Obviously I am convinced that films are very useful in teaching about ethnicity and race. But what about historical and sociological inaccuracies? Doesn’t Hollywood present a false reality that may actually miseducate rather than enlighten?
Sometimes this charge is completely valid. Sometimes this charge is not valid at all. Most of the time this charge is partially valid.
How do we, first as viewers and then as teachers, determine validity? First we see the film, next we read the critiques, and finally we may do research of our own. Then we decide if the film is appropriate for our students. If so, we may still come up with a few disclaimers - or we may require our students to do research to discover their own disclaimers.
Minor disclaimers usually involve minor errors of fact. For example, Professor David Brion Davis, Pulitzer Prize winning historian at Yale University, lectured to our film seminar on the Amistad affair on May 26, 1998. When asked about the movie “Amistad”, his minor disclaimers were that “Men didn’t wear beards” and “People didn’t ride bicycles.” If these were “Amistad’s” only inaccuracies, the film would be home free as far as I’m concerned. While historical errors should not be excused completely, it is unrealistic to expect Hollywood directors and screenwriters to meet professional standards of scholarly accuracy.
Professor Davis made another, more far-reaching criticism. He said that “Amistad” grossly underrepresented the racism found in the Northern United States in 1839. This is a major disclaimer, an important topic for critical discussion.
Note that the major disclaimer is not merely a question of an error of fact. It involves an error of omission, a question of emphasis. These types of errors are much more important than the inevitable minor historical and sociological errors which crop up in all films.
Documentary filmmakers must be especially aware of questions of emphasis. Ken Burns, our leading documentary filmmaker today, was criticized for focusing too much on the battlefield in The Civil War. A rather obscure general received fifteen minutes screen time for successfully defending a hill during the Battle of Gettysburg. Frederick Douglass, the great abolitionist leader, received four minutes of screen time. I am one of those who sees this as nearly a sacrilege.
Mr. Burns took some of the criticism rather hard. But he listened to his critics. His epic “Baseball” place greater emphasis on matters of wide societal, rather than baseball, significance. The Negro Leagues, Jackie Robinson, and the other Black baseball pioneers received three hours of screen time, which I believe reflects the tremendous importance of baseball segregation and eventual integration.
Of course baseball purists attacked Burns. An irate caller to WFAN in New York ranted and raved about the disproportionate amount of time given Robinson, implying that this came at the expense of Stan Musial, who was merely a blip in the fourteen hour documentary. The caller kept reading from baseball’s record book, which he claimed proved Musial was a better player than Robinson.
The caller may have been right about Robinson and Musial’s playing abilities (actually it is a close call), but it was Ken Burns, not the caller, who made the right call. Jackie Robinson is the most significant historical figure in baseball history. Musial has virtually no wide historical significance, although he may be the best left fielder of all time.
I am not going to draw the line between minor and major errors, because this is an extremely subjective undertaking. I do like the line drawn by Robert A. Rosenstone in Visions of the Past. He acknowledges that there will be a certain amount of invention in all historical films. He goes on to distinguish between true and false invention, asking only that historical films not violate the overall data and meanings of what we already know of the past.(79) This may be a relaxed standard, but it is a sensible one when we evaluate films to determine if they are suitable for our students. We can’t expect filmmakers to be academic researchers, although we can expect them to use academics as consultants when it is necessary. But we certainly have a right to expect filmmakers not to alter or embellish the past to gain viewers.
