Films as history

I went to hear Giacomo Lichtner's talk at the weekly history seminar on The Double Historicity of Historical Film: Revisiting Rosenstone. I went because I am on the mailing list and thus was invited, and because Giacomo is a friend. I had never heard of Robert Rosenstone, who is a film historian, so I didn't know what Giacomo's argument with Rosenstone was about, but I could certainly follow the crux of the argument: do films represent the past as history. Can films serve as historic evidence?  In a very limited sense they, of course do. Did Bismarck bow to the Russian flag? There was evidence on the contemporary documentary film that he did. But in a broader sense, does the TV series on the Tudors represent a true history of the age, no matter how much trouble the producers went to to replicate costumes and props. The series is apparently awful, and they certainly didn't capture the essence of history. On the other hand Attenborough's film on Ghandi has some very valid things to say about Ghandi and the spirit of the age, even if some totally fictitious matter was introduces and details do not conform to things as they were. Giacomo saw al lot of films, but the argument was not hard to follow. He didn't touch on one of the great documentary films, revolutionary in its way at the time, Claude Lanzmann's Shoah. It is a documentary, radically different from other films on the Shoah. Is it a true representation of the Shoah or an interpretation of it? Nor did Giacomo touch on the issue that films are of their very nature tell a story to present a case, because the cost of making a film, unlike that of writing a book, is such that a film is always the product of an institutional interest. But all told, it was a very interesting talk, to a full seminar room, and elicited numerous learned comments and questions.

The seminar was held in the F. L. Wood Seminar Room. Fred Wood was a long serving Professor of History, and professor in my time in the 1950s. He was an excellent and caring teacher. His photo looked down on those assembled in the seminar room, and I thought that he, like Peter Munz, his colleague, would be bemused by the way this generations of young historians like Giacomo see and teach history.Would they think that arguing about the way Samson and the Pirates, a film Giacomo quoted, deal with historical issues is history in the academic sense?