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For an academic historian to become involved in the world of motion pictures is at once an exhilarating and disturbing experience. Exhilarating for all the obvious reasons: the power of the visual media; the opportunity to emerge from the lonely depths of the library to join with other human beings in a common enterprise; the delicious thought of a potentially large audience for the fruits of one's research, analysis, and writing. Disturbing for equally obvious reasons: no matter how serious or honest the filmmakers, and no matter how deeply committed they are to rendering the subject faithfully, the history that finally appears on the screen can never fully satisfy the historian as historian (although it may satisfy the historian as filmgoer). Inevitably, something happens on the way from the page to the screen that changes the meaning of the past as it is understood by those of us who work in words.
The disturbance caused by working on a film lingers long after the exhilaration has vanished. Like all such disturbances, this one can provoke a search for ideas to help restore one's sense of intellectual equilibrium. In my case, the search may have been particularly intense because I had a double dose of the experience -- two of my major written works have been put onto film, and both times I have been to some extent involved in the process.
The two films were about as different as films can be. One was a dramatic feature and the other a documentary; one was a fifty-million-dollar Hollywood project and the other a quarter-million-dollar work funded largely with public money; one was pitched at the largest of mass audiences and the other at the more elite audience of public television and art houses. Despite these differences, vast and similar changes happened to the history in each production, changes that have led me to a new appreciation of the problems of putting history onto film. After these experiences, I no longer find it possible to blame the shortcomings of historical films either on the evils of Hollywood or the woeful effects of low budgets, on the limits of the dramatic genre or those of the documentary format. The most serious problems the historian has with the past on the screen arise out of the nature and demands of the visual medium itself.
The two films are Reds (1982), the story of the last five years in the life of American poet, journalist, and revolutionary, John Reed; and The Good Fight (1984), a chronicle of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, the American volunteers who took part in the Spanish Civil War. Each is a well-made, emotion-filled work that has exposed a vast number of people to an important but long-buried historical subject, one previously known largely to specialists or to old leftists. Each brings to the screen a wealth of authentic historical detail. Each humanizes the past, turning long-suspect radicals into admirable human beings. Each proposes--if a bit indirectly--an interpretation of its subject, seeing political commitment as both a personal and historical category. Each connects past to present by suggesting that the health of the body politic and, indeed, the world depends on such recurrent commitments.
Despite their very real virtues, their evocations of the past through powerful images, colorful characters, and moving words, neither of these motion pictures can fulfill many of the basic demands for truth and verifiability used by all historians. Reds indulges in overt fiction--to give just two examples--by putting John Reed in places where he never was or having him make an impossible train journey from France to Petrograd in 1917.(1) The Good Fight--like many recent documentaries--equates memory with history; it allows veterans of the Spanish war to speak of events more than four decades in the past without calling their misremembrances, mistakes, or outright fabrications into question.(2) And yet neither fictionalization nor unchecked testimony is the major reason that these films violate my notion of history. Far more unsettling is the way each compresses the past to a closed world by telling a single, linear story with, essentially, a single interpretation. Such a narrative strategy obviously denies historical alternatives, does away with complexities of motivation or causation, and banishes all subtlety from the world of history.
(1)A fuller discussion of the historical shortcomings of Reds can be found in my "Reds as History," Reviews in American History, 10 (1982): 297-310.
(2)A fuller discussion of the historical shortcomings of The Good Fight is in my paper, "History, Memory, Documentary: 'The Good Fight' Fifty Years After," delivered at a symposium entitled "The Abraham Lincoln Brigade and the Spanish Civil War: History, Memory and the Politics and Culture of the 1930s," National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., December 5, 1986.
This sort of criticism of history on film might be of no importance if we did not live in a world deluged with images, one in which people increasingly receive their ideas about the past from motion pictures and television, from feature films, docudramas, mini-series, and network documentaries. Today, the chief source of historical knowledge for the majority of the population--outside of the much-despised textbook--must surely be the visual media, a set of institutions that lie almost wholly outside the control of those of us who devote our lives to history.(3) Any reasonable extrapolation suggests that trend will continue. Certainly, it is not farfetched to foresee a time (are we almost there?) when written history will be a kind of esoteric pursuit and when historians will be viewed as the priests of a mysterious religion, commentators on sacred texts and performers of rituals for a populace little interested in their meaning but indulgent enough (let us hope) to pay for them to continue.
To think of the ever-growing power of the visual media is to raise the disturbing thought that perhaps history is dead in the way God is dead. Or, at the most, alive only to believers--that is, to those of us who pursue it as a profession. Surely, I am not the only one to wonder if those we teach or the population at large truly know or care about history, the kind of history that we do. Or to wonder if our history--scholarly, scientific, measured--fulfills the need for that larger History, that web of connections to the past that holds a culture together, that tells us not only where we have been but also suggests where we are going. Or to worry if our history actually relates us to our own cultural sources, tells us what we need to know about other traditions, and provides enough understanding of what it is to be human.
Perhaps it seems odd to raise such questions at this time, after two decades of repeated methodological breakthroughs in history, innovations that have taught us to look at the past in so many new ways and have generated so much new information. The widespread influence of the Annales school, the new social history, quantification and social science history, women's history, psychohistory, anthropological history, the first inroads of Continental theory into a reviving intellectual history--all these developments indicate that history as a discipline is flourishing. But--and it is a big BUT, a BUT that can be insisted on despite the much discussed "revival of narrative"--it is clear that at the same time there is a rapidly shrinking general audience for the information we have to deliver and the sort of stories we have to tell. Despite the success of our new methodologies, I fear that as a profession we know less and less how to tell stories that situate us meaningfully in a value-laden world. Stories that matter to people outside our profession. Stories that matter to people inside the profession. Stories that matter at all.
Enter film: the great temptation. Film, the contemporary medium still capable of both dealing with the past and holding a large audience. How can we not suspect that this is the medium to use to create narrative histories that will touch large numbers of people. Yet is this dream possible? Can one really put history onto film, history that will satisfy those of us who devote our lives to understanding, analyzing, and recreating the past in words? Or does the use of film necessitate a change in what we mean by history, and would we be willing to make such a change? The issue comes down to this: is it possible to tell historical stories on film and not lose our professional or intellectual souls?
Wallpapers of Nature Biography 3D wallpapers are three dimensional pictures or graphics you can use as a desktop background for your computer. There are millions of downloadable 3D backgrounds, images and pictures online. If you wish, you may also purchase premium wallpapers and pictures after signing up. Why are 3D wallpapers so popular? 3D is the most popular way of viewing movies, television shows, channels and images nowadays because images are realistic, overtaking high definition quality movies and pictures by a landslide.With the advent of releasing 3D television, more and more consumers are looking for a richer, brighter and more realistic way of viewing the world. With 3D wallpapers, you can make your desktop come to life with images that seem to burst right out of the screen. You don't really need to wear 3D glasses just like when you are watching 3D films, all you need are simple system requirements to easily download and display on your desktop, laptop, iPad or even on your android phone.Technically, when you want to display a 3D background on your computer desktop you must first be certain if your operating system is supported. Usually there are sites that support Linux, Macs and other PCs, Windows 7, Vista and Windows XP. Of course you need available memory space to store the file; 3D images are usually heavy on file size with the simplest 3D background at 1.41MB. Your computer monitor size may also affect the quality of your wallpaper background; naturally you may want to view a 3D image in a bigger screen with a higher resolution to fully appreciate the effect.Suppose you have all these system requirements, what 3D background should you choose? There are millions of images and pictures you can choose and download for free; you can even find sites with a 3D image of just about anything under the sun: cars, fruit, landscapes, people, geometric designs, animals, flowers, nature, anime, space, under the sea sights and many more images. Probably the most popular 3D images that you can find online are fantasy 3D art with realistic images, folklore characters and game characters from famous online games. Mostly fan made, these are not for download, and you need to purchase these with a credit card or debit card. There are many more adventurous 3D images that can technically take your breath away. Surreal art are the in thing online and the more thrilling your desktop design is, the more viewers and downloads you will truly get.3D wallpapers are so realistic you may have thought only professional web designers can recreate them. However, there are online tools that can help you make amazing 3D images even without professional background in web design. Some have already made profit with creating 3D images and desktop backgrounds with these online tools by selling their finished work online.
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Free High Res Images Biography
For an academic historian to become involved in the world of motion pictures is at once an exhilarating and disturbing experience. Exhilarating for all the obvious reasons: the power of the visual media; the opportunity to emerge from the lonely depths of the library to join with other human beings in a common enterprise; the delicious thought of a potentially large audience for the fruits of one's research, analysis, and writing. Disturbing for equally obvious reasons: no matter how serious or honest the filmmakers, and no matter how deeply committed they are to rendering the subject faithfully, the history that finally appears on the screen can never fully satisfy the historian as historian (although it may satisfy the historian as filmgoer). Inevitably, something happens on the way from the page to the screen that changes the meaning of the past as it is understood by those of us who work in words.
The disturbance caused by working on a film lingers long after the exhilaration has vanished. Like all such disturbances, this one can provoke a search for ideas to help restore one's sense of intellectual equilibrium. In my case, the search may have been particularly intense because I had a double dose of the experience -- two of my major written works have been put onto film, and both times I have been to some extent involved in the process.
The two films were about as different as films can be. One was a dramatic feature and the other a documentary; one was a fifty-million-dollar Hollywood project and the other a quarter-million-dollar work funded largely with public money; one was pitched at the largest of mass audiences and the other at the more elite audience of public television and art houses. Despite these differences, vast and similar changes happened to the history in each production, changes that have led me to a new appreciation of the problems of putting history onto film. After these experiences, I no longer find it possible to blame the shortcomings of historical films either on the evils of Hollywood or the woeful effects of low budgets, on the limits of the dramatic genre or those of the documentary format. The most serious problems the historian has with the past on the screen arise out of the nature and demands of the visual medium itself.
The two films are Reds (1982), the story of the last five years in the life of American poet, journalist, and revolutionary, John Reed; and The Good Fight (1984), a chronicle of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, the American volunteers who took part in the Spanish Civil War. Each is a well-made, emotion-filled work that has exposed a vast number of people to an important but long-buried historical subject, one previously known largely to specialists or to old leftists. Each brings to the screen a wealth of authentic historical detail. Each humanizes the past, turning long-suspect radicals into admirable human beings. Each proposes--if a bit indirectly--an interpretation of its subject, seeing political commitment as both a personal and historical category. Each connects past to present by suggesting that the health of the body politic and, indeed, the world depends on such recurrent commitments.
Despite their very real virtues, their evocations of the past through powerful images, colorful characters, and moving words, neither of these motion pictures can fulfill many of the basic demands for truth and verifiability used by all historians. Reds indulges in overt fiction--to give just two examples--by putting John Reed in places where he never was or having him make an impossible train journey from France to Petrograd in 1917.(1) The Good Fight--like many recent documentaries--equates memory with history; it allows veterans of the Spanish war to speak of events more than four decades in the past without calling their misremembrances, mistakes, or outright fabrications into question.(2) And yet neither fictionalization nor unchecked testimony is the major reason that these films violate my notion of history. Far more unsettling is the way each compresses the past to a closed world by telling a single, linear story with, essentially, a single interpretation. Such a narrative strategy obviously denies historical alternatives, does away with complexities of motivation or causation, and banishes all subtlety from the world of history.
(1)A fuller discussion of the historical shortcomings of Reds can be found in my "Reds as History," Reviews in American History, 10 (1982): 297-310.
(2)A fuller discussion of the historical shortcomings of The Good Fight is in my paper, "History, Memory, Documentary: 'The Good Fight' Fifty Years After," delivered at a symposium entitled "The Abraham Lincoln Brigade and the Spanish Civil War: History, Memory and the Politics and Culture of the 1930s," National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., December 5, 1986.
This sort of criticism of history on film might be of no importance if we did not live in a world deluged with images, one in which people increasingly receive their ideas about the past from motion pictures and television, from feature films, docudramas, mini-series, and network documentaries. Today, the chief source of historical knowledge for the majority of the population--outside of the much-despised textbook--must surely be the visual media, a set of institutions that lie almost wholly outside the control of those of us who devote our lives to history.(3) Any reasonable extrapolation suggests that trend will continue. Certainly, it is not farfetched to foresee a time (are we almost there?) when written history will be a kind of esoteric pursuit and when historians will be viewed as the priests of a mysterious religion, commentators on sacred texts and performers of rituals for a populace little interested in their meaning but indulgent enough (let us hope) to pay for them to continue.
To think of the ever-growing power of the visual media is to raise the disturbing thought that perhaps history is dead in the way God is dead. Or, at the most, alive only to believers--that is, to those of us who pursue it as a profession. Surely, I am not the only one to wonder if those we teach or the population at large truly know or care about history, the kind of history that we do. Or to wonder if our history--scholarly, scientific, measured--fulfills the need for that larger History, that web of connections to the past that holds a culture together, that tells us not only where we have been but also suggests where we are going. Or to worry if our history actually relates us to our own cultural sources, tells us what we need to know about other traditions, and provides enough understanding of what it is to be human.
Perhaps it seems odd to raise such questions at this time, after two decades of repeated methodological breakthroughs in history, innovations that have taught us to look at the past in so many new ways and have generated so much new information. The widespread influence of the Annales school, the new social history, quantification and social science history, women's history, psychohistory, anthropological history, the first inroads of Continental theory into a reviving intellectual history--all these developments indicate that history as a discipline is flourishing. But--and it is a big BUT, a BUT that can be insisted on despite the much discussed "revival of narrative"--it is clear that at the same time there is a rapidly shrinking general audience for the information we have to deliver and the sort of stories we have to tell. Despite the success of our new methodologies, I fear that as a profession we know less and less how to tell stories that situate us meaningfully in a value-laden world. Stories that matter to people outside our profession. Stories that matter to people inside the profession. Stories that matter at all.
Enter film: the great temptation. Film, the contemporary medium still capable of both dealing with the past and holding a large audience. How can we not suspect that this is the medium to use to create narrative histories that will touch large numbers of people. Yet is this dream possible? Can one really put history onto film, history that will satisfy those of us who devote our lives to understanding, analyzing, and recreating the past in words? Or does the use of film necessitate a change in what we mean by history, and would we be willing to make such a change? The issue comes down to this: is it possible to tell historical stories on film and not lose our professional or intellectual souls?
Wallpapers of Nature Biography 3D wallpapers are three dimensional pictures or graphics you can use as a desktop background for your computer. There are millions of downloadable 3D backgrounds, images and pictures online. If you wish, you may also purchase premium wallpapers and pictures after signing up. Why are 3D wallpapers so popular? 3D is the most popular way of viewing movies, television shows, channels and images nowadays because images are realistic, overtaking high definition quality movies and pictures by a landslide.With the advent of releasing 3D television, more and more consumers are looking for a richer, brighter and more realistic way of viewing the world. With 3D wallpapers, you can make your desktop come to life with images that seem to burst right out of the screen. You don't really need to wear 3D glasses just like when you are watching 3D films, all you need are simple system requirements to easily download and display on your desktop, laptop, iPad or even on your android phone.Technically, when you want to display a 3D background on your computer desktop you must first be certain if your operating system is supported. Usually there are sites that support Linux, Macs and other PCs, Windows 7, Vista and Windows XP. Of course you need available memory space to store the file; 3D images are usually heavy on file size with the simplest 3D background at 1.41MB. Your computer monitor size may also affect the quality of your wallpaper background; naturally you may want to view a 3D image in a bigger screen with a higher resolution to fully appreciate the effect.Suppose you have all these system requirements, what 3D background should you choose? There are millions of images and pictures you can choose and download for free; you can even find sites with a 3D image of just about anything under the sun: cars, fruit, landscapes, people, geometric designs, animals, flowers, nature, anime, space, under the sea sights and many more images. Probably the most popular 3D images that you can find online are fantasy 3D art with realistic images, folklore characters and game characters from famous online games. Mostly fan made, these are not for download, and you need to purchase these with a credit card or debit card. There are many more adventurous 3D images that can technically take your breath away. Surreal art are the in thing online and the more thrilling your desktop design is, the more viewers and downloads you will truly get.3D wallpapers are so realistic you may have thought only professional web designers can recreate them. However, there are online tools that can help you make amazing 3D images even without professional background in web design. Some have already made profit with creating 3D images and desktop backgrounds with these online tools by selling their finished work online.
Free High Res Images
Free High Res Images
Free High Res Images
Free High Res Images
Free High Res Images
Free High Res Images
Free High Res Images
Free High Res Images
Free High Res Images
Free High Res Images
Free High Res Images
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