Film - A Source of History

Films represent the most widely accepted visual media of the modern period, which can be used as a source of historical research. People take history written by trained historians seriously because they think the historian knows better than anyone else. But there are historical productions outside the world of historians, which may be used as a source of further historical research. One can’t even think of history, especially modern history, without reference to its visual representation. In this regard, films can claim to present an alternative to written history to some extent. History in film form is developed through the story of the individual because of the manner of the medium. The camera creates a connection between the viewers and the individuals on the screen. The actions of the individuals represent the history of a larger group. The film also depicts history through one story, one perspective of the past. History in the film is always told as a story, with a beginning, middle and, end, which delivers a moral message meant to show how history is progressive.

Hayden White and the Concept of ‘Historiophoty'

Hayden White, the American postmodern historian, coined the term ‘historiophoty’ to describe the representation of history in visual images. The concept of historiophoty refers to the “representation of history and our thought about it in visual images and filmic discourse”. Currently, the term is used by historians to understand how films produce interpretations of the past.  Hayden White argues that the historical process that films and written documents use to interpret their data is the same. The historian and filmmaker both construct their version of a historical document. The historian interprets and constructs the written word from facts. Similarly, the filmmaker interprets the written word into a visual representation.

Historical Films and Mainstream Films

Within the world of cinema, with its various genres, there are different types of films. Rosenstone, a professor at the California Institute of Technology divides historical films into two parts: history as a document – the documentary, and history as drama - the mainstream film. Both the historical films and mainstream films, directly and indirectly, serve as a source of history.

Historical Films

These are consciously produced histories, that represent ‘film as a document’, which carefully recreates the past in great detail. A film in this category often relies heavily on oral history to travel between the past and present in the making of historical documentaries. The popular types of historical films are: 

• Historical documentaries: These were produced on a particular theme with a view to document our history and tradition, and are the result of well-designed research work.
• Biopics: This type of film focuses on the life of an individual with a view to documenting his contributions
• Propaganda films: These are intended to propagate different ideologies, especially used for political propaganda.
• ‘Period’ films: These types of films recreates a particular historical period with its unique aspects of people’s life.
• Costume dramas: These films focus on the display of various costumes of different cultures rather than the people.  

The strength of the historical film lies in emotionalising, personalising, and dramatizing the past. Historical films offer the viewers a window to look into the past. The greatest asset of the historical film is its ability to show history as an integrated process to a curious audience. It is this ability of the film which poses the greatest challenge to written history. Historians also try to paint a holistic picture of the past.

Historical films are essentially fiction, but it becomes a preferred mode of receiving and understanding the past in contemporary society. Historical films are fictional to a lesser or greater extent, otherwise, they would bore the audience and fail at the box office. Without the play of imagination, fictional characters invented minor events, and emotional responses of historical persons the historical films cannot be made.

Mainstream Films

Pierre Sorlin asserts that feature films could be considered a more important source of history than historical documentaries. Here, the camera records history unintentionally and this enables us to reflect on geographical and social reality. Outdoor shooting is important here, it might display significant historical details pertaining to various aspects of life, which can rarely escape from the camera like social relations, urban or rural life, geographical features, trees, roads, bridges, monuments, streets, architecture, onlookers, civic amenities or their absence, means of transport, clothes people wear, expressions on people’s faces, etc. Feature films shoot outdoors tend to incorporate valuable information on topography and infrastructure. All this comprises valuable source material for history.

Film as an Alternative Source of History

The positivist and Rankean approaches to history brought the scientific and factual representation of history. This stressed the use of purely historical documents and scientific methods in the writing of history and fixed the necessary characteristics of a historical source. Hence, most historians are reluctant to accept the film and other visual media as historical sources. The fact is that neither a film representation nor a written document can provide a literal truth of history. Instead, the written text generalizes and the film summarizes. Specific images are needed in the film to present a coherent narrative, while the written word can generalize ideas and events. The popularity of historical films beats books. Robert Rosentone’s idea is that “film is a disturbing symbol of an increasingly post-literate world (in which people can read but won’t)”.

Films draw out attention to many emotions that written history either ignores or cannot express. Films often highlight systemic exploitation, the underworld, wage slavery, the emotional trauma of women, or problems of migrant labourers and the unemployed. Written words are often not enough to express complicated feelings in a condensed form. Perhaps this is where the power of film makes a difference.

The viewers’ connection to the film is essential with the film’s use of presenting history through emotion and personalization. Allowing the viewer to experience the history through sensory means immediately makes the viewer feel connected to the past. With its cinematographic and editing techniques, along with the use of sets and costumes, films present the past visually. This, in a sense, brings history to life, or at least attempts to present it in a multi-layered context; the landscape, utensils, homes, clothing, and personal interactions all work together to show the bigger picture, rather than focusing on one fact after another.

While the written text will often sort aspects of history into different groupings, such as politics, religion, economics, and social structure, the film will integrate and connect all the aspects and definitions of history. As Rosenstone states, “history in the film becomes what it most centrally is: a process of changing social relationships where political and social questions…are interwoven.” The film often compresses historical figures into certain stereotypes that offer a diverse representation of the population, using the obvious differences between the characters to illustrate the conflicts and tensions commonly found in that culture or society.

Ultimately every film is a historical artifact or datum. Each is created as mass entertainment; each offers a commentary on the filmmaker’s world through moving images that serve as surrogates for the lived realities of audiences. The patterns of repeated images from the film to film and director to director – the themes they repeat, emotions they stir, and meanings they suggest – allow us to analyze the ‘historical role’ of the cinema of a particular period. The vast holdings of the world's film archives offer to the historian a priceless source material for the study of modern civilisation.

Visual Sources of History

“The camera doesn’t lie” is an old saying that seemed to have considerable truth for many years. Many people consider still “Seeing is believing” another popular maxim, whether in motion or in still photography, people believe what they see. Certainly, for the historian, the knowledge of the modern periods has been enriched greatly by the collection of visual records that have survived. These collections provide life and colour to our understanding of the past and provide a more accurate experience than reading a printed copy. Some images are created as a representation of reality. Photojournalism and documentaries are examples of this area.

There are different categories of visual sources, which can be used as a source of history. Paintings, photographs, cartoons, and films comprise the principal categories of visual evidence most widely used by historians. Each variety provides unique insights and each poses specific analytical questions for researchers. These sources can help us “be there” in the past. They can provide evidence of past history in ways that words on the printed page simply cannot describe. They can also help us interpret the past in new ways by letting us see things visually rather than in our imagination based on our reading. From this body of evidence, researchers can deduce the attitudes, assumptions, and values of the audience.

Paintings

Paintings form the first category of visual evidence. It ranges from the cave paintings of the people of early cultures to the digital paintings of the contemporary periods. In the early times, it was part of 'the work of art' of ancient cultures and many of the original paintings were lost during the course of time. The earliest paintings portray the geographical sceneries, animals, individuals and their aspects of life, etc. The cave paintings provide the primary source for reconstructing a different aspects of ancient cultures. Modern paintings emerged as the cultural expression of a society, which helps the historian to infer valuable clues of the period.

Photographs

Still, pictures have been used to document life since the middle of the nineteenth century. Fortunately, many of these photographs are still available to the historian. Photographs may offer a more accurate visual image than paintings. They may also be staged, with the photography ultimately controlling the picture that is taken. A picture may indeed be worth a ‘‘thousand words’’ but it is the interpretation and analysis provided by the researcher that brings meaning to the photograph. Paintings and photographs are the creations of the artist; yet, the pictures they produce offer another type of evidence of great use to researchers. These sources not only reveal important images; they also provide insights into the mind and world of the artist and the times. The composition of crowds at events may offer unique glimpses of different cultures and present information not intended by the artist or photographer.

Cartoons

Analysis of cartoons raises other issues because they reflect the times in which they were produced in such different ways. In the original meaning, a cartoon was a drawing on more or less permanent paper intended as a prelude to a painting of the same subject. A second meaning of the term is more familiar: a drawing, usually in a newspaper, that may be satirical or humorous. In this sense, cartoons provide rich insights into both the artist’s perceptions and how individuals or events were understood by contemporaries. These sources assume certain knowledge by the viewer and must be used carefully.

Film (See Film as a Source of History)

The film is the final example of a visual source type used for historical analysis. Certainly, the film is a powerful tool for seeing and hearing history. Films can both visualise and document the past. It provides us with the sights and sounds of a recreated past that can have a powerful impact on us. The film may be valuable to achieve an understanding of the culture and times in which the film was produced or to provide insights into what it valued, or found humorous, but films differ profoundly from other visual resources. A film can put us “there” in ways that the printed page simply can never accomplish. But it can also distort, falsify, or simply ignore historical truth.

Dealing with the Visual Sources

• In assessing works of art, it is essential to know something about the artist, as well as the motivation and purpose of the work. Historians need to understand the reasons the creator made the image and the context in which the image was made. It is also necessary to consider: What influenced the photographer to take the picture? What limitations were there? What choices were there in capturing reality? What images were not taken? Were the images modified? How and why? It is equally important to think about how portraits and paintings are to be used in the research being conducted.
• In dealing with the visual sources, the historian must consider the technical and artistic aspects of the creation of that vision. Lighting, focus, positioning, and framing also could be looked at in the analysis of the visual document. In a photograph, it will help to determine the importance of an individual, his dominance, and the projected emotions.
• In utilizing film and videotape, the researcher is confronted by the fact that these media are edited easily. In many instances, it is difficult to perceive the point or nature of the changes. It is therefore valuable to have some understanding of the editing process.
• Since the beginning of photography, the visual record has been manipulated. In the past, the negative or first-generation videos frequently were kept. However, the increased likelihood of the new media cases the frequent manipulations. Manipulation can occur before and after the shot is taken by changing or staging the elements of the picture. Hence, the knowledge of the technology and tools of various visual media is essential for a historian, who uses visual sources.
• Often photographs or videotapes are taken of family, or other events, and provide a record of time and place. Many of these works were done without professional training and, therefore, include technical problems that may contribute to difficulty in analyzing the material.
• The audiences of the period of those visuals also must be considered within the context of their times and expectations.

Docudramas, feature films, and the like are produced for many different purposes. While they may illuminate aspects of the past, they are the creation of the film artist and should not be used in the same way as written, oral, or other visual sources. Susan Sontag in her critique of photography noted the purpose of an image and the role of the historian in understanding the past through that image. “Photographs are not windows which supply a transparent view of the world as it is, or more exactly as it was. Photographs give evidence often spurious, always incomplete—in support of the dominant ideologies and existing social arrangements. They fabricate and confirm these myths and arrangements.” She further states that the images tell us what we should look at what is in the world. The historian’s job is to help make sense of this world through critical analysis—an analysis that has become more important and more complicated in the digital age of the visual.

Note Taking Methods and Techniques

Systematic note-taking from the source materials is an important part of the research work. It helps to arrange and organise the project report in a detailed manner. Notes must contain all the relevant points from all available sources for the writing of history. After the collection of all the raw material or historical data is over, they have to be properly processed. Various points relating to a particular topic or sub-topic have to be brought together and co-related in a rational way. Before taking notes from a particular source, the researcher has to verify its authenticity of a source. The details of a book like, author, title, publishing house, place of publication, year, etc. must be verified. Various topics or sub-topics have to be divided before taking notes. This will help the researcher to take notes separately for different themes. The knowledge of the documentation of a source is also essential for taking notes systematically.

There are four methods of note-taking: 

• Book method
• File Method
• Card System
• Computer Oriented File and Folder Method

Book Method

In this method, notebooks are to be used to take notes. Taking notes of different topics in one notebook may cause confusion. The researcher then has to separate the notes into topics or sub-topics wise. To avoid this, different notebooks are to be used to take notes on different topics and sub-topics. Thus, in the end, there would be many notebooks on different topics. This method is not satisfactory, because separating the notes on topic or sub-topics wise, will be a difficult task for the researcher. The researcher also has to carry all the notebooks with him at the time of note-taking.

File Method

Here, separate foolscap sheets are to be used to take notes topic-wise or sub-topic-wise, which are then filed separately. The advantage here is that the researcher is now able to detach the notes separately to arrange them in any format. But this method is not enough to solve the issue. The main problem is that one sheet of paper may contain notes from different sources. This will create difficulty for the researcher to give references to the consulted source.

Card System

This is an ideal method for note-taking. This is also known as the slip method. Here cards of equal size are to be used to take notes. The two most important features of this method are the totality and detachability of each card. On each slip only one point is noted; the point is complete in itself. Each slip is detachable and can be placed anywhere. Slips can be arranged topic-wise, sub-topic-wise, section-wise, or in any other format.

• Each card must contain:
• the details of the book
• the name of the chapter or section or sub-section for which the notes taking
• note or a point 
• page number from which the point is noted

After taking notes on cards, the researcher can arrange them into any format suitable for the preparation of the research report.

Computer Oriented File and Folder Method

The use of computers in research, and activity brought new methods to the collection and organisation of data. Collecting data through the file and folder methods is getting dominant in the age of computers. In this method, separate word files are to be used in taking notes in typed format. Like the card system, it uses one file to store the data about one particular theme. Again the different files of a particular topic can be grouped into one folder. This helps the researcher to prepare his research report in any format suitable for his research. It is an ideal method if the research work carries a number of diagrams, charts, statistical tables, pictures, and other such data. This also helps the researcher to easily prepare his research report because most of the notes are now available in typed format. For better use of the computer-oriented file and folder method, the researcher has to do the following:

• Use separate files to take notes on different topics or sub-topic.
• Name files and folders appropriately to easily identify them and avoid duplication.
• Set a hierarchy of folders by designing a folder structure with broad topics at the highest level and then use sub-folders within these.
• Ensure that your files, whether they are on your local drive, or on a network drive, are backed up.

The proper knowledge of computer applications and standard methods of file and folder organisation is necessary for using this method. Further, the total dependency on computers in organising the research may lead to a mere ‘cut and paste’ of data.