Hollywood and History

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Hollywood and History


How far should Hollywood go when distorting historical fact in movies--- It doesn’t matter, its just entertainment.---Depends on the subject matter---When it insults anyone with average intelligence.--- when it becomes just ludicrous.

Yes I’m sure that as one American pundit said “Expecting Hollywood to produce history is like expecting a barrow organ to play Mozart” but how many of the audience question what they are seeing on the screen? I would hazard a guess, not that many but that could change
For example:
It only takes a moment to enter Princess Isabella of France into the Google box to find that when she was engaged in bedroom gymnastics with Mel Gibson she was four years old, it could be a trifle off putting.

Our Mel was at it again later in ‘The Patriot’ which the New York Times review quoted ‘''The Patriot'' is to history as Godzilla was to biology’

Views?

[Calidore]

It's not just Hollywood; both popular and literary writers also adapt history freely. Alexandre Dumas, for one, used historical events as the basis for many (or most) of his works, but he intended to write entertainment and wasn't about to let real history interfere with that.

I think the real problem is that when people see fictional entertainment based on history, for some reason they immediately make the background history more important somehow than the foreground story. Fiction and non-fiction are opposites. Mel Gibson wasn't trying to make a documentary on the American Revolution (or on William Wallace for that matter).

[free]

You are right, fountain. Every field of dealing with history is inclined to forge the history. I have already written somewhere that a historian decided to write a huge history book after being so annoyed by reading the Walter Scott's historical novels and discovering how many false facts were in them.

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I am not for one moment suggesting that movies should be viewed as a history lesson or that other genres haven’t distorted history in the name of fiction but I do suggest that films show us the illusion of real events are being played out before our eyes making the effect much more dramatic.
It’s a case of how high or low the bar should be raised or lowered. I don’t think we should get bogged down in continuity errors, all movies have them but when known historical facts become so falsified that what we are watching on the screen is not only ludicrous but in some instances offensive.

For example, no film today could portray the Native Americans as they once did but The Patriot gave the impression that the Afro Americans were free and contented farm workers in the 1770s when surely most Americans know the truth. The film dealt with a watershed in time, a birth of a nation and that surely demanded a portrayal better than a simplistic goodies versus the baddies extravaganza. Though perhaps that was what the punters wanted, we are all heroes.

[Emil Miller]

An interesting thread. From its inception, Hollywood has had a juvenile view of world history; which is not surprising considering that , in relation to other societies, it is still very young. From the ludicrous biblical epics of Cecil B DeMille to the present day, things don't appear to have improved if this embarrassing 1960s version of Cleopatra is an example. Does anyone believe that she would have winked at Caesar when she arrived in Rome?

http://youtu.be/tNjrfXOgZkM

Where Americans have scored is in depicting their own history. The 'News on the March' sequence from Citizen Kane is a good example of a set of contrived events that have the ring of reality. From the hyperbole of the 1940s style presentation to the grainy film stock of the early scenes, it could be an actual historical record.


https://www.google.co.uk/search?sour...87...........0.


Naturally, there have been a lot of films featuring the American Civil War but it's unlikely that many have the authentic feel of John Huston's film of Stephen Cranes' novel The Red Badge of Courage

http://youtu.be/l5xTMl2CJQw

[stlukesguild]

It’s a case of how high or low the bar should be raised or lowered. I don’t think we should get bogged down in continuity errors, all movies have them but when known historical facts become so falsified that what we are watching on the screen is not only ludicrous but in some instances offensive.

Film is an art form no different from poetry, theater, and novels. Who is their right mind believes that Homer's version of the Trojan War (if such an event even occurred) is historically accurate to any real extent? Firdausi's Shahnameh? Shakespeare's "histories"? Les Miserables? Employing a good bit of fiction or invention or skewing the facts to better serve the drama... the narrative is in no way lowering the bar. I would far rather read Gibbons' Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire than any dry text book that undoubtedly is far more accurate.

[Paulclem]

I think economics is the driver. The makers of films simply want to maximise their profits and so target their audience very effectively. The idea of Anthony and Cleopatra as expressed by Burton and Taylor isn't t that different from Shakespeare's description of Cleopatra's barge in Anthony and Cleopatra in that they are both spectacles.

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Film is an art form-- well a few films could fall in to that category but epics like The Thing with Two Heads and The Giant Spider Invasion etc I fancy might struggle a little with that definition.

Your examples, with the exception of Les Miserables, are set from 500 to over a thousand years ago which makes it impossible to know the truth, we can only speculate so political license is not in any way an issue. Les Miserables is a musical based on a novel which itself is a work of fiction’.

Let me make it clear what we are discussing, it’s not about movies made for their entertainment value or that all films should be factually correct.
No doubt some really believe the many western movies are a true representation of how it was when most of us know that nearly all are pure fiction and view them as such.

Ask yourself this question, would a film that depicts the scenario that the Holocaust never happened and the death camps never existed be acceptable? I think not, so why then is a movie ok for showing British soldiers cramming women and children in a church and setting it on fire acceptable when no such an atrocity ever happened in the War of Independence but in WW2 at Oradour-sur-Glane in France by the 2nd Waffen-SS Panzer Division.

[stlukesguild]

Film is an art form-- well a few films could fall in to that category but epics like The Thing with Two Heads and The Giant Spider Invasion etc I fancy might struggle a little with that definition.

All films are works of art... how good of bad is always open to debate. I doubt that the percentage of truly bad films is any worse than that of truly bad books. We might do well to remember that both Twilight and 50 Shades of Gray were books before they were films.

Your examples, with the exception of Les Miserables, are set from 500 to over a thousand years ago which makes it impossible to know the truth, we can only speculate so political license is not in any way an issue.

Well... I'm pretty certain we can safely assume that the levels of prowess claimed for Achilles or Rostam are exaggerations in the least.

Les Miserables is a musical based on a novel which itself is a work of fiction’.

Hugo's Les Miserables is a work of fiction played out against the events of history... which are themselves quite fictional at times.

Let me make it clear what we are discussing, it’s not about movies made for their entertainment value or that all films should be factually correct.
No doubt some really believe the many western movies are a true representation of how it was when most of us know that nearly all are pure fiction and view them as such.

Ultimately, the critical thinking of anyone who confuses art with reality is already open to question.

Ask yourself this question, would a film that depicts the scenario that the Holocaust never happened and the death camps never existed be acceptable?

Some might cite you for breaking Godwin's Law here.

I think not, so why then is a movie ok for showing British soldiers cramming women and children in a church and setting it on fire acceptable when no such an atrocity ever happened in the War of Independence...

Did Richard III kill 12 year old Edward and his brother? How many atrocities and acts of violence employed in works of art that are purportedly "historical" are in fact quite fictional and intended wholly to manipulate the audience one way or another?

Distortions and outright falsifications of the "hard facts" are in no way limited to film. One need only read: Pynchon's Mason & Dixon, Gore Vidal's Burr and Lincoln, as well as Julian; Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead, Ancient Evenings, The Armies of the Night, etc...; Robert Grave's I, Claudius, Count Belisaurius, King Jesus, etc...
Peter Ackroyd's The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde. Chatterton, The House of Doctor Dee, Milton in America, etc... and who can count how many more.

Oh and yes, the British did commit atrocities during the Revolutionary War:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banastre_Tarleton

There is also the soldiers of the Chasseurs-Volontaires de Saint-Domingue: The Chasseurs were a regiment of 10 companies (approx. 700 men) of free colored men recruited from the French colony of Saint Domingue (today Haiti and Santo Domingo). After the fall of Savannah to the British, the Chasseurs on land and those aboard three transport ships in the harbor were not treated as POWs, but as properties of war and were all sold into slavery by the British.

Undoubtedly there were atrocities perpetuated by the American colonists as well as war is never a civil undertaking.

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Well I respect your opinion but its not mine.