Movies as historical sources?
I’m currently taking three courses to finish my BA. One of them is titled “History and Film.” It’s known to be a “bird” course and that’s why I took it, I want to focus on my other two courses and do well in them.
Well yesterday was the first full day of class, it’s a night class that runs 3 hours, and we covered early film. There was a quote read out by the professor from a then famous movie director. Paraphrased, it said that in the future mankind will not need books to study history. That libraries will only need to be filled with monitors that have access to various film/motion pictures. This gentleman claimed that one would not need to sift through lots of primary documents to reach the truth, just look into a screen and have the honest truth to see. This director also imagined it would be a panel of recognized authorities who would make these films.
Most of the class laughed but being as sci-fi minded as I am I got to thinking about the same issue just in the future. What if our society were to develop time travel in a safe way. By safe I mean that the traveler wouldn’t need to worry about getting hurt or disrupting the past. We really could go and see the past. Who needs a primary source when you can go back and watch it being written?
I’m entirely convinced that if time travel were invented history would disappear as a discipline of study, or be changed so radically as to become irrelevant. Which is kind of sad. To think that the discipline of history is dependent to some degree on our inability to see the past. But I suppose every area has some limitation, astronomy comes to mind.
What do you think about film as historical source (not something I talked about) and film as replacing books, not necessarily just for history.
February 2nd, 2008 at 11:18 pm
I think you’re right that, if time travel were to be invented, the discipline of history would pretty much collapse. Scholarly history revolves around the creation and competition of interpretations (Whig, Progressive, etc. in regards to, say, the American Revolution). If you could just go back and say, “See, your interpretation is wrong, this is how it happened and why”, academic history would go poof.
But it’d still be awesome to be able to sit on the sidelines of history and just watch. So cool.