Lumen Autumn 2024 - Flipbook - Page 38
Movies
As I write this, Ridley Scott’s latest film Napoleon has been
slated in some quarters for its fabrications (apparently, Napoleon
never actually fired cannons at the Pyramids during the French
invasion of Egypt).Yet when was history ever a completely
objective science? And should it be?
By Ben McCann
Whenever a historical film or biopic is released, there is an
enormous amount of discussion from academics, historians
and film critics about truthfulness, fidelity, and objectivity.
From Braveheart (1995) to Pearl Harbor (2001) to Netflix’s
The Crown and SBS’s Versailles, films and television series have
long been regarded as unreliable documents to history.
The creative joints between history and film have long been a
topic of interest to filmmakers, historians, audiences and historical
consultants. There is the ‘film as history’ concept that proposes
that film offers a window on the past (through, say, the Lumière
brothers’ extensive recording of everyday French life in the
1890s) that can be read alongside written historical accounts.
Steven Spielberg’s Amistad (1997) and Saving Private Ryan
(1999) were lambasted by some historians for their trite
rhetorical flourishes and sledgehammer sentimentality, as well as
their overall untruthfulness and ‘creative reimagining’ of the past.
“Based on
a
agined?
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History on film: real o
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