Dudley Andrew, “Film and History”
Henry Haaker
German 529

In the text I am trying to discuss, Andrew is showing his understanding of a (complete?) compendium like list of different approaches to film history and different notions of film historians. One of his main ideas through the text is the difference between historians, which are concerned with the aesthetics and historians concerns with the society. The latter are sub grouped in those taking movies as a pure and direct freeze image of society (like taking a still life as a picture of real apples and oranges) and others seeing it more as an indirect “mirror of society” which shows in a more subtle way parts of society which are less obvious (and though for the majority more interesting) and which goes more into the direction of what some call ‘mentalité’ (even though I have the feeling the term ‘esprit’ would be more fitting).

At one point he is assuming that at the end of the day the “survivors” are defining history and that in fact all kinds of scaling into periods, all sorts of cataloguing films and any approach of judging and putting a film in a “serial history” is more or less influenced by our actual present society. Hence he had to admit that his essay can be also taken as one part of the endless line of papers, which won’t have much reference tomorrow except as historic artifact. What I thought when I read this text, was “OK fine and now … ?”  Isn’t there any kind of final stand point and thesis missing at the end? Isn’t it just a list of aspects, we all intuitively and consciously know and practice every day?

Well, we can still use this text in order to think about the films we saw in this semester and pick for example the movie of this week “Nachts, wenn der Teufel kam.” Here we’ve got to deal with a chain of a dozen different subjective judgments and orderings. First our professor putting the film in a line of serial murders movies, Weimar republic issue discussing movies, than the characters in the movie, which have differing and conflicting opinions and notions of justice and law, the scriptwriter and the director, which where trying to use the actual historical events in order to communicate something to the audience of this time (and it was a big success as far as the awards can be taken as an indications). And today we, looking with so much distance at the movie and with all our knowledge and underlying assumptions. In addition to that we might have read some reviews, which all deal with a singular person judging, sorting, chaining and explaining the different aspects of the film. So it nearly seems to be, that after a certain time of interpretation and theorizing the movie becomes secondary and not only a mirror of society which it is staged in but also of society it is seen in (which can be many different periods of time and societies). And we can also see it also as a mirror of every single audience member’s psychology and cognition. (In terms of Theodor W. Adorno we as subjects not only violated the object – ‘ihm Gewalt antun’- ; we did already commit multiple rapes on it.)

So what I am trying to say in a complicated way is that I think Andrew forgets to talk about the personal and unconscious entity we create when we watch a movie and how these changes with our level of reflection, knowledge, intention and co-audience we are watching it with. May be it would be a fruitful enterprise to base a film history on personal psychological perceptions in different contexts and times.

One interesting very recent example would be our perception of “Schindler’s List” made by Mr. Spielberg. When we saw the ‘authentic’ movie about an existing ‘hero’ during a horrible time in Europe, we had specific feelings, based on our educational, personal and may be national and religious background. A couple of weeks ago the “New York Times” was reporting, that a book by David M. Crowe named “Oskar Schindler: The Untold Account of His Life, Wartime Activities and the True Story Behind the List “ showed, that ‘Schindler’s List’ never existed and that he wasn’t this undisputable hero many people think. So what happens yet? Does the film change? Do we see it different now? Would we see it different, when we saw it the first time with this information provided?

May be this could be an interesting field of research, worth giving it a shot. It might turn out being uninteresting, but thatÂ’s what research is about; finding out which ideas are craps, isnÂ’t it?