History, the World, and Their Representation in Movies

[bimo]

Currently reading History and the Media, a compilation of essays dealing with the rendering of historical subjects for both TV and silver screen. Editor David Cannadine picked some illustrious contributors I must say, as the table of contents looks quite a bit like the 'Who is Who' of BBC historians, telly-friendly academics and history-friendly producers.

Among the featured texts is one I'd very much like to quote from, partly for personal reference, partly in vague hope that it might perhaps capture somebody else's interest as much as it captured mine:





Some people try to persuade us that films and television are a business just like any other. They are not. Films and television (like newspapers) shape attitudes and behaviour, and in doing so, reinforce or undermine many of the wider values of society. We have come to accept that cinema's influence on people's behaviour, and their sense of history, is a global phenomenon. We should recognise, for instance, that thousands or even millions of young people are growing up in incredibly distressed circumstances. Wherever they are concentrated in the world -every one of these locations is a 'tinderbox' which could explode at any moment. It's important to reflect on the fact that simplistic and insensitive plots, images and stereotypes can only make those explosions that much more inevitable.

[...]

This is why cinema, and its relationship with history and the 'real world' matters. [...] But if film-makers simply make movies which rely on technology and special effects to portray their world, I fear that the difference between the demands of mainstream cinema and our everyday reality could well become just too great, with consequences that will ultimately effect all of us.

[...]

There is a quote from the great Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky which I have been using for almost twenty years but which I still think captures all of this quite beautifully. Shortly before his death, Tarkovsky wrote this:

"The connection between man's behaviour and his destiny has been destroyed; and this tragic breach is the cause of his growing sense of uncertainty in the modern world...because he has been conditioned into the belief that nothing depends on him, and that his personal experience will not affect the future, he has arrived at the false and deadly belief that he has no part to play in the shaping of even his own fate...I am convinced that any attempt to restore harmony in the world can only rest on the renewal of personal responsibility."

He was, of course, talking about film-makers.


David Puttnam, "Has Hollywood Stolen our History?" in David Cannadine, ed., History and the Media (Houndmills, Hampshire: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004).






100% Optional Feedback Poll. To be taken about as seriously as the depiction of British Colonialism throughout all three of Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean movies ;-)

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