The Historical Film as Real History

Authors

  • Robert A. Rosenstone

Abstract

Let's face the facts and admit it: historical films trouble and disturb (most) professional historians. Why? We all know the obvious answers. Because, historians will say, films are inaccurate. They distort the past. They fictionalize, trivialize, and romanticize important people, events, and movements. They falsify History.

Author Biography

Robert A. Rosenstone

ROBERT A. ROSENSTONE spent two decades writing history on the page before becoming interested in history on the screen. Author of many articles and books, including the award-winning Romantic Revolutionary: A Biography of John Reed (which became the basis of the motion picture, Reds), he was asked to create a film section for the American Historical Review in 1989, a section he edited through 1994. His most recent publication is the edited collection, Revisioning History: Film and the Construction of a New Past (Princeton, 1995). His own collected essays on film, Visions of the Past: The Challenge of Film to Our Idea of History will be published by Harvard University Press in October, 1995.

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Issue

Vol. 5 No. 1 (1995)

Section

Essays

License

Authors retain copyright. Creative Commons: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike


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