out cordially to his neighbours is reminiscent in style and substance to a moment from The Truman Show (1998), a film that uses a faux-​1950s setting for its own narrative. The scenes in the Smith family home generate a strong sense of nostalgia, but it is one that viewers can never get lost in as the swastikas, eagles, and the appearance of Hitler himself, both in photographs and on television, pull viewers out of the narrative. Such disruptions work to encourage historical thinking. In watching this episode viewers might be prompted to think about the character of Helen Smith and the role of women more generally in post-​war America. So much has changed in this version of America that it is equally startling when something has not. Audiences are likely to notice that Helen Smith, excepting the pin on her breast, is remarkably familiar in her role as wife and mother. Costume is our first clue to this; Helen never appears in uniform and as the wife of a high-​ranking officer wears an endless array of tailored housedresses in classic 1950s silhouettes. She spends her time in seasons 1 and 2 hosting ladies’ lunches, attending the garden club, looking after the children, and supporting her husband in his endeavours, rather than working outside of the home. Helen typifies the ideal of the White post-​war middle-​class housewife, supposedly content in her comfortable home filled with consumer goods while her husband goes out to work. Beneath the surface Helen suffers from what Betty Friedan (1963) famously described as “the problem that has no name” (15), an unfulfilled life built around pleasing and nurturing others. The idea that Helen is dissatisfied is revealed when we see her surreptitiously take medication for anxiety, breaking the picture-​perfect facade. The Man in the High Castle presents the Greater Nazi Reich as a dystopia where Americans exterminate Jews and euthanize the disabled, yet nothing has significantly changed for (White) middle-​class American women. While it is far from being a comprehensive or nuanced examination of femininity, the show highlights the repressive confines of mid-​century American society by allowing this element of our own timeline to exist almost untouched within this troubling alternate world. In contrast to Helen, Thomas Smith’s role in the show is to illuminate Nazi ideology, particularly the concept of Volksgemeinschaft (people’s community). While on the surface he looks like an average 1950s American teen, having grown up in the Greater Nazi Reich Thomas fully embodies its ideals. His character is often employed to demonstrate and explain Nazi ideology, 321

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including in his very first appearance. The first introduction to the Smith family is a similarly halcyon domestic scene to the one described earlier. Helen and the two girls prepare the table while John and Thomas, both dressed in uniform, sit down to a breakfast table laden with food. Thomas complains about a “nonconformist” boy at school whom he wants to beat in a test and John assures his son that, regardless of scores, Thomas is on the right path. “Your goals are directed outward,” says John. “A boy like Randolph wants only to gratify himself. This is the path to moral decay … decadence ruined this country before the war.” Thomas is earnest in his desire to make his family proud and serve his country, in contrast to the nonconformist whom he describes as negative and questioning. This conversation between father and son clearly illustrates the Nazi ideal to put the wider community before the individual. As David Welch (2004) points out, “the assault on the individual, so characteristic of the regime, was directed primarily at the youth” (230) and instilled both at school and within organizations such as Hitler Youth and the League of German Girls. While civic duty is a core American belief, individualism is central to American mythology and identity. This difference in Nazi and American ideology is crystallized in the opening moments of episode 1, season 2 as Thomas leads his classmates in a pledge at the start of class: “I swear I will observe the law, conscientiously fulfil my duties at home and school, be faithful and obedient and pledge absolute allegiance until death, to the leader of the Nazi Empire, Adolph Hitler.” The American Pledge of Allegiance celebrates “liberty” of all peoples, whereas this dystopian version places absolute dedication to Hitler above all else. Thomas effectively and efficiently serves dual functions on the show, embodying Nazi ideology while also becoming a victim of Nazi policies. At the end of the breakfast conversation described earlier, John tells his son that he “will grow to be a useful member of society.” A few episodes later though, John finds out that, in the eyes of the state, Thomas will grow to be the exact opposite. The family doctor diagnoses Thomas with Landouzy-​Dejerine syndrome, a form of muscular dystrophy and, as he explains to John, a “class A congenital disorder.” Thomas will instead become a “useless eater” and a drain on state resources. Given Smith’s position in the Nazi regime, the doctor allows John to deal with it himself, sending the father home with an injection to kill Thomas painlessly rather than involving the authorities. This event may prompt viewers to recall a scene from the pilot episode when Joe Blake enquired about grey ash falling from the sky. A policeman explained to him that it came from the hospital: “on Tuesday’s they burn cripples, the terminally ill. Drag on the state.” From Thomas’ diagnosis comes plot developments that will drive the show forward over subsequent seasons: John murders the doctor and hatches a plan to keep Thomas out of the hands of the state; Thomas gives himself over to the authorities when he finds out about the illness; and John embarks on a quest to find alternate versions of his dead son in other worlds. While this storyline veers into melodrama and science fiction, it is nonetheless rooted in history. The T4 program, which began in 1939, mandated that anyone considered by physicians to have life unworthy of living should be euthanized. Germany “had to be cleansed of sick, inferior, socially unfit, and nonproductive incapable people” (Rotzoll et al. 2006, 19). Nazis employed propaganda to stir up hatred of “useless eaters” to help convince the public that “these miserable disabled people and the national community would be better off if they were dead” (Poore 2007, 98). Thomas has been so thoroughly indoctrinated that this is how he sees himself upon learning of his illness in episode 10 of season 2. Embodying Nazi ideology in a polite, clean-​cut American teen who likes to throw a baseball around keeps viewers, even those who have been oversaturated with Second World War narratives, on unfamiliar ground as they try to reconcile how both facets can exist within the same character. The Man in the High Castle weaves together historical truths from both Nazi Germany and post-​war America and, in doing so, becomes a new category of televisual history. Not all 322

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long-​form dramatic series approach history the same way and it is productive to acknowledge differences in their scope and engagement. Band of Brothers (HBO, 2001) and John Adams (HBO, 2008) can be classified as synthetic histories that rely upon established scholarship and reproduce existing historical interpretations.3 Audiovisual histories, such as Treme (HBO, 2010–​ 2013), engage in historical debates, craft original interpretations, and are akin to written academic histories. Landsberg (2015) has also identified the category of “historically conscious dramas,” shows like Deadwood (HBO, 2004–​2006), Mad Men (AMC, 2007–​2015), and Rome (HBO, 2005–​2007), that “do not aim first and foremost to re-​create historical events. Rather, they aim to reconstruct the lived contours of a particular historical moment” (62). The Man in the High Castle is similar to these historically conscious dramas but is more experimental in its approach. This show also aims to reconstruct the lived contours of the past, but not just a single past. Within the Smith household the realities of life in the Third Reich, life in post-​war America, and outright science fiction are intertwined. Viewers have to actively work to decode and make sense of the history presented on screen while always being aware of the fictive nature of the narrative. It does not delve as deeply into any one period or provide as much nuance as any of the historically conscious dramas mentioned earlier, but its structure and approach has different strengths. It can, perhaps, be identified as a fourth category of dramatic televisual history: experimental history. Beyond generating knowledge of various historical periods, as an alternate history The Man in the High Castle raises larger historical questions about contingency and determinism. Hindsight bias shapes our understanding of the past so that the ways things turned out, and the path that history took, seems inevitable and the only path possible. Counterfactual and alternate histories “prevent the world that did happen from obstructing our view of the panorama of possible worlds that could have sprung into being” (Tetlock and Parker 2006, 15). Indeed, for advocates of allohistories, it is their ability to inject a sense of contingency and challenge deterministic thinking that is key. “Counterfactualism,” argues Simon T. Kaye (2010), “is a powerful corrective tool that undoes the tendency of ‘History’ to hide the fact of plausible alternative outcomes and the reflexive importance of uncertainty in human affairs as they occur” (57). Once again, though, as Ferguson (1997) points out, for professional historians there “is no real point in asking most of the possible counterfactual questions” (83) and following the infinite forking paths of history. Instead, they should focus on those alternatives that are the most plausible and probable to counteract determinism, rather than “fantasy.” The sense of contingency that is generated on The Man in the High Castle does stem from fantastical alternatives rather than from the exploration of historically plausible alternatives. Still, the incorporation of fanciful alternative worlds has the desired effect of encouraging viewers to see history, not as something fixed and predetermined, but volatile and subject to change. The show posits the idea of the multiverse and presents history as a sprawling and infinite web of possibilities. First proposed by American physicist Hugh Everett in the 1950s, the many worlds theory suggests that: every possibility or outcome in history that does not take place in our world does in fact take place in a separate reality or universe. Points of divergence generate these new realities constantly and infinitely, as ever rippling outcomes… each played out in their entirety in another part of the ‘multiverse’. (Kaye 2010, 53) The first clue to the multiverse in The Man in the High Castle comes in the form of newsreel films. While in Dick’s tome The Grasshopper Lies Heavy is a novel, in the series it becomes the first film 323

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reel that Juliana watches. Juliana is transfixed as she sees black-​and-​white footage of Japan signing the terms of surrender on the deck of the battleship Missouri, US soldiers raising the American flag on Iwo Jima, and Nazi emblems crumbling to the ground. Over the course of the series the existence of more film reels is revealed, each offering a new version of history with differing consequences for both the United States and individual characters in the narrative. While the first reel captures iconic moments that will be familiar to audiences from our own history, subsequent reels contain unknown images. A few feature the ruins of San Francisco after an atomic bomb, the destruction clearly modelled on the aftermath of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.4 “Each one of these films,” Hawthorne Abendsen, the titular Man in the High Castle explains to Juliana, “show a reality like ours, but not ours.” The future is not predetermined and the characters have the ability to shape events within their own world. Abendsen tells Juliana that in worlds where the Japanese are the victors of the Second World War, the newsreels have shown that San Francisco is inevitably destroyed by an A-​bomb—​except for one. Juliana’s quest over the course of season 2 is to stop this from happening in her own reality and she is ultimately successful. The many worlds theory becomes increasingly central to the show’s narrative and is physically rendered in season 4 when John Smith is shown a room that contains a map of the multiverse. In the centre is a glass orb—​their world—​surrounded by many more. The glass orbs and the central lights are infinitely reflected in the mirrored floor, ceiling, and walls, representing the existence of an infinite number of worlds, each with its own history. The series could have explored the issues of causation and contingency with more nuance as Juliana’s ability to singlehandedly change the course of history is simplistic and relies on the common “chosen one” narrative trope. Nonetheless, flawed as they might be, the show’s multiverse storylines draw attention to the fact that history is not something which is predetermined. Even without the multiverse element, the main reality of the show imagines three alternative courses of history for the United States had it lost the Second World War. Each geographical zone places the audience in unfamiliar historical scenarios, encouraging them to rethink what is often taken for granted in US history: post-​war economic prosperity, the privileged position of Whites, and American moral superiority. What if the US never benefitted from Roosevelt’s New Deal policies and did not remain the world’s predominant industrial power? The Neutral Zone, arguably the least developed of the three areas, offers a glimpse into this possible version of history. It is not directly controlled by any foreign power, so it remains the most “authentically American” with familiar Buicks, Chryslers, and Chevrolets lining the streets and records by Billie Holliday and Blind Willie Johnson playing in the local diner and hotel. However, because the post-​war economic boom never took place the sets and props are old, worn, and dusty, while the costumes are correspondingly faded and patched. Nothing dates from after the mid-​1940s, which is when the economic engine of the US ground to a halt after its defeat. Once again, mise-​en-​scène plays a crucial role communicating the alternate reality. The West Coast offers a second alternative that upends twentieth-​century American racial hierarchies. Society is strictly stratified, with the Japanese at the top and all other ethnicities below (the Japanese Pacific States are more multicultural than the East Coast and so, for example, Black characters can exist here). Japanese iconography and architecture dominate the visual on-​screen world while the soundtrack features classic American pop songs performed in Japanese. All high-​ ranking positions in the government and police are held by Japanese characters such as Nobusuke Tagomi, the Trade Minister of the Japanese Pacific States, and Chief Inspector Takeshi Kido of the Kampeitai. Conversely, White characters occupy menial roles as assistants, factory workers, and servants. The shift in twentieth-​century race relations is effectively captured in the character of Robert Childan, the White proprietor of American Artistic Handicrafts, and the relationships 324

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he cultivates with his wealthy Japanese clients. In the presence of his customers Childan is subservient and obsequious, desperate to prove himself knowledgeable of Japanese customs and be admitted into their social circle. When he fails to please one rich and powerful couple he is relegated to entering their house through the servant’s side-​door by the White “house boy.” As Powell (2018) argues, Childan’s character “illustrates the white male’s change of status in the occupied Japanese Pacific States” and erases “nostalgia for a past permeated with bigotry and racism” (157). The racial milieu in the Japanese Pacific States, which replaces White supremacy with Japanese supremacy, effectively demonstrates that racial hierarchies are not natural or based in science but are instead socially constructed. This particular facet of the series also highlights how what is an alternative history for some is a lived experience for others. Watching the show is potentially an unsettling experience for White viewers unaccustomed to seeing White Americans as second-​class citizens on American soil, or indeed, non-Whites as colonizers and Whites as colonized. For people of colour, on the other hand, the racism faced by White characters reflects a familiar reality, rather than a what-​if. The Greater Nazi Reich further counteracts determinism by offering a third potential historical path, while also posing some challenging historical questions. In The Man in the High Castle, the East Coast of the United States has seemingly embraced Nazism and is complicit in an ongoing Holocaust. Adams (2016) has stated that alternate histories set during and after the Second World War have the potential to explore the “extent to which other societies may also have been susceptible to fascist violence” (86). She goes on to identify Dick’s novel as one that “challenges the moral complacency of Allied nations with a suggestion of their own potential for genocide, oppression and the overriding of democracy” (90). This theme becomes even more central in the show and is centred specifically on the United States. Through the character of John Smith, viewers are prompted “to consider their own capacity for wrongdoing” (Pettitt 2020, 363). John is shown to be a loving family man, but he is calculating, violent, and ruthless when it comes to his job as an enforcer and protector of the Reich. It is revealed across the seasons that John grew up poor during the Great Depression, fought in the US Army in the Pacific Theatre during the Second World War, witnessed the bombing of Washington DC, and became one of the first to capitulate to the Nazi side in 1946. On the surface, his decision is understandable—​faced with defeat John abandoned his ideals to save his family, even if that meant committing atrocities. Aligning the audience with John encourages viewers to consider not only an individual’s capacity for wrongdoing, but an entire country’s. Faced with such a scenario, could the United States have adopted Germany’s fascist ideology? Could American teens have become zealots like Thomas, rather than idolizing rebels like James Dean? Most representations of the Second World War in American popular culture support a Good War interpretation that celebrates the US as a righteous bastion of freedom and democracy. The Man in the High Castle challenges this simplistic interpretation by placing viewers in the uncomfortable position of considering the country’s potential for fascism. Yet, in posing such questions, and more generally in its depiction of the Greater Nazi Reich and an ageing Adolph Hitler, the show contributes to the normalization of the Nazi past (Partsch 2019; Powell 2018).5

Fact and fiction: the potential of experimental history This chapter has focused predominately on the first two seasons of The Man in the High Castle. While the series does continue to do historical work and encourage historical thinking, later seasons increasingly lean into the science fiction and multiverse elements. The alternate world

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of the show arguably becomes more and more familiar to audiences as well, meaning there are fewer instances of dissonance and less negotiation to figure out the differences between history as we know it and the version on screen. It may not be accurate then to categorize the entire series, consisting of four seasons, as an experimental history. Seasons 1 and 2 are deserving of this title and the series’ value as a form of history has already begun to be recognized. Cornelius Partsch (2019), for example, has persuasively argued that The Man in the High Castle is an effective tool for teaching the Holocaust as students “are productively suspended between the known historical record and the alternative scenario inscribed in the possible world of the series, acting as explorers and detectives in the discourses they are navigating” (254). However, it is not only the Holocaust that viewers are exposed to and must navigate; American history is just as central, and the show also encourages the contemplation of larger historical questions. It need not only be students in a classroom guided by a teacher that can learn from the series or be prompted to think historically; general audiences can find it to be a rich and thought-​provoking historical text. The ability of audiences to appreciate televisual historical narratives like The Man in the High Castle should not be underestimated. Complex television can be both entertaining and challenging. It can simultaneously feature gratifying storytelling with well-​developed characters, moments of high tension, and narrative payoffs, as well as offering an unconventional approach to history. “Complex television encourages, and even at times necessitates, a new mode of viewer engagement,” explains Mittell (2015, 52). Audiences must be switched on to puzzle out ambiguous or difficult narratives or to figure out how the formal construction of the show impacts their understanding of the story. The popularity and cult status of narratively complex television shows suggests that audiences both large and small have developed faculties to decode complex televisual plots (Mittell 2015, 53). Viewers of The Man in the High Castle have to work to decipher and understand the alternate world of the narrative if they want to follow the myriad of science-​ fiction and political storylines and complex interpersonal relationships that take place within it. It stands to reason that at least some viewers will be invested enough to consider the historical questions The Man in the High Castle generates. Audience engagement is also aided by the X-​Ray feature unique to the Amazon Prime streaming platform that provides easy access to bonus information to help process and understand the series’ historical storylines. As they watch, audiences can choose to see X-​Ray content, including “General Trivia” boxes. These boxes of text regularly provide basic historical information to supplement the viewer’s historical knowledge.6 When, for instance, John meets with the doctor and discusses Thomas’ diagnosis, background on the T4 program is provided. Viewers who may have been unaware of the existence of this program will learn that this is not an invention of the show and will have a better understanding of why the characters react a certain way to the diagnosis. Furthermore, the trivia boxes provide insight into the creative decision-​making that went into crafting the on-​screen world, as well as additional explanations that clarify how this alternate world operates and is different from our own. More than simply trivia, this information enhances the basic effects of the show: it alerts audiences to the fictional and constructed nature of what they are seeing on screen and encourages them to compare the alternate version of history with actual history. There are limitations and drawbacks—​so much trivia is provided during season 1 episodes that it can become overwhelming and distracting to read, although this is preferable to season 2 when it becomes almost non-​existent. More so than audio commentaries and podcasts that must be consumed separately, the X-​Ray feature is a particularly effective way of integrating notes in an audiovisual text as they can be viewed in medias res. This feature, and any similar ones that are developed, have the potential to aid the process of historical thinking while watching any category of historical television show. 326

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What-​if stories like The Man in the High Castle are just one variety of experimental history. This is the era of “Peak TV,” a term coined by FX CEO John Landgraf to describe the overabundance of original scripted programming in the US (Rose and Guthrie 2015). Given that 2021 saw 559 original scripted series released (Porter 2022), it is unsurprising that unorthodox approaches to historical stories and experimentation with blending fact and fiction are increasing. Horror, like alternate history, is proving to be a genre with great potential. Lovecraft Country (HBO, 2020) and The Terror (AMC, 2018–​2019) are two series, which, like The Man in the High Castle, highlight the constructed nature of the on-​screen history but nonetheless capture historical truths and encourage historical thinking. Lovecraft Country features magic, ghosts, curses, spirits, and time-​travel, but it is rooted in the racial realities of mid-​twentieth-​century America. The true horror of the series comes not from the grotesque bodily transformations of the characters, but from the injustice and hate African Americans face. Likewise, in season 1 of The Terror, the fictitious Tuunbaq creature pursuing the HMS Terror and Erebus provides scares, but it is the harsh Arctic conditions that are most horrifying. The inclusion of horror elements, like an alternate timeline, keeps viewers at arm’s length, never allowing them to imagine that what is on screen is the one true version of events. Experimental televisual histories cannot and, indeed, should not replace academic written histories or audiovisual histories that offer new and challenging historical arguments, engage in debate, and are meticulously researched. However, they can and should coexist alongside them. They take existing historical arguments and interpretations and embed them in narratives that are entertaining to general audiences. The Man in the High Castle was one of Amazon Prime’s first hits and now more than 200 million subscribers worldwide have access to the show. By crossing over into other genres such as science fiction, experimental histories have the potential to appeal to wide audiences who might not otherwise be interested in historical shows (or history in general). Indeed, this is the beauty and strength of experimental televisual histories—​they are freed from the confines of rigorously documented academic history but nonetheless illuminate historical truths and encourage historical thinking.

Notes 1 Rosenfeld is correct in identifying a rise in allohistorical television shows. Alongside The Man in the High Castle, other series and miniseries include 11.22.63 (Hulu, 2016), The Plot Against America (HBO, 2020), SS-​GB (BBC, 2017), and For All Mankind (Apple TV Plus, 2019–​). 2 The Smith family move into a New York City penthouse for seasons 3 and 4. This space, while luxe, lacks the warmth and comfort of the Long Island home and reflects the growing troubles within the Smith household. 3 The term “synthetic” comes from Gary R. Edgerton (2001) who has argued that history on TV is “essentially synthetic in nature and should not be judged on whether or not it generates new knowledge as much as it should on how creatively and responsibly it sheds additional light on the existing historical record” (9). For more on the categorization of long-​form historical TV see Weeks (2022, 181–​184). 4 For an in-​depth analysis of how the film reels are experienced by both the characters within the narrative and the audience see Kelsey Taylor Abele (2020, 64–​80). 5 For an explanation of the normalization of the Nazi past, including how historical counterfactuals and popular alternate histories contribute, see Rosenfeld (2014). 6 Historical video games, such as the Assassin’s Creed (Ubisoft, 2007–​) series, are particularly adept at incorporating supplementary historical information into the gameplay.

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Reference list Abele, Kelsey Taylor. 2020. “The Man in the High Castle or the History that Never Happened: The Conflation of Alternative History, Memory, and Ideology.” PhD diss., Arizona State University. Adams, Jenni. 2016. “Relationships to Realism in Post-​Holocaust Fiction: Conflicted Realism and the Counterfactual Historical Novel.” In The Bloomsbury Companion to Holocaust Literature, edited by Jenni Adams, 81–​101. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Bunzl, Martin. 2004. “Counterfactual History: A User’s Guide.” The American Historical Review 109, no. 3 (June): 845–​858. https://​doi.org/​10.1086/​ahr/​109.3.845. Carr, E.H. [1961] 2008. What Is History? London: Penguin. Collins, William Joseph. 1990. “Paths Not Taken: The Development, Structure, and Aesthetics of Alternative History.” PhD diss., University of California, Davis. Consoli, Ben. 2019. “Designing The Man in the High Castle (with Drew Boughton).” Go Creative Show, August 27. Podcast, 1:08:43. https://​goc​reat​ives​how.com/​design​ing-​the-​man-​in-​the-​high-​cas​tle-​with-​ drew-​bough​ton/​. Cowley, Robert, ed. 1999. What If? New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons. Cowley, Robert, ed. 2001a. What If? 2. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons. Cowley, Robert. 2001b. “Introduction for What If? 2.” In The Collected What If?: Eminent Historians Imagine What Might Have Been, edited by Robert Cowley, 397–​399. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons. Cowley, Robert, ed. 2003. What Ifs? of American History. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons. Dick, Philip K. [1962] 2001. The Man in the High Castle. London: Penguin. Edgerton, Gary R. 2001. “Introduction: A Different Kind of History Altogether.” In Television Histories: Shaping Collective Memory in the Media Age, edited by Gary R. Edgerton and Peter C. Rollins, 1–​20. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Egner, Jeremy. 2015. “Red, Reich and Blue: Building the World of ‘The Man in the High Castle’.” New York Times, November 19. www.nyti​mes.com/​2015/​11/​22/​arts/​tel​evis​ion/​the-​man-​in-​the-​high-​cas​tle-​imagi​ nes-​a-​red-​reich-​and-​blue.html. Evans, Richard J. 2014. Altered Pasts: Counterfactuals in History. Waltham: Brandeis University Press. Ferguson, Niall, ed. 1997. Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals. London: Picador. Fogel, Robert William. 1964. Railroads and American Economic Growth: Essays in Econometric History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Friedan, Betty. 1963. The Feminine Mystique. New York: Dell. Gallagher, Catherine. 2007. “War, Counterfactual History, and Alternate-​History Novels.” Field Day Review 3: 52–​65. Grobar, Matt. 2016. “‘Man In The High Castle’ Production Designer Drew Boughton On Show’s Relevance To 2016 Presidential Race.” Deadline, May 12. https://​deadl​ine.com/​2016/​05/​the-​man-​in-​the-​high-​cas​tle-​ ama​zon-​drew-​bough​ton-​pro​duct​ion-​des​ign-​interv​iew-​120​1736​358/​. Hawthorn, Geoffrey. 1991. Plausible Worlds: Possibility and Understanding in History and the Social Sciences. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Hellekson, Karen. 2001. The Alternate History: Refiguring Historical Time. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press. Hellekson, Karen. 2009. “Alternate History.” In The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction, edited by Mark Bould, Andrew Butler, Adam Roberts and Sherryl Vint, 475–​479. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. Heller, Steven. 2019. The Swastika and Symbols of Hate: Extremist Iconography Today. New York: Allworth Press. Hemphill, Jim. 2020. “Clubhouse Conversations: Gonzalo Amat–​Cinematographer of The Man in the High Castle.” American Cinematographer, May 12. Video, 52:11. https://​asc​mag.com/​vid​eos/​clubho​use-​conver​ sati​ons-​the-​man-​in-​the-​high-​cas​tle. Kaye, Simon T. 2010. “Challenging Certainty: The Utility and History of Counterfactualism.” History and Theory 49, no. 1 (February): 38–​57. https://​doi.org/​10.1111/​j.1468-​2303.2010.00527.x. Landsberg, Alison. 2015. Engaging the Past: Mass Culture and the Production of Historical Knowledge. New York: Columbia University Press. Le Sueur, Marc. 1977. “Theory Number Five: Anatomy of Nostalgia Films: Heritage and methods.” Journal of Popular Film 6, no. 2 (January): 187–​197. https://​doi.org/​10.1080/​00472​719.1977.10661​834. Li, Shirley. 2015. “The Man in the High Castle Times Square opening shot: How the team pulled it off.” Entertainment Weekly, September 22. https://​ew.com/​arti​cle/​2015/​09/​22/​man-​in-​the-​high-​cas​tle-​times-​ squ​are-​shot/​.

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What if? Experimental history on television Mittell, Jason. 2015. Complex TV The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling. New York and London: NYU Press. Moore, Ward. 1953. Bring the Jubilee. New York: Farrar, Straus and Young. Partsch, Cornelius. 2019. “Fake News of the Power of Fiction? The Case for Using Amazon Series The Man in the High Castle in Holocaust Education.” In Holocaust Education Revisited, edited by Anja Ballis and Markus Gloe, 241–​259. Germany: Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden. Pettitt, Joanne. 2020. “What Is Holocaust Perpetrator Fiction?” Journal of European Studies 50, no. 4 (December): 360–​372. https://​doi.org/​10.1177/​00472​4412​0965​268. Porter, Rick. 2022. “Peak TV Update: Scripted Series Volume Hits All-​Time High in 2022.” The Hollywood Reporter, January 14. www.hollyw​oodr​epor​ter.com/​tv/​tv-​news/​peak-​tv-​scrip​ted-​ser​ies-​all-​time-​high-​ 2021-​123​5075​677/​. Poore, Carol. 2007. Disability in Twentieth-​Century German Culture. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Powell, Zachary Michael. 2018. “The Ethics of Alternate History: Melodrama and Political Engagement in Amazon’s The Man in the High Castle.” South Atlantic Review 83, no. 3 (Fall): 150–​169. Rose, Lacey, and Marisa Guthrie. 2015. “FX Chief John Landgraf on Content Bubble: ‘This Is Simply Too Much Television’.” The Hollywood Reporter, August 7. www.hollyw​oodr​epor​ter.com/​tv/​tv-​news/​fx-​ chief-​john-​landg​raf-​cont​ent-​813​914/​. Rosenfeld, Gavriel. 2002. “Why Do We Ask ‘What If?’ Reflections on the Function of Alternate History.” History and Theory 41, no. 4 (December): 90–​103. https://​doi.org/​10.1111/​1468-​2303.00222. Rosenfeld, Gavriel. 2014. Hi Hitler! How the Nazi Past Is Being Normalized in Contemporary Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rosenfeld, Gavriel. 2019. “Why Alternate Histories Have Overtaken Pop Culture.” Washington Post, February 20. www.was​hing​tonp​ost.com/​outl​ook/​2019/​02/​20/​why-​altern​ate-​histor​ies-​have-​overta​ken-​pop-​cult​ure/​. Rotzoll, Maike, Paul Richter, Petra Fuchs, Annette Hinz-​Wessels, Sascha Topp, and Gerrit Hohendorf. 2006. “The First National Socialist Extermination Crime: The T4 Program and Its Victims.” International Journal of Mental Health 35, no. 3 (Fall): 17–​29. https://​doi.org/​10.2753/​IMH0​020-​741​1350​302. Schneider-​Mayerson, Matthew. 2009. “What Almost Was: The Politics of the Contemporary Alternate History Novel.” American Studies (Lawrence) 50, no. 3/​4: 63–​83. Singles, Kathleen. 2013. Alternate History: Playing with Contingency and Necessity. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter. Sprengler, Christine. 2009. Screening Nostalgia: Populuxe Props and Technicolor Aesthetics in Contemporary American Film. New York: Berghahn Books. Streitfeld, David, ed. 2015. Philip K. Dick: The Last Interview and Other Conversations. Brooklyn: Melville House. Tashiro, C.S. 1998. Pretty Pictures: Production Design and the History Film. Austin: University of Texas Press. Tetlock, Philip E., and Geoffrey Parker. 2006. “Counterfactual Thought Experiments.” In Unmaking the West: “What-​If?” Scenarios That Rewrite World History, edited by Philip E. Tetlock, Richard Ned Lebow, and Geoffrey Parker, 14–​44. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Thompson, E.P. 1978. The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays. London: Merlin. Turtledove, Harry. 1992. The Guns of the South. New York: Del Rey. Tyranny of Style. n.d. “Costume Design for an Alternative History: The Man in the High Castle.” Accessed November 10, 2021. https://​tyr​anny​ofst​yle.com/​cost​ume-​des​ign-​man-​in-​the-​high-​cas​tle/​. Weeks, Rebecca. 2022. History by HBO: Televising the American Past. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Welch, David. 2004. “Nazi Propaganda and the Volksgemeinschaft: Constructing a People’s Community.” Journal of Contemporary History 39, no. 2 (April): 213–​238. https://​doi.org/​10.1177/​00220​0940​4042​129.

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AFTERWORD History with images: a conversation with Robert A. Rosenstone Robert A. Rosenstone and Kim Nelson

Rosenstone: What drew me to writing about history on film? The move was no doubt foreshadowed by developments prior to taking on film. My first three books were narratives that moved from traditional historical writing toward innovative history. The publication of Crusade of the Left: The Lincoln Battalion in the Spanish Civil War, a revision of my dissertation, allowed me to put back all the evocative language that my doctoral committee had made me remove. Romantic Revolutionary: A Biography of John Reed played with the shape of its narrative by moving back and forth through time. When writing Mirror in the Shrine: American Encounters with Meiji Japan, I was in full revolt against the writing of history in the confining and dated form of “the nineteenth-​century novel,” to use the words of Hayden White (1966) that I had not yet read. It was no whim that brought me to innovate, but my feeling that historical prose was formulaic and confining, locked in a literary prison that prevented the historian from expressing both the full and subtle range of human emotion, thought, and action. One afternoon in the fall of 1972, I was at my typewriter struggling with the book on Reed, when I received a phone call, and a voice said something like, “This is Warren Beatty. I’m going to make a film about John Reed. I understand you are writing his biography. I’d like to talk to you. Can you join me for dinner tonight?” Startled, I said yes, and we ended up eating together at a restaurant on the Sunset strip full of movie people that evening and the next to talk about Reed. To be specific, he asked questions, and I answered them, perhaps at greater length than he wanted. I am, after all, an academic, someone who can talk about my subjects almost forever. At the end of the first evening, Beatty explained that he wanted me to be a historical consultant on the film, but he couldn’t sign me up yet. There was no script. No production company. Nothing but Beatty’s crazy—​my word, not his—​notion that he could make a film about a once-​renowned American Communist. Yet, that first night he promised to put me on the payroll once there was money for the film. From friends who are in Hollywood, I knew it was a risk, but Beatty was true to his word, and, in 1972, with the help of his attorney and mine (I had to hire one), we worked out a payment plan that was decent enough but ignored all the hours we spent together in the preceding years. Our occasional talks over the next seven years took place first in Warren’s penthouse at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, then, after he moved, at his palatial home on Mulholland Drive that had a single piece of furniture in his enormous living room: a love seat. Over the years, he would 330

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phone me at odd hours at home or even when I was abroad to continue our conversations. Once, I received a call at 4 a.m. in Japan, where I was teaching on a Fulbright Fellowship. Usually, he’d have specific questions about Reed’s activities in Greenwich Village, Provincetown, at Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) labour strikes, his journalistic stints during the Mexican Revolution, or on three fronts (France, Germany, and the Balkans) as a foreign correspondent during the First World War, and his two stays in Russia before and after the Bolshevik Revolution. After 1975, when my biography was published, Warren often wanted me to elaborate on something in the book. A work of history is like an iceberg: the author knows 20, 50, perhaps 100 times more than you could ever put on the page. Nelson: How much time passed between your first meeting with Beatty and when the film went into production? Rosenstone: Pre-​production started in 1979 or 80. Beatty had a script by then that he had co-​ written with Trevor Griffiths, the leftist British playwright. He also had money and put me on the payroll. Nelson: Historians can experience real highs and lows working on historical films and documentaries, and this has led to fascinating reflections about those experiences. In particular, I’m thinking of an essay by historian Donald Watt, and writing by Natalie Zemon Davis, and, of course, you. How did Reds engage you as a historical consultant, and what was your role like once you got into the pre-​production process? Rosenstone: It was not all that different from the previous eight years; only now, far more people were asking me questions. It took place at Beatty’s home, which I began to visit twice or occasionally more times a week. I was a consultant for anyone who was involved in the project: producers, designers, costumers, script rewriters, and a great many others whose connections to the film were never clear. My job was to answer their questions about various topics: ideologies, the World War, the anti-​war movements, revolutions, clothing, language, especially slang of the era, locations, love affairs, and favourite alcoholic drinks. I was also given the continually rewritten script many times to read and make comments, positive or critical. There was a lot of historical fiction in the script, which, at the time, I found objectionable. Now that I have been studying such films for 35 years, I know inventions are inevitable and even necessary to convey truths of the past. But at the time, I tried to edit them out, writing notes or saying to Warren, “No, this didn’t happen, that didn’t happen, that’s totally false.” My criticisms were largely ignored, as I could see when I was yet again asked to read a newer version of the script. I went over it at least 12 times. Nelson: What kind of historical fictions were they crafting that made you uncomfortable? Rosenstone: Characters in places they had never visited, people meeting who had never met, conversations that sounded more like talk of the 1970s rather than that of in the teens of the century—​things like that. Later I got into the spirit of the screenplay and created a couple of fictions of my own. One of the producers asked me to specify how many people attended the organization meetings in 1919 for the Communist Party of America. These took place in the basement of a union hall in Chicago. There were three overlapping meetings at the same time because three groups had splintered from the American Socialist Party in support of the Bolsheviks, each with ideological or personal differences from the others. The meetings took place on three different floors of the building, and many people floated back and forth between them. I read all the personal accounts people had left, and no participant or journalist could estimate how many people were in the union hall beyond saying there were “a lot.” So, after looking over all the evidence available, I told the producer, “Between 55 and 90 people.” “Not good enough,” he roared. “You’re the historian. I need a precise figure.” So, for the first time in my career, I consciously invented

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a historical fact, telling him that there had been 88 people at the meeting. A few months later, 88 actors and extras showed up on a set. Nelson: That reminds me of a fascinating talk I attended by historian Liam Brockey, who was a historical consultant on Martin Scorsese’s Silence (2016). Being part of the film was a positive experience for him. But like many historians, he had some misgivings about it too. He is a historian of Jesuits in Japan from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The film adapts a novel rather than an academic history. The book and film mix historical figures from different times, including a real person who had, in actual fact, died before the action of the story. I remember that he likened this to making a historical film with George Washington and Abraham Lincoln attending the same ball. But when he raised these concerns, it went nowhere. The art department, however, was very interested in his input. He said that he was sent over 50 images to choose one table and another time, he was asked what colour underwear the priests wore. He felt the strain of being stretched far beyond the limits of the archive. Meanwhile, his concerns about including a person from another era were brushed aside. Was your experience like that? Rosenstone: There were questions I simply could not answer. There is so much a historian doesn’t know about the past that many things must be invented. What did a room in that union hall look like in 1919? We have no way of knowing. If the building still stands, we can go to that same room today, but we don’t know what furnishings were there in 1918 or how it was decorated. Multiply that by the content of conversations, or the stance, the body language, and the voices of characters, etc. This is complicated by the two historical discourses in Reds, which are often at odds. One is the drama, and the other comes from the voices of the historical witnesses who lived at the time and either knew John Reed personally or were members of the Greenwich Village culture or the journalistic world in which he flourished. Having such elderly figures as talking heads was an idea Warren shared with me during our first talk. I thought it was a brilliant idea then, and I still do. Nelson: You’re referring to the documentary interviews with Reed’s contemporaries in the film? Rosenstone: Yes, Beatty interviewed most of them personally, but during pre-​production, he realized that there were not enough people alive who knew John Reed or were part of his circles. For my book, I had interviewed a painter named Andrew Dasburg, who lived in Taos, New Mexico. He knew Reed so well that he had an ongoing affair with his wife, Louise Bryant, during both periods that Reed spent in Russia. Still, Warren wanted more witnesses, so a half dozen of us gathered to think of famous people alive in the nineteen-​teens. Maybe they would know something about Reed. We began tossing names around, but almost always, someone would say, “No, he or she wasn’t alive then.” If Wikipedia had been available, our job would have been much easier. As the historian on the project, I was, supposedly, the expert, but a couple of my colleagues seemed to know more than I did. My main suggestion beyond Dasburg was the infamous author Henry Miller, who also lived in West Los Angeles, not far from Beatty’s home. Immediately a producer got on the phone to track him down, and Warren was at his house with a camera crew the next day. Eventually, other suggestions paid off, but some of the elderly folk alive at the time knew little or nothing about Reed. Clare Boothe Luce, erstwhile Ambassador to China and wife of the famed publisher, Henry Luce, said something like, “Well, I didn’t know anything about John Reed, but when I learned he was a Communist, of course, I hated him.” The author, Henry Miller, also didn’t know Reed, but that did not prevent him from saying that people like Reed wanted to save the world, and were less heroes than victims of psychological problems, adding, “I think people fucked as much in those days as they do today.”

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Figure 21.1 Warren Beatty and Diane Keaton on the set of Reds. © PARAMOUNT PICTURES /​AJ Pics /​Alamy Stock Photo

Nelson: What is it like when you are writing history, describing people, places, and events, and then suddenly you’re on a set, and the people and places you have researched and the events that you’ve spent so much time describing are brought to life in front of your eyes? Rosenstone: Because of teaching duties, I was only with the company for three weeks toward the end of the shoot in Spain. Before that, most of the film had been made in the United States and England, with Helsinki filling in for St Petersburg, for many of that city’s old buildings look like those in the Russian capital. I joined the company in Seville and was very pleased to see my book all over the set being read by actors, technicians, producers—​almost everybody, it seemed. The first morning I joined the company for a shoot in the old Alcázar, a palace that had once been a Muslim stronghold, then after Christians retook the city, became a residence of the Spanish king. I walked into that enormous building just when they began to film scenes from the Congress of the Peoples of the East, which had been held in Baku, Azerbaijan. The conference was part of the Bolshevik attempt to reach out to the workers of the Islamic world. As an American comrade, Reed was there to show the international aspect of the revolution. I arrived to see some actors

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playing Russian leaders standing on a high podium, delivering speeches that were simultaneously translated into many different languages for the hundreds of extras who were gathered in a huge patio clad in Middle Eastern outfits and headgear, armed with old rifles, carbines, pistols, and swords. Around the edges of the patio, out of camera sight, was a big crowd of film people and spectators. Suddenly, I was stunned to see, directly across from me, John Reed’s face in the crowd, staring directly at me. It took about 15 seconds to realize that it was really Warren Beatty. My mistake was amazing. They do not look the least bit alike. Reed had a very round, puffy sort of visage that one of his friends described as a “potato face.” Warren has a sleek, stunningly handsome face, so how could I make such a mistake? Watching that scene play out, with translators of the speaker on a podium shouting in different languages while the costumed men raised their weapons and cheered wildly, I felt as if I were involved in attending the actual historical event. That feeling continued as I watched several subsequent takes both in person and then replayed on a monitor, and that uncanny feeling of somehow living in the past lingered for quite a while. Nobody really knows precisely how that Congress looked or how people reacted to the talks, so the scene was largely an invention, but to me, it had a kind of verisimilitude that, for a moment, turned Beatty into Reed. It is also one of the moments that led to my writing about film. Not the only one, but that scene stayed with me, and indeed it still occasionally lingers today. Whenever I screen that scene, I cannot help but think that what they produced conveys a kind of dramatic truth. Nelson: I just can’t imagine that feeling. You write a history, working to bring to life a past that’s gone. And then it’s right in front of you in all its colour and dimension. Rosenstone: There is one more thing I want to mention: the high point of my years working on the film, perhaps in my whole career as a writer. The cinematographer was Vittorio Storaro, who had already won an Academy Award for Apocalypse Now, would win a second one for Reds and a third one for The Last Emperor. Beatty introduced us at the daily lunch for the whole crew, more than 50 people sitting at tables under a tent. Vittorio, who is Italian, makes this very elaborate bow, the kind you see in historical films when a noble bends a knee to the king while he sweeps the ground with his fancy, elaborate wide-​brimmed hat and said “Maestro, I never set up the camera or light a scene until I’ve read the chapter in your book,” and everyone in the tent applauded. Nelson: That’s incredible, given that he is one of the most influential and respected cinematographers of all time. So many cinematographers have copied his style. He is a master. Rosenstone: Yes, it doesn’t get any better than that! Nelson: In the documentary about cinematography, Keepers of the Magic (2016), Storaro talks eloquently about how cinematography and lighting are all about working with shadow. That’s such a lovely metaphor for history. Elsewhere, I have described history in prose as lit by a candle, while history in film is lit by stadium lights. And this is just what you were talking about, the way that in history films, all these things that are undescribed must be conjured. It contradicts history’s core contract to try to cleave wherever possible to evidence. Rosenstone: Remember, any prop or set is fiction. You are inventing the past, as you are when someone speaks lines unless they are direct quotations from a historical document. To get around this, on TV many years ago, The Adams Chronicles (1976) took all the words spoken by John and Abigail and John Quincy from their letters and other writings. But who has ever spoken the same way as when they write letters? Nobody. Letters are formal. They have their own strategies that are quite different from the kind of casual conversations we have in real life. We can’t get around the inventions or the fictionality of certain aspects of the historical film. They’re part of the genre. But let me add that words on the page, however accurate to historical documents, are also not the past. At best, they are a distant approximation of what might have happened and been said. It is 334

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Figure 21.2 Vittorio Storaro behind the camera with Bernardo Bertolucci on set filming The Conformist. Album /​Alamy Stock Photo

imperative to distinguish between the past and history. What remains of the past is what’s in the archives—​official and personal documents, letters, diaries, newspaper reports, recordings for the modern age, and archeological evidence. But as soon as we start putting such evidence into a story, it becomes a kind of fiction—​an invention. I argue that it is possible to distinguish whether a historical film has worthwhile inventions. The real question is to what extent they enter the larger discourse of history. A book, an essay, a lecture, even this conversation is part of a stream of evidence that we use to turn the past into history, that is, into a story. That’s been how history has been told since Herodotus wrote The Histories, what we consider to be the first work of history in the West, a study of the Persian-​Greek wars that in a modern edition contains 624 pages. Nelson: In his earlier writing, Siegfried Kracauer was no fan of history films, but later he wrote a thoughtful book comparing history and photography. In it, he defended the narrative and storytelling aspects of history. He writes about the “historical idea” as something that emerges when historians make generalizations and draw meaning from the data points of the past. And he claims this is history’s ultimate purpose. Do you agree with that? Rosenstone: Yes. And those generalizations are invented by the historian. Other historians looking at the same data could make different generalizations. We are not, after all, robots. We have value systems, morals, and personal histories that shape the evidence we acquire and choose to use. The past is like an iceberg. Most of it is hidden from view. There’s a hundred times more evidence for what we’re writing than we can incorporate. So, we must pick and choose because we can never use all of it. That is not made clear to readers by professional historians who still insist that a kind of “objectivity” governs their choices of data and argument. Yet considerable fictional elements remain in historical works. 335

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Nelson: We’ve been focusing on one kind of film, but you also have experience with others. How do you compare working on Reds to the documentary you were a part of that drew from your book Crusade of the Left: The Lincoln Battalion in the Spanish Civil War? Rosenstone: Reds was both more fun and obviously more lucrative. With the documentary, The Good Fight: The Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War (1984), I was dealing with only three other people, all of whom were producers and directors. In general, they were a touch more open to criticism than the people on Reds, except on one topic. They avoided any negative information about the Lincoln Battalion. When I insisted that they at least mention the documented charges that a certain amount of Soviet terror touched the battalion and led to the jailing and executions of a few Americans, they refused. In other words, my values of never hiding evidence were upstaged by their desire to present a film about virtually stainless heroes. Making Reds, I met many interesting people, several of whom were helping to rewrite the script. Elaine May worked on it, and so did Robert Towne and other big Hollywood names who floated in and out of Beatty’s house. I also contributed to the script in tiny ways. In one instance, I was asked to find good quotations from Reed and his wife, Louise Bryant in the letters they shared when apart for the long periods that he was abroad. They were passionate, descriptive, and informational missives written by two good writers, and Warren wanted to use them as voice-​overs during sequences when the two were apart. When I explained that I couldn’t always find appropriate phrases in the letters, I was told to look again. I did, but still came up blank. So, I simply made up several lines, elaborating on actual phrases without telling Warren because I thought, okay, I’m adding my creativity to this joint venture. It’s in the spirit of how they wrote, just the different phraseology. That was my second invention inserted into history. Nelson: A historical idea can take the meaning of a given history into many possible directions. An important aspect of academic history is the dialogue that happens between historians about evidence and interpretation. It seems to me that this is especially crucial for mass media histories. A significant thing that seems to be missing in historical films is an open public discussion about what they allege about the past. One that engages the ideas, by the way, rather than impugning the author. Given that history films and series often establish origin stories that implicate large collectives of people and inform our sense of ourselves, shouldn’t public dialogue and respectful criticism be appendages to these kinds of works? Rosenstone: There’s a spectrum to historical telling, from academic history to public history to pop history. The question is, to what extent does the film intersect with or comment upon or interact with the larger historical discourse on the topic? There is rarely a single book on any topic. There are dozens of books, maybe hundreds. And that’s only in English. If you have access to other languages, there are many more versions. Our form of history comes out of the German seminar tradition that we have been practising in the states since the late nineteenth century. We like to think it is somehow “objective,” but I believe it’s our job as historians to, when possible, teach it from both from the page and the filmic point of view, and perhaps the podcast point of view as well. There’s no one history, and there’s no one history book. There’s a discourse of history that includes books and essays, plus the data we know beyond that, films and lectures, and now podcasts. It’s a vast body of knowledge, and we need to make our view of the past more complex to show that there are never single truths, but various versions of the truths. Nelson: In Aspects of the Novel, E.M. Forster famously explains that “ ‘The king died, and then the queen died’ is a story. ‘The king died, and then the queen died of grief’ is a plot” (1927, 130). Although he’s talking about fiction, this search for meaning or causation is also the essence of history, isn’t it?

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Rosenstone: Yes, we are constantly guessing at motivation or interpreting it from documents that do not necessarily supply the motivation. Nelson: Natalie Zemon Davis is another influential historian who has written about history in film. There’s a moment in a scholarly dialogue between you when she critiques films for modernizing the past to make it more relatable, writing that “historical films should let the past be the past” (Davis 2000, 136). And you respond in another essay that “we should let historical films be films” (Rosenstone 2013, 189). Can’t they do both? Rosenstone: Natalie is a friend of mine. We’re both professional historians, and we know we will get criticized sometimes, and rightfully so. It’s hard for me to tell you precisely what she meant, but I interpreted it as we should not innovate with the past and not get too far from the facts. Natalie knew, even in The Return of Martin Guerre (1982), a wonderful film on which she served as a historical consultant, that it wasn’t the same as her book. Actually, she wrote the book after the film as a corrective. Probably a few thousand people read the book, and perhaps millions saw the film. We who write history are currently playing against great big odds. The original medium for history was, of course, the spoken word. Or as Oliver Stone wrote: “What is history? Some people say it’s a bunch of gossip made up by soldiers who passed it around a campfire” (Toplin 2000, 47). Oral history long predates written history and still exists in the contemporary world. We all have our own personal and family histories. I don’t really think historians ever let the past be the past because we turn the past into history. For me, history is a genre of writing in which we use data from the past to explain why things have happened. Whether they are biographies of individuals, movements, or national histories, we take the remains of the past and turn them into a story. Even quantitative historians who number crunch—​and at Caltech, I was surrounded by many such scholars—​to me that quantitative approach only makes sense if it’s part of a story and stories have their own rules of engagement with the past. Say we know who voted for Abraham Lincoln. That’s only important if we know something about him and his ideas, the US at that time, what that vote meant, and what slavery meant. Through quantitative data, we learn much, but it only means something historically if we make it part of a story that people can absorb. The same holds true for all such work. For example, the new Social Historians of the late twentieth century could look at the wills of people in France in the early modern period to see how much property people held, leading to a calculation of how rich and poor people lived in that time. But why do we care unless we are telling a story about French society? It may be nice to know that people had two beds and 14 sheets etc., but why do we care unless it is part of a tale about France and its development? Nelson: In 2007, you called Hayden White’s “The Burden of History,” from 1966, the manifesto history still needed in the new millennium. How much did White’s thinking affect your approach to the historical film, and what does his name mean in these debates? Rosenstone: I first met Hayden just when I was beginning to write on historical film. He invited me to give a seminar at the Getty Institute. He was a very affable and wonderful man, but at that point, I had not read any of his work. It was only later, after I gave the talk under his auspices, that I thought I better read some of his stuff. Like most historians, at least of my generation, I had very little background in historiography. It consisted of one class in graduate school that we didn’t much like because we grad students wanted to write history, not read about historical writing. The first effect on me of his essay, “The Burden of History,” was to justify my narrative innovations in Mirror in the Shrine intellectually. My developing ideas on film narrative came in part from White, but other theorists of history also influenced me, such as Frank Ankersmit, while the film theorists I was reading raised questions in my mind about how the medium worked. We, historians,

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can’t really assess a film unless we understand what the film offers to historical discourse in its own filmic language. White’s theories and my own are similar in that we believe historians are storytellers. And the stories we tell, as he wrote back in the 1960s, are based on the model of the nineteenth-​century novel. That, to me, was a mind-​bending remark! My first film review, “Reds as History,” stressed “facts” far too much and interpretation far too little. Years later, I wrote an essay that partially rejected my arguments in “Reds as History.” For those interested, it’s titled “The History Film as a Mode of Historical Thought” and located in the introduction to a big collection called A Companion to the Historical Film. Nelson: And you were disavowing your previous essay? Rosenstone: I was questioning what I thought was wrong with it. I wasn’t rejecting the whole essay. I compared my analysis of Reds to an essay by a film scholar on the same film, and I said that they’re both questionable and here’s why. I don’t know if any other historians have done the same. I received a touch of praise and many questions for doing that. What do you mean critiquing yourself? But how else do we grow intellectually? And so, the ideas you’ve heard from me today were not at all form-​ed when I was working on Reds. They developed slowly over the years from much viewing, reading, discussing, and arguing with fellow historians, Nelson: The flexibility of your thinking and openness to challenge, and your intellectual curiosity, have been hallmarks of your approach to history in the moving image. This spirit is now an indelible aspect of the field. The American Historical Review’s Forum issue on the problems and possibilities of portraying history on film was a vital intervention with several essays, including yours and Hayden White’s, that continue to resonate and speak to present-​day concerns in the digital age. How did that publication come about? Rosenstone: I wrote the first article and sent it to the AHR. And when he accepted it, the editor wrote that they were going to have some other people answering me. Only when it was published did I know they included Hayden White, Robert Brent Toplin, and John E. O’Connor, both of whom had written on film, and David Herlihy, a former president of the American Historical Association. He was the only one to be totally critical of the essays by Hayden and me, perhaps because our positions were the most extreme on the possibility of film as history. Nelson: In that issue, O’Connor focuses on the implications of history in moving images for the history classroom. But those concerns seem to have fallen out of the debate in the field. What happened to that side of the discussion? Rosenstone: We’ve forgotten it. Those of us who started writing about history films, taught and used such films in the classroom, but we were not writing about the classroom. John E. O’Connor’s project was groundbreaking. I am glad to see that the chapters in this volume consider what people learn from the books we read, but even more what they learn from visual media because other than students, very few read serious books much anymore. When I got into this topic, like other contributors to the forum, we were scholars who had already written history in words. We had some sense of how history worked. Or how we thought it worked. Our audience was other academics, although some of our books are used in classrooms now. Bringing up the implications of history in moving images is critical in classrooms as films are often used in a very naïve way. History students should also be taught that history is a construction after all. It is not the past itself, but scholars doing research and trying to put together what they think the past was. And that, of course, is why history changes every generation or two—​new ways of looking at the past based on current concerns and ideas flourish for a while. But it seems to me that storytelling is the one thing that endures. Take quantitative history, who really cares about the details of the election of 1864 in the United States during the Civil War unless you are telling a story about what that conflict means to us today? 338

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Nelson: Could you speak to White’s concept of historiophoty that he proposed in the AHR forum? He suggested the term for those working in the field and challenged them to fill in its contours. It has not seen a massive take-​up in the intervening years. Rosenstone: Who would be the people to take it up? Most people who write history do not care about Hayden White. The impact on people who write histories rather than think about how histories are written has been minimal. Historical theory hardly impinges on the writing of history, which is a great shame. I do not know how history is taught in PhD programs now. In my day, I was taught what you might call the Dragnet school of history. You go out and get the facts, ma’am, and then you tell a story from them. There was very little theoretical underpinning. I don’t know if it is that way now, but the reactions of the people who write history to Hayden White or other theorists show that this is an ongoing process that replicates itself. Nelson: His work offers a robust analytical tool. Although he argued different things at different times, he did not argue that there is no such thing as reality or that you can make any claim you want about the past. Rosenstone: The current interpretations of his work show how many historians have not read him. The undercurrent in the history profession is that White’s work is irrelevant. There is this rumour that he was a strange man with odd theories that say nothing about history. Some may find it surprising that history is still such an untheoretical field. Nelson: Yes, I think that for many historians, theories and philosophies of history can read as a reproach that undermines what they are trying to do, so there is an understandable tension there. But these ideas also offer a source of challenge that benefits the discipline. I find the reaction to White can be extreme. When I mention his work at film conferences, the Q&A can get fractious. Some people find him too much of a historical relativist. That argument did erupt into an edited volume put together by Saul Friedländer that warns that this level of scepticism leads to positions like Holocaust denial. Rosenstone: Ah, the Holocaust controversy. I was at that conference at UCLA. I also knew the other protagonist, Carlo Levi, the great Italian historian and one of the founders of Microhistory. I knew him because he had had Mirror in the Shrine translated into Italian, so I imagined him to be an intellectual colleague of White. Not so. He walked out of a lecture I gave at UCLA, one of the first on film. Later he said to me with a frown: “Oh, that’s all that old Hayden White stuff you were talking about.” I think Levi completely misunderstood what Hayden was doing. Later, Hayden wrote a kind of corrective to that conference talk, for White was not saying that you could never write about anything that had happened. That’s a whole other debate, and anyway, I was a spectator, not a participant. Nelson: That must have been one of the most exciting and historic history conferences of all time. Rosenstone: Certainly the most exciting I have ever attended. The verbal fireworks were impressive. But a lot of it was based on a total misreading. A few years back, I was at a large dinner that included an economic historian, and someone said, “Robert is a friend of Hayden White.” The other historian turned to me and said, “Oh, you mean the guy who says history is all made up by historians?” The problem is that his theories threaten historians. They are brilliant and as world-​shaking as theories of history can be. Still, they haven’t done much to change the writing of history except for a few souls who have braved the opposition of traditionalist reviewers. The late Alun Munslow and I started the journal Rethinking History in part to encourage the writing of innovative history. The innovative essays were the most interesting part of that journal for the first 20 years. Most of the other essays could have been published in History and Theory or some other theoretical journal. Some of them were very good. 339

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Nelson: There is such a wide range of films about the past. One of the issues with addressing history in moving images is how different a film like 12 Years a Slave (2013) is from RRR (2022) and a documentary like MLK/​FBI (2020) to a series like Yellowstone (2018–​2023). What do you make of these different approaches to the history genre? Rosenstone: I think many historical films are attempts to use the past as a foreign setting for romance and adventure. I would distinguish for my students between films I call “history films’ and those I label “historical films.” The former engage the discourse enough to make you think seriously about the past; the latter are largely aimed at entertaining you. There is, of course, no way to draw an absolute line between these two kinds of film. I know that these days teachers use films in high school and college history classes, but I understand from empirical studies that they do not prepare students to critique such films by teaching the language of the visual media and how it works to create a world. If people are going to be teachers of history, they should learn about how film communicates messages. Nelson: Given how much you have thought about historical films, are there any standouts for you? Rosenstone: Too many to list, but standouts are made across the world. I am particularly fascinated by Latin American and African directors because they have a sense of history very different from our own. But if I had to pick one masterpiece, it might be the Greek film, The Travelling Players (1975), directed by Theodoro Angelopoulos. Among other favourites, I would name Ceddo (1977) by Senegalese director Ousman Sembene, October: Ten Days That Shook the World (1928) by the Russian director Sergei Eisenstein, and Born on the Fourth of July (1989) directed by the American filmmaker Oliver Stone. In many ways, history films have broadened my education. Let me mention just one of them. Quilombo (1984) by director Carlos Diegues is a Brazilian film named after a series of remote settlements set up by people who escaped enslavement. There were dozens of these in Brazil during the centuries of slavery. The film depicts the formerly enslaved in Quilombo wearing costumes that we associate with modern Carnival. I doubt that the people in these settlements, who had to farm and provide for their welfare and defense against former masters who wanted to enslave them once again, wore such extravagant clothing every day, as I doubt that they spent most of their time singing, dancing, and practicing martial arts as they do in the film. Obviously, we don’t know with any precision what they wore and how they acted three hundred years ago. But such scenes are surely meant as visual and aural metaphors for the freedom they feel after escaping from their enslavers. Nelson: Why do you think the film had such a profound effect on you? Rosenstone: I grew up in the forties and fifties, learning in school and college that, yes, slavery was terrible, but after all, it was a way of civilizing primitive people for their own good. The first textbook I used as a teaching assistant in the early sixties, the most popular of its day, was written by two famous scholars, Samuel Eliot Morrison of Harvard and Henry Steele Commager of Columbia. It said that slavery was awful and immoral, but it was, after all, a way of enlightening “happy Sambos” (a longtime racist term about Blacks that many people today may well not know). The following year, there was a new edition of the book. The happy Sambos had vanished, and in their place were overworked enslaved people who were often cruelly treated as disposable property by their masters. What accounts for the changes? Martin Luther King was on the march with the Civil Rights Movement, and much of the American public was behind him. The present was helping to rewrite the past, as it always does. That is a perennial problem in America, as we can see from the ways school curricula are currently changing the history of slavery once again, apparently in an effort to decide that we Americans are good and just people after all.

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Nelson: There is a fourth edition of your foundational book, History on Film, Film on History, being published soon. How has the field shifted between this edition and the last one that came out in 2017? Rosenstone: Every time you have a new edition, they send it to readers again. I was pleased that they said nice things about the book and its importance, and then, of course, they criticized what I failed to do. One of the persistent themes is that I overlook much of global cinema, dealing with films from Africa, Latin America, East Asia, South Asia, and so forth. If it can be dignified as a theory, my theory says that for history in moving images to be history, they must intersect with and add to the larger discourse of history. Some people in the theoretical area have misunderstood this. By the discourse of history, I do not mean only what historians have written. I mean the entire body of data on which history is based, as well as those writings. When you start to research a topic, you read the relevant books. If you are researching ancient history, good luck, because there have been commentaries on them for more than 2000 years. If you choose John Reed for a topic or others who died in the last century, there is a great deal of writing to absorb. Then you go back to the papers, the archives, and so forth, which have their own problematics, I know. It is not a trivial task, but a work of both research and art. For there is an art to writing history. It is not just putting words on paper, but telling a story in the best way you can. The readers all said nice things, but three of the four complained “that the book is way too Anglo-​American, with only a few mentions of European films.” I do also mention some African and Latin American films but only in passing. But my whole notion is that you cannot write about a historical film from China if you know nothing about Chinese history. Reading one, two, or three accounts of Chinese history will not prepare anyone for grappling with the questions of that history in detail. I told the publisher that I have created a way of looking at films, and now you are asking me to write about a range of films set in countries that I know very little about. Still, my editor requested a whole new section of the book. We negotiated, and I said, “Okay, I’ll do a chapter on a few (it turned out to be 12) foreign language films and write about why I am not qualified to analyze them deeply, but I’ll give you some ideas.” And so, I will have a preface to the book that deals with why the book consists mostly of detailed analyses of American or European films. Nelson: This suggests that the interdisciplinary field of history in moving images should move further in the direction of connecting scholars from all over the world with expertise in different national cinemas. Rosenstone: Yes, a couple of years ago, I was approached to write an essay on The Travelling Players, a film set in twentieth-​century Greece. I think it is one of the most brilliant history films ever made, but I know almost nothing about modern Greek history, so it would be a farce for me to try to write about it. With some regrets, I said no, I cannot do it. Find someone who knows Greek history. Nelson: At the symposium for the contributors to this volume, there was conversation about depictions of historians in film and TV. They are characterized in various ways, perhaps most memorably, the windbag in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The historian is not always the ideal character for mainstream scripted histories that rely on constant action and ever-​heightened conflict, as watching someone reading and writing does not make for engaging cinema. Rosenstone: Yes, in the Monty Python film, the modern historian living in Medieval times is beheaded. In our real life, however, it is historians beheading the importance of history films. Nelson: In your book, Adventures of a Postmodern Historian: Living and Writing the Past, you wrote that you like reading and dreaming other people’s lives. It’s a poetic appraisal. When we go into other people’s lives through history and think from their perspective, does it help us get out

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of our own heads in a constructive way? And might this aspect of history help us to conceive and dream different ways out of the present? Rosenstone: I think history is seeing the world from other people’s perspectives. And as a historian, you do it even more often because you get into the documents and geographic settings, and in a sense, you vicariously live other people’s lives in other eras. The thing about the future is that we know it won’t precisely repeat the past, though we often claim it does. History widens your sense of human experience. And insofar as that experience is wider, it can suggest possible alternatives for our beliefs and actions. You carry the past with you into your understanding of life and the future and how your beliefs and actions shape the future. Now I’m going to do something terrible: I am going to quote myself. As I said on 9/​11 as my wife and I watched the towers burn and fall, “The United States . . . the world will never be the same again.” What made me say that? The study of history, of wars and empires of the past. We could now write a book showing that I was right, as the last 22 years have shown. The study of history, this particular telling of stories that explore the breadth of human experience, our collective achievements and failures, armours you for life. How else do we learn to cope? From family, friends, schools, reading, and the media. History on the page and on screen, told in voices and images, helps us to understand the legacy we carry and will no doubt help to shape the future. But no historian, indeed no one at all, can tell you precisely how.

Bibliography Beatty, Warren. 1981. Reds. Paramount Pictures. Brockey, Liam. 2017. “Dying for the Faith in Japan, 1597–​1650.” Lecture presented by Assumption University at the University of Windsor, Windsor, Ontario, Canada, March 9. Buckner, Noel, Mary Dore, and Sam Stills.1984. The Good Fight: The Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War. Abraham Lincoln Brigade Project and The National Endowment for the Humanities. Davis, Natalie Zemon. [1983] 2001. The Return of Martin Guerre. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Davis, Natalie Zemon. 1987. “Any Resemblance to Persons Living or Dead: Film and The Challenge of Authenticity.” The Yale Review 6, no. 4: 457–​482. Davis, Natalie Zemon. 2000. Slaves on Screen: Film and Historical Vision. Canada: Vintage Canada. Forster, E.M. 1927. Aspects of the Novel. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Friedländer, Saul, ed. 1992. Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution.” Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Herodotus. 1996. The Histories. Translated by Aubrey De Sélincourt. London; New York: Penguin Books. Kracauer, Siegfried. 1969. History: The Last Things Before the Last. Translated by Paul Oskar Kristeller. Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener Publishers. Kracauer, Siegfried. [1960] 1997. Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality. New York: Oxford University Press. Nelson, Kim. 2024. Making History Move: Five Principles of the Historical Film. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Rosenstone, Robert A. 1969. Crusade of the Left: The Lincoln Battalion in the Spanish Civil War. New York: Pegasus. Rosenstone, Robert A. 1975. Romantic Revolutionary: A Biography of John Reed, 1st ed. New York: Knopf, distributed by Random House. Rosenstone, Robert A. 1982. “Reds as History.” Reviews in American History 10, no. 3: 297–​310. https://​doi. org/​10.2307/​2702​489. Rosenstone, Robert A. 1988. Mirror in the Shrine: American Encounters with Meiji Japan. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Rosenstone, Robert A. 1988. “History in Images/​History in Words: Reflections on the Possibility of Really Putting History onto Film.” The American Historical Review 93, no. 5: 1173–​1185. https://​doi.org/​ 10.2307/​1873​532.

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Afterword: history with images Rosenstone, Robert A. 2007. “Space for the Bird to Fly.” In Manifestos for History, edited by Keith Jenkins, Sue Morgan and Alun Munslow, 11–​18. Oxon: Routledge. [Google Scholar] Rosenstone, Robert A. 2013. History on Film/​Film on History, 2nd ed. Abingdon, Oxon; New York: Routledge. Rosenstone, Robert A. 2016. Adventures of a Postmodern Historian: Living and Writing the Past. London; New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Rosenstone, Robert A. 2017. History on Film/​Film on History, 3rd ed. Abingdon, Oxon; New York: Routledge. Rosenstone, Robert A., and Constantin Parvulescu, eds. 2013. A Companion to the Historical Film. Malden: Wiley-​Blackwell. The American Historical Review. 1988. 93, no. 5. Oxford University Press. Toplin, Robert Brent. 2000. “Stone on Stone’s Image.” Oliver Stone’s USA: Film, History, and Controversy, 40–​65. University Press of Kansas. “Volume Information.” 1988. The American Historical Review 93, no. 5: 1450–​1495. Watt, Donald. 1976. “History on the Public Screen I.” In The Historian and Film, edited by Paul Smith, 169–​176. White, Hayden. 1966. “The Burden of History.” History and Theory 5, no. 2: 111–​134. https://​doi.org/​ 10.2307/​2504​510. White, Hayden. 1988. “Historiography and Historiophoty.” The American Historical Review. 93, no. 5: 1193–​ 1199. https://​doi.org/​10.2307/​1873​534. White, Hayden. 2000. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-​Century Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

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INDEX

Note: Endnotes are indicated by the page number followed by “n” and the note number e.g., 191n29 refers to note 29 on page 191. 2bears, Jackson Leween 211, 212 9/​11: The Falling Man 52 32 Sounds 261, 262, 270 Aberth, John 130 actuality 30–​44, 84: films 34, 50, 84; footage 20, 34, 50; historical actuality 32, 33, 42; preclassical films 33–​34; see also reenactments; supplementation Adams, Jenni 317, 325 Adorno, Theodor 43, 164, 165 aesthetic actions 209 Afflerbach, Peter 301 Afrofuturism 194, 197, 204 Afro-​nostalgia 194–​96, 197, 201 Afro-​pessimism 194, 199, 204 Agnew, Vanessa 106 Ahad-​Legardy, Badia 195–​96 Ahmed, Sara 279 Aldgate, Anthony 10, 15, 19 Alexander, M. Jacqui 280, 281, 284, 291–​92, 294 Allen, Robert C. 103 Allison, Tanine 76–​77 All Quiet on the Western Front 79, 80–​81, 228, 229, 230 American Civil War cinema, New 225–​38, 319: Emancipation Cause tradition 234–​36; Lost Cause tradition 231–​33; Reconciliation Cause tradition 236–​37; Union Cause tradition 233–​34 American Historical Review 18, 21, 23 American Historical Review Forum 18, 338–​39 Anderson, Benedict 245 Anderson, Carolyn 104

Animal Planet 62–​63, 67 Ankersmit, Frank 39–​41, 42, 258, 263, 271, 337 archives 209–​21: access 108–​9; archival footage 11, 12–​13, 212, 216, 217, 220, 221; archiveology 214; archiving film 8–​9, 10, 12; categorizing 278; collaborations 281; content 277; creating with 210, 221, 277, 279, 335; crossing the threshold 284; governing 210, 211; Live Documentary 261, 262; processes 277; refraction 210, 221; remediation 74, 210, 211, 220, 221; rememory 210, 212, 221, 291; remix theory 211; re-​presentation 33, 42, 77, 292; restorying 210, 213, 221; right of reply 220; right to know 220; undoing 277, 278, 291, 293; visual sovereignty 217, 219, 222n15 Aristotle 46, 49, 61, 155 Arthurs, Jane 252, 255 Asif, K. 182, 183 Aston, Judith 269 Atget, Eugène 41 A Thousand Thoughts 261 Atkinson, Sarah 267–​68, 271 Attenborough, Richard 178–​79 audiences see spectatorship audiovisual histories 20–​21, 244, 319, 323 Auslander, Philip 268 authenticity 14, 24, 37, 65–​66, 244, 252, 304 authorship 260, 262, 263, 266 Azoulay, Ariella 279, 280–​81, 285, 291 Baadassss! 99, 103–​4, 105, 106 Bailey, Cameron 283 Bakhtin, Mikhail 227–​28, 234

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Index Bal, Mieke 77–​78, 80, 81, 212 Bandit Queen 179–​80 Banks, Miranda 278 Barnaby, Jeff 209, 214, 216 Baron, Jaime 213 Barrett, Jenny 227, 237 Barsam, Richard M. 83–​84 Barthes, Roland 33, 41, 51 Bartlett, Becky 104 Bazin, André 13 BBC 245–​46 Beatty, Warren 330–​34 Bell, Erin 244 Bellour, Raymond 267 BenHaMeen 201, 203, 204–​5 Benjamin, Walter 41, 164–​67, 169, 272, 273 Berkhofer, Robert 260, 262 Bertolucci, Bernardo 335 Betrand, Karine 219 Bevernage, Berber 165–​66 Beyoncé 204, 205 Bilandzic, Helena 61 Bingham, Dennis 103 biographical genre 109, 260, 261 Birth of a Nation, The 225, 227, 228, 231 Bjorkland Jr., Peter 303 Black aliveness 198–​99, 202 Black Canadians (After Cooke) 289, 293 Black Drones in the Hive 279–​83, 284–​85 Black feminist liberation 195, 198 Black performance study 277, 284–​85, 292 Blacksmith, Sam 214, 215 Blair Witch Project, The 59, 65, 68 Blaxploitation films 100, 103–​4, 106, 253 Bolter, Jay David 211 Booker, M. Keith 118, 123 Booth, Wayne C. 61 Boudreau, Brenda 119 Bowen, Deanna 276–​95: audience 279, 280, 281, 284, 286, 288–​89; collaborative pedagogy 277, 289; methodology 277, 291; prismatic approach 278, 280 Boyd, Michelle 197 Boym, Svetlana 115 Brady, Matthew 227, 228, 230, 232 Brady, Miranda J. 211 Brecht, Bertolt 167, 264, 265–​66 Breton, André 220–​21 Brockey, Liam 332 Bronfen, Elisabeth 81 brown, adrienne maree 195, 203–​4 Buchanan, Lisa Brown 304 Bunzl, Martin 317 Burgoyne, Robert 23, 24, 35, 36, 105–​6, 144, 163, 190n21, 229, 260, 262 Burke, Andrew 219, 220

Burkholder, Peter 1, 47–​48, 49, 52 Burnham, Michelle 197 Burns, Ken 13, 229, 231, 236, 238 Busselle, Rick 61 Butler, Rose 122, 124 Bynum, Victoria E. 226, 234, 237 Caldwell, John T. 99–​100, 110 Callens, Melissa Vosen 125, 126 Campt Tina, T. 293 Carr, E.H. 316 Casetti, Francesco 74, 75, 77, 259, 269 Cassidy, Taylor 252–​55: Fast Black History 253; presentation style 253; TikTok 252–​54 César's Bark Canoe 214–​15, 217 “Challenge for Change” 214, 217 Chapman, James 17, 99 Chartrand, Rhéanne 214, 216–​17 Chopra-​Grant, Mike 23 Christie, Ian 78 Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe 132, 135–​38, 141 cinema of attractions 50, 265, 266, 269 Citizen Kane 101, 102 Civil War, The 13, 229, 231, 235, 236 Civil War cinema see American Civil War cinema, New Class of '61 236, 237 Claxton, Dana 211–​12 Cmiel, Kenneth 255–​56 Cohan, Steven 99, 100, 101 Cold Mountain 232 Cole, Sarah 235 Collingwood, R.G. 39 Comolli, Jean-​Louis 13, 37, 38 compilation films 12, 78 Coombs, Adam 105 Coppola, Francis Ford 268 Corsa, Andrew 263 counterfactual histories 131, 315, 316–​17, 323 Cowen, Paul S. 61, 63, 65 Cowley, Robert 316 Crash Course 298, 299–​300, 303–​5: difficult histories 303–​8, 310; Green, John 299–​300, 306–​8; presentation style 300 Crawley, Ashon 197, 198, 293–​94 creature feature 60 Cree Hunters of the Mistassini 214, 217 Cripps, Thomas R. 15, 16 Cubitt, Sean 272 Cultural Studies 7, 11, 13–​19, 22–​24 Cunningham, Stuart 250 Custen, George 102, 103 Cuthrell, Kristen 303

345

Index see also Game of Thrones; Lovecraft Country; The Chronicles of Naria: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe; The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of Rings Fargo 58–​59, 60 Farred, Grant 196 Fatona, Andrea 277, 283 faux-​documentary 59, 62, 64 Felsenthal, Julia 123 feminist production study 277, 278–​79, 282 Ferguson, Niall 316–​17, 323 Ferro, Marc 15, 17–​18 Fields, Barbara 225, 237, 238 Filene, Benjamin 252, 255 Film and Cultural Studies 11, 13–​14 Film History 22, 23 Film Studies 9, 11, 21–​22 Finke, Laurie 138 Fledelius, Karsten 15 Fogel, Robert William 316 Foucault, Michel 213, 269 found footage films 35, 65, 78 Free State of Jones 225–​38: disenchanted violence 235–​36; Emancipation Cause tradition 235–​36; as New Civil War cinema 226, 233; pre-​cinema visual culture 227, 228–​29, 232–​33; Reconciliation Cause tradition 236–​37; Union Cause tradition 233–​35; see also American Civil War cinema, New Friedan, Betty 321 Friedberg, Anne 272 Friedländer, Saul 339 Future is Wild, The 62, 63

Daly, Alan J. 303 Damisch, Hubert 212 Danto, Arthur 39, 41 Daraiseh, Isra 118, 123 Das, Santanu 75 Davis, Natalie Zemon 21, 144, 157, 258, 263, 331, 337 Death of Stalin, The 145, 147–​56 Debord, Guy 267 de Certeau, Michel 188 De Groot, Jerome 23, 131–​32 Deleuze, Gilles 19, 167, 225 del Fresno Garcia, Miguel 303 Delholmme, Benoît 230–​31 Desai, Anita 179 Desser, David 46, 48, 49 dialectical images 165–​67: Get Out 168–​69; Lovecraft Country 171–​73; Watchmen 169–​71 Dick, Philip K. 315, 316, 317, 325 Diehl, Kristin 59 difficult histories 299, 300, 303–​5, 309–​10 Disaster Artist, The 103, 105, 106, 107 disenchanted violence 235–​36 disidentification 293 Dixon, Dougal 62 Doane, Mary Ann 43 documentary 22, 34, 83–​84: faux-​ 59, 62, 64; filmmaking 83–​86, 88, 89, 93–​97; pedagogical uses 304; reenactment 34, 37; remediation 74–​82, 210, 211; television 12–​13; see also Live Documentary Documentary Theatre 264, 265 Dolemite is My Name 104, 106 Donnelly, Debra 301 Drakopoulou, Sophia 252 Due, Tananarive 194, 199 Dwyer, Michael D. 119 Eberthardt, J.A. 231 Edgerton, Gary 23 Ed Wood 99, 103–​6 Eisenstein, Sergei 265, 266, 269 Eisler, Hanns 43 Elsaesser, Thomas 269, 270 Emancipation Cause tradition 228, 231, 234, 236, 237 ephemeral collisions 292–​93 Epic History 249–​50; see also Groom, Toby epic theatre 264, 265–​66 ethics 48–​53 ethos 46, 49, 61 Evan, Richard J. 317 Expanded Cinema 259, 267, 268, 269 fantasy: films 167, 171: medieval 129–​32, 141–​42; of witnessing 34, 37–​38, 42;

Gallagher, Catherine 319 Gallagher, Gary W. 228, 231 Game of Thrones, “Rain’s of Castamere” 130, 132, 138–​41 Gandhi 178–​79, 181 Gandhi, My Father 179 Gare, Arran 263 Garrett, H. James 304 Gaudreault, André 266 Genette, Gérard 24 genre memory 227–​28, 234 Get Out 168–​69 Gilbert, Daniel T. 61 Gilroy, Paul 277, 293 Gittings, Chris 217 Glancy, Mark 17, 99 Glory 225, 227, 234–​35, 237 Gomery, Douglas 103 Gonzalez, Anita 285, 292 Gopnick, Adam 37 Gottschall, Jonathan 138 Gowariker, Ashutosh 180, 181, 182–​83

346

Index Grainge, Paul 100, 108 Green, John 299–​300, 306–​8 Green, Misha 171, 199, 202 Green, Sam 258, 259, 261, 264, 266, 270, 272; see also Live Documentary Grenier, Richard 178 Grenville, John A.S. 15 Grierson, John 84 Griffith, Jane 219 Groom, Toby 247, 254, 255 Gross, Magdalena H. 304, 305, 306 Grusin, Richard 211 Gunning, Tom 50–​51, 265, 266 Guthrie, Caroline 131, 163 Guynn, William 23

Huberman, Isabella 217, 219 Hughes, William 15 Hughes-​Warrington, Marnie 23, 131, 272–​73 Hulbert, Matthew Christopher 117 Huntzicker, William E. 237 Huston, Aletha C. 60–​61 Huston, John 233 Hutcheon, Linda 221 Huyssen, Andreas 271 Hynes, Samuel 79 hypertopia 265

Hall, Alice 60 Hamilton, Shelley 294 Han, Simran 126 Hannah-​Jones, Nicole 164 Hartman, Saidiya 164, 167–​68, 195 Harty, Kevin 129, 130 Haspel, Paul 232, 237 Hassler-​Forest, Dan 120 Heritage Minutes 211 Heritage Mythologies 211 Herlihy, David 18, 338 heterogeneity 265 heterotopia 269 Hewitt, Andrew 289, 292 Hey Ram 179, 181 High Steel 216, 218 Hindi historical cinema 176–​88: blockbuster historicals 180–​82, 185; Kaal (Time/​Death) 186–​87, 191n29, 191n30; karmic temporality 187–​88; “known” past 184; new “historicals” 180–​84; parallel cinema 177–​78; pedagogical approach 176–​88 historicization 20, 37, 40–​41, 165–​66, 197, 260, 262 histories, alternate 314–​18: allohistory 315, 317, 323; competency 319; nexus event 315; in novels 315–​16; presentist 317 historiography 17, 23, 30–​33, 38–​44, 260 historiophoty 1, 7, 18, 48, 51, 258, 260, 261, 267, 272–​73, 339 “History and film” 7, 9, 17, 22, 24 History Hit TV 247–​49; see also Snow, Dan Hitchcock 99, 101–​2, 103, 105 Hladki, Janice 212 Hoberman, J. 102 hooks, bell 280 Horak, Jan-​Christopher 76, 109 Horkheimer, Max 164–​65 horror 115, 117, 168, 194, 195, 198, 327; see also Lovecraft Country; Stranger Things; Us Hozic, Aida 99, 100

indexicality 32–​34, 41 Indian Memento 216, 218, 219 Indigenous histories on film 209–​22 intellectual property 100, 107–​10, 135 interiorization 33, 36, 42–​43 intertextuality 80–​81, 118, 127, 150 Jackson, Martin A. 15, 16 Jackson, Peter 35, 37, 75–​77, 79, 80, 132–​34 Jarvie, Ian 15 Jay, Martin 41 Jinnah 179 Jodhaa Akbar 181, 182–​84 Johnson, Catherine 243 Jones, Troy 303 Jordanova, Ludmilla 245 Julian, Betty 283, 289 Kaal (Time/​Death) 186, 187, 191n29, 191n30 Kappelhoff, Hermann 229 karmic temporality 187–​88 Kaufler, Melissa A. 119 Kaye, Simon T. 323 Kean, Hilda 245 Keeling, Kara 291 Kelly, John M.H. 211 King, Tatiana 201, 202, 203, 205, 206 Knipfel, Jim 59 Konishi, Takako 58–​59, 60, 61 Koselleck, Reinhart 31–​32, 38, 39, 40, 188 Kracauer, Siegfried 10–​11, 13, 15, 16, 164, 335 Kronos Quartet 261 Kuehl, Jerry 12, 15 Kuhn, Annette 23 Laal Kaptaan 176, 185–​87 Lacasse, Germain 265 Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India 180–​81 Lage Raho Munna Bhai 179, 184, 185 Landrum, Jason 115, 124 Landsberg, Alison 23, 163, 168, 236, 272–​73, 319, 323 Landy, Marcia 17, 22, 23, 24, 156, 163 LaRocca, David 84

347

Index Latimer, Michelle 209, 214, 216, 221n2 Latour, Bruno 271 Lawrence, Janice 216, 218–​19 LeAnn, Joyce 281 Lecture-​Performance 264, 265 Legend of Boggy Creek, The 59–​60 Leitner, David 37 Lepecki, Andre 291, 293 Levi, Carlo 339 Levy, David 33–​34 Lewis, C.S. 132, 135 Live Cinema 211, 222n4, 268, 269, 270 Live Documentary 258–​73 liveness 268 Locke, Hilary Jane 140 Lorde, Audre 200 Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring 132–​34, 141 loss/​compensation 41–​42 Lost Cause tradition 226, 228, 229, 231–​34, 235, 236, 237 Lotz, Amanda 244 Lovecraft Country 171–​73, 194–​206: Black horror 194, 195, 196, 197, 199; multiverse 197, 203–​4; pleasure activism 194, 195, 204; sci-​fi/​ fantasy 194 Lowenthal, David 165 Lowenthal, Leo 103 Luker, Trish 220 Lupo, Jonathan 104 MacDonald, Shana 259 Mager, Sophia 121 Majumdar, Rochana 178 Making of the Mahatma, The 179 Man in the High Castle, The (novel) 314–​27 Man in the High Castle The (TV series) 315, 316: dystopian nostalgia 320–​21; juxtaposition 319–​25; many worlds theory 323, 324; multiverse 322–​23; production design 318 Mank 101, 102, 107 many worlds theory 323, 324 Marcus, Alan S. 301–​2, 304, 309 Martin, Anne 49 Martin, Carol 264 Martin, George R.R. 132, 138, 140 Martin, Keavy 209 Mary Poppins 100, 107–​10, 111 materialist history 147, 165–​67 Matthews, Jill Julius 23 Matuszewski, Boleslas 1, 8–​9, 10, 13, 15 McDonald, Soraya Nadia 120 McKittrick, Katherine 277 media and deception: deception-​for-​profit 57–​58; plausibility 59, 62–​63, 64–​65, 66; techniques 61, 64, 65–​66, 68; true story disclaimer 58–​60

medieval fantasy see fantasy Méliès, Georges 50 memory see genre memory; prosthetic memory “Memory Project” 85 Mermaids: The Body Found 62–​63, 65, 68 Mermaids: The New Evidence 62–​63, 66, 67 metamodernism 258, 261, 262–​64 Metz, Christian 16, 43 Metzger, Scott Alan 302–​3, 309 Miller, Henry 332 Mills, Gary D. 304 Mirch Masala 177, 178 Mitoma, Glenn 304 Mittell, Jason 318, 326 Mobilize 209, 214–​21 modernity 31–​32, 133, 164: Mobilize 217–​18, 219 Monkman, Kent 209, 211–​12, 213, 214, 216 Monnet, Caroline 209, 214–​21 montage of attractions 266 Montagu, Ivor 84 Morgan, Joan 195 moving histories 258, 259–​60, 262, 266, 269–​70, 271, 279–​81, 288–​89, 293, 295n3 Mowry, Crystal 279, 281 Mughal-​e-​Azam 182, 183 Muller, Christine 120 multiverse 167, 171, 172, 197, 202–​4, 206, 323, 324, 326 Muñoz, José Esteban 293 Munslow, Alun 261–​62, 263, 339–​40 Munsterberg, Hugo 43 Murphy, Bernice M. 116–​17 Murray, Simone 108 My Week with Marilyn 101, 102, 103 Nandy, Ashis 181 narratives: combat 86–​87, 89–​91, 92; counter-​ narrative 79, 300, 304; exclusion of 88–​89; multiverse 323–​24 National Film Board of Canada 209–​10, 214, 216–​18, 220 National Gallery of Canada 217, 293 Nichols, Bill 34, 35, 37, 42, 84 nostalgia 115, 220, 221, 320–​21: 1980s 114–​15, 118–​20; Afro 194–​96, 197, 201; dystopian 320; historical 195; Jim Crow 197 Nunes, Joseph C. 59, 60 Obomsawin, Alanis 217 O’Connor, John E. 15, 16, 18, 19–​20, 21, 22, 301, 338 On Trial The Long Doorway 284–​88, 289 O’Sullivan, Timothy 227, 228–​29, 232 otherwise possibility 194, 198, 204, 206 Oudart, Jean-​Pierre 13

348

Index parallel cinema 177–​78, 182 Paris, Carl 293 Parker, Geoffrey 316 Partsch, Cornelius 326 Parvulescu, Constantin 23 past-​present barrier 32, 34, 36, 38–​41 Patreon 247, 250, 256n3 Paul, Herman 40 Pearl Harbour 46, 50, 52 Pearson, Heath 123, 124 Peele, Jordan 115, 118, 121, 126, 168, 195 Peters, John Durham 255–​56 Philip, M. NourbeSe 283 Plan 9 From Outer Space 104, 105, 106–​7 pleasure activism 194, 195, 204 Poe, Marshall 21 Pontalis, J.B. 34 Poole, Scott W. 117 postmodernism 14, 16, 18, 20, 263–​64 post-​truth 258, 271 Pouliot, Louise 61, 63, 65, 69 Powell, Zachary Michael 317, 325 pre-​cinema visual culture 226, 227–​28, 229–​31, 235 primary sources 38, 41: in Crash Course 299–​300, 309; film as 177, 187 production history film 99–​111: anti-​great man 103–​4; “backstudio” film 99; director-​as-​auteur 104–​5; Hollywood depictions 100–​3; Off-​Hollywood depictions 103–​7 prosthetic memory 236, 237, 238n9 public histories 243–​56 Pudovkin, Vsevolod 84 Quashie, Kevin 198, 199 Quilombo 340 quotation in film 77–​78, 80 Rambo 46, 50, 51, 52 Rang de Basanti 184–​85 realism: identifying in media 59, 60–​62, 63; patterns 57–​82; satire and realism 144–​56 reality-​effects 33, 36, 38 Recollect, Karyn 211 Reconciliation Cause tradition 228, 231, 236–​37 Red Badge of Courage, The 227, 233 Reds 330–​34, 336, 338 Reed, John 330, 332–​34, 336 reenactments 33–​34, 37–​38, 42, 105–​6 reflexivity 263–​64 releasement 293–​94 remediation 74, 210, 211, 220, 221; see also They Shall Not Grow Old rememory 210, 212, 221, 291 re-​presentation 33, 42, 77, 292 restorying 210, 213, 221 Rethinking History 339

Return of Martin Guerre 337 Rickard, Jolene 219 Rifkin, Mark 212 RKO 281 99, 101, 102, 103, 105 Robinson, Dylan 209 Robinson, M.J. 244 Rodowick, D.N. 75 Rollins, Peter C. 15, 21, 23 Room, The 103, 104, 105, 106, 107 Rosen, Philip 10, 12, 32, 38, 157n4, 191n31 Rosen, Robert 100 Rosenfeld, Gavriel 317 Rosenheim, Jeff 229 Rosenstone, Robert A. 18, 20–​21, 22, 23, 30, 34, 100, 177, 187, 210, 234, 271, 330–​42: Adventures of a Postmodern Historian 342; Crusade of the Left 330, 336; fictional inventions 331–​32, 334–​35, 336; historical consultant 330, 331; historiography 337; History on Film/​Film on History 20, 341, 343; Mirror in the Shrine 330, 337, 339; “Reds as History” 338; Revisioning the Past 20–​21; Romantic Revolutionary 330; storytelling 338, 341; teaching history on film 338, 340; Visions of the Past 20–​21 Rosenzweig, Roy 1, 47, 255, 301 Ross, Gary 226, 227, 230, 232, 235 Ruby, Jay 264 Russell, Catherine 78, 214, 221 Russell, William B. 302 Samuel, Ralph 246 satire 146, 151–​53: Death of Stalin 144–​56 Saving Mr. Banks 101, 107–​10 Saving Private Ryan 228, 229, 234 Sayers, Nicola 114–​15 Schaffer, Dana 1, 47–​48, 49, 52 Sconce, Jeffrey 99, 104 Scott, Allen J. 110 Scott, Malcolm 228 Screened History 7–​24, 131–​32: phase 1 (1898–​1949) 8–​11; phase 2 (1950–​1969) 11–​14; phase 3 (1970–​1979) 14–​16; phase 4 (1980–​ 1989) 16–​18; phase 5 (1990–​1999) 19–​22; phase 6 (2000 and beyond) 22–​24 Searle, Alison 136, 140–​41 Sepinwall, Alan 205 Sharpe, Christina 164, 168, 198–​99 Shatranj ke Khilari 177–​78 Shichtman, Martine B. 138 Singh, Navdeep 176, 186, 187 Singles, Kathleen 315, 319 Singleton, David 105 Sisters and Brothers 212, 213 Smith, Paul 15–​16, 19, 21 Snelson, Chareen 303 Snow, Dan 249–​50

349

Index Snow, Peter 247–​50, 254–​55 social choreography 285, 288–​89, 292 social cinema 272 social media 57, 298; see also Crash Course; TikTok; user-​generated content; YouTube Sorlin, Pierre 15, 17–​18, 21, 139 “Souvenir” series 209, 212, 214, 216, 218, 219 spectatorship 15, 17, 19, 46–​47, 52, 164–​65, 170: communal spectatorship 258, 259, 262, 267, 270, 271; expectations 118; historical spectatorship 13–​14, 16, 17, 23, 51; influence 87; social choreography 281, 284, 286, 288–​89 speculative evolution 62–​63 Sprengler, Christine 320 Squires, Catherine 163 Staiger, Janet 22, 23 Stam, Robert 263 Stephens, Robert P. 304 Stephenson, Jenn 264 Stevens, Barry 83, 85, 86 Stewart, Tyson 212–​13, 222n9 Stoddard, Jeremy D. 301–​2, 309 Stone, Linda 271–​72 Stone, Oliver 337 Stoner, Megan 135 Storaro, Vittorio 334–​35 Storm, Jason Josephson 263 Stranger Things 114–​27: 1980s nostalgia 114–​15, 118–​20; horror 117, 124, 126; mirror worlds 116, 117, 120, 124–​25; New Right 119, 120, 122; Upside Down 115–​16, 122, 125, 126 Stringfield, Bessie 203 Stubbs, Jonathan 23, 111n5, 131, 135, 144 Studlar, Gaylyn 46, 48, 49 Suh, Yonghee 302–​3 supplementation 33, 34, 36, 37, 38, 41–​43 Sverrisson, Árni 84 Sweet Sweetback's Baadassss Song 103–​4, 106 Swenberg, Thorbjörn 84 Switek, Brian 68 Tagaq, Tanya 215, 217, 219, 221 Taunton, Carla 212, 222n14 Taylor, A.J.P. 12 teaching history with film 24, 176–​78, 299, 301–​3, 308, 340: difficult histories 303–​5, 326; media literacy skills 303 Televising History project 244–​45, 254 Television Studies 11, 14 televisual history 7, 9, 10, 11, 12: audiovisual 20–​21, 244, 319, 322, 323; broadcast era 243, 244, 254; complex TV 318, 326; digital and internet era 243–​44, 245, 246; experimental 323, 326, 327; historically conscious dramas 323; synthetic histories 323

temporality 31–​32, 211, 212, 216, 267, 283, 291: counter 164, 166–​67, 168; disruptions 220–​21; karmic 187–​88; reframings 219 Terra, Luke 304, 305, 306 Tetlock, Philip E. 316 Theatre of the Real 264, 265 Thelen, David 1, 47, 255, 301 Theobald, Andrew 85, 86 They Shall Not Grow Old 35–​38, 42, 74–​82: as quotation 77–​78; restoration critique 76–​77; selectivity critique 74–​75 TikTok 8, 247, 252–​54, 255 Tolkien, J.R.R. 132–​33 Toplin, Robert Brent 18, 21–​22, 228, 231, 233, 338 towardness 198 Treacey, Mia 131 Tribe Called Red 217 Trigg, Stephanie 130 Trotti, Lamar 102 Truffaut, François 13 Truth and Reconciliation Commission 209, 212 Umrao Jaan 177–​78 Union Cause tradition 228, 231, 233–​34, 236 Untouchables 59 Us 114–​27: 1980s nostalgia 115, 118–​20; Hands Across America 121, 126–​27; horror genre 117, 124, 126; mirror worlds 116, 117, 120, 124–​25; Tethered 116, 120–​21, 125, 126 user-​generated content 8, 24, 246 Valour and the Horror, The 94 Valsesia, Francesca 59 Van Alphen, Ernst 78 VanDerBeek, Stan 259 VanSledright, Bruce 301 Van Veldhuizen, Adriaan 40 Verevis, Constantine 105 Vidhaata 187 visual selectivity 35–​36 visual sovereignty 217, 219, 222n15 vivification 37–​38, 42 Vogel, Joseph 119, 122, 123 von Gleich, Paula 204 Wagner, Marianne 264 Walcott, Rinaldo 279 Walker, Alice 206 Walkowitz, Daniel 21 War of the Worlds 68 Warr, Catherine 247, 250–​52, 254–​56 War Story 83–​97: editing process 84, 86, 88, 89, 92–​96, 97; editorial exclusion 85–​86; narrative exclusion 88–​89 war-​western 227 Watchmen 169–​71

350

Index Watt, Donald 331 Weinczok, David 139 Welch, David 322 Welles, Orson 68, 102, 103, 105 Wente, Jesse 283 Wetmore Jr., Kevin J. 118 Whissel, Kristen 33, 34, 37, 42 White, Hayden 18, 48–​49, 187, 330, 337–​39: The Burden of History 258, 337; Metahistory 18, 48, 144, 146, 154 White Hunter, Black Heart 101, 102, 103, 105 Wilderson III, Frank 204

Williamson, Terrion L. 199 Wilson, Pamela 219 Wood, Robin 117 Worley, Alec 130 Worth, Sarah E. 61 Yorkshire's Hidden History 250–​52, 254–​55 Youngblood, Gene 267 YouTube 246, 247, 249–​52, 254, 298–​311: Crash Course; educational purposes 298–​99; teaching difficult histories 303–​5; see also user-​generated content

351