Lights, Camera, History: Portraying the Past in Film
edited by Richard Francaviglia and Jerry Rodnitzky
Texas A&M University Press, 138 pp., $19.95
“The farmer and the cowman should be friends!” Such is the lyric that constituted a main theme of the 1955 big-screen musical Oklahoma! It was a declaration that, during the time period represented, was revolutionary if not heretical. Not too dissimilar is the notion that, throughout the relatively brief history of the motion picture as an art form, two warring camps have each claimed to best understand the medium: the “serious” filmgoer and the more casual “movie hound.” Lights, Camera, History collects five essays addressing the issue of how – and how well – the cinema has handled the job of portraying historical personages, places, and events from its silent early days to the present era of the Hollywood megablockbuster.
A cursory flip through the book’s pages shows it to be a product of film aesthetes. The back cover further identifies it as an “important volume” with an equally important intent, stating unequivocally that “students WILL see historical films, and if they are not taught critical viewing, they will be inclined simply to accept what they see as fact.” One might expect the contents to be drier than James Bond’s martini.
Surprisingly, given the blurbs’ overwrought sense of urgency, the quintet of academically sound essays within has much to offer all cinephiles. Robert Rosenstone’s “In Praise of the Biopic” examines the positive side of the oft-derided field of the filmed biography. “History Is What Remains: Cinema’s Challenge to Ideas About the Past” by Geoff Pingree focuses specifically on Jay Rosenblatt’s 1998 featurette, “Human Remains,” in order to illustrate the possibilities for character revelation inherent in the medium.
Perhaps most fascinating is “Crusaders and Saracens,” by editor Richard Francaviglia, which opens its look into the portrayal of orientalism in film with an examination of Howard Hughes’ legendary 1956 miscasting of Caucasian cowboy John Wayne as Mongolian warlord Genghis Khan and manages to mention – at least in passing – Conan the Barbarian, the Lord of the Rings trilogy, the Indiana Jones series, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and the recent Hollywood “event” National Treasure. The subject could easily fill a book on its own, especially since, at its current 37-page length, it barely even addresses the early movies’ persistent Fu Manchu-led image of the calculating “yellow devil.”
The final essay, “In Defense of the Filmmakers,” by Robert Brent Toplin, is rather too specific in its uncovering of positive occurrences that might be
attributable to certain historical dramas (D.W. Griffith’s notorious 1915 smash, The Birth of a Nation, revived a dying Ku Klux Klan, but it also spawned anti-racism protests in Boston, New York, and L.A.; the 1978 made-for-TV miniseries Holocaust opened previously closed eyes and ears in Germany). Overall, though, the volume does a good job at its self-proclaimed goal of educating cinemagoers about both the good and bad elements to be found in cinema’s depictions of the past. Possibly even better, it does its fair share toward narrowing the gap between the “farmer” and “cowman” in the movie-theatre audience – which bodes well for the world of motion pictures, be they focused on the past, the present, or the future.
This article appears in June 29 • 2007.