Introduction

I know it's short but it's a start! I'm currently answering my first question about perspective.

You know,
Perspective
- Film is entertainment so it doesn’t matter if its right or wrong
- Film can have grains of truth but is mostly wrong
- Films can be quite accurate with a few mistakes.
- Films aren’t records of history- they’re just based on history

Anywho, here we go!




As historians, the simple desire of an ‘inquiry’ into the past has always been a driving force behind the recording and presentation of history. This presentation of the past however, has been refashioned over generations and influenced highly by predeceasing historians, the historian’s personal context and the complex cultural and sociological impact placed upon the historian.

Acknowledging this, one must ask if in our rapidly developed, technological society, can film be seen as a valid historical source? In order to answer this question a series of smaller questions must be taken into consideration, regarding accuracy of the history being told, audience perception and motivation behind the creation of the movie.

Before addressing these issues however, one important aspect of film as a historical source is how we perceive the films value. Do we take into consideration the traditional view of films being created solely for entertainment purposes, or do we approach this study with the idea of films holding mostly truths with a few inaccuracies. Furthermore, do we just assume films are mostly fictions with a few granules of factual information or do we simply trust in the statement that films are nothing more than a story based on historical events? In order to assess the value of
Cinematic productions as valid historical sources we must take into consideration the different ways we can approach these texts.



NOTE: With this last paragraph, those ideas of how to perceive history are derived from a text I'm using (Lessons from the Reel Life: Movies, Meaning and Myth-Making by Michael Frost and Robert Banks) and I'm not sure how I should go about referencing this, as I haven't directly quoted anything, i've just derived these questions from the discussions in the book about how to approach studying film.

Do I reference the pages that I got the ideas from? Or do I just reference the start of the chapter about historical films?

I referenced it like this: Michael Frost and Robert Banks, "Personal History- Life is Beautiful and the Interplay between Memory and Fable", Lessons from Reel Life: Movies, Meaning and Myth-Making (April 2001): pp 159-165

The pages span so largely because even though the chapter later on focuses solely on Life is Beautiful, for the first six pages it just discusses generally how we can perceive history and therefor what judgements will be made.