The Authenticity Within Film

Filmmakers engage the past as a historian but not specifically in a way actual historians are doing. Historians use archived facts ranging from documents, photos, or objects from a specific time era to understand history. Contrastingly filmmakers as a historian can only bring to life a certain part of history without altering the past by focusing specifically on an aspect of the subject at hand. Scholars Marita Sturken and Barbie Zelizer argue how well-known filmmakers use film techniques or credibility in order to portray what happened in the past. Filmmakers as a historian is limited to only details they can use based on documents and archived history to re-tell a history through mise-en-scene to become a faux “historian”. Sturken and Zelizer would argue that filmmakers are not real historians; specifically how film can be made to manipulate the past towards the vision to get a narrative through that appeals to the film viewer and director. Filmmakers are not real historians since they can be biased to specific details of what occurred in the past.

Sturken wrote how Oliver Stone uses his own credibility to create his films about the Vietnam War from a soldier’s perspective. With Stone’s film Born on the Fourth of July (1989) and Platoon (1986) is produced in a sense that interpreted, creates a narrative, and makes meaning of the history that has occurred in late American twentieth-century (Sturken, 65). Sturken is questioning the authenticity of Stone being a filmmaker with his status of being a historian and how the facts within the film are presented to accurately interpret of what actually happened in the past. The argument that Sturken makes about media texts and the reception films get only show a perspective from the fil...

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...nput in their own production. With the filmmaker selecting certain scenes or how narratives should play out, there is a re-telling of history. The input makes the filmmaker have a biased opinion to how history is told and that how the media texts operate in order to reinterpret the past. The past is different from how it is told within media texts unless it is a documentary since having well-known actors pulls the viewer out of the sense of authenticity and accuracy of the film.

Works Cited

Sturken, Marita. (1997), Reenactment, Fantasy, and the Paranoia of History: Oliver Stone's Docudramas. History and Theory, 36: 64–79. doi: 10.1111/0018-2656.00031

Zelizer, Barbie. "Every One in a While Schindler's List and the Shaping of History." Spielberg's Holocaust: Critical Perspectives on Schindler's List. By Yosefa Loshitzky. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1997. 19-35. Web.