Writing History in Film

WRITING HISTORY IN FILM William Guynn New York: Routledge, 2006, 225 pp. Reviewed by Michael Meneghetti It is a risky business to write seriously about the William Guynn reminds us. Until fairly recently, professional historians have offered mostly negative judgments on the cinema's capacity to accurately and legitimately render histories. Lacking traditional historiography's overt argumentation and erudition, the film has often been dismissed for its tenuous connection to fact, costume drama being the typical term of disparagement for such films. Over the past decade several book-length studies have tried to redress this no longer tenable characterization of filmmaking. Rather than emphasize a particular film's relation to existing written accounts of events, recent has tended to look at the film as a certain type of relationship to the past, or a distinct mediation of our ties to past reality. Understanding the precise nature of this mediation has been augmented by our growing awareness of representation, its forms, and the various means at the medium's disposal for making meaningful histories. Writing History in Film returns to this occasionally treacherous terrain to offer a cross-disciplinary understanding of what constitutes in film. In my anticipation, or pre-reading, of the book's subject matter, I expected yet another defense of history on film in terms of its utility to those spectators who receive it in specific cultural and contexts. Guynn, however, has a fundamentally different project in mind. The aim of his study is only to defend the film but also to construct a framework within which to judge approaches to representations in film. Guynn is uncommonly forthright in his desire to judge the seriousness of the film's intentions, and he insists upon distinguishing between historical spectacles like those of Cecil B. De Mille and what he clearly considers the more serious work of a Rossellini or an Eisenstein. The grounds for making such distinctions and the criteria for judging what he calls the validity of representations in film are the principal theoretical concerns of his study. Over the course of five chapters, Guynn elaborates this theory by appealing to the of philosophers of history, rhetorical studies, narratology, and semiology. The result is a multidisciplinary perspective on the philosophical commitments historians make to the past and to the public they address, and the basic structures of meaning and techniques of they deploy. After a brief summary and refutation of the academic historian's skepticism about history in film, Guynn addresses the central problem of all narratives: how are these stories to be distinguished from fictional stories? If history is indeed a of a particular kind, what accounts for its particularity? Guynn draws upon the philosophy of history to examine the fundamentally narrative character of historiography and its seemingly paradoxical epistemological claims. Constructing an account of the causal development of events through time, he tells us, is a precondition for understanding; and to recount the past in this manner is to create plots and a story. Historiography, however, retains its particularity in the following way: although fictive plots may enjoy a relative freedom of invention, a representation of the past...adheres to a principle of fidelity and credibility. Of course, the line is frequently blurred, insofar as the historian is obliged to imagine a past that s/he has not necessarily experienced, while the novelist may in turn make precise reference to concrete details and real events. Nonetheless, although history and fiction are both species of the genus story, Guynn insists that the former can be defined in terms of its distinct discursive posture and the constraints of veracity on its tale-telling. …

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