Natalie Zemon Davis writes her article Movie or Monograph? A Historian/Filmmaker's Perspective about the role she played as an historical movie consultant. Davis is a historian, and became involved with the French movie Le Retour de Martin Guerre. Having published a book about early modern France, her expertise was called upon by the film's writers and directors, as the story took place during the sixteenth century.
While Davis was consulting on the film, she faced the dilemma of historical inaccuracies. She explains that films have the job of guiding the audience in the general direction of historical accuracy, but they should be allowed to take some historical liberties. As long as the story is historically plausible and the plot doesn't deter too much from the original account, Davis believes films do not have to be 100% accurate. She calls for the "imagination to be guided by evidence", letting the film capture the spirit of the historical event, not necessarily every accurate detail.
As a caveat to this statement, Davis tells about how she wrote a book that presents the historically accurate story of Martin Guerre while she was working on the film. This eased her mind about the historical liberties in the film, because she corrected them in print. Davis feels that having both the written and cinematic versions of the story available guides the audience into dialogue and debate. For her, this is the most important role that historical films can play; their purpose is to make the audience think about the event. However, this raises the question of whether an audience will take the initiative to become informed and involved in the debate, or will simply take an historical film at face value? Davis is wonderfully optimistic that film goers will want to investigate further into the story, but if this is not so then this audience is only reached by a partial truth. With the important role that films play in our lives today, it is up to historians to become involved with movies so audiences can benefit from historically accurate and trustworthy cinematic experiences.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
I think you address an interesting point in your blog that I never even thought of when reading Davis' article. With the completion of the film, she also finished her accompaning book correcting the historical inaccuracies found throughout the film. You bring up the point of whether or not the viewer will seek out Davis' work after seeing the film or not. I made me consider all of the historic films I have seen and disagreed with, but never did anything to seek out to see what sort of references were availible to other viewers.
Post a Comment