Film and Public Identification with History

Glassberg’s Chapter entitled “Watching” makes an excellent point about film/television/media, history, and the public’s sense of identity. Burn’s series on the civil war reflected that not only was knowledge of the history of the civil war interesting to the American public, but they were grateful to have someone lay out the facts and the pain of this historical identity. I can not help but think of old Spaghetti Westerns starring Clint Eastwood such as “The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly” or “The Outlaw Josey Wales” in which the civil war is portrayed, without mention of slavery, as a hardship the south had to bear, complete with carpet baggers and all. However, a large part of the appeal of the western is this iconic relation to American history and identity. One of the first things a student will learn in an undergraduate multi-cultural film class is that the two most recognizable actors in America are John Wayne, with a close second of Clint Eastwood.

Basically the problem is that, in spite of popular appeal and authority with public identity, can the media be trusted to present historical narratives? Frisch’s chapter entitled “Shared Authority” does an effective job of presenting the issue of historical evidence, ie first hand anecdotal or oral history accounts of Vietnam, by describing the difficulties that are inherent in the media art form as an editorial process. Every clip that is played or not played, every quote not juxtaposed with a quote from a opposing vantage, every choice and clip is a manipulation, a persuasion and suspension of disbelief in the authority of the screen. For instance, in Frisch’s retelling of the oral histories of the Vietnamese villagers juxtaposed with the accounts of US soldiers provides the two vantages of the brutality of war versus the “matter-of-fact” demeanor of the soldiers who won the battle.

However, I greatly enjoyed Toplin’s article on the power of cinema to engage and create historical dialogue, controversy, and sometime understanding of actual history=-) When film makes historical and cultural references it is citing a cultural heritage and identity that the viewers participate in and accept as their own. In this way film creates unity of cultural identity and stimulates cultural conversation. The best kinds of art can create catharsis, discomfort, revelation, awe, and wonder history and historical methods of telling narratives are not devoid of these same dramatic and aesthetic qualities as stories or spectacles. The histories we watch are the histories we identify as our own, the ones we are willing to buy on dvd.