Clio at the Multiplex
history hollywood movies
Simon Schama David D. Kirkpatrick Amy Davidson Sorkin Isaac Chotiner Vinson Cunningham Condé Nast
ONWARD AND UPWARD WITH THE ARTS about historical movies. "We have come to understand that who we are is who we were," says Anthony Hopkins, impersonating …
https://www.newyorker.com/verso/static/the-new-yorker/assets/favicon.ico
The New Yorker
The New Yorker, January 19, 1998 P. 38

ONWARD AND UPWARD WITH THE ARTS about historical movies. "We have come to understand that who we are is who we were," says Anthony Hopkins, impersonating John Quincy Adams at the climactic moment of Steven Spielberg's "Amistad." A muted trumpet sounds over the rhetoric, vaguely invoking patriotic sacrifice. Hearts around the theatre swell like popcorn. In reality, Adams's address to the bench on behalf of the abducted Africans of the Amistad took 8 hours, spread over 2 days. Spielberg works on a broad canvas, but not that broad. His movie boils the speech down to a 5-minute appeal to the Founding Fathers... "Amistad" is just the most recent example of filmed history as costume civics, right in line with "Glory," "Malcolm X," and "Michael Collins." If movie history is to get produced as box-office with a conscience, it must serve one of two purposes: explain the Origins of Us or act as Augury of What Is to Come. But this kind of history seldom escapes the contemporary world it claims to transcend... When the historian Natalie Zemon Davis got involved in the making of Daniel Vigne's "The Return of Martin Guerre," that involvement was apparent in the historical detail and accuracy within every frame. A true feeling for the period contains more than just pedantically correct costume-and-decor detail; it contains an instinct for the illuminating power of the incidental detail... Thucydides was the founding father of history as the political science of the past, while Herodotus exemplified the history that emphasized, poetically, the otherness of the past, and which promiscuously muddled myth and ritual, report and document. Hollywood is afraid of the uncertainties of history. Outside Hollywood, though, there have been powerful history movies, created in the poetic, not instructional, mode. The best movies in this mode--Luchino Visconti's "The Leopard" (1963), Roberto Rossellini's "The Rise of Louis XIV" (1966), and Yves Angelo's 1994 "Le Colonel Chabert," among others--not only are dedicated to reconstructing vanished worlds, but challenge the truisms of linear history...