Walker: the dramatic film as historical truth .

Authors

  • Robert, A. Rosenstone California Institute of Technology

Abstract

Among academic historians there is a general, if largely unarticulated, feeling that historical works done on film, particularly dramatized history, can never be as worth wile or as "true" as historical works done on the printed page*. Such a notion seems to arise from a sense that words are able to provide a serious and literal past reality that film, with its supposed need to entertain people, can never hope to match. To combat such a shortsighted view of the possibilities of history on film, I want to show the ways in which a single historical film can create a past that is at once complex, important, challenging, and "true". My point: to see that one film can make a contribution to historical discourse is to admit that the visual media can be used seriously by those who wish to create and understand the meaning of the past.

Author Biography

Robert, A. Rosenstone, California Institute of Technology

ROBERT A. ROSENSTONE is Professor of History at the California Institute of Technology and editor of the Film Review section of the American Historical Review. Author of Crusade of the Left: The Lincoln Battalion in the Spanish Civil War (1969), Romantic Revolutionary a Biography of John Reed (1975), and Mirror in the Shrine: American Encounters with Meiji Japan (1988), he served as writer for the documentary The Good Fight and historical consultant for Reds. Currently Rosenstone is working on a screen version of Mirror in the Shrine and writing a book on history and film.

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