Media and History Research Paper

Eisenstein, Luchino Visconti, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Steven Spielberg can be counted among the greatest historians of our times, each for his own reason. Eisenstein, because he knew how to translate socialist doctrine into intelligible images in Strike by analysing its strategic aspects in a capitalist country at a specific historical juncture: the rise of discontent, the strike, the time of waiting, the provocation, repression. Visconti, for unraveling the relationship of seduction and murder between an aristocratic family and the plebeian power of the Nazis in La caduta degli dei (The Damned). Fassbinder for researching and decoding the prohibitions and taboos of contemporary society. All of these were works of historians who go by way of fiction to find paths of analysis, while Spielberg, in Schindler’s List, plays the instruments of cinema to elicit emotions. The film is more a product of a false memory than a portrayal of history, like Nikita Mikhalkov’s. Nonetheless it is a monumental work.

Today we are observing a reversal, the triumph of the image, and an inversion: the image has fallen under suspicion of becoming a prevaricator. One of the most poignant war photographs, Grief, by Dmitri Baltermants (1942), has been exposed as a montage. The filmed impaling of Chinese children in Shanghai (1938) has turned out to be a fake, as were many films and photos depicting Lenin, more and more so as the Stalinist era progressed, as first the backdrops of the 2nd Congress of the 3rd International, then Radek, followed by Zinoviev, disappeared. But moving pictures and today images on television, the dictator of morals and opinions, are purported to be a more faithful message—‘pictures don’t lie’—than political statements. However, this is another illusion. If you change the focus and angle of the view, you alter the message of a picture, as Kuleshov demonstrated in the 1920s.

Elites and leaders tried for a long time to ignore television, just as the preceding generation treated motion pictures with contempt. However, the world of politics recognized its impact in the 1960s and has not stopped trying to exploit this medium. The Nixon–Kennedy debates were the opening round of this struggle. De Gaulle understood the stakes involved and knew how to use the platform to his advantage.

2. Images as Agents of History

The relationship of film to the history of societies assumes several patterns. It is both a reflection and a source of history and may even constitute a historical event in its own right. In the first place, film—initially on the big screen, then on television—acts as an agent of history. Naturally its social and political impact is all the greater if the agencies or institutions that control production and distribution see themselves as propagators of an ideology. The extreme case is the propaganda film. The Nazis went furthest and were the most thorough in the development and production of this genre. They controlled and coordinated the script, the shooting, the selection of actors and the music, and assured distribution and screening by issuing 70,000 16 mm projectors in schools and universities from 1936; staging multiple premieres and offering free showings (for example Jud Suß), etc.

There is no doubt that the Bolsheviks—above all Lunacharsky and Trotsky—were the first to divine that cinema would become an art for the masses and the art of the future, as well as an educational tool. They were able to contribute to the grandeur and the glory of Soviet motion pictures, but, unlike the Nazi leaders, they did not control all phases of production because, being members of the intelligentsia, as lawyers, professors, and physicians, they were unfamiliar with, filmmaking and were initially condescending toward the art. They were content to control the explicit denotation, the written screenplay, in the manner of an auditor. As a result, the big names in Soviet film (S. M. Eisenstein, Lev Kuleshov, Vsevolod Pudovkin, etc.), while sympathizers of the new regime, were capable of making films which, although criticizing the Tsarist past, did not really conform to the ruling ideology. This changed during the Stalin era, when a film like Chapaye expressed it very consciously. This work was a certain turning point, to the satisfaction of the rulers (1934).

This desire to use film for propaganda purposes should not be considered the exclusive domain of extremists. Democracies have also produced propaganda films and have sometimes even shaped and pursued a policy of using film to this end. This was particularly so in wartime, and most conspicuously in the United States, where from 1941 to 1945 the Roosevelt administration launched an ambitious programme of films designed to justify American intervention in World War II and an alliance with the USSR, etc. Even with no government prompting, the studios had long been marketing movies which served to glorify American social and political systems. It was not by chance that in 1941 one of the most zealous advocates of the American way of life, Frank Capra, was entrusted with making Why We Fight. Nonetheless, the US did not lack snipers, soon to become scapegoats of the McCarthy era, such as Dalton Trumbo, Herbert J. Biberman, and a little later Elia Kazan, victims of the hostility of those who did not want their clear consciences troubled.

As an agent of history, film appears not only in its best-known forms: feature, documentary and newsreel. Commercials and promotional films are other vehicles which have more limited targets but are no less effective. Today television performs some of these functions, such as when reducing the role of theatrical film production, or, alternatively, lifting it to heretofore unknown heights when it shows films originally produced for other media. Nevertheless, the functions of cinema and television have been able to remain distinct. An example is the USSR during the Brezhnev era, when the Agitprop torch was passed to television. Cinema managed to escape to a greater extent from the constraints of official ideology, as films like Andrei Tarkovsky’s Andrei Ruble and Gleb Panfilov’s I Want the Floor demonstrate. Yet it was television which, during the reign of Andropov and Chernenko, opened a political breach in the system thanks to in-depth reporting on the lamentable conditions in factories and hospitals, absenteeism and incompetence of administrators, summed up as a ‘bureaucratic katastroika.’ Until then, only journals (not newspapers) had had a dissident influence on public opinion, albeit only on a small fraction of the population. Suddenly, television exposed the degenerate trends of the society to a wide audience.

3. Images as Documents

Film has won respect as a document, but more in anthropology than in history, and more in AngloSaxon countries than in France, Italy, Germany, and Russia. In the late 1990s we recognized that film, after all, constitutes an archive; a document which, directly or indirectly, furnishes testimony on contemporary society, whether it aspires to that function (newsreels, documentaries) or has other objectives (feature films). One of the particular characteristics of the latter was to take a page from novelists like Zola, Camus, Gorky, etc., and present various facts as demonstrations of social and political behaviour. Fritz Lang’s M, Jean Renoir’s The Crime of Monsieur Lange and Victorio De Sica’s The Bicycle Thief (which was actually based on a novel) are a few precedent-setting examples.

Their approach differs radically from that of Joris Ivens and Michelangelo Antonioni’s Chung Kuo Cina. They take their political assessment as the starting point in filming the ‘real’ and the captivating. The phenomenon in the early twenty-first century is to employ video for documentary purposes, i.e., using it to write the history of our times. Film investigations which solicit reminiscences and oral accounts of witnesses are legion: Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah and Jacques Kebadian’s Memoire armenienne are legendary examples. They are a continuation of a series of films made by conquered peoples, including the Lakotas in Osawa’s The Black Hills Are Not for Sale, or of another genre, successors of investigations and documentaries which have appeared since the first motion pictures with John Grierson’s English school, Walter Ruttmann in Germany, and Ivens in the Netherlands.

4. Media Events

Besides documenting an event, a film can create one. In 1962 Erwin Leiser’s Mein Kampf triggered an outbreak of children’s accusations against their parents in Germany. In 1972 Le chagrin et la pitie played the same explosive role in provoking the French national conscience. It far outstripped the effect of works like that of the American historian Robert Paxton on the voluntary collaboration of the Vichy State. A dozen years earlier similar charges by Henri Michel and Eberhard Jaeckel had left the French cold. Another aspect is the media use of some so-called ‘events.’ An example is the discovery of the so-called unpublished works of Goebbels. They show that the hype jeopardizes factualness because it creates a hierarchy in information which corresponds to the status of the author rather than to the significance of the information contained in the work.

Another illusion, which was clearly demonstrated during the Gulf War, is that of ‘live’ history, which claims to be the event and claims to be simultaneous and omnipresent thanks to satellite communications. Reporters at different locations go all out to escalate the drama, filling in the gaps in available footage, and the TV screen becomes a screenplay instead of a mirror of reality. The event ceases to be what is supposed to be the object of the coverage and turns out to be the reporters’ picture of the story.

Moreover, Gulf War television coverage illustrated that live history is a myth. A historical event cannot be subjected to a time schedule like a sporting event and it does not abide by any other ground rules unless it degenerates into a show. That was the case at the end of World War II when the assaults of the US Marines were planned to coincide with the positioning of cameras. Nor is a historical event restricted to what is shown. It includes its antecedents and aspects which are not broadcast.

5. Media Multiplication and Spread of Knowledge

The multiplication of sources of information, of media, today creates new obstacles to the intelligibility of historical issues because each transmits different bits of knowledge, which are rarely tied together into a more comprehensive picture. We are a long way from the time when knowledge consisted of the contents of a textbook plus a few supplementary readings which made minor or major corrections or additions. However, this development presents several obvious disadvantages.

During the first stages of our education, in secondary school, then at a university, we start by studying separate fields of knowledge—history, foreign languages, literature, economics, etc.,—which usually pay no heed to each other. Those who take Spanish are not acquainted with Dostoyevsky. Even worse, in France, for example, one learns in literature that Jean Jacques Rousseau drafted a constitution for Corsica around 1760, but the required history of France does not indicate that Corsica had a republican regime before the French Revolution. Later, in higher education, each subject tends to be subdivided into several new disciplines—from archaeological anthropology to culinary epistemology—and most of these try to swallow the others and dominate them by means of a kind of ‘transdisciplinary imperialism.’ For example, in the social sciences and history, aggressive encroachment passes from economics to linguistics, demography and anthropology. Each field, in turn, attempts to impose its own account of most academic issues.

Later in life, reading the press, we observe that newspapers organize information differently. We see this if we compare five dailies at the recent turn of the century—El Pais, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the New York Times, Le Monde, Corriera della Sera. Naturally, the first page is occupied by the celebration of the new millennium, the Indian Air Lines hostage tragedy, etc. Constancy is maintained by the division into sections. It may be patterned on the organization of government, of ministries, or on the activities of society: foreign affairs, internal affairs, health, etc. Then there are variously placed pages on the courts, culture and sports and a special financial section. The distribution is about the same in the German newspaper, which has a few pages devoted to art, social problems and careers. These sections do not interact naturally unless an occasional editorial or lead story refers readers to another article.

Moreover, the print media often publish an article on history, for example on the anniversary of an event. But this historical piece lives in a returned-to past and is not related to developments which have surfaced in the meantime, as if the past were dead and gone forever. In fact, this attitude is not limited to the print media; a biography of Bismarck does not mention the influence of his ideas after he died. We see the same obliviousness in most biographies, written or unwritten.

Let us now turn to the structure of television programming. It reflects the bureaucratic organization of the channel and its professional and technical divisions: news, features, movies, cartoons, documentaries, etc. Each department is unaware of what its neighbor is doing, unless it is to dispute time slots, since exposure is a matter of vying for the limited amount of viewing windows. Comparing the items devoted to the situation in Russia at the very beginning of 2001; the BBC News reported that Putin spent New Year’s Eve with soldiers in Chechnya, a special mentioned his past in East Germany and his encounter with Sobchak in Saint Petersburg, etc. The French TV Journal presented news bulletins but had no in-depth coverage, while features provided analyses but no news items. There were certainly some parallels between French TV news and the contents of daily newspapers of the same day. The former derives its contents from the latter, while the inverse applies to a lesser extent, first, because of the professional rivalry between print and broadcast journalists, the former looking down on the latter, and also because a daily furnishes, to all appearances, much more information and opinion than television, in the light of the amount of air time available and television’s goal of entertaining as well as informing.

Apart from that, it is evident that the situation of each medium is different in different countries and that it does not carry the same weight in the political habits of their citizens. Compared to the influence of other sources of knowledge, the status of television is much weaker in Germany than in the US or France. It is very strong in North Africa and mistrusted in Russia because it is under government control. It did not become the main platform of debate there until the days of perestroika. Instead journals were the main opinion makers—not newspapers, not television, not cinema—and the journals transmitted the culture found in school books and the teaching profession. Subsequently everything changed. At the beginning of the twenty-first century there was no longer a dominant pole.

Finally, as far as movies are concerned, going to see a film is a free choice, even more so than turning on the television set (you can switch channels whenever you want) or read a newspaper, usually the same one each day out of habit or preference, or take required university courses. Surfing the Internet is also a choice. Either you master its navigation or you do not. It may be like browsing in an encyclopedia. (The Internet will not be mentioned again in this research paper.) The public makes choices which indicate its receptivity or lack of interest in subjects which are on offer. The French, for example, wholeheartedly embraced Italian neorealism, Fassbinder’s films and those of Woody Allen, which are far from being the most popular in their counties of origin. Is this because they cruelly or humorously describe the shortcomings of their own societies? It has been said that a taboo concerning the war in Algeria prevails in France. As a matter of fact, the conflict engendered more than 50 films, but the French are in no hurry to see them.

The desire not to know disconcerting facts is frequently stronger than the desire to learn the truth. This phenomenon is well known, both in Germany and France. But the same thing goes for Russia, Japan, and Algeria. For whatever the reason, the problem presented here is the non-connectivity of bodies of knowledge; (a) within each community, and (b) from one community to the other.

The problem is therefore to verify the existence or nonexistence of connections between knowledge provided by textbooks, historical scholarship and news media, between professional journalism and the products of the film industry, with the understanding that history is not only knowledge of the past but also the relationship of the past to our times, the analysis of continuities and breaks.

6. Production of History

Before continuing, it is a good idea to remind ourselves that there are several approaches to historical questions. First, the philosophical or political approach which makes ‘sense’ out of history: history is ‘progress’, history is ‘decadence’, etc. This vision has prevailed for ages and still exists as a Marxist or Christian view, for example. To express the duality the Russians have two terms while the French have only one. ‘Sens’ translates as ‘znachenie’ (meaning) and ‘napra lenie’ (direction, orientation). The second approach is erudite or scholarly. It involves recording all pieces of information in a chronological calendar of sources and documents of all kinds and attempts to reconstruct the past. This approach is dominant in textbooks. The third is exemplified by the Annales school, which regards itself as experimental. It opposes the first, takes advantage of the second and distrusts an academic free-for-all. Risking an analogy, I would say that experimental history is modeled on experimental medicine in the sense that conventional medicine and traditional history address universal problems (life and death, the meaning of history), whereas experimental medicine and new history seek to classify illnesses or phenomena—prices and wages, taxes and strikes, types of war—and then attempt to solve problems. New teaching systems incorporate this aspect but go too far in excluding the second approach. The fourth comprises written fiction and docudrama.

Having said this, how does one explain that a work of fiction, Visconti’s The Damned (La caduta degli die), for example, facilitates comprehension—better than any well-documented text—of the fact that part of the German elite succumbed to Nazism? And how does one explain that two works of fiction, a Solzhenitsyn novel and Abuladze’s Repentance, enabled readers to understand how the Stalinist regime worked better than any analysis by a political scientist or historian? We could proceed further with the analyses of nineteenth and twentieth century French society by Balzac, Zola and Chabrol, which were more convincingly presented than the essays of many sociologists and humanities scholars. This poses the question of the way works of this type convey a message and suggests the desirability of comparing it to the way journalists, historians, filmmakers and teachers perform their functions.

The collapse of ideologies and the formidable force of history in the making, released partly by the renaissance of the former colonies, has shaken the Eurocentric model of universal history. Now every nation and social group knows how to come to terms with its own history and is starting to compile elements from its memory to recreate its own past.

Today several forms of history survive and coexist alongside factual reporting and fiction: general, traditional history, which is by no means restricted to the Western world and which is the most commonly used model for school textbooks in most countries; memorial history, which is one of the processes of history in the making; and experimental history, exemplified by the journal Annales.

Clearly, a historical work usually combines all these forms or models in varying proportions. Only fiction claims to be different. Yet, like the other kinds of history, it takes pride in scholarship and is not necessarily devoid of significance, at times even becoming a vehicle for ideological thought. This schematic comparison of the role of different approaches and how they work is merely an attempt to answer the question of how news reporting, history, education, and fiction overlap.

The choice of information, or more precisely, the selection criteria, depends on the approach. The first case, which, for the sake of convenience, we will term traditional history, that of textbooks and encyclopedias, certainly involves a sifting process. This follows a hierarchical principle. Some authors and sources rank higher than others. Information originating from people in positions of authority receives more attention than private records. A letter handwritten by Churchill is treated with more respect than accounts of an anonymous witness. Consequently this form of history tends to be a reproduction of statements made by leaders, and often of verbal exchanges between opponents; in short, between those who steer its course. We could call it official history, or more accurately, institutional history, for it is the history of the establishment and opposition institutions. In this model mundane details count for little, because they reveal the flaws in a society and its institutions and fail to highlight changes.

Accumulation is the governing principle in memorial history. Each discovery is another piece in the puzzle recreating a picture of the past. I can rebuild the history of my village, of my community, by collecting and compiling snippets of information.

Experimental history is defined by how it justifies its choice of information. Simply specifying sources is not enough. Experimental historians spell out the selection principle they use to answer questions such as: What is the divorce trend in France? How does the Kurds’ status vary in the different States governing their territory? ‘These are the documents I will use, and this is how I propose to proceed.’

Film fiction focuses on the facts which seem the most relevant when the movie is being made. This is not the past which is at our fingertips, as in memorial history. It concentrates on what will interest viewers today.

Television and often print media exploit shocking images and sensational headlines to make a lasting impression on people. Vivid illustrations and catchy phrases stimulate the imagination and clamor for attention.

These forms are also based on different organizational principles. The first two stay within a chronological framework, for dating is one of the main criteria for historical documentation, where authenticity is judged by record-keeping accuracy. Experimental history, in contrast, adheres to the dictates of logic. The quality of the text is determined by the stringency of the argument. Historical fiction stresses dramatic and aesthetic aspects. Here history is a matter of beautiful designs, twists and turns, and suspense. But true history, as people experience it or events unfold, does not conform to aesthetic rules. Neither does it abide by the laws of melodrama or tragedy. Just as with news broadcasting, imagining that you are seeing history happen live is something of an illusion. Admittedly, as Ignacio Ramonet recognized, in most cases the images appear in an ordered pattern, like a football match, with a universally fixed structure. However, the format of a game is governed by a rule book. The players know the rules and abide by them. This is not the case with war or the history of a nation.

The specific roles of works of art depend on their nature. And they do not always give those who produce them the same advantages. The task of general history is to instill patriotism and to establish the legitimacy of the powers that be. While the USSR and Islamic countries have reined it in history too tightly, Western regimes have allowed it more leeway. But those who are most successful in achieving these objectives rarely refuse the honors and privileges attached to their vocation—which reminds us of clergy who glorify their church.

Memorial history is an identifier. A group’s history fosters coherence. It recounts its experiences, guided by concern for its self-dignity and recognition. This type of history is often anonymous and collective and usually affects one particular occupation or ethnic group. The common heritage is frequently expressed in celebrations, rituals or some kind of ceremony. Experimental history, accompanied by demography, anthropology, sociology, economy, etc, has the latent function of establishing the sovereignty of science. Its practitioners vie for intellectual power. Finally, filmmakers follow the pleasure principle. Their admittedly selfish quest for prestige determines the nature of their creations, which may be aimed at a large audience or target the avant-garde. News coverage serves to enforce the public’s right to know ‘what is going on.’ Freedom of information is one but not the only prerequisite. High visibility and the power of images on screen are the features which influence awareness. Where is the creativity in these very different types of work? In general history, it is found in the classification and organization of the facts, or at least those which are chosen. In contrast, creativity is not important to memorial history, for this form is based on devotion and reverence. The individual who uncovers and logs the tracks fades into the background and becomes anonymous. In experimental history, creativity is expressed in the choice of problems and not of imaginary situations conceived by the filmmaker or the novelist. Finally, in news reporting, the perspective reflects the creative input of the journalist. As far as television is concerned, late-breaking news can upset the applecart at any moment. Incidentally, news programmes are the part of television broadcasting in which the relationship between the medium and its audience has changed the least in the 20 years since 1980. It remains a one-way transmission of knowledge from those in the know to those they wish to inform.

Interaction plays only a minor role (in talk shows) while some ‘informative’ radio programs encourage listener participation. Viewers only intervene to the extent that they are taken into consideration by those who choose particular news items or images. What has changed the most in broadcasting is the degree of autonomy of channels which are more politically independent but more dependent on outside sources, such as the US networks, to obtain news footage. This poses the question whether the demand for images may create a bias, an obstacle to a reasoned analysis of the situation and to the definition of newsworthiness. No pictures—no news. Yet in the beginning of the twentieth century image transmission was unknown. What a turnaround! What a paradox!

Ordering facts is therefore becoming more and more complex and taking a multitude of forms. School books have lost their privileged status. In France, for example, the policy designed to democratize education by not forcing families to pay for textbooks means that they often do not even belong to the pupils any more. The schools issue them to students on loan. The same pupils own cassettes and video games and surf the Internet. The devaluation of textbooks is a serious issue. After all, they provided a framework for knowledge, which we could always subsequently analyze or correct.

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