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AHR Forum
Historiography and Historiophoty
HAYDEN WHITE
Some information about the past can be provided only by visual images. Where
imagistic evidence is lacking, historical investigation finds a limit to what it can
legitimately assert about the way things may have appeared to the agents acting
on a given historical scene. Imagistic (and especially photographic and cinematic)
evidence provides a basis for a reproduction of the scenes and atmosphere of past
events much more accurate than any derived from verbal testimony alone. The
historiography of any period of history for which photographs and films exist will
be quite different, if not more accurate, than that focused on periods known
primarily by verbal documentation.
So, too, in our historiographical practices, we are inclined to use visual images
as a complement of our written discourse, rather than as components of a discourse
in its own right, by means of which we might be able to say something different
from and other than what we can say in verbal form. We are inclined to use pictures
primarily as "illustrations" of the predications made in our verbally written
discourse. We have not on the whole exploited the possibilities of using images as
a principal medium of discursive representation, using verbal commentary only
diacritically, that is to say, to direct attention to, specify, and emphasize a meaning
conveyable by visual means alone.
zations and the level of interpretation on which the account is cast. Are short books
about long periods of history in themselves non-historical or anti-historical in
nature? Was Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall, or for that matter Fernand
Braudel's The Mediterranean,of sufficient length to do justice to its subject?' What
is the proper length of a historical monograph? How much information is needed
to support any given historical generalization? Does the amount of information
required vary with the scope of the generalization? And, if so, is there a normative
scope against which the propriety of any historical generalization can be mea-
sured? On what principle, it might be asked, is one to assess the preference for an
account that might take a hour to read (or view) as against that which takes many
hours, even days, to read, much less assimilate to one's store of knowledge?
According to Rosenstone, Jarvie complemented his critique of the necessarily
impoverished "information load" of the historical film with two other objections:
first, the tendency of the historical film to favor "narration" (Rosenstone himself
notes that the two historical films he worked on "compress[ed] the past to a closed
world by telling a single, linear story with, essentially, a single interpretation") over
"analysis"; and, second, the presumed incapacity of film to represent the true
essence of historiography, which, according to Jarvie, consists less of "descriptive
narrative" than of "debates between historians aboutjust what exactly did happen,
why it happened, and what would be an adequate account of its significance."2
Rosenstone is surely right to suggest that the historical film need not necessarily
feature narrative at the expense of analytical interests. In any event, if a film like
The Return of Martin Guerreturns out to resemble a "historical romance," it is not
because it is a narrative film but rather because the romance genre was used to plot
the story that the film wished to tell. There are other genres of plots, conventionally
considered to be more "realistic"than the romance, that might have been used to
shape the events depicted in this story into a narrative of a different kind. If Martin
Guerreis a "historical romance," it would be more proper to compare it, not with
"historical narrative" but with the "historical novel," which has a problematic of its
own, the discussion of which has concerned historians since its invention in much
the same way that the discussion of film today ought properly to concern them.
And it ought to concern them for the reasons outlined in Rosenstone's essay,
namely, because it raises the specter of the "fictionality" of the historian's own
discourse, whether cast in the form of a narrative account or in a more "analytical,"
non-narrative mode.
Like the historical novel, the historical film draws attention to the extent to which
it is a constructed or, as Rosenstone calls it, a "shaped" representation of a reality
we historians would prefer to consider to be "found" in the events themselves or,
if not there, then at least in the "facts" that have been established by historians'
investigation of the record of the past. But the historical monograph is no less
the effort to put history onto film centers for the most part on the question of what
gets lost in this process of translation. Among the things supposedly lost are
accuracy of detail, complexity of explanation, the auto-critical and inter-critical
dimensions of historiological reflection, and the qualifications of generalizations
necessitated by, for instance, the absence or unavailability of documentary
evidence. Rosenstone seems to grant the force of Jarvie's claim that the "infor-
mation load" of the filmed representation of historical events and processes is
inevitably impoverished when he considers the question of whether a "thinning of
data" on the screen "makes for poor history." While pointing out that film permits
us to "see landscapes, hear sounds, witness strong emotions. . . , or view physical
conflict between individuals and groups," he seems unsure whether historiophoty
might not "play down the analytical" aspects of historiography and favor appeals
to the emotive side of the spectator's engagement with images. But, at the same
time, he insists that there is nothing inherently anti-analytical about filmed
representations of history and certainly nothing that is inherently anti-
historiological about historiophoty. And, in his brief consideration of the film
documentary, Rosenstone turns the force of the anti-historiophoty argument back
on those who, in making this argument, appear to ignore the extent to which any
kind of historiography shares these same limitations.5
He grants, for example, that, although the film documentary strives for the
effect of a straightforwardly direct and objective account of events, it is always a
"shaped"-fashioned or stylized-representation thereof. "[W]e must remember,"
he writes, "that on the screen we see not the events themselves ... but selected
images of those events."6 The example he gives is that of a film shot of a cannon
being fired followed by another shot of an explosion of the (or a) shell some
distance away. Such a sequence, he suggests, is, properly speaking, fictional rather
than factual, because, obviously, the camera could not have been simultaneously
in the two places where first the firing and then the explosion occurred. What we
have, then, is a pseudo-factual representation of a cause-effect relation. But is this
representation "false" thereby, that is to say, is it false because the explosion shown
in the second shot is not that of the shell fired in the first shot but rather is a shot
of some other shell, fired from who knows where?
In this case, the notion that the sequence of images is false would require a
standard of representational literalness that, if applied to historiography itself,
would render it impossible to write. In fact, the "truthfulness" of the sequence is
to be found not at the level of concreteness but rather at another level of
representation, that of typification. The sequence should be taken to represent a
typeof event. The referent of the sequence is the typeof event depicted, not the
two discrete events imaged, first, the firing of a shell and, then, its explosion. The
spectator is not being "fooled" by such a representation nor is there anything
duplicitous in such a rendering of a cause-and-effect sequence. The veracity of the
representationi hinges on the question of the likelihood of this typeof cause-and-
effect sequence occurring at specific times and places and under certain conditions,
namely, in the kind of war made possible by a certain kind of industrial-military
technology and fought in a particular time and place.
Indeed, it is a convention of written history to represent the causes and effects
of such events in precisely this way, in a sequence of images that happens to be
verbal rather than visual, to be sure, but no less "fictional" for being so. The
concreteness, precision of statement, and accuracy of detail of a sentence such as,
"The sniper's bullet fired from a nearby warehouse struck President Kennedy in
the head, wounding him fatally," are not in principle denied to a filmed depiction
either of the event referred to in the sentence or of the cause-and-effect relation
that it cites as an explanation. One can imagine a situation in which enough
cameras were deployed in such a way as to have captured both the sniper's shot
and the resultant effect with greater immediacy than that feigned in the verbal
representation and, indeed, with greater factual precision, inasmuch as the verbal
utterance depends on an inference from effect to cause for which no specific
documentation exists. In the filmed representations of this famous event, the
ambiguity that still pervades our knowledge of it has been left intact and not
dispelled by the specious concreteness suggested in the provision of the "details"
given in the verbal representation. And if this is true of micro-events, such as the
assassination of a head of state, how much more true is it of the representation in
written history of macro-events?
For example, when historians list or indicate the "effects" of a large-scale
historical event, such as a war or a revolution, they are doing nothing different
from what an editor of a documentary film does in showing shots of an advancing
army followed by shots of enemy troops surrendering or fleeing, followed by shots
of the triumphant force entering a conquered city. The difference between a
written account and a filmed account of such a sequence turns less on the general
matter of accuracy of detail than on the different kinds of concreteness with which
the images, in the one case verbal, in the other visual, are endowed. Much depends
on the nature of the "captions" accompanying the two kinds of images, the written
commentary in the verbal account and the voice-over or subtitles in the visual one,
that "frame" the depicted events individually and the sequence as a whole. It is the
nature of the claims made for the images considered as evidence that determines
both the discursive function of the events and the criteria to be employed in the
assessment of their veracity as predicative utterances.
Thus, for example, the depiction, in Richard Attenborough's film Gandhi, of the
anonymous South African railway conductor who pushed the young Gandhi from
the train, is not a misrepresentation insofar as the actor playing the role may not
have possessed the physical features of the actual agent of that act. The veracity
of the scene depends on the depiction of a person whose historical significance
derived from the kind of act he performed at a particular time and place, which
act was a function of an identifiable type of role-playing under the kinds of social
conditions prevailing at a general, but specifically historical, time and place. And
the same is true of the depiction of Gandhi himself in the film. Demands for a
versimilitude in film that is impossible in any medium of representation, including
Historiographyand Historiophoty 1199
that of written history, stem from the confusion of historical individuals with the
kinds of "characterization" of them required for discursive purposes, whether in
verbal or in visual media.
Even in written history, we are often forced to represent some agents only as
"character types," that is, as individuals known only by their general social
attributes or by the kinds of actions that their "roles" in a given historical event
permitted them to play, rather than as full-blown "characters," individuals with
many known attributes, proper names, and a range of known actions that permit
us to draw fuller portraits of them than we can draw of their more "anonymous"
counterparts. But the agents who form a "crowd" (or any other kind of group) are
not more misrepresented in a film for being portrayed by actors than they are in
a verbal account of their collective action.