Scattered Images: Movies as History

WHILE I WAS growing up, I thought that films were just for fun. Going to the movies on Saturday afternoons was a big treat. Some fantasy, a little greasy popcorn, and a couple of hours of dark anonymity, all at pre-inflation prices. Once in a while, I'd learn something interesting from an animal movie, but I didn't go to the theater to learn--learning was strictly a five-day-a-week job. Most Americans do go to the movies just to have fun, to escape from sordid reality, to see their fantasies played out in Technicolor. We've all been taught that the function of film is to entertain. Films, after all, are the product of an "entertainment industry."

In the sixties, though, it suddenly became vogue to use films as a teaching device. In my high school, apathetic students and tired teachers banked their hopes on film, the new, fun, relevant medium. It promised to rescue us all from tedium. In history classes, especially, teachers began using films to replace the dry, outdated textbooks. Watching films became the painless way to absorb facts. But the films we watched were usually as boring as the textbooks we'd shoved aside. We watched films only to glean a few salient facts, and we never considered that films, as cultural artifacts, might be worthy of study in themselves. Films simply replaced textbooks as secondary source material.

But the real historical value of films lies in its use as primary source material. A film like The Longest Day is only vaguely interesting for what it tells us about military maneuvers during the D-Day invasion. However, if one watched the film to figure out what made an American audience, one generation later, clamor to see such a long, detailed re-enactment of a World War II operation, the film becomes a much more interesting social document. It teaches us about 1962, not 1944.

Why have historians been so slow to accept film as a primary source for history? Film, like literature, is a cultural artifact, and historians have long recognized the value of studying literature. They feel free to apply literature to purposes of historical preservation rarely contemplated by the original authors. Historians read popular American literature of the 1850s to learn about that era's social values and aspirations, and they read 19th century English novels to learn about 19th century English society. This literature is interpreted as subjective material--it has an historical validity despite its lack of straightforward objectivity. Nobody claims, for example, that London was exactly as Dickens described it, but most would agree that his novels give some valuable impressionistic descriptions of what life was like. And certainly the popularity of his novels shows something about the needs and interests of Dickens's reading public.

But most historians have yet to accord film the validity they have granted to literature. Maybe these historians can't get over their initial orientation towards film as an entertainment medium. Twenty years ago, Sir Arthur Elton, one of the first to write about the value of film as source material, suggested another possible reason for the historians' reluctance to study film. "The principle thing frustrating the proper application of film to history," he wrote, "is lack of awareness of the possibilities; and the lingering feeling, a hangover from the Nathan flare days, that it is undignified for scholars to take seriously what they often chose to call the 'flicks', something associated so uncomfortably closely with the unscholarly masses."

If leading historians continue to disdain the study of film, reels and reels of valuable footage will continue to sit, unused and unstudied, in musty archives. Most of the footage shot more than 50 years ago, on nitrate-base film, has already deteriorated, and those films that were not transferred to more durable acetate are lost to future historians forever. Film archives are in a general state of disarray. There is no comprehensive international film catalogue listing credits, content, and location of prints, and it seems unlikely that much will be done to rectify this deficiency until historians begin to realize that valuable material is rotting before their eyes. An efficient listing of existing prints might encourage more historians to examine films, but only a broader academic acceptance of the scholarly value of film can give a big push to the necessary cataloguing work. It's a vicious circle.

SURPRISINGLY, the Harvard History Department, scarcely the University's most innovative or forward-looking Department, has agreed to sponsor a colloquium on film as source material for history. The teaching fellows and professors who organized the colloquium managed to convince the Department that it's time to recognize film as a respectable kind of historical document. So, beginning next week, and continuing for six consecutive Monday evenings, the colloquium will screen films illuminating some of the social consequences of the Great Depression in Britain and America. Each screening will be followed by a discussion on the use of the films as source material.

Next Monday, at its opening session, the colloquium will focus on the subject of leisure activity during the Depression. The featured film of the evening is Easy Living (1937), one of the most successful of the "goofy comedies" that Hollywood was able to sell to Depression audiences. It's hardly the kind of movie one would expect scholars to analyze. But by watching the film critically with certain questions in mind, one can come up with some interesting hypotheses about life in the 30s.

The Central question to ask is why people liked the film. The producers ofEasy Living launched a massive promotional campaign aimed at affluent, urban consumers, so it's clear who they expected the film to attract. It it plausible, then, to characterize the film as an appeal to white collar escapism? Or does it appeal more to blue collar aspirations? What values represented in the film were shared by its audience? What made this fantasy world so attractive to the movie-going public?

THE ANSWERS to these questions must be highly speculative. But even speculative answers are of historical importance, for the problem of defining the social aspirations of the amorphous movie-going masses cannot readily be answered with other kinds of evidence. Historians can learn about the aspirations of the intellectuals by reading the books, journals, and newspapers they wrote. But studying popular films is a much better way, and perhaps the only way, to learn about the dreams of the millions of less articulate people, Elton's "unscholarly masses."

Speculation about a film's audience is only one way to use a film as an historical document. One can also learn by examining the economic and ideological motives of the film-makers. Included in the colloquium's schedule are films by various government agencies as well as films by radical film-makers working outside the commercial movies industry. Viewed in juxtaposition, these films convey the political tensions of a decade. United Action Means Victory(1940), a production of the United Auto Workers Film Department, which celebrates the 1939 GM tool and die strike, will be shown along with The Memorial Day Massacre (1937), a newsreel suppressed by Paramount executives for being too inflammatory. Willard Van Dyke's Valley Town(1940), a film showing the devastating effects of technological unemployment, will be screened with Walter Niebuhr's Machine: Master or Slave? (1941), which suggests, conversely, that the threat to jobs and well-being is only temporary.

Film is an integral part of our society, and may prove to be the chief way our culture is preserved for future historians. Films document events and coalesce dreams with a vividness unmatched by any other medium. They speak for the film-making elite and for the film-going masses.

An examination of films made during the Depression seems now, 40 years later, to be an appropriate way to learn what people were thinking about then. It is interesting to speculate what future historians may hypothesize about us on the basis of our most recent popular films.

The History Film Colloquium will meet on six consecutive Monday evenings, beginning October 28, in Science Center B, at 7:45 p.m. The $5.00 enrollment fee must be submitted in advance, by mail or in person, to Film Colloquium, Robinson 201. Tickets for individual showings will not be mail or in person, to Film Colloquium, Robinson 201. Tickets for individual showings will not be available.