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| History and American Studies: History & Film |
"Any writer, including the most wretched,
can be occasionally useful, at least as a witness of his own age." --
Claude Fauchet
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HISTORY
351: |
Link to H351 Schedule of Reading & Assignments
History 351& AMST 300 Play List & Movie Project List
Core 210 Mini-Unit
Syllabus (Fall 2004)
"When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."
: Near the end of the classic John Ford western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, a newspaper man confronts an ethical dilemma. Should he print the truth of a story he uncovered about a famous gunfight or should he print the legend of that battle, now mythic in its details and collective meanings. The reporter indicates his solution, observing that, "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend." On one level at least, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is about how legends and myths get made. In the scene described above, Ford indicates that our popular notions of how the west was won differs substantially from the truth.Course Overview
By making a movie about who really shot Liberty Valance and by exploring the tensions that exist between reality and myth Ford no doubt believed that he was communicating a greater understanding of the reality behind western settlement than he was himself trafficking in myth making. However, Ford was not a professional historian, he was a filmmaker. His interpretation of western settlement owed more to his own preconceived notions, popular and mythic in their own right, than they did to any scholarly analysis of the subject. The reporter’s remark, "print the legend," is ironic because Ford, in substantial ways throughout his long career as a filmmaker of westerns, helped fashion popular American myths about The West and its meaning in American history.
The process of myth-making in Liberty Valance, both intentional and unintentional, illustrates the problematic and complicated role that movies play in shaping our collective understanding of the past. Often our first contact with important events and people in our national history comes through film. These cinematic interpretations of the past offer important cues about how we should think about our history. Certain genres; the western, the gangster film, the war movie, because of their popularity, their uniformity, and their number ultimately help fashion popular myths about our past. Such myths often possess a stronger hold on our collective imagination and appear more real to us than any scholarly exploration of such topics.
Contemporary Hollywood films serve the purpose that religious paintings played in medieval times. Like the medieval church, movie theaters today function as our popular houses of worship. And like medieval church paintings, movies instruct a largely ignorant public on how to understand and think about our past – about our cherished national individuals and events, and they tell us what people and incidents of the past we should consider important. In this way, then, movies often tell us how to use the past in order to understand who we are as a nation, instructing us, ultimately, on how we should think about ourselves.
However, this cinematic historical pedagogy often lacks any scholarly rigor.
The rules which guide a filmmaker’s selection of subject matter differs
substantially from the concerns which guide the professional historian’s
research into the past. The historical events filmmakers choose to focus on tend
to be events that are the most easily adaptable to film, events that have an
inherent dramatic narrative. Stories of obvious conflict possess more appeal to
the filmmaker than more complicated historical events. Furthermore, movies tend
to be celebratory, offering positive, reaffirming interpretations of national
history and identity. In order to fully understand the role movies play in the
process of historical construction, we must examine them critically,
analytically, and fully.
Course Goals, Objectives, and Organization: Central to our task in this
course will be an examination of the tensions between myth and reality inherent
in films that take historical individuals, events, and epochs as their subject
matter. While assessing historical accuracy will form a portion of what we do in
class, our attention will focus more on cinematic interpretations of the past
and placing such interpretations into the proper schools of historical thought.
Each film also exists as a cultural document, revealing the attitudes and values
of the age in which it was made. A second focus of this course will be to
examine the fingerprints of contemporary life that all movies leave behind
regardless of subject matter. Because our task involves analyzing myth-making in
movies and popular representations of the past, our examination will be limited
to popular Hollywood productions possessing American historical or cultural
subject matter. Foreign, independent, and art films, along with documentaries,
while worthy of study, will not be the focus of this course.
A final objective of our work this semester will be to broaden your ability to think critically about popular movies – or to do what scholars call "reading" films. Thus, this course is, in part, an exercise in media literacy. This class is not designed to teach American history using film. Instead, my goal is to get students to think critically and analytically about history and about films through an analysis of Hollywood movies. While we will not focus directly on the history of Hollywood, we will examine the Hollywood production process and its history as a way to inform ourselves about the movies we examine.
Attendance Policy: Attendance
counts as 5% of your final grade. I
consider each class as three separate classes.
Therefore, missing one night is equivalent to missing three classes.
For the purpose of determining final grades, I will count each absence as
three individual absences. There
are no “free” absences. Excused
absences are possible but must be cleared with me, in advance if possible.
If you show up late to class you
may be marked as absent and it is your responsibility to see that I make the
correct changes. This can only be
done on the day you show up late and not after.
Two “late” marks will count as one absence.
Each un-excused absence will be factored in as a third off your final
attendance grade. In addition, each
absence will also take one point off your final grade for the course.
Finally, absences, excused or un-excused, negatively impact your class
participation grade.
At the start of every class there will be one five to ten minute quiz
over the reading. Quizzes will be simple and are designed just to check and make
sure you have done the reading. You may use a hand written 3x5 note card for
quizzes. Students who show up early to class may start their quizzes early. Quiz
time will not last longer than 10 past the hour. Extra credit questions
for the quizzes and exams will be taken from the "This Day in History"
link on the History Department's homepage. This class meets three times a
week for an hour. Classes will be divided between lecture and discussion. You
are expected to have read the material in advance and come to class ready to
discuss the day’s assignment. Bring all your books with you to each class.
Assignment and Evaluation: Students taking this course will be
evaluated on the basis of the following assignments and requirements:
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Assignment |
Percent |
Date Due |
Assignment |
Percent |
Date Due |
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Attendance |
5% |
Class Participation |
15% |
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Homework |
10% |
Class Presentations |
20% |
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Quizzes |
10% |
Final Paper |
20% |
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| Final Exam | 20% |
Required Reading: Most of the readings for this course come in the form of articles that I have photocopied and placed on reserve in the library. I have made three copies of all reserve readings so that access and availability are not an issue. All readings are placed in a three-ring binder titled, "Film and History Readings," under my name. On the syllabus reserve reading is indicated by the symbol ®. I have also placed almost all the books and journals where the reserve reading-articles come from on reserve. We will have one textbook for this course that you will need to purchase at the bookstore. This is:
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Charlotte 1900 Selwyn Ave. Charlotte, NC 28274 phone 704
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