1Eleftheria Thanouli, History and Film: A Tale of Two Disciplines.

2Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. Pp. 296. ISBN: 978-1-5013-4077-2.

3Hilaria Loyo

6In the Introduction, Thanouli, drawing upon the work of Warren Susman, expresses her awareness of the multifold relevance of films for the study of history and explains that her book addresses Susman’s claim that cinema works as “an interpreter of history” (1). The introduction also critically engages with the work of academic historians, like Robert Rosenstone, William Guynn and Marnie Hughes-Warrington, who have recognized the value of film to “do history,” in order to identify what Thanouli considers an important caveat: the neglect of film narrative theories elaborated by film theorists like David Bordwell and Edward Branigan, which she, as a formalist, knows very well. Tracing also the work of film scholars interested in history on film (Robert Burgoyne and Jonathan Stubbs, in this case) and in the debate on the historical film as a particular genre, the author takes cue of Rosenstone’s recent observation that the historical film bridges the “parallel orbits” of written and audiovisual history and, therefore, its exploration requires “a combination of tools and concepts from both disciplines” (11). The examination of the dialogue between these two disciplines, their shared ground and divergences, elaborated in the following chapters constitutes the foundation for the investigation of two central hypotheses: one, that “a historical film is magnified miniature of a historical book” (12), and, secondly, that historical cinema “should be regarded as the dominant form of history in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, because it produces historical knowledge according to a distinct set of epistemic principles characteristic of our contemporary age” (13). To support these two interrelated hypotheses, the book combines a broader theoretical discussion on central issues in historiography – a “macro level” in the author’s words (13) – and a more specific account of particular narrative devices – which she called a “micro level” (13). Much in line with her previous work on the formal transformation of film narration, Post-Classical Cinema: An International Poetics of Film Narration (2009), in this book Thanouli seeks to examine how specific historical films interpret the past through the exploration of “the complicated ways in which form, argument and ideology collaborate within this particular genre of filmmaking” (223). Moving beyond the sometime trite debates on the inaccuracies in cinematic representations of the past in comparison with the written historical accounts, she claims that scholars mastering the various mechanisms of representing the past (oral, written, or visual) are placed “in an exceptional vantage point” to examine how representational choices are “tied to the very specific mechanisms for handling knowledge and power in a given society” (x).

7 Starting with the micro level of this study, no doubt, one of its key achievements is the methodology offered to analyze the ideological baggage of historical films (fiction and non-fiction/documentary) and to generate historical thought. This methodological model is condensed in a couple of charts, one for fiction films on chapter 5 (115) and another for documentaries on chapter 6 (176), in the second part of the book. The poetics of the historical film developed in these last two chapters, derived from the poetics of written history formulated by Hayden White in his well-known book, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe, first published in 1973. In chapter 5, Thanouli’s adaptation of White’s model combines four modes of film narration (classical, art cinema, historical-materialistic, and post-classical) with corresponding modes of argument and modes of ideological implications, which she explains and exemplifies through a brief analysis of a suitable selection of fiction films on the Second World War and the Holocaust. In chapter 6, devoted to documentaries, she draws upon the work of Bill Nichols, particularly on his two books Representing Reality (1991) and Blurred Boundaries (1994), to chart the poetics of the historical documentary. Nichols’ extensive and influential research on the documentary owes significantly to three key figures, Michel Foucault, Hayden White, and David Bordwell, also prominent in Thanouli’s book. As in the previous chapter, Thanouli briefly explains the combination of modes of representation (expository, observational, interactive, reflexive, and performative – following Nichols’ categorization) with the corresponding types of historical explanation. This overview is supported by the brief analysis of carefully chosen documentaries on the Vietnam War and the biography of well-known figures as case studies. In the two models, the analysis of film forms is combined with the consideration of the film’s context, the historical context of the represented past event as well as the context of reception, essential for the ideological interpretation of the film. Although Thanouli constantly reminds us on the importance of the consideration of context in her methodological models, the contextual information in the films she analyzes feels a bit scant, and this reader would have expected the exploration of more case studies as well as further elaboration of the contexts in which the films were made.

9 Part One of the book is a long theoretical elaboration of the interconnections and convergences of the “parallel orbits” of history and film, discussed in the book’s Introduction. After a critical discussion of the most influential existing literature on historical films, the three chapters that follow in Part One address a series of concepts and theoretical issues pertaining to both historiography and the representation of history in visual images – ‘historiophoty” in Hayden White’s terminology. After looking into the works of Siegfried Kracauer, Roland Barthes, and Jean-Luc Godard and establishing an analogy between cinema and history in their treatment of historical reality in Chapter 1, Chapter 2 tackles the problem of medium specificity that allows Thanouli to justify the metaphor of the “magnified miniature” to refer to historical cinema in relation to written history. Chapter 3 looks into Michel Foucault’s concepts such as archaeology, genealogy, and episteme that serve to endorse the deconstructionist problematization of historical knowledge and challenge to our idea of history. As she clearly states: “historical films, just like history books, narrate and explain the past through a set of narrative, argumentative, and ideological mechanisms. As magnified miniatures, however, the historical films do not pretend to represent, the past as it really was. Instead, they construe a relation between the images and the historical past, which problematize the transparency that written works strive so hard to maintain” (87). Foucault’s concepts also serve as the theoretical foundations for Thanouli’s second thesis: the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries established “the role of historiophoty as the dominant mode of historying in the contemporary Age” (15). For Thanouli, this predominance of historiophoty over written history is an indication of a new epistemic logic she associates with today’s popular term “post-truth.” For her, historical films seek to establish a “close dialogue with the achievements and the principles of professional historiography, which provide a point of constant reference and comparison as well as a point of critique” (248). This “close dialogue” is now changing because of the unbalanced role of academic and cinematic history in the public consumption of historical knowledge; as she writes, “the devolution of the historical profession in the education and the evolution of historical appetite in new media forms probe us to reconsider once again the very definition of history” (14-15). The changes in the dialogue between written and cinematic history Thanouli identifies may reverse their relation in the construction of historical truth. As she argues, “Whereas written history presents formal, argumentative and ideological explanations in an effort to definitively tell us ‘the truth’ about the past, the filmic history puts forward the same explanations in the effort to give us ‘a truth’ about the past” (247). The use of definite (“the”) and indefinite (“a”) articles are clearly used to indicate the depending relation of cinematic history on written history as reference; the definite article, “the” to refer to written history may also lead to a misleading interpretation about academic history as a monolithic and undisputed historical truth. Although there is usually some consent about historical facts of the past among academic historians, there is no equal consent about their interpretation. In this regard, historical truth in written history is also “a truth about the past.”

10In sum, this volume is not only a rigorous and excellently written study on the theoretical convergences of history and cinema as academic fields, but most importantly it provides an invaluable tool for historians and film scholars alike interested in analyzing how films do history, as well as their ideological implications in today’s mediated world. The vast field that this study explores is too wide to be covered in one volume, but the methodological model charted here will definitely inspire future research on other films as case studies that may open up new ways to look at the interconnection of film and history. Those of us working in this interrelated world will definitively enjoy reading this thought-provoking book.