AHR Forum
Historiography and Historiophoty
Hayden White
Uploaded
16 April 1999 | 3,691 words
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[First
published American historial review 93, no.5
(December 1988): 1193-1199. References in notes to Robert
Rosenstone's article refer to Rosenstone's contribution to
that issue of AHR, and to pagination in the printed
issue of AHR, not to its reproduction electronically
in Screening the past]
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Robert Rosenstone's
essay raises at least two questions that should be of
eminent concern to professional historians. The first is
that of the relative adequacy of what we might call
"historiophoty" (the representation of history and
our thought about it in visual images and filmic discourse)
to the criteria of truth and accuracy presumed to govern the
professional practice of historiography (the representation
of history in verbal images and written discourse). Here the
issue is whether it is possible to "translate" a given
written account of history into a visual-auditory equivalent
without significant loss of content. The second question has
to do with what Rosenstone calls the "challenge" presented
by historiophoty to historiography. It is obvious that
cinema (and video) are better suited than written discourse
to the actual representation of certain kinds of historical
phenomena--landscape, scene, atmosphere, complex events such
as wars, battles, crowds, and emotions. But, Rosenstone
asks, can historiophoty adequately convey the complex,
qualified, and critical dimensions of historical thinking
about events which, according to Ian Jarvie, at least, is
what makes any given representation of the past a distinctly
"historical" account?
In many ways, the second
question is more radical than the first in its implications
for the way we might conceptualize the tasks of professional
historiography in our age. The historical evidence produced
by our epoch is often as much visual as it is oral and
written in nature. Also, the communicative conventions of
the human sciences are increasingly as much pictorial as
verbal in their predominant modes of representation. Modern
historians ought to be aware that the analysis of visual
images requires a manner of "reading" quite different from
that developed for the study of written documents. They
should also recognize that the representation of historical
events, agents, and processes in visual images presupposes
the mastery of a lexicon, grammar, and syntax--in other
words, a language and a discursive mode--quite different
from that conventionally used for their representation in
verbal discourse alone. All too often, historians treat
photographic, cinematic, and video data as if they could be
read in the same way as a written document. We are inclined
to treat the imagistic evidence as if it were at best a
complement of verbal evidence, rather than as a supplement,
which is to say, a discourse in its own right and one
capable of telling us things about its referents that are
both different from what can be told in verbal discourse and
also of a kind that can only be told by means of visual
images.
Some information about
the past can be provided only by visual images. Where
imagistic evidence is lacking, historical investigation
finds a limit to what it can legitimately assert about the
way things may have appeared to the agents acting on a given
historical scene. Imagistic (and especially photographic and
cinematic) evidence provides a basis for a reproduction of
the scenes and atmosphere of past events much more accurate
than any derived from verbal testimony alone. The
historiography of any period of history for which
photographs and films exist will be quite different, if not
more accurate, than that focused on periods known primarily
by verbal documentation.
So, too, in our
historiographical practices, we are inclined to use visual
images as a complement of our written discourse, rather than
as components of a discourse in its own right, by means of
which we might be able to say something different from and
other than what we can say in verbal form. We are inclined
to use pictures primarily as "illustrations" of the
predications made in our verbally written discourse. We have
not on the whole exploited the possibilities of using images
as a principal medium of discursive representation,
using verbal commentary only diacritically, that is to say,
to direct attention to, specify, and emphasize a meaning
conveyable by visual means alone.
***
Rosenstone properly insists that some things --he cites
landscapes, sounds, strong emotions, certain kinds of
conflicts between individuals and groups, collective events
and the movements of crowds--can be better represented on
film (and, we might add, video) than in any merely verbal
account. "Better" here would mean not only with greater
verisimilitude or stronger emotive effect but also less
ambiguously, more accurately. Rosenstone appears to falter
before the charge, made by purists, that the historical film
is inevitably both too detailed (in what it shows when it is
forced to use actors and sets that may not resemble
perfectly the historical individuals and scenes of which it
is a representation) and not detailed enough (when it is
forced to condense a process that might have taken years to
occur, the written account of which might take days to read,
into a two or three-hour presentation). But this charge, as
he properly remarks, hinges on a failure to distinguish
adequately between a mirror image of a phenomenon and other
kinds of representations of it, of which the written
historical account itself would be only one instance. No
history, visual or verbal, "mirrors" all or even the greater
part of the events or scenes of which it purports to be an
account, and this is true even of the most narrowly
restricted "micro-history." Every written history is a
product of processes of condensation, displacement,
symbolization, and qualification exactly like those used in
the production of a filmed representation. It is only the
medium that differs, not the way in which messages are
produced.
Jarvie apparently laments
the poverty of the "information load" of the historical
film, whether "fictional" (such as The Return of Martin
Guerre ) or "documentary" (such as Rosenstone's own
The Good Fight ). But this is to confuse the question
of scale and level of generalization at which the historical
account ought "properly" to operate with that of the amount
of evidence needed to support the generalizations and the
level of interpretation on which the account is cast. Are
short books about long periods of history in themselves
non-historical or anti-historical in nature? Was Edward
Gibbon's Decline and Fall , or for that matter
Fernand Braudel's The Mediterranean , of sufficient
length to do justice to its subject?
[1]
What is the proper length of a historical monograph? How
much information is needed to support any given historical
generalization? Does the amount of information required vary
with the scope of the generalization? And, if so, is there a
normative scope against which the propriety of any
historical generalization can be measured? On what
principle, it might be asked, is one to assess the
preference for an account that might take a hour to read (or
view) as against that which takes many hours, even days, to
read, much less assimilate to one's store of knowledge?
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[1]
Edward
Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire (London, 1776-88); Fernand Braudel, The
Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World (New York and
London, 1972).
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According to
Rosenstone, Jarvie complemented his critique of the
necessarily impoverished "information load" of the
historical film with two other objections: first, the
tendency of the historical film to favor "narration"
(Rosenstone himself notes that the two historical films he
worked on "compress[ed] the past to a closed world
by telling a single, linear story with, essentially, a
single interpretation") over "analysis"; and, second, the
presumed incapacity of film to represent the true essence of
historiography, which, according to Jarvie, consists less of
"descriptive narrative" than of "debates between historians
about just what exactly did happen, why it happened, and
what would be an adequate account of its significance."
[2]
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[2]
Robert A. Rosenstone, "History in Images/History in Words:
Reflections on the Possibility of Really Putting History
onto Film," AHR, 93 (December 1988): 1174; I.C. Jarvie,
"Seeing through Movies," Philosophy of the Social
Sciences , 8 (1978): 378.
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Rosenstone is surely
right to suggest that the historical film need not
necessarily feature narrative at the expense of analytical
interests. In any event, if a film like The Return of
Martin Guerre turns out to resemble a "historical
romance," it is not because it is a narrative film but
rather because the romance genre was used to plot the story
that the film wished to tell. There are other genres of
plots, conventionally considered to be more "realistic" than
the romance, that might have been used to shape the events
depicted in this story into a narrative of a different kind.
If Martin Guerre is a "historical romance," it would
be more proper to compare it, not with "historical
narrative" but with the "historical novel," which has a
problematic of its own, the discussion of which has
concerned historians since its invention in much the same
way that the discussion of film today ought properly to
concern them. And it ought to concern them for the reasons
outlined in Rosenstone's essay namely, because it raises the
specter of the "fictionality" of the historian's own
discourse, whether cast in the form of a narrative account
or in a more "analytical," non-narrative mode.
Like the historical
novel, the historical film draws attention to the extent to
which it is a constructed or, as Rosenstone calls it, a
"shaped" representation of a reality we historians would
prefer to consider to be "found" in the events themselves
or, if not there, then at least in the "facts" that have
been established by historians' investigation of the record
of the past. But the historical monograph is no less
"shaped" or constructed than the historical film or
historical novel. It may be shaped by different principles,
but there is no reason why a filmed representation of
historical events should not be as analytical and realistic
as any written account.
***
Jarvie's characterization of the essence of historiography
("debates between historians about just what exactly did
happen, why it happened, and what would be an adequate
account of its significance") alerts us to the problem of
how and to what purpose historians transform information
about "events" into the "facts" that serve as the subject
matter of their arguments. Events happen or occur; facts are
constituted by the subsumption of events under a
description, which is to say, by acts of predication. The
"adequacy" of any given account of the past, then, depends
on the question of the choice of the set of concepts
actually used by historians in their transformation of
information about events into, not "facts" in general, but
"facts" of a specific kind (political facts, social facts,
cultural facts, psychological facts). The instability of the
very distinction between "historical" facts on the one side
and non-historical ("natural" facts, for example) on the
other, a distinction without which a specifically historical
kind of knowledge would be unthinkable, indicates the
constructivist nature of the historian's enterprise. When
considering the utility or adequacy of filmed accounts of
historical events, then, it would be well to reflect upon
the ways in which a distinctively imagistic discourse can or
cannot transform information about the past into facts of a
specific kind.
I do not know enough
about film theory to specify more precisely the elements,
equivalent to the lexical, grammatical, and syntactical
dimensions of spoken or written language, of a distinctly
filmic discourse. Roland Barthes insisted that still
photographs do not and could not predicate--only their
titles or captions could do so. But cinema is quite another
matter. Sequences of shots and the use of montage or
closeups can be made to predicate quite as effectively as
phrases, sentences, or sequences of sentences in spoken or
written discourse. And if cinema can predicate, then it can
just as surely do all the things that Jarvie considered to
constitute the essence of written historical discourse.
Moreover, it should not be forgotten that the sound film has
the means by which to complement visual imagery with a
distinctive verbal content that need not sacrifice analysis
to the exigencies of dramatic effects. As for the notion
that a filmed portrayal of historical events could not be
"defend[ed];" and "footnote[d]," respond to
objections, and "criticize the opposition," there is no
reason at all to suppose that this could not in principle be
done.
[3]
There is no law prohibiting the production of a historical
film of sufficient length to do all of these things.
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[3]
Jarvie, "Seeing through Movies," 378.
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Rosenstone's list of
the effects of historians' prejudices against
"historiophoty" is sketchy but full enough. He indicates
that many of the problems posed by the effort to "put
history onto film" stem from the notion that the principal
task is to translate what is already a written discourse
into an imagistic one.
[4]
Resistance to the effort to put history onto film centers
for the most part on the question of what gets lost in this
process of translation. Among the things supposedly lost are
accuracy of detail, complexity of explanation, the
auto-critical and inter-critical dimensions of
historiological reflection, and the qualifications of
generalizations necessitated by, for instance, the absence
or unavailability of documentary evidence. Rosenstone seems
to grant the force of Jarvie's claim that the "information
load" of the filmed representation of historical events and
processes is inevitably impoverished when he considers the
question of whether a "thinning of data" on the screen
"makes for poor history." While pointing out that film
permits us to "see landscapes, hear sounds, witness strong
emotions..., or view physical conflict between individuals
and groups," he seems unsure whether historiophoty might not
"play down the analytical" aspects of historiography and
favor appeals to the emotive side of the spectator's
engagement with images. But, at the same time, he insists
that there is nothing inherently anti-analytical about
filmed representations of history and certainly nothing that
is inherently anti-historiological about historiophoty. And,
in his brief consideration of the film documentary,
Rosenstone turns the force of the anti-historiophoty
argument back on those who, in making this argument, appear
to ignore the extent to which any kind of
historiography shares these same limitations.
[5]
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[4]
Rosenstone, "History in Images/History in Words,"
1175.
[5]
Rosenstone, "History in Images/History in Words,"
1178-80.
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He grants, for
example, that, although the film documentary strives for the
effect of a straightforwardly direct and objective account
of events, it is always a "shaped"--fashioned or
stylized--representation thereof. "[W]e must
remember," he writes, "that on the screen we see not the
events themselves . . . but selected images of those
events."
[6]
The example he gives is that of a film shot of a cannon
being fired followed by another shot of an explosion of the
(or a) shell some distance away. Such a sequence, he
suggests, is, properly speaking, fictional rather than
factual, because, obviously, the camera could not have been
simultaneously in the two places where first the firing and
then the explosion occurred. What we have, then, is a
pseudo-factual representation of a cause-effect relation.
But is this representation "false" thereby, that is to say,
is it false because the explosion shown in the second shot
is not that of the shell fired in the first shot but rather
is a shot of some other shell, fired from who knows where?
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[6]
Rosenstone, "History in Images/History in Words," 1180.
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In this case, the
notion that the sequence of images is false would require a
standard of representational literalness that, if applied to
historiography itself, would render it impossible to write.
In fact, the "truthfulness" of the sequence is to be found
not at the level of concreteness but rather at another level
of representation, that of typification. The sequence should
be taken to represent a type of event. The referent
of the sequence is the type of event depicted, not
the two discrete events imaged, first, the firing of
a shell and, then, its explosion. The
spectator is not being "fooled" by such a representation nor
is there anything duplicitous in such a rendering of a
cause-and-effect sequence. The veracity of the
representation hinges on the question of the likelihood of
this type of cause-and- effect sequence occurring at
specific times and places and under certain conditions,
namely, in the kind of war made possible by a certain kind
of industrial-military technology and fought in a particular
time and place.
Indeed, it is a
convention of written history to represent the causes and
effects of such events in precisely this way, in a sequence
of images that happens to be verbal rather than visual, to
be sure, but no less "fictional" for being so. The
concreteness, precision of statement, and accuracy of detail
of a sentence such as, "The sniper's bullet fired from a
nearby warehouse struck President Kennedy in the head,
wounding him fatally," are not in principle denied to a
filmed depiction either of the event referred to in the
sentence or of the cause-and-effect relation that it cites
as an explanation. One can imagine a situation in which
enough cameras were deployed in such a way as to have
captured both the sniper's shot and the resultant effect
with greater immediacy than that feigned in the verbal
representation and, indeed, with greater factual precision,
inasmuch as the verbal utterance depends on an inference
from effect to cause for which no specific documentation
exists. In the filmed representations of this famous event,
the ambiguity that still pervades our knowledge of it has
been left intact and not dispelled by the specious
concreteness suggested in the provision of the "details"
given in the verbal representation. And if this is true of
micro-events, such as the assassination of a head of state,
how much more true is it of the representation in written
history of macro-events?
For example, when
historians list or indicate the "effects" of a large-scale
historical event, such as a war or a revolution, they are
doing nothing different from what an editor of a documentary
film does in showing shots of an advancing army followed by
shots of enemy troops surrendering or fleeing, followed by
shots of the triumphant force entering a conquered city. The
difference between a written account and a filmed account of
such a sequence turns less on the general matter of accuracy
of detail than on the different kinds of concreteness with
which the images, in the one case verbal, in the other
visual, are endowed. Much depends on the nature of the
"captions" accompanying the two kinds of images, the written
commentary in the verbal account and the voice-over or
subtitles in the visual one, that "frame" the depicted
events individually and the sequence as a whole. It is the
nature of the claims made for the images considered as
evidence that determines both the discursive function of the
events and the criteria to be employed in the assessment of
their veracity as predicative utterances.
Thus, for example, the
depiction, in Richard Attenborough's film Gandhi, of
the anonymous South African railway conductor who pushed the
young Gandhi from the train, is not a misrepresentation
insofar as the actor playing the role may not have possessed
the physical features of the actual agent of that act. The
veracity of the scene depends on the depiction of a
person whose historical significance derived from the
kind of act he performed at a particular time and
place, which act was a function of an identifiable type of
role-playing under the kinds of social conditions prevailing
at a general, but specifically historical, time and place.
And the same is true of the depiction of Gandhi himself in
the film. Demands for a verisimilitude in film that is
impossible in any medium of representation, including that
of written history, stem from the confusion of historical
individuals with the kinds of "characterization" of them
required for discursive purposes, whether in verbal or in
visual media.
Even in written history,
we are often forced to represent some agents only as
"character types," that is, as individuals known only by
their general social attributes or by the kinds of actions
that their "roles" in a given historical event permitted
them to play, rather than as full-blown "characters,"
individuals with many known attributes, proper names, and a
range of known actions that permit us to draw fuller
portraits of them than we can draw of their more "anonymous"
counterparts. But the agents who form a "crowd" (or any
other kind of group) are not more misrepresented in a film
for being portrayed by actors than they are in a verbal
account of their collective action.
***
Too often, discussion of the irredeemably fictional nature
of historical films fail to take account of the work of
experimental or avant-garde filmmakers, for whom the
analytic function of their discourse tends to predominate
over the exigencies of "storytelling." Rosenstone cites a
number of experimentalist films that not only depart from
but actually seek to undermine the conventions of commercial
(especially the Hollywood variety of) filmmaking. A film
such as Far from Poland , he points out, not only
does not feature storytelling at the expense of analysis but
actually brings under question the conventional
(nineteenth-century) notions of "realistic" representation
to which many contemporary historians, analytical as well as
narrational, still subscribe. He specifically likens the
work of experimental filmmakers to that of Bertolt Brecht in
the history of the theater. But he might just as well have
likened it to the work of those historians of the modern age
who have taken as their problem less the "realistic
representation" of "the past" than what Jarvie himself calls
the question of "what would be an adequate account" of "what
exactly did happen, why it happened, and . . . its
significance." This is surely the lesson to be derived from
the study of recent feminist filmmaking, which has been
concerned not only with depicting the lives of women in both
the past and present, truthfully and accurately, but, even
more important, with bringing into question conventions of
historical representation and analysis that, while
pretending to be doing nothing more than "telling what
really happened," effectively present a patriarchical
version of history. The kind of experimentalist films
invoked by Rosenstone do indeed "subvert" the kind of
"realism" we associate with both conventional films and
conventional historiography, but it is not because they may
sacrifice "accuracy of detail" in order to direct attention
to the problem of choosing a way to represent the past.
[7]
They show us instead that the criterion for determining what
shall count as "accuracy of detail" depends on the "way"
chosen to represent both "the past" and our thought about
its "historical significance" alike.
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[7]
Rosenstone, "History in Images/History in Words,"
1183.
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