One of the lessons in the Stanford-developed Reading Like a Historian series uses the 1995 Disney animated feature Pocahontas to explore how popular lore, and popular depictions, can distort the facts. David Kennedy, emeritus professor of history, has mixed feelings about history Hollywood style.
Movies that tackle historical themes may help foster interest in learning more about the past, says Kennedy, '63, but they can also become an accepted version that risks obscuring what really happened.
"On the one hand, I'm very grateful that filmmakers want to dwell in historical places and use historical material—that helps develop an appetite for history," says Kennedy, whose 1999 book Freedom From Fear won the Pulitzer Prize. "On the other hand, it runs the constant danger of messing up the accuracy of the historical record."
Kennedy recalls a fishing trip in Alaska 20 years ago when his tent mate was Robert Altman, the award-winning director of such films as MASH and Nashville. The two had a running argument about whether writers and filmmakers who use historical subjects should strive for accuracy. "I said, look, Bob, I've spent most of my life trying to get the facts straight and you guys don't really care about the facts," Kennedy recalls. They agreed to disagree and parted friends.
"You don't need absolute fidelity to the historical record, but that doesn't mean the audience receives it in that framework," Kennedy observes. "It's easy even for dedicated professional scholars to get the facts wrong from one generation to the next. For the casual consumer of so-called 'historical faction' the danger is that they'll ingest some less-than-accurate version and this will become conventional wisdom. It's not trivial."
But Kennedy is not a purist, and he concedes that filmmakers should be given sufficient latitude to make pictures that entertain. "We would badly constrain artistic license if we insisted that all these things be in essence documentaries."
A spate of recent films dramatized historical figures and periods with varying success, in Kennedy's view. While he enjoyed Argo, winner of the Academy Award for best picture, he worries that the central focus of the film may leave a false impression. "People may see the narrative of rescued embassy employees as a key feature of the Iranian crisis, and that would be a mistake," he says.
What about Lincoln, featuring an Oscar-winning performance by Daniel Day-Lewis in the title role? "I thought it was a brilliant movie, and I thought it was sufficiently faithful to the historical record," Kennedy says. "A lot of credit goes to Tony Kushner, the screenwriter. There is a scene in which Lincoln explains the constitutional necessity of the 13th Amendment because the Emancipation Proclamation was a war measure, and freedom needs a better guarantee than a war measure. That is a dense piece of intellectual political history that the dialogue rendered absolutely marvelously."
