Spartan_X
Chieftain
An example is the movie "300". It is based on a comic, so It's not accurate at all. But i'm fairly certain that at least a few people after seeing it had the incentive to research the actual history.
Should Hollywood teach history?
- Thread starter Flying Pig
- Start date
An example is the movie "300". It is based on a comic, so It's not accurate at all. But i'm fairly certain that at least a few people after seeing it had the incentive to research the actual history.
drivebyslow
Chieftain
Hollywood should NEVER be responsible for accurately depicting history because Hollywood is about entertainment and that's it! If the History channel screws up than I can understand. PS: Please don't come back with 'Ancient Aliens' is fake bla bla - It's an opinion that is presented in a very informative way (Quite impressive actually).
I suspect more people thought no more about it, but would probably fall back on that film if you asked them what Ancient Greece or Persia were like.
Spartan_X
Chieftain
No doubt, certainly people do exist who may actually believe that monster-ninjas and all the other crazy things did in fact exist as they were depicted in that movie. Also, I remember reading somewhere that there is a number of people who saw "Titanic" and didn't know that this was a true historical event ( even though most of the movie is fiction ) - and that is a story much much closer to us in history, than the battle of Thermopylae
well, uh, Ancient Aliens is kind of a big one
it is the equivalent of Gavin Menzies' 1421 "thesis", except on television
r16
not deity
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- 11,200
but as a propeller head ı should say they were exactly right material for the era in question . And in numbers , considering F-8s are long museum material .
I'm not sure those are the big problems - the bigger one is casting the Greco-Persian wars as the struggle of rugged, freedom-loving Europeans against decadent Oriental types for the defence of liberty, equality and fraternity. I'm not sure 300 mentions, for example, that the Spartan system was entirely based on one of history's most brutal slave systems, and that one of its close contenders for that honour held up Athens' democracy. I think it's a great film, but there are times when the undercurrent of physically perfect European supermen fighting against ugly, effeminate brown people gets a little uncomfortable. That subtext doesn't sit too well with the history either - after all, less than fifty years after the battle, those Spartans would be fighting a war against Athens that would end with their using Persian money to replace the democracy with a rather nasty oligarchy.
Spartan_X
Chieftain
Yes, the way the films portrays the "Spartans" is completely wrong, You will see no argue from me about that, I agree. I may be a Greek, from Athens no less ( with my family heritage from Sparta ), and although I do believe the roots of Democracy do indeed come from ancient Athens and the system the Athenians were calling "Democratic", the system they had was anything but Democratic when we compare it to what we call "Democracy" today ( in ancient Athens the slaves were in greater numbers than the citizens themselves ). The matter is that democracy just can't sprout out of the ground simply one day and abolish all bad things of a society, that simply cannot happen.
So, we're then back to the question - how much does it encourage people to seek out a better way of portraying them, and how much does it just leave people with the wrong one? I'd venture that the second is what happens for the vast majority of people who go into the film knowing nothing about the history.
Spartan_X
Chieftain
I don't say that it will encourage everyone who sees it to research the history around the battle, most people wouldn't care to look up a historical event after watching a film about it anyway. But I do think that the intelligence of most people is at least at a level to tell that what they see is not history but rather Hollywood nonsense, and if a few have at least even a very limited knowledge of ancient Greek history, it may encourage them to look up the real facts about what they saw.
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
I sometimes wonder if part of the problem is Western film-maker's preoccupation with realism. Whether that means historical accuracy or just the historical accuracy, there's a consistent effort to give historical dramas a sheen of authenticity, which implicitly elevates them to the status of pseudo-documentaries, and casts whatever biases, misrepresentations and even outright fictions they present as historical fact.
Flying Pig mentioned 300 as an example of a film which plays into certain myths- Greek nationalist specifically, and European chauvinist more generally- but I think that it actually avoids the worst of this precisely because it is so brazen, because it is so bombastic and ridiculous. Read at face value, yes, it's drooling sub-fascist propaganda, but audiences aren't so credulous that they won't grasp that a film like that is an exaggeration, and even Zack Snyder isn't so hapless that he doesn't realise audiences won't grasp that. (Most of them would grasp it, at any rate. I hope.)
To take a more subtle example, Braveheart is often lambasted as a film which puts nationalist mythology above fact- but that's largely outside of Scotland, where ignorance of Scottish medieval is so total as to allow the film to appear factual. In Scotland, where knowledge of Scottish history just about edges from "terminally ignorant" to "generally foggy", it's common understood that the film is simplified and a little ridiculous: it's popular because it's a dramatic narrative that offers a lot of rallying points, like a Scotland vs. England football match. Also because a lot of English people are brutally murdered, like a Scotland vs. England football match.
And there's something to be said for embracing fictionalisation. This is something that Asian films do all the time: nobody watches Red Cliff and imagines that Guan Yu really did kill a hundred men by himself (it was more like fifty, tops), and in fact the borrowing from the non-realist genres like wuxia helps establish a distance between the narrative and the history, and at least gives the viewer the opportunity to place themselves at that distance. If a film is just using the historical setting as the backdrop to tell an historically non-specific story, it may well be the more even-handed decision to fictionalise the setting rather than pretend the particular distortion of it required to make the narrative work is itself accurate or truthful.
There's a few problems with that, of course. The first is that it supposes that audiences know a period well enough to tell fact from fiction; as I said, most non-Scots wouldn't immediately realise that Braveheart is storybook nonsense, and how many of us outside of Greece or Turkey would realise that the aforementioned scene in The Water Diviner is inaccurate? Unless the filmaker is willing to embrace wacky genre hijinks, they have to put a lot of trust in the audience, maybe more than is warranted. The second is that some films are about historical events themselves, not just using them as backdrop: could one really make a version of Downfall, for example, detached from the specific setting of the last days of Hitler's bunker? Backing away from the problem of historical representation would undermine rather than strengthen films like that. And, bringing the two together, can audiences be relied upon to understand when a film is using a setting as a backdrop and when it is actually about that setting? Was The Last Mohican a film which used the Seven Years War to tell an historically non-specific story about love and revenge and whatnot, or was it actually a film about the Seven Years War? And how would a filmaker signal signal the distinction to an audience, short of embracing genre tropes that can't possibly be appropriate for every film?
So, I don't think that film-makers have a duty to treat their work as educational materials- at least not until we take Shakespeare to task for his shoddy treatment of 11th century Scottish court-politics. But if their work is taken as such, and it often will be, they certainly have a responsibility to be aware of that and to address it as far as possible. But what that actually means varies from film to film, far more widely than we could account for in abstract. So, ultimately, I think, we have to have faith in audiences. Or if that's a stretch, engineer a culture in which audiences are well-educated enough to deserve our faith. Because, let's be frank, if audiences are at risk of being seriously mislead by the talkies, we were stuffed before we started.
Flying Pig mentioned 300 as an example of a film which plays into certain myths- Greek nationalist specifically, and European chauvinist more generally- but I think that it actually avoids the worst of this precisely because it is so brazen, because it is so bombastic and ridiculous. Read at face value, yes, it's drooling sub-fascist propaganda, but audiences aren't so credulous that they won't grasp that a film like that is an exaggeration, and even Zack Snyder isn't so hapless that he doesn't realise audiences won't grasp that. (Most of them would grasp it, at any rate. I hope.)
To take a more subtle example, Braveheart is often lambasted as a film which puts nationalist mythology above fact- but that's largely outside of Scotland, where ignorance of Scottish medieval is so total as to allow the film to appear factual. In Scotland, where knowledge of Scottish history just about edges from "terminally ignorant" to "generally foggy", it's common understood that the film is simplified and a little ridiculous: it's popular because it's a dramatic narrative that offers a lot of rallying points, like a Scotland vs. England football match. Also because a lot of English people are brutally murdered, like a Scotland vs. England football match.
And there's something to be said for embracing fictionalisation. This is something that Asian films do all the time: nobody watches Red Cliff and imagines that Guan Yu really did kill a hundred men by himself (it was more like fifty, tops), and in fact the borrowing from the non-realist genres like wuxia helps establish a distance between the narrative and the history, and at least gives the viewer the opportunity to place themselves at that distance. If a film is just using the historical setting as the backdrop to tell an historically non-specific story, it may well be the more even-handed decision to fictionalise the setting rather than pretend the particular distortion of it required to make the narrative work is itself accurate or truthful.
There's a few problems with that, of course. The first is that it supposes that audiences know a period well enough to tell fact from fiction; as I said, most non-Scots wouldn't immediately realise that Braveheart is storybook nonsense, and how many of us outside of Greece or Turkey would realise that the aforementioned scene in The Water Diviner is inaccurate? Unless the filmaker is willing to embrace wacky genre hijinks, they have to put a lot of trust in the audience, maybe more than is warranted. The second is that some films are about historical events themselves, not just using them as backdrop: could one really make a version of Downfall, for example, detached from the specific setting of the last days of Hitler's bunker? Backing away from the problem of historical representation would undermine rather than strengthen films like that. And, bringing the two together, can audiences be relied upon to understand when a film is using a setting as a backdrop and when it is actually about that setting? Was The Last Mohican a film which used the Seven Years War to tell an historically non-specific story about love and revenge and whatnot, or was it actually a film about the Seven Years War? And how would a filmaker signal signal the distinction to an audience, short of embracing genre tropes that can't possibly be appropriate for every film?
So, I don't think that film-makers have a duty to treat their work as educational materials- at least not until we take Shakespeare to task for his shoddy treatment of 11th century Scottish court-politics. But if their work is taken as such, and it often will be, they certainly have a responsibility to be aware of that and to address it as far as possible. But what that actually means varies from film to film, far more widely than we could account for in abstract. So, ultimately, I think, we have to have faith in audiences. Or if that's a stretch, engineer a culture in which audiences are well-educated enough to deserve our faith. Because, let's be frank, if audiences are at risk of being seriously mislead by the talkies, we were stuffed before we started.
schlaufuchs
Break My Heart
I don't really care about having a realistic movie per se. I just want to see a good film. Cleopatra doesn't suck balls because it's unhistorical. Cleopatra sucks balls because it's a boring, uninspired piece of filmmaking.
Well, that's another matter. To put it another way, Life of Brian and Holy Grail are both fantastic films, and you won't hear any complaints from me about the history in those.
EgonSpengler
Deity
- Joined
- Jun 26, 2014
- Messages
- 11,685
Personally, I'm very reluctant to let audiences entirely off the hook when it comes to things like this. I don't think Hollywood has a duty to consider whether the audience will think a movie is genuinely educational, even though I like it when they do. There are certainly times when a movie or television show misses the mark on something factual or historical, and it can grate my nerves a little, especially if it wouldn't have impacted the story to get it right. In those instances, it can seem a little lazy.
That said, I think a filmmaker who isn't trying to present an accurate portrayal of actual events shouldn't be held to that standard. Generally speaking, I always try to judge a work of art by what it's attempting to do, and not by what I want it to do. 300 and Saving Private Ryan are clearly aiming at different targets, and if the latter had put the US Rangers on Juno Beach or using an M60 instead of a BAR, I'd have been grinding my teeth a little.
That said, I think a filmmaker who isn't trying to present an accurate portrayal of actual events shouldn't be held to that standard. Generally speaking, I always try to judge a work of art by what it's attempting to do, and not by what I want it to do. 300 and Saving Private Ryan are clearly aiming at different targets, and if the latter had put the US Rangers on Juno Beach or using an M60 instead of a BAR, I'd have been grinding my teeth a little.
^Iirc the OP article is about Russel Crowe acting like an uneducated audience member and claiming this film presents the real history they haven't been told and other such excellent revelations. I don't mind audiences, but an actor should bother to be more serious, instead of here having Crowe trying to dilute his antics in the near past by proclaiming himself a historian of revelations 
Round the World :musical note:
Round the World :musical note:
Lexicus
Deity
I reserve the right to call a filmmaker a Nazi if he makes a film glorifying Nazis.
^Indirectly that has been done and is being done all the time. Eg "very very VERY few bad germans=nazis, the rest of the army were just ok and did no wrong". Not really. The number of massacres of civilian population the germans committed in ww2 should not be forgotten nor should they be attributed to a few 'monsters'. It was an entire mentality at work.
That's a bit of a historical issue, to say the least. Certainly, a lot of the history of Nazism - see Ordinary Men and Eichmann in Jerusalem - emphasises that you don't have to be particularly evil or particularly hateful to do terrible things: all that is needed is indifference and a system that encourages them.
It's possible to be too extreme in both directions. Play the 'all Germans were Nazis' card too hard and you run into problems with the many attempts by military men to assassinate Hitler. You also have Erwin Rommel, who ordered his men to disregard Hitler's orders to break the Geneva Conventions and kill PoWs, and people like these men.
More fundamentally, the more you make the Nazis into one-dimensional villains, the less human you make them - and then you fall into the age-old trap of assuming that they're just not like us, they're evil people (subhuman?), and decent people like us couldn't possibly do things like that. In reality, Germany was as friendly and liberal a country as anywhere else a decade before Hitler came to power, and the Nazis thought that what they were doing was right. Many of the worst crimes of Nazism were carried out, at some level, by ordinary and essentially decent people who believed in what they were doing. The great lesson of the Holocaust and the like is that we should not be as complacent as they were in going along with what our superiors and those around us tell us is the right thing to think or do.
Try getting that into a two-hour action film!
It's possible to be too extreme in both directions. Play the 'all Germans were Nazis' card too hard and you run into problems with the many attempts by military men to assassinate Hitler. You also have Erwin Rommel, who ordered his men to disregard Hitler's orders to break the Geneva Conventions and kill PoWs, and people like these men.
More fundamentally, the more you make the Nazis into one-dimensional villains, the less human you make them - and then you fall into the age-old trap of assuming that they're just not like us, they're evil people (subhuman?), and decent people like us couldn't possibly do things like that. In reality, Germany was as friendly and liberal a country as anywhere else a decade before Hitler came to power, and the Nazis thought that what they were doing was right. Many of the worst crimes of Nazism were carried out, at some level, by ordinary and essentially decent people who believed in what they were doing. The great lesson of the Holocaust and the like is that we should not be as complacent as they were in going along with what our superiors and those around us tell us is the right thing to think or do.
Try getting that into a two-hour action film!
That claim isn't supported by historical writing, though. I mean even if one just reads accounts written in 1920, (personally i read them in Kafka's notebooks), there were many german newspapers Openly naming the jewish people as the bane of Germany. Hitler did not invent his strategy there, he was very much based on the spirit of a large part of the german population at least two decades before he got to power.
Not all societies are the same. No one is claiming that all germans were freakishly bad at the time, yet it is also naive to argue that just some commanding officers had this dreadful mentality that led to epic massacres in most territories they occupied. It seems that a large part of the overall population were just expressed by the nazis, and that part went easily into the tens of millions.
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