My history lecturer recently suggested that studying film in history is not ‘proper history’. I disagree.
- Films as an avenue to popular mentality
Film can impact what happens in the past itself.
A peculiar episode occurred in 1914 when Pancho Villa struck a deal with American newsreel company ‘Mutual Film’ during the Mexican Revolution, allowing the company to have exclusive permission to film the battles. Villa recognised that a film conveying his heroism might sway American public opinion and thus lead to domestic pressure for state involvement. This in fact changed the course of history when Villa changed his battle plans in order to cater the best footage for the crew. Unfortunately Villa’s directing efforts did not reap immediate reward. While the US government would eventually get involved, the final product was so exaggerated and unbelievable that when Mutual Film returned home, they were prohibited from releasing it to the public. So, the presence of film and the desire of leaders to implant a film hindered the initial course of history.
In a more indirect way, films intervene with how people in the past thought. This is because how you think about a certain idea or event (e.g. protest, war or leader) affects how you behave.
The most obvious way this happens is in direct propaganda films. These are films made to promote a certain message or idea to change the way people think. Digital media is particularly effective as it is accessible and can be displayed to large groups.
Think of the film ‘Don’t Look Up’ about an asteroid hitting earth. You may initially be drawn in by appearances of Jennifer Lawrence, Leonardo DiCaprio, Cate Blanchett, Meryl Streep and Timothée Chalamet. But you walk away aware with the message that climate change is not being taken seriously enough. Lawrence’s character appears in an interview with the leading news channel, yet after the hosts consistently brush off her warnings of impending doom she has a meltdown. “Are we not being clear? We’re trying to tell you that the entire planet is about to be destroyed”. Her words parallel Greta Thunberg’s at the U.N’s Climate Action Summit: ‘you say you hear us and that you understand the urgency… I do not want to believe that’.
This is not propaganda, but it illustrates clearly how films can influence people to think differently in a way that an article or book might not. On the more extreme end of the spectrum, films were made and broadcast at cinemas to justify Nazi actions. In the following clip we see a scene of German poles refusing to sing the Polish anthem, causing them to be attacked by other Poles and locked up in prison and threatened with death. The final scene sees the German army arriving in time to save the unjustly persecuted Germans. Leaving the cinema, viewers were stirred up with the fear of the Poles infringing on German national identity and being an existential threat, thus softening the idea of an invasion of Poland. Hitler certainly thought the film had this impact, giving it the esteemed and rare honour of ‘Film of the Nation’ due to its considerable contribution to the nationalist cause.
Another example includes the famous scene from Sergie Eisenstein’s Battleship of Potempkin. This move was based on a true story, where a Russian naval mutiny of the Tsar’s army occurred in 1905, resulting in both a riot and police massacre. The film served as a reminder to the audience about the evils of aristocracy and the justification of the 1917 revolution. It includes a scene of the massacre of Odessa, where soldiers of the Tsar’s army opened fire on a crowd of innocent civilians, ending with the sequence of a baby in its carriage rolling down the steps after her mother gets shot by a solider.
The massacre happened but there is absolutely no source referring to a baby’s carriage tumbling down the steps. However, it was included to reinforce the values of the Bolsheviks by tugging at the heartstrings of its audience and serving as a way to bolster the revolution’s support.
So, watching and studying the films that a population was consuming is one way of understanding the sentiments of people, their mentality and thus why they acted the way they did. In this case, why people continued to support the Bolsheviks.
2. Media and popular opinion
If we extend the word ‘film’ to mean more than just movies and talk more about videos and pictures, there are further implications for historians.
News coverage has been seminal in multiple historical developments. In the Vietnam War, for the first time videos of casualties were being seen by the public whose country was at war – the development of colour in film allowed Americans to see the red blood of not only their American husbands, brothers and sons but also the Vietnamese casualties. The following video shows a journalist reporting on the burning of a Vietnamese village.
This video, and others were seen by the American public and one of the factors that changed the course of the war in Vietnam by contributing to the withdrawal of American troops was the role of public opinion – knowledge of what was going on when paired with intense emotional imagery contributed to significant anti-war demonstrations. The image below sees the demonstration at the Pentagon where 100,000 protestors gathered to air their anger towards US foreign policy.
The same goes for photography which is a type of film and has the ability to convey a message, evoke emotions and change minds in the matter of milliseconds, while being seen by millions in the age of technology and print-capitalism.
Phan Thai Kim Phuc is pictured running away, naked and covered in napalm while her village burns in the background.
The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 saw a swarm of pictures published worldwide to confirm that communism had been defeated – installing the perception that America had won the Cold War.
Elizabeth Echford is pictured walking to her High School on the first day of racial integration in 1957 as a white woman called Hazel Bryan stands behind her screaming in indignation.
Looking to the future, there is a high chance that historians working in 2100 will turn not only to the films we watch but to TikTok and Instagram to understand shifting mentalities. This seems ridiculous at first. But think back to lockdown and the proliferation of vivid images and videos of George Floyd consumed and the protests which broke out as a result. This media was primarily viewed by the youth, causing a somewhat generational split in how important matters over racism seemed to different groups. Remind yourself of the outlook-altering ‘Everyone’s Invited’ and the divide which occurred between us, who were reading these horror stories on Instagram, and our teachers and parents who had not. Such divides seem important in understanding social, political and cultural history.
So, let’s not confine ourselves to the study of diary entries of statesmen or census data to find out about the past. Film has had considerable impacts on the history in the modern era and continues to shape how we see the present.
Stamp’s Post 