Introduction to History and Film: Overview
Copyright © Henry J. Sage, 2005

When I first started thinking about history and film, probably at least 30 years ago, the phrase that most often came to mind was the “Hollywood ending.” In the nineteen forties, fifties and even into the sixties, filmmakers were famous for taking novels, historical events, or other raw materials reproducing them in such a way that the hero always got the girl, the good guys won and everybody rode off into the sunset to live happily ever after. Life just isn't that way.

When I became a full-time history teacher, however, I began to realize that trying to make the case that people should not try to learn history from movies was foolish for several reasons. First, whether historians like it or not, most Americans learn more about history from films and television than they will ever learn in the classroom. Unless you are a history major, or unless you really love to read about history—which many non-historians do because historians are generally excellent writers—you're likely to discover that most of what you know about our present and past worlds will come from the visual media.

Someone did a study, for example, that has turned up the fact that at least 50% of all Americans believe the true story of the Kennedy assassination is what was shown in Oliver Stone's film, “JFK.” Anybody who knows more than a passing amount about the actual event, however, realizes that Stone's version, while imaginative and creative, probably bears little essential truth.

The second reason is that when Hollywood does history, it often does it very well, even in films that are not meant to be historical. For example, the best depiction of the immigrant experience at Ellis Island I have ever seen in a commercial film shows up in “Godfather II,” where young Vito Corleone comes through Ellis Island on his way to America. In that same film, the depiction of life in the Italian section of New York City, aside from the creation of the gangster image while young Vito earns his bones, is also probably a fairly accurate depiction of what life in New York was like at that time.

Many such films that have nothing directly to do with history do that very well. Another excellent example is “The Age of Innocence,” which truly shows life among the wealthy and prosperous in late 19th-century New York City.

The third reason is simply the old adage, a picture is worth a thousand words. The first 45 minutes of the movie “Saving Private Ryan” probably more graphically illustrates the horrors of Omaha Beach on D-Day than anything ever put in print.

Finally, in recent years the past 10 to 15 years or so filmmakers have paid much more attention to trying to present authentic historic experiences. This is especially true of the cable TV channels HBO and Showtime, as well as Turner films, who produced a number of notable historical films, including “Gettysburg” and “Rough Riders.”

So I take the intrusion of Hollywood into history as a positive event. Our purpose here is not to criticize Hollywood, but rather to find out how to critique films so that when one watches historic film one knows where liberties have been taken and where the authentic truth lies. If we become better film critics, we can learn better history from studying film.

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Updated May 22, 2005