Consuming History

History on Film and Television in the USA and UK

Today’s class

• 1/ Preface: What is Popular/ Public History? (plenary introduction)

• 2/ History on Television: Documentary (group discussion/ work)

• 3/ Film History and National Identity(group discussion/ work)

1/ What is ‘public/ popular history’?

• An investigation into the way that history works in popular culture

• Or: an investigation into the way that history is made public

• Or: an investigation into the way that publics get their histories

• History as practice?• ‘The employment of historians

and historical method outside of academic’ (Robert Kelley)

• The ‘historical imagination’

• The ‘historical sensibility’ of a nation, an audience, a group

• Response to shifts in museum practice, collecting

• ?does Public/ Popular history have a ‘centre’?

Radicalism: the past vs. history

• ‘History’ must be radically severed from ‘past’: the former is always calibrated with cultural contradictions, whereas the latter is much more fluid a notion. ‘Past’ is involved with both active and involuntary memory, but ‘history’ can only project the simulation of the remembered.

- Sande Cohen

Ato Quayson, developing Chakrabarty

• ‘I ask for a history that deliberately makes visible, within the very structure of its narrative forms, its own repressive strategies and practices, the part it plays in collusion with the narratives of citizenship in assimilating to the projects of the modern state all other possibilities of human solidarity’, Postcolonialism, p. 48

‘History Happens’• Popular audiences have become

involved in and understand the stakes in historical representation, recognize ‘history in the making,’ and see themselves not only as spectators of history but also as participants in and adjudicators of it. Current debates around the nature, shape, and narration of history are no longer on the province of academic historians and scholars of film and literature. ‘History happens’ now in the public sphere where the search for a lost object has led not only to cheap substitutes but, in the process, also to the quickening of a new historical sense and perhaps a more active and reflective historical subject

Celebrating some bits and forgetting others, heritage reshapes a past made easy to embrace. And just as heritage practitioners take pride in creating artifice, the public enjoys consuming it. Departures from history distress only a handful of highbrows. Most neither seek historical veracity nor mind its absence.

One of the key questions:

• IS THIS OK?

– What happens when history is ‘outside’ the academy?

– Who ‘controls’ it?– Who ‘uses’ it?– What does it become?

Consuming history?

2/ History on Television

• Documentary history• Development of style through

the C20th• Shift of focus in much

documentary from ‘great story’ to ‘personal touch’?

• Interactivity and development of evidence

• ‘authorship’ – the historian and the documentary

• Anglophone focus?• ‘popularity’ – WWII and

Pharaohs

• The YouTube clips (group, 15 minutes): – What is the style of the

presenter?– What do they tell us?– What kind of history are they

giving us?– How do they get their authority? – What evidence do they use?– Is there anything controversial

here? – What does this suggest about how

history works in popular culture?– How is it being consumed?

History on television

• Types of documentary• Evolution of the

documentary form• How does this

communicate ‘history’?• How does this allow the

audience to ‘think historically’?

• Give some examples of how it works in your experience

• How might it work around the world?

• Different cultures, different historiographies?

3/ Film and National Identity

• How does film add to national identity?

• Is this an easy fit?• Nationalism/ identity?• Think about ‘national

cinemas’ from early cinema:– Hollywood– Bollywood– Nollywood– British film – Russian film – But, influence of émigrés?

Rosenstone

• History on film • The influence of historical

film on the way we think about the past

• ‘the contribution of the historical film to historical understanding’

• Range of types of historical film

• The creation of ‘real’ atmosphere

• What do you think?• Should historical films

be respectful of the past?

• Give some examples of films that ‘work’ and films that don’t

• What are the ethics of making films about real people?

Rosenstone in detail

Mainstream film:• History as a story• History as story of

individuals• ‘completed and simple

past’• Emotional, personal

history• History as process• The ‘look’ of history

Experimental contests these in Rosenstone’s viewExperimental film is more ‘useful’?…they ‘may help to revision what we mean by history’

Higson on national cinema

• Status of British film• Gravitas and film

making• Types of ‘Britain’ sold

in film around the world

• ‘new’ genre – the Costume Drama

Higson: costume drama and nation

• Linearity (?)• Nostalgia (?) • Political conservatism• Thatcherism• ‘heritage industry’ >

Museums, sites, art galleries…

• Fascination with: property, houses, things, ownership, inheritance

Higson: costume drama and nation

• Linearity (?)• Nostalgia (?) • Political conservatism

• But: innovation• But: movement,

dynamism, historicity• But: ART?