Many of us have seen, and possibly recite parts of, historical movies. Such movies include: Lincoln, Gone With the Wind, Pearl Harbor, We Were Soldiers, Agora, Troy, Lucy AuBrach, Valkyrie...basically the list goes on and on. Below is a link to just a sampling of movies. There is a fascination with history in America and around the world but the question arises of how these films influence the understanding of history for the viewers? Anyone who goes to see a movie based on a book will attest to the alterations of the storyline and characters when translated to the "big screen"(think of the Harry Potter franchise). Hollywood has a need to change the stories to appeal to a wider audience. The translation of historically contextualized films is no different. A good example, or a bad one depending how you look at it would be Inglorious Basterds. (Seriously, if only actual events played out that way!) I recently saw a commercial for a movie entitled Parkland which deals with the assassination of JFK and I'm interested in finding out more about it. We saw some footage of the day he was killed and know the conspiracies surrounding the event in class and the question is what will the movie-goers in 2013 think? How will the people who see this event? For instance, will some think that what they see is what really happened? In the future, how can the use of public historians help translate history for audiences of the "big screen?" In the end, it is an interesting topic to explore and can serve as a commentary on the social conceptions of our own history in the twenty-first century.
Links:
Internet Movie Database (IMDb) list of best historical movies: (http://www.imdb.com/list/n8yhCGTLyGw/)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkland_%28film%29
No comments:
Post a Comment