DOCUMENT RESUME

ED 310 025 SO 020 106

AUTHOR O'Connor, John E.

TITLE Teaching History with Film and Television.
Discussions on Teaching, Number 2.
INSTITUTION American Historical Association, Washington D.C.
SPANS AGENCY National Endowment for the Humanities (NFAH),
Washington, D.C.
REPORT NO ISBN-0-87229-040-9
PUB DATE 87
NOTE 94p.; Contains photographs that may not reproduce
clearly.
AVAILABLE FROM American Historical Association, 400 4 Street, 3E,
Washington, DC 20003 ($3.50 plus $1.00 for shipping
and handling).
PUB TYPE Guides - Classroom Use - Guides (For Teachers) (052)

EDRS PRICE MF01 Plus Postage. PC Not Available from EDRS.

DESCRIPTORS *Critical Thinking; Curriculum Enrichment; *Films;
*History Instruction; Secondary Education; Social
Studies; *Television; Television Viewing; Videotape
Recordings; *Visual Literacy
IDENTIFIERS Film Aesthetics; *Film History; *Film Theory

ABSTRACT
History teachers should be less concerned with having
students try to re-experience the past and more concerned with
teaching them how to learn from the study of it. Keeping this in
mind, teachers should integrate more critical film and television
analysis into their history classes, but not in place of reading or
at the expense of traditional approaches. Teachers must show students
how to engage, rather than suspend, their critical faculties when the
projector or television monitor is turned on. The first major section
of this book, "Analyzing a Moving Image as a Historical Document,"
discusses the two stages in the analysis of a moving image document:
(1) a general analysis of content, production, and reception; and (2)
the study of the moving image document as a representation of
history, as evidence for social and cultural history, as evidence for
historical fact, or as evidence for the history of film and
television. Strategies for the classroom are also discussed. The
second major section, "Visual Language," is an introduction to visual
language meant to serve as a general and selective guide for history
teachers new to the critical use of moving-image media in the
classroom. Discussions of various aspects of film history and film
techniques help to illustrate the possible use of films and
television as historical documents and show how film history is a
manifestation of the same socio-cultural forces that shape the larger
history of society. A 103-item bibliography and a sample class
assignment are included. (JB)

********** **** ************** *****************C*** ***** ************ *****

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from the original document.
 Teaching History
With Film and Television

JOHN E. O'CONNOR

"PERMISSION TO REPRODUCE THIS

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American Historical Association

2
 .50 0 cD (/) /0

Teaching History
With Film and Television

JOHN E. O'CONNOR

2
DISCUSSIONS ON TEACHING
AMERICAN HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION
400 A Street, SE, Washington, D.C. 20003

,)
JOHN E. O'CONNOR is a professor of history at New
Jersey Institute of Technology, chairman of the Histo-
rians Film Commit Lee, and editor of its quarterly jour-
nal Film & History. He has written and edited several
books on early American history and in the historical
study of film and television. He also designed the NEH-
funded project "The Historian and the Moving-Image
Media," and has directed this project for the American
Historical Association. He wishes to thank the other
participants in the project for their assistance in de-
veloping the ideas presented here. Contributions from
twelve of them will be published in a forthcoming book
entitled Image as Artifact: The Historical Analysis of
Film and Television.
This book replaces Teaching History with Film (1974)
by John E. O'Connor and Martin A. Jackson in the
Discussions on Teaching series. It is a completely new
work that reflects the most up-to-date information avail-
able on the subject.

Part of a larger project funded by the National Endow-

ment for the Humanities

AHA Staff Editor: MAUREEN VINCENT-MORGAN

°Copyright, AMERICAN HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION, 1987

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be repro-

duced in any form without permission in writing from
the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote
brief passages in connection with a review written for
inclusion in a magazine or newspaper. The American
Historical Association does not adopt official views on
any field of history and does not necessarily agree or
disagree with the views expressed in this book.
Library of Congress catalog card number: 87-72569
ISBN: 0-87229-040-9
Printed in the United States of America

4
 CONTENTS

Introduction 1

Analyzing a Moving Image as a Historical Document 7

Stage One: General Analysis of a Moving-Image Document 8
Questions about content 11
Questions about production 15
Questions about reception 18
Stage Two: Four Frameworks for Historical Inquiry 23
Framework One: Moving-image documents as
representations of history 24
Framework Two: Moving-image documents as evidence
for social and cultural history 31
Framework Three: Moving-image documents as
evidence for historical fact 36
Framework Four: Moving-image documents as evidence
for the history of film and television 39
Strategies for the Classroom 43

Visual Language: An Introduction for Historians and

History Teachers 55
The Historical Development of the Moving Image 56
Functional Components of Moving-Image Media 57
Elements of a shot 58
Editing: Joining image to image 63
Sound and image 70
Making Meaning from Film and Television 72

For Further Reading 77

Appendixes 83

0
 Teaching History
With Film and Television
JOHN E. O'CONNOR

Flush with praise of The Birth of a Nation in 1916, D. W. Griffith pre-

dicted that within ten years all students would learn their history lessons
by watching movies rather than by reading books. According to this
logic, if films were made with due attention to historical accuracy, the
students who watched them would be transported into the past, where
they would meet historical figures face-to-face and witness events first-
hand, rather than having to read static, secondhand descriptions. That
Griffith's prediction was mistaken is evident from the millions of dollars
still being made by textbook publishers. That his rationale was wrong
as well is one of the central premises of this discussion. History teach-
ers should be less concerned with having students try to re-experience
the past and more concerned with teaching them how to learn from the
study of it. Keeping this in mind, teachers should integrate more critical
film and television analysis into their history classes, but not in place of
reading and not at the expense of traditional approaches.
The moving-image media in which Griffith was pioneering in the early
twentieth century have a tremendous impact on society and culture to-
day. For history teachers, both the opportunities and the pressures are
great. The days of quirky projectors and torn, brittle 16-mm prints are
gone, swept away in the video revolution. Wonderful software resources
are available: feature films on cassette, school licensing and off -air taping
of television specials, videodisks that can be programmed for interactive
learning, and much more. But the availability of the media materials
must remain secondary to what the teacher tries to accomplish with
them. Indeed, some teachers should perhaps use less film and video, but
analyze what they do use more critically.
Griffith was impressed with the power of his camera to recreate the
past; he wanted students to sit back and let themselves be carried away
by his films. However, if +he goal of education is to teach rather than en-
tertain, teachers must, in contrast, show students how to engage, rather
than suspend, their critical faculties when the projector or the TV mon-
itor is turned on. This approach may require that the teacher take

6
 considerably more time to prepare for a film-oriented lesson, but when
carefully integrated into the course, and when properly handled by the
sensitive teacher, lessons based in film and television analysis can im-
prove the effectiveness of history teaching. Although unmotivated by
history per se, students may find themselves caught up in "doing" his-
tory before they realize what has happened to them.
In the 1970s and early 1980s, the academic field of history, like the
humanities in general, underwent a series of challenges. Students who
wanted skills they could use in the job market saw little reason to study
what many perceived as an irrelevant past. At the same time, schol-
ars turned to sophisticated statistical and other techniques and further
specialized the subjects of their research. The gap between current his-
torical scholarship and what was taught in the typical history classroom
widened. Exciting as new investigative approaches may have been, it
became more difficult for teachers in high schools and in introductory
college survey courses to integrate the conclusions of current research
into their everyday classes. For some, introductory-level history teach-
ing became stale. Just as historians perceived a widening gulf between
what interested them as researchers and what they had to teach in
the classroom, so studentsdriven to worry more about training for
an occupation--saw even less clearly the relevance of history courses to
their future lives.
The most common applications of film and television in the history or
social studies classroom today reflect that staleness. Films are often used
for programmed learning (conveying a body of information that would
be particularly difficult or time-consuming for teachers to develop on
their own) or for sensitizing the class to a subject or giving the students
the "feeling' of an era. The moving-image media serve these functions
well, because they can present complex information and transport stu-
dents across space and time so that dis.ant events and far-flung parts of
the world seem more real and relevant. Discussions based on the group
experience of a class viewing a film may be more productive than discus-
sions of homework reading assignments, and poor readers and otherwise
hard-to-motivate students may find it easier to participate. Yet each
such use, pragmatic as it may seem, may also serve to reinforce the pas-
sive pattern of viewing that students develop in front of their televisions
at home. If teachers were to devote some of their efforts to a more ac-
tive analytical approach to film and television, the moving-image media
would better serve the history classroom.
Almost every course in the history curriculum lends itself to at least
some dimension of relevant film or television analysis. In addition to
helping communicate subtle aspects of historical subject matter, the
structuring of a critical analysis of visual materials within the context
of traditional historical methodology helps to teach students the basic
elements of historical thinking, gives them firsthand experience in the

2
7
process, and aids them in dealing more intelligently with the kinds of
communications media they will face outside of school
All historians and hi ;tory educators, especially in the context of an
open and democratic society, have a broader responsibility to the pub-
lic and their students than simply relating the events of the past They
must also provide members of society with the skills of critical evaluation
necessary to perform as responsible citizens Thirty years ago, students
had to be taught to read the newspaper critically, to identify bias, and
to distinguish between factual reporting and editorializing. Today, when
more people claim to get their new; about the world from TV than from
newspapers, students also need to learn skills of critical evaluation for the
viewing of film and television. While most students are probably more
familiar with TV than teachers would wish, few students understand
the ways this medium affects (and often misleads) them. Students need
to understand how the construction of the typical TV news interview is
an expression of technological limitations and media conventions. Sim-
ilarly, they should learn to be sensitive to the ways political television
commercials may unconsciously appeal to their feelings and emotions
rather than to their intellectual judgment.
When educators accept the responsibility of teaching students not to
believe everything that appears in print, they endorse the American tra-
dition of freedom of.expression and give students the tools with which
to survive in a free marketplace of ideas. Likewise, teachers must pre-
pare their students to critically evaluate the audiovisual messages they
receive. The freedom a democratic society allows to media producers
implies a direct challenge to educators to teach students to interpret
critically and evaluate everything that they see in the media. There is
no more appropriate person for teaching these lessons than the history or
social studies teacher, and no more appropriate place for such learning
to take place than in the history classroom.
Another goal of history and social studies education is to encourage
students o adopt habits of lifelong learning and to provide them with
the analytical skills they will need in order to learn from their future
experiences. The growing frequency of historically oriented television
dramas and miniseries offers a challenge to teachers. It would be a mis-
take to presume that becaut .! of such programs the public is developing
more of a historical con.ciousness than it had before. What can be as-
sumed, however, is that whatever the average person today does know
(or presumes to know) about history is much less likely to come from
books than from film and TV. It might be argued that a steady diet of
television docudramas and pseudo-docudramas, from "Plymouth Plan-
tation" to "Roots" and "Watergate," from "I Claudius" to "Shogun"
and "The Winds of War," has begun to undermine whatever respect
thcre might have been in the public mind for the work of the profes-
sional historian and history teacher. Without having read a book or

3
 gone near a classroom, millions of viewers in 1981 thought that they
had learned much about the American Civil War by watching several
evenings of "The Blue and the Gray."
The ever-present implication of most popular productions is that his-
tory is no more than a straightforward story to be told like any other
narrative. In such a simple context there is no room for subtle shad-
ings of interpretation. In the stories that make for successful movies
or television programs, the motives of major characters must be un-
derstandable in terms of present-clay values and concerns immediately
accessible to a general audience, and there must always be a satisfying
conclusion. Network touting of the research that went into the design
of sets and costumes (characteristically greater than that which went
into a thoughtful presentation of genuinely important historical issues)
encourages the public to understand a production as the most accurate
portrayal possible. The study guides that many productions provide for
teachers may suggest questions for classroom discussion or sources for
additional information, but they never explain how the requirements of
producing for popular television may have forced the simplification of
complex historical characters and intricate patterns of causation to near
caricature, nor do they acknowledge that there may be very different but
equally defensible interpretations of the issues and events portrayed.
Scholars and teachers, people professionally committed to understand-
ing and practicing the intellectual rigors of historical methodology and
interpretation, must defend against the notion that history is no more
than storytelling and the historian no more than a storyteller, stringing
together dates and details and arbitrarily moving characters around as
though they were actors on the set of "Eleanor and Franklin." Students
should learn that there is no such thing as a completely objective or ab-
solutely true historical account in print or on film, and should become
sensitive to the often complex ways moving-image media invariably in-
terpret what they present.
The need to analyze film in the history classroom should be measured
against the relative importance of teaching students to evaluate critically
what they encounter in textbooks or journal articles. Once they have
finished with their high school or college courses, how many are likely to
read a history textbook or subscribe to the American Historical Review?
It may be myopic to spend so much precious class time dealing with the
sources important to scholars and specialists, without taking at least
a few hours each term to help develop the skills students will need to
view more critically the historical documentaries and docudramas from
which they will more likely learn their history in future years. Teachers
should he less concerned with identifying factual mistakes on the screen
and more with alerting students to the characteristic ways popular film
and television productions often manipulate and trivialize historical is-
sues. Students should be taught how to question the images they see on

4 9
the screen, just as they are urged to look for loaded words or phrases
in a book or newspaper. For example, they can be made aware of the
potential for bias and misrepresentation in the creative use of music and
sound effects and in the presentation of staged or studio-produced stock
footage as though it were actuality footage (film of events, unstaged and
unrehearsed, as they actually took place). Likewise, they should become
alert for such techniques as an emotive sound track or improbable cam-
era positions in footage presumed to be documentary. On the positive
side, heightened awareness will enable students to understand the ways
sensitive filmmakers can use their medium to address serious historical
questions in unique ways.
How can film analysis be fit into an already crowded curriculum?
Educators may need to re-think the goals of their teaching and remem-
ber that they must do more than simply fill students with information.
Would a class period taken to discuss the elements of historical inter-
pretation inherent in several clips from The Return of Martin Guerre
distract a class from their textbook survey of early modern Europe?
Would two or three class periods devoted to a close study of The Plow
That Broke the Plains as a propaganda effort for Roosevelt's New Deal
be off the track of a syllabus in American history? Would a ten-minute
analysis of the famous "Daisy Spot" political commercial from the 1964
Lyndon Johnson presidential campaign be a digression for a class learn-
ing about the evolution of the electoral process in the twentieth century?
These and other films, which will be used as examples in the following
pages, are included rmong the thirteen selections in a two-hour video
compilation intended to provide teachers with the materials necessary
to begin to practice the approaches suggested in this discussion. The
selections also include examples of newsreel footage and television news,
a Nazi propaganda film, a recent historical documentary, a historical
docudrama made for public television, and several often-cited examples
from the early histories of both film and television. A printed guide to
the compilation includes support materials for each selection, many of
which can be photocopied for class distribution.

10 5
 ANALYZING A MOVING IMAGE AS
A HISTORICAL DOCUMENT

One approach to the analysis of film and television programs parallels

the way a written document is studied The moving-Image selection
is treated as a historical document and studied using methods that re-
inforce historical thinking and develop students' skills of visual liter-
acy. The term moving -image document refers to any form of the motion
picture technology descended frog. that developed in the 1890s. from
Edison's earliest experiments to last night's TV news, from classic doc-
umentaries to TV sitcoms; from factual footage such as the Zapruder
film of the Kennedy assassination to the complete fantasy of some TV
docudramas; from relatively "value-free" and undeniably accurate im-
ages such as the unedited filmed records of scientific experiments to the
unbridled propaganda of Leni Riefenstahl and the only slightly more sub-
tle manipulations of everyday television commercials. Calling these vi-
sual examples documents may seem strange at first, but the term alloys
teachers and students to approach moving images witil the traditional
tools of historical analysis.
There are two stages in the analysis of a moving-image document
Taken together, they provide a coherent and comprehensive method-
ology for historians when studying film and television and Integrating
moving-image media into the research and teaching of history The first
stage involves the general analysis of the document in order to estab-
lish as much information as possible about it. While certain data will
be evident at first viewing, a more thorough analysis will require that
students explore questions of the document's content, production, and
reception through:
A close study of the content of the film itself. that is, the images
that appear on the screen, the sounds on the sound track, and the
ways they are brought together to convey meaning;
An investigation of the social, cultural, political, economic, and in-
stitutional background of the production and the conditions under
which the film was made; and
An examination of the ways the film or television program was
understood by its original audiences.
In the second stage, the data or information gathered in the first stage
is endowed with deeper meaning in relation to some type of historical
inquiry. The many and varied ways in which scholars and teachers have
made use of moving-image documents can be reduced to four frameworks
for historical inquiry:

11
 Moving-image documents as representations of history;
Moving-image documents as evidence for social and cultural his-
tory;

Moving-image documents as evidence for historical fact; and

Moving-image documents as evidence for the history of film and
television.

In the first framework the moving image is studied as a secondary doc-

ument, but the remaining three frameworks are contexts in which film
and television can be used as primary sources. Although many moving-
image documents might be analyzed using multiple frameworks, each
calls different analytical concerns to the fore and assigns more or less
significance to different aspects of the data collected in the first stage.
Stage One: General Analysis of a
Moving-Image Document
Historians characteristically ask three types of questions of any doc-
ument or artifact: questions about content, production, and reception.
Generations of history teachers have successfully applied this technique
when analyzing writtel documents with their classes. In a lesson on the
1776 Declaration of Independence, for example, the teacher would ask
what the content of the document was, that is, what did the declaration
itself say? Students then might break the document into its constituent
parts: a preamble and a paragraph-long explication of the theory of
popular sovereignty and the right of revolution, followed by a catalog of
grievances held against the king and a closing proclamation of indepen-
dence. Once the structure of the document was understood, students
would consider the meaning and connotation of certain words, such as
"unalienable" rights, and the likely derivation of pertinent phrases, such
as "a long train of abuses" evincing a "design," which they would find
had been drawn directly from Locke's Second Theattse on Government.
Students would then discuss what might have been deliberately omitted
from the document and the reasons for it, perhaps noting the absence
of any reference to slavery.
Next, questions about the production of the document would cen-
ter on the precedents for such public declarations, the makeup of the
Second Continental Congress, the personalities and values of the people
involved, the experience of previous efforts to deal with the British, the
need to foster the support of the many colonists hesitant to make such a
break, and the ON erriding fact that war had been under way since April
1775. Each of these factors and many more would have to be kept in
mind if the students were to fully understand why this document took
the shape that it did.

8
12
 Finally, in term& of the reception of the document, the students would
note the document's significance to people like George Washington and
his soldiers, who until this point had fought as an army of rebellion in
the name of a nation too timid to declare its intentions. The document
also put pressure on uncommitted colonists to choose sides, and it helped
American diplomats in Europe who were trying to arrange for foreign
assistance in the war. Students might also consider the significance of
the document in terms of later experience, such as its relevance to the
abolition movement of the nineteenth century or Third World liberation
movements in the twentieth century.
The searching inquiry of each of these factors makes the techniqu of
documentary analysis valuable in the teaching of history. It addition
to raising for discussion the complex nexus of related issues and events
and introducing various theories of causation, such an approach pro-
vides students with valuable experience in carefully analyzing meaning,
identifying bias, and evaluating significance with regard to written or
published documents, essential skills for any educated person.
Teachers can productively apply the same questions of content, pro-
duction, and reception to the ctudy of film and television documents:
Questions about content. What information can be gleaned
from the document itself, from a close study of what appears on
the screen, through either direct or ine*.ect analysis? What is
included in the film? What is left out of it.? How is this information
determined by the visual and aural texture of tilt. film? What is
the connection between the medium and the message?
Questions about production. What influences were at work in
shaping the moving image document and, perhaps, served to limit
or bias the information it conveys? Beyond the images themselves,
how might the background (personal, political, professional) of the
producer, director, actors, and others have influenced their perfor-
mances? How might the institutional conventions and the larger
purpose of the sponsoring agency (a Hollywood studio, an indus-
trial organization, a Wabl:ington lobbying gr6up) have colored the
messP -se of the pro(' uction?
Questions about recontior.. Regardless of the nuances of mean-
ing that can be derived from an analysis of the film or TV produc-
tion today (,,,,..F.-ring it with other contemporaneous materials
or judging it in the knowledgf of what subsequently took place),
what effect, if any, did it nay, on the pace or dire :ion of events
at the time it was made? Who saw the production and how might
it have influenced them?
When these questions are applied to moving-image documents, class-
room viewing is transformed from a passive to an active experience.

13
 In the process, teachers engender in their students a healthy analytical
skepticism, the first step toward infcrined comprehension.
There are different levels at which one can approach a Stage One
analysis with a class. In terms of content, the second part of this discus-
sion ("Visual Language") includeF, an explanation of the cutaway simple
enough to be used with any hie.' school class. The strategy for content
analysis will vary with the interest of the teacher, the age and ability of
the students, and the overail goals of the course. Regardless of the level
of analysis attempted, any such process would help develop historical
judgment and improve visual literacy skills.
In terms of production, students and teachers at every level should
be sensitive to Cie biases built into any document they bring to -lass.
College majors or graduate students in American history might find it
appropriate to take a course in the communications department on the
history of the flm industry. In contrast, even fourth- cr fifth-graders
watching an environmental film produced by their local utility company
should be asked to consider how the filmmakers may have influenced
(subtly or otherwise) what is presented. In the same way that know-
ing the context or the political debates of the 1770s offers insight into
the meaning of the Declaration of Independence, awareness of the com-
mercial and political pressures at w ork on filmmakers in Hollywood and
elsewhere, and the dramatic conventions current in the moving-image in-
dustry at one time or another, cannot help but deepen the understanding
of a moving-image docuinert.
Challenging a class to _:onsider the reception of a film such as The
Plow That Broke the Plants (193) or Edward R. Murrow's 1954 "See
It Now: Report on Senator McCarthy," can be as instructive about the
social and political complexion of the 1930s or 1950s as understanding
reception of the Declaration of Independence would be about the revo-
lutionary generation. It is appropriate for students to realize, on levels
commensurate with their interests and abilities, that although scholars
may have failed as yet to trace the precise avenues of the social and psy-
chological influences of fill, and television, there is indeed an association
between media messages and the societies that perceive them.
It may also be important to sensitize students to the concern for
authentication and completeness as it applies to the moving-image doc-
ument. With a manuscript document, scholars would be concerned first
with dating and authenticating a new discovery, studying the age of
the parchment or paper, making sure that the document was all in the
same handwriting, and comparing the script with others known to be
-ritten by the supposed author. They would check that the document
was complete, that no pages were misAing or damaged, and that there
were no internal references to people who lived or events that took place
at a later date and no anachronistic language relative to the time pro-
posed for the piece. Such concerns are more typically those of the re-

10

14
search historian than the history teacher, and the teacher who brings
a printed copy of the Declaration of Independence into the classroom
rightly presumes that preliminary concerns have been dealt withthat
the document has been dated, authenticated, checked for completeness,
and carefully transcribed.
When factors of age or wear-and-tear result in pages of a written
manuscript being missing, it is usually evident to the scholar. In film and
television, however, missing material is more of a problem. Many, if not
most, of the films in rental circulation today are missing footage, often
destroyed by projectors or cannibalized by collectors. Unless a splice
was made poorly, viewers are usually unaware that anything is missing.
Students should also be aware ti.at there may be different releases of a
film, just as there are different editions of a book. Many schools that
screen the Nazi propaganda classic Triumph of the Will (1935) show it
in a forty-two-minute version, rather than taking the class time for the
original two-hour film. While it would be interesting to study in detail
the ways the shortened version differs from the longer original, students
should at least be aware that there is a difference. Minor changes can be
important too. For example, Alain Resnais, maker of the documentary
Night and Fog (1955) on the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps,
responded to pressure that he remove a shot from the film that showed
a French officer cooperating with Germ-1n troops. Once students have
discussed matters of authentication and completeness, they will be ready
to ask questions about content, production, and reception.

Questions about content. Focusing on the content of a moving-

image document can be more difficult than analyzing a written one.
This is due in part to the breadth of individual interpretation that the
viewer brings to the watching experience. The ordinary analytical tools
a teacher would use may prove inadequate when applied to moving im-
ages. To comprehend more than the surface content of a moving-image
document, therefore, teachers must develop at least a basic knowledge
of visual language, including the elements of a shot (duration, lighting,
color, field size, composition, camera angle, camera movement, focus,
lens characteristics, film stock, projection speed) and the editing tech-
niques (fade, dissolve, wipe, cut) with which filmmakers communicate
their ideas. (See the section on "Visual Language.") It would be foolish
indeed to try to study the "Declaration of the Rights of Man and the
Citizen" in the original text with students who cannot read French, yet
teachers regularly show moving-image documents without addressing the
language of images. The viewing process is complicated because, unlike
the frustrated readers who do rot know French, passive viewers uncon-
sciously assume that they have fully comprehended the visual document.
Untrained viewers may have taken in the message that the filmmakers
meant them to (or manipulated them to), but this is never enough. Real-

5 11
 izing that surface comprehension represents only the most rudimentary
level of meaning, teachers would never be completely satisfied with that
level of analysis when examining a written document. They must there-
fore learn to demand the same depth of analysis in regard to moving
images.
Early filmmakers realized that film allowed them the ability to play
with time and space. Edwin S. Porter, D. W. Griffith, and others pio-
neered in the use of editing to collapse and expand time (drawing out
a chase for dramatic effect, for example), and to cut from one location
to another as an enhancement to dramatic tension (as in intercutting
between chaser and chased). Editing could transform an ordinary series
of images into an extraordinary one. An interesting historical example
is the famous footage of Hitler's jig after stepping from the railway car
in which he had accepted the surrender of France in 1940. This event
never took place. With the help of a laboratory device called an op-
tical printer, a team of patriotic British film editors was able to take
an otherwise benign image of Hitler raising his leg and turn it into a
diabolical dance. Shown on the newsreel screens of all the Allied na-
tions at a psychological low point in the struggle against Nazism, the
footage became powerful propaganda, a force for re-dedicating opposi-
tion against the heartless Fiihrer. Filmmakers do not necessarily set out
to misrepresent, but the creative tools they use nevertheless reshape and
manipulate reality. Because questions of time, place, and reality are of
concern to researchers and teachers of history, they must *decome fluent
in the rhetoric of images.
The first step is to look closely at the image. For a moving ir.iage,
close viewing requires repeated viewing, as well as an awareness of the
technical tools developed by specialists in cinema studies and the ability
to apply them where appropriate. One reason for using a short film with
a class, even a single TV news story or a commercial, is that it can be
shown several times Another approach is to show a longer film once,
and then repeat one segment of it several times for closer analysis. The
video compilation designed to accompany this book includes a number
of short films and selections from longer films and television productions
chosen especially for the history classroom. One of the selections from
this video compilation, The Plow That Brute the Plains, will be used to
illustrate moving-image analysis.
The analytical process should involve the conscious segmenting of the
document, parsing it as one would a sentence, to perceive patterns in its
structure and form that also communicate meaning, but which might not
be apparent at first viewing. The Plow That Broke Me Plains, a twenty-
eight-minute documentary film made by the United States government
in 1936, is composed of seven major sequences:

12
16
 "Prologue," which identifies the Great Plains area and its environ-
mental history as the subject for the film;
"Settlement," which details the arrival of the ranchers and farmers;
t
"Warning," which recounts the impact of one of the cyclical
droughts in the area that should have led settlers and policymakers
to act differently;
"Wheat Will Win the War," which explains the influence of World
War I on the rapid agricultural development of the plains area;
"Twenties Boom," which shows the mechanization of farms and
the speculation that led to continuing overdevelopment in the
1920s;

"Dust Bowl," which details the overwhelming impact of the mid-

1930s drought and the resulting dust storms; and
"Migration," which shows how farmers were forced to abandon
their homesteads and travel west to California looking for work.
To understand how the structuring, ordering, and connecting of these
sequences contributed 'to the information and point of view presented by
the film, the class must outline these segments and analyze them in some
' ,tail. But even more information is needed if the class is to understand
the controversy that surrounded the release of The Plow in the 1930s,
when accusations of propaganda were raised against it. The first release
of the film in April 1936 included a three-minute epilogue that explicitly
credited the programs of the Roosevelt administration with responding
to the plight of the people uprooted by the plains disaster. This epilogue,
which contained the film's most forthright propaganda message, was
removed as early as four weeks after the original release. The shorter
ending to the film was a simple fade out from an image of a dead tree with
an abandoned bird's nest (Figure A). The video compilation includes
both endings so that students can compare and contrast.
A moving-image document usually communicates through visual signs
and symbols and through the mixing of these visual elements with the
dialogue and music on the sound track. In "Settlement," there is an
image of a sledgehammer striking the top of a wooden stake; in "Warn-
ing," a small child is pictured sprawled on the dusty ground near an
abandoned plow (Figure B); in a montage in "Twenties Boom," belch-
ing smokestacks are intercut with several shots of a ticker-tape machine
that speeds up, teeters on its platform, and eventually crashes to the
floor (Figure C). Each of these images derives its symbolic meaning in
slightly different ways. The shot of the sledgehammer on the wooden
stake is based on a cultural code, the tradition on the American frontier

13
17
 w
f ;Apr r,
'116

Figure B

S
Figure C

Figure D
13
 of "staking" a claim to a piece of land. This meaning might be read
independently, but it is reinforced by the context of the shot in a se-
quence dealing with the settlement of the frontier. The series of shots
of the telegraphic ticker that eventually falls to the floor is arranged so
that it almost has to refer to the 1929 "crash" of the stock market. The
belching smokestacks, on the other hand, rely for their meaning almost
completely on their visual context. Though the very same images in a
different film might be intended to signify the bleakness and dirtiness of
industrial life, in The Plow they represent surging productivity.
The image of the child and the plow is open to widely divergent
interpretive readings, and students should be encouraged to work out
the alternatives. One view, for example, is that the drought and the dust
storms made the farmers and their tools as ineffective as a child in coping
with the environment. A slightly different view suggests that the people
who farmed the land were as innocent as "babes" in the face of great
environmental forces (a view that seems to be at odds with the overall
massage of the film, which records how ambitious farmers overdeveloped
and overcultivated the land, leaving insufficient grass cover to hold the
moisture in dry years).
There are also interesting ways editing is used to create content an
The Plow, although they are almost always open to interpretation. In
"Wheat Will Win the War," images of farm tractors are intercut with
pictures of tan Ls in battle. On one level, this is a visual way to dramatize
the contributions of farmers to the war effort, but others might interpret
these scenes as a comment on the impact new farm technology had on
the delicate ecology of the plains. Some viewers might understand the
cut from the "crash" of the ticker-tape machine to a bleached skull lying
on the parched earth (Figure D) as a simple chronological transition
from the 1920s to the 1930s; others might read ideological meaning into
that juxtaposition, suggesting that financial collapse and environmental
disaster may somehow have been connected, perhaps by causes rooted
in the capitalist system.
A detailed effort to comprehend the signs and symbols present in
a film is essential to a thorough analysis of its content. The meaning
of images may seem self-evident, but it almost always depends on an
interaction or negotiation between the viewer and the moving image
being viewed. The only time that it is correct to think of film as a
static object is when it is rolled up in its can on the shelf. Any effort
to elucidate meaning from a moving image demands a consideration of
the spectator. For the historian, this often means a spectator from some
past time.
Another element of content that must I-2 considered is the sound
track. The sound track of a film or television document can, at times,
be more important than the visual information, and the sound track
always influences the way the images are understood. When watching

14
2u
silent films, it is important to remember that they would have almost
always been shown with musical accompanimentan orchestra, a piano,
or even a phonograph. Dialogue, narration, sound effects, and music all
contribute to the message content of a moving-image document. For
example, the authoritative voice of the narrator in The Plow is an im-
portant aural reinforcement of the film's claim to truth. The musical
score for the film, by composer Virgil Thomson, adds additional im-
pact. Based in part on quotations from traditional Amercan folk music,
Thomson's "Suite for The Plow That Broke the Plains" has for years
been available as an audio recording independent from the film, and is
worth study as a piece of evocative music as well as the accompaniment
to the film.
To summarize, although study of content (defined here as the infor-
mation that can be gleaned from the close study of the images themselves
on the screen) is the approach a historian would normally take to any
document, a moving-image document may require resorting to different
kinds of tools. Teachers who turn to film as evidence must give serious
consideration to the nature of visual communication. They must famil-
iarize themselves with at least some of the technical terminology used
to characterize the elements of a motion-picture shot and the types of
editing devices available to the filmmaker. The insights of scholars who
bring linguistic, psychological, and other theoretical constructs to the
study of cinema and television should also be considered. To the extent
that anyone who sits down to study a film has at least an unconscious
assumption about what a film is and how it communicates its message,
each person brings some concept of theory to the task of analysis.

Questions about production. Whereas content analysis deals

with what is on the screen, production analysis probes the background
elements, how and why things made it to the screen. When studying
a letter or a diary entry as a piece of evidence, historians seek to put
themselves in the place of the author, trying to understand the condi-
tions under which the document was written and how those conditions
may have influenced its content. To some extent, therefore, the analysis
of a moving-image document requires learning something about how and
why it was produced.
Manuscripts or printed documents are often the product of one per-
son, but such individual authorship is rare in moving-image documents.
Despite the tendency of some critics to credit one auteur with the style
and presentation of a production, most film and television scholars now
recognize that productions are the result of complex collaborative efforts
in wiaich scores of people (including producers, directors, screenwriters,
cinematographers, editors, actors, and publicists) contribute creative
ideas at various stages in the process. To some extent, understand-
ins, of this collaborative process has been demonstrated most clearly by

71
'
15
 historians who have combed studio and other archives in search of a
"paper trail" to document the moving-image production process.
The production background of The Plow offers some interesting
illustrations.' This film was, more than most, the work of an indi-
vidual artist. Pare Lorentz had been a film critic and an outspoken
booster of the Roosevelt administration before he won the approval of
the Resettlement Administration, one of the myriad new "alphabet"
agencies set up in the early days of the New Deal, to make his first film.
The Resettlement Administration wanted a movie that could be used
to train its many new employees and introduce them to the agency's
goals, which were to provide rehabilitation loans to farm families and to
facilitate the resettlement of people from depressed areas of the country
to places where there were better opportunities for employment. The
Great Plains, a depressed area that was suffering from environmental as
well as economic woes, held special interest for Lorentz. In addition, the
Resettlement Administration was impressed by Lorentz's insistence that
such a film could be made with production values advanced enough to
allow commercial release as well. The agency had drawn sharp criticism
from those opposed to Roosevelt's policies, because it represented the
increasing role of government in social planning, and it saw the film as a
much desired opportunity to explain and defend its programs. Moreover,
Lorentz wanted to utilize the dramatic power of the medium to convince
audiences to accept his film's important social and political messages.
Lorentz's decision to produce and direct the film himself was the first
of many driven by the spartan $6,000 budget authorized for the project.
It was immediately decided that he would not hire actors, rent studio
facilities, or attempt to record sound on location. On-screen animations
would be kept simple and inexpensive (as indeed is the opening map an-
imation in the film). Lorentz refused to compromise on the quality of his
technical crew, however. As camera operators he chose Ralph Steiner,
Paul Strand, and Leo Hurwitz, all experienced and talented filmmakers
in their own right. Each had already established a personal ,, ision in his
own work and would go on to a long and important career. As the team
proceeded through a seven-week tour of filming locations in Montana,
Wyoming, Colorado, Kansas, and Texas, however, it became clear that
their vision was not the same as that of Lorentz. Steiner and Hurwitz,
who would later found their own radical leftist group under the name
Frontier Films, complained that Lorentz did not have a clear enough
plan for the film he was making and that he failed to see the economic
roots of the problems he wanted to explain. Lorentz remembered that
"they wanted it to be all about human greed and how lousy our social
iFor more detail on the background of Pare Lorentz and The Plow, see the guide
to the video compilation and Robert L. Snyder, Pare Lorentz and the Doctmentary
Film (Norman, Okla., 1968).

16 P2
system was."2 As a Roosevelt loyalist, Lorentz was not prepared to go
this far. He rejected the alternative script the two proposed and, after
shooting enough dust-storm footage, he released the crew.
The remaining footage necessary for the film was to be stock footage
purchased from newsreel companies and Hollywood studios, but the lead-
ers of the movie capital proved uncooperative. The movie industry peo-
ple feared government involvement in movie production and did all they
could to make access difficult.3 Lorentz had to rely on the personal assis-
tance of his friend King Vidor to get the needed footage from the studio
libraries: footage of giant mule-driven combines at work on the plains,
of World War I battle scenes, and of parades of returning troops, among
others. Before returning from California, Lorentz shot the closing scenes
of the roadside migrant camp, with the assistance of still photographer
Dorothea Lange, who personally lined up cars along the road.4
Back in New York, having spent far rrt re than his original budget
(the final cost would come to just under $20,000), Lorentz still had to
edit his film and have a musical score written for it. Not knowing how
much money he could promise as a fee, the novice filmmaker convinced a
bright young composer who had never written a film score to work with
him. The collaboration between Pare Lorentz and Virgil Thomson was
uniquely creative because of the way that they worked together. Typ-
ically, the editing of a film is finished first and the narration recorded;
then the composer is called in to write music to fit it. Lorentz took
a different approach in The Plow (and in his second film, The River
[1937D, which resulted in an interesting interplay between the images
and the musical score. First, he and Thomson discussed at length the
kinds of traditional and folk music that should be quoted in various se-
quences. Lorentz provided the composer with a rough cut of the film
to guide his work to timed sequences, and once the music was written,
Lorentz projected each sequence of the film as Thomson played his score
on the piano. Once approved, the score was orchestrated and recorded.
In a significant departure from standard practice, Lorentz then took the
recorded score back to the editing room and re-edited the film, adjust-
ing the sequence and timing of the images where necessary to fit the
music or, at times, to use the music as a counterpoint for the visual
presentations The end result was a unique marriage of music and film
(which was even more impressive in The River).
By understanding the process of the production of this film, viewers
can comprehend it much more fully. By explaining that the problems of
the dust bowl were largely due to unplanned and overambitious agricul-
tural development, first by ranchers, then by small independent farmers,
2 Snyder, Pare Lorentz, 31.
3Richard Dyer MacCann, The People's Films (New York, 1973), 68.
4Snyder, Pare Lorentz, 31-32.
5 Ibid., 33-37.

17
03
 and finally by mechanized farms and corporate land companies in the
wake of war-driven increased demand for grain, the film rationalized the
need for agencies such as the Resettlement Admiristration to bring con-
servation, planning, and organized redevelopment to the area. Viewers
aware of the arguments that Lorentz had with his politically radical film
crew should better understand the relati rely moderate ideological point
of view that the film assumed. More st,ecifically, they may be less dis-
appointed by the rather rudimentary style of the map animation at the
beginning of the film, possible mistakes in continuity, and transitions
that confuse historical issues, once aware of the financial and creative
restrictions under which the filmmaker worked Finally, students may
be more appreciative of the Interplay of image, narration, and music
when they know something about Lorentz's feeling for all three and his
unique procedures for bringing them together.
The social and political influences at work in the production process
may be more or less explicit, but they must be taken into account for a
complete analysis of any document. Hollywood entertainment films offer
numerous examples. Jack Warner's support for FDR and involvement
in the writing of the National Recovery Administration code for the
motion-picture iadustry clearly influenced the pro-New Deal films made
by Warner Brothers in the early 1930s. To view these films without
this knowledge limits the insights that can be drawn from them. Any
attempt at analysis of a social-problem film like Wild Boys of the Road
(1934), without a realization that the form had become a genre in its
own right, would surely invite a misreading. Every film or television
program has a production history that helps to explain it as a document.
While there is not as much known about the production of most films
as about that of The Plow, historians and film scholars have amassed
a great deal of background .nformation about many important moving-
image documents. Teachers should choose carefully the films they bring
to class (as the selections in the video compilation have been chosen),
with an eye to the background information that is available to support,
classroom analysis. No matter what film is used in class, students should
be asked to consider, at least in a hypothetical way, the reasons for the
making of the film and the forces that may have been at work in ius
production.

Questions about reception. Questions about reception have

been most troublesome for film scholars and historians alike. Many
assertions have been made regarding the direct impact of film and tele-
vision on society. The Payne Fund Studies of the 1930s associated movie
watching with juvenile delinquency and a perceived decline of morals in
the United States. More recently, television viewing has been used as a
defense in the courtroom, with a defendant's attorney claiming that the
client had been brainwashed by the violence on TV and left unable to

18
distinguish right from wrong. Neither of these efforts offered convincing
proof of the negative effects of the moving-image media on viewers.
How can the impact of a film or television program on its audience be
evaluated? Published reviews are available, but eaLn represents only one
individual's point of view. Studio commercial records, where available,
and trade newspapers such as Valley provide some data on the financial
success of many productions, but there is no certain way to measure the
impact of even the most popular production on the people who saw it.
Much of the current work in cinema studies involves what is termed
reception analysis. If a film communicates its message through visual
symbols that derive their meaning at least in part from the viewer's
individual personality, cultural values, or experience with other films,
then the viewer must be involved in the construction of that meaning.
An older "illusionist" position argues that films create the illusion of
reality, which spectators simply absorb as passive receptacles. Today
this older view has been replaced by a much more complex understanding
of reception in which the viewer is an active agent in the making of
meaning from a film. In analyzing the Classical Hollywood Cinema (New
York, 1985), David Bordwell borrows from art historian E. M. Gombrich
in suggesting that filmmakers build upon traditional formal patterns for
the ways of presenting things, "schemata," as he calls them, which have
been normalized over years of studio production. After looking at scores
of films, viewers have become experienced at interpreting these schemata
and have developed a series tA' "mental sets" through which they process
the images presented to them. The viewing of a film, then, is not a
passive experience; rather, the audience tests each twist in the plot,
each cinematic event, against the relevant mental set. If subsequent
shots do not obey the schemata, viewers turn to the next most likely
alternative. Piecing together the meaning of a film thus represents a
complex negotiation between filmmakers and viewers.6
Another problem relates to the varying experiences and frames of
mind that any audience brings to a moving-image experience. Different
cultural experiences, different racial or class associations, and different
sexual or political predispositions all influence the ways people carry on
this negotiation. To some extent, therefore, every viewer, or at least ev-
ery group of viewers distinguished by differences of class, race, or gender,
sees their own film. Feminist film criticism, for example, concentrates
on studying how films make meaning for women.
When teachers watch The Plow with their students today, they see
it differently than audiences did in 1936. This is due in part to the
far broader experience today's audiences have had with visual commu-
nications. The compositional style (comparable to documentary pho-
6David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood
Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (New York, 1985), 7-9.

19
 tographs of the period), the black-and-white (rather than co:lr) images,
and the pattern and pace of some of the editing may strike today's
viewers as dull in comparison to the dynamic, colorful, and almost fre-
netically paced images of television. More important in understanding
this film as a historical document, however, is recognizing that the val-
ues, concerns, and experiences of the people of the 1930s influenced the
way those viewers saw the film. Even then, it would have had differ-
ent meanings for different audiences. The Plow would have met with
varying receptions in New York or Oklahoma, among businesspeople,
farmers threatened with eviction, or displaced migrants. To some ex-
tent, today's viewers may %Is° be influenced by subsequent films they
have seen about life in thirties America ruch as Tht Grapes of Wrath
(1940) or TV series such as "The Walton."
Most critics of the 1930s were generous in their praise of The Plow
That Broke the Plains. A few thought it was too dreary or depressing,
but others noted the importance of getting this message to the American
public. Still, Lorentz found only limited success in his attempts to have
the film screened commercially. There were a few presentations in first-
run theaters in New York, Chicago, and other cities, but the film was
refused by the large booking circuits that dictated the programs for the
nation's major theater chains. Lorentz and the staff of the Resettlement
Administration went to work in the Midwest during the summer of 1936
trying to book the film in independent theater chains, and they had
some success. In the end, due to direct promotion, there were as many
as 3,000 commercial theaters that showed the film. This was not a
bad showing, considering the total of approximately 14,000 commercial
theaters operating in the country in 1936, but it was not what Lorentz
had hoped for.'
One presentation of which the filmmaker was particularly proud was
under the auspices of the Museum of Modern Art, in which The Plow
was screened on the same bill with government-sponsored films of other
nations, such as Germany's 7humph of the Wills In this context, there
was no mistaking Lorentz's intention to have his film present a propa-
gandistic message.
President Roosevelt was ecstatic after seeing the film in a special
White House screening. Time magazine reported that Roosevelt had
actually considered sending the film to Congress in place of a presi-
dential message.9 But FDR's congressional critics, still a minority but
riding high on court decisions that were supporting their efforts to de-
flate the New Deal and tear down its hierarchy of new social agencies,
were particularly infl.. .J. They noted that 1936 was a presidential
?Snyder, Pare Lorentz, 47.
6 See Lorentz's letter to Stephen J. Early at the White House, 12 May 1936, in
the guide to the video compilation.
9 Time, 25 May 1936, quoted in MacCann, People's Films, 78-79.

20 06
election year, and that by actively promoting pul-hc screenings of The
Plow, the agency was spreading propaganda for the administration (and,
by definition, against the Republicans). The most avid criticism of the
film came from those who objected to the broad brush used by the film
to identify the blighted region. . regional administrator from Texas
complained to Resettlement Adm. iistration chief Rexford Guy Tugwell
that the film's generalizations abort the areas devastated by soil erosion
and dust storms made The Plow unusable in his part of the country.
A Democratic Texas state representative called the film "a libel. on the
greate t section of the United States" and threatened to punch Tugwell
in the nose i. e did not have the film destroyed.1°
The deleting of the epilogue from the film may have helped to blunt
the charges of propaganda, but it did nothing to soften the political
opposition or the protest from the plains region. Eventually, the combi-
nation of Republican opposition and regional criticism led to the film's
withdrawal from circulation in 1940. It remained on the shelf until the
early 1960s.
The controversy over The Plow affected subsequent government film
projects. Since World War II, the American government has spent hun-
dreds of millions of dollars making films about every aspect of American
life and -ociety for use in informational and educational programs over-
seas. Concern over potential domestic charges of political propaganda,
which was bred in part by the controversy over The Plow That Broke
the Plains, led Congress to forbid the screening of all but a few of these
films in the United States.
The reception experience with television is very different from that
with the big screen. Whatever illusion of reality there may be in the
darkened theater is broken, or at least altered, in the context of the liv-
ing room. The viewing experience mast be understood in the context of
the flow or programming, for example, from a news broadcast to a quiz
show to a baseball game, all punctuated by commercial interruptions.
Watching TV with other people is characterized by very different pat-
terns of personal courtesy; people are much more willing to carry on a
conversation over a TV program in their living room (or to tolerate one
going on around them) than they would be in a movie theater. Although
people may not watch the TV screen as attentively as they do the movie
screen, they watch TV more frequently, an,. therefore the repetition of
TV messages, whether the generalized messages of violence in police dra-
mas or the repetition of specific commercial messages, may have more
cumulative impact. Finally, because for many people the same electronic
box serves both as their prime source for news information and as their
major source of everyday entertainment, television necessarily influences
the ways people make meaning about the world around them.
3°See the guide to the video compilation.

21
P7
 There are cases in which the reception of a moving-image document
has been linked to the progress of historical events. The history of
television and recent American politics offers such interesting examples
as the impact of Walter Cronkite's February 1968 special report from
Vietnam on Lyndon Johnson's decision not to run for a second com-
plete term, and the role of Roger Mudd's special interview witli Edward
Kennedy in defeating his bid for the 1980 presidential nomination. Ed-
ward R. Murrow's 1954 "See It Now: Report on Senator McCarthy"
has often been credited with beginning to turn the public mind against
the senator, although there had already been many print and at least
a few radio journalists who had taken that stand. Certainly the cred-
ibility that Murrow had with the American public must be considered
a factor in the reception of the broadcast, and the tens of thousands of
letters and telegrams CBS received (90 percent of them agreeing with
the program) cannot be discounted. Bat absolute proof is elusive. The
televised Army McCarthy hearings that began only a few weeks later
have also been credited with deflating McCarthy, but it hat elsewhere
been pointed out that only a few stations carried those hearings in full.
Whenever thoughtful scholars have addressed the problem of audience
impact, they have noted the complexity of the connection." Although
it is difficult to make precise connections, a growing amount of literature
discusses the intersection of media reception and culture. Most impres-
sive is the National Institute of Mental Health's summary of research on
the impact of television on American society, Television and Behavior:
Ten Years of Scientific Progress and Implications for the Eighties, Vol.
1, Summary Report (Washington, D.C., 1983), which makes categorical
statements on subjects such as the relation of TV violence and attitudes
among youth.12
Popular writers have been quicker to suggest how changes in social
values can be credited to popular films. Style in the wearing (or not
wearing) of men's undershirts, for example, has been traced to the bare-
chested appearance of Clark Gable in 11 Happened One Night (1932).
More important examples center on the changing roles of women and
racial minorities, but these speculations are still impressionistic and sub-
stantially undocumented. Direct correlation is often difficult to prove
because the patterns of reflection and refraction that form the connec-
tion between screen images and social values are so complex.
II See, for exampk, Gregory W. Bush, "Edward Kennedy and the Televised Person-
ality in the 1980 Presidential Campaign," and Daniel Leab, "See It Now: A Legend
Reassessed," in John E. O'Connor, ed., American Hs:.ory/Amencan Television: In-
terpreting the Video Past (New York, 1983), 1-32.; David Culbert has written on
LBJ and the CronkitT broadcast in "Johnson and the Media," in Robert A. Divine,
ed., Exploring the Johnson Years (Austin, Texas, 1981), 214-48.
12See also Joshua Meyeowitz, No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media
on Social Behavior (New York, 1985).

22
 Stage Two: Four Frameworks for Historical Inquiry
Once the basic questions about the content, production, and recep-
tion of a moving-image document have been asked and answered as fully
as possible, there are a number of ways the history scholar or teacher
can proceed. Just as a diplomatic historian and a psycho-biographer
might look very differently at the same document, for example, Henry
Kissinger's personal diary, so there are various frameworks for analysis
that can be applied to a moving-image document. The four frameworks
for historical inquiry include: moving-image documents as representa-
tions of history; moving-image documents as evidence for social and cul-
tural history; moving-image documents as evidence for historical fact;
and moving-image documents as evidence for the history of film and
television.
The value of any document depends on the information one seeks to
draw from it. No sensible research historian or history teacher would try
to study the history of World War II using clips from newsreels as the
major source of information. On almost any broad topic there are better
sources in print. For more closely framed questions, however, such as
the public's perception of the war as it proceeded, the newsreels, as well
as the newspapers and magazines, of the period would be an important
source. Though it may be best to withhold ,;udgment on questions of
cause and effect, Hollywood entertainment films and their counterparts
in other cultures can serve as primary documents for the study of social
and cultural history.
Films that portray history raise deeper issues. A film like The Birth
of a Nation, despite its concentration on the institution of slavery and
the experience of the Civil War and Reconstruction, is almost useless
for studying those issues and events. Griffith was proud of his efforts
to recreate precisely the interior of Ford's Theater and other sites, but
his interpretation )f the issues and events involved was based on his
own prejudiced reading of the then-current secondary literature. Yet,
in the proper frame of reference, viewing and analyzing The Birth of
a Nation and studying the record of the public protests that accompa-
nied its screening around the country, can be a rewarding experience in
the history classroom.13 This film is a particularly rich document for
illustrating to students how the popular perception of historical subjects
changes over time, as well as for studying the history of the developing
industry and art form of the cinema.
In each of the four frameworks for historical inquiry, the different
types of information sought from the documents dictate diffe,_ent ana-
lytical concerns, and different aspects of the content, production, and
reception will therefore assume more or less importance. The four frame-
works for historical inquiry are not meant to be rigid or limiting 'n any
I3See Fred Silva, ed., Fonts on Birth of a Nation (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1971).

23
79
 way, nor should they suggest that a complex and dynamic field can be
so neatly divided. In practice, there will always be an overlap among
the four; no single framework can or should be applied without some
reference to the others. Each serves to concentrate attention on the
types of analytical issues about which teachers should be aware and to
identify particular mthodological concerns that may relate more to one
framework th, n to another.
The four frameworks do not address different types of films, but dif-
ferent types of historical investigation. Any film is open to study un-
der more than one of the frameworks. Newsreel footage of a protest
demonstration, such as the 1932 Bonus Marchers recorded by Universal
Newsreel (see the video compilation), might invite study in terms of all
four frameworks. If the producers of the newsreel placed the event in
the context of previous protest activity, the newsreel could be studied
as an interpretation of recent history (Framework One). Ii, a study of
the social and cultural values inherent in the newsreel story (Framework
Two), special attention would be devoted to the attitudes suggested in
the editing of the images and in the words and tone of voice chosen for
the narration. A scholar more concerned with the details of the event as
it actually took place (Framework Three) would hope to transcend both
the editors' and the narrator's points of view and use outtakes to try to
reconstruct the raw, unedited footage of the event as it was originally
shot. Finally, a historian of the movie industry (Framework Four) might
find special meaning in the other stories included in the same newsreel,
in the order and style in which the stories were presented, in the ways
the newsreel company promoted its product, and in the cities and neigh-
borhoods where theaters showed that company's newsreels rather than
another's.
In the outiine of the four frameworks for historical inquiry that fol-
lows, attention is directed to the ways in which the context of each
framework heightens or diminishes the relative importance of content,
production, and reception.

Framework One: Moving-image documents as represen-

tations of history. Perhaps the most obvious way the moving image
relates to history is in the portrayal of historical events. By 1923, when
the Chronicles of America series of films for the classroom was launched
under the auspices of Yale University, commercial producers were al-
ready touting their skills at recreating the past. "It's history written in
lightning,"" Woodrow Wilson was said to have responded to a White
House screening of The Thrill of a Nation.
14 Thomas R. Cripps, "The Reaction of the Negro to the Motion Picture, Birth of
a Nation," Historian, 26 (1963): 344-62, reprinted in Silva, Focus on The Birth of a
Nation, 115.

24
30
 There is no such thing as a totally objective or absolutely true repre-
sentation of the past, and it is foolish to think that anyone can experience
the past through a filmed attempt to recreate it. Any film that deals
with a historical subject interprets that subject in some way. The ap-
proach may be unintended or carefully designed; it may be explicit in the
narration or implied in the visual context. Whether the film is a docu-
mentary or a Hollywood dramatization with costurn, actors repeating
scripted lines, every moving image, like every piet of writing, has a
point of view. The challenge in understanding and fully appreciating
moving-image documents as representations of history is to comprehend
that point of view and the ways the visual and aural elements of the film
contribute to its presentation.
It .night seem at first glance that the documentary film made com-
pletely with archival actuality footage from the period in question would
be by definition more accurate than a dramatization, but every choice
of image, every joining of one image to another, and every word of nar-
ration or note of music added to the sound track represents a creative
choice equivalent to the writer's composition of sentences and the com-
bining of paragraphs and chapters into a book. Makers of dramatized
films may have an even greater opportunity than documentarists to de-
velop accurate historical situations because the mise-en-scene is so much
more in their control.
There are several selections in the video compilation that lend them-
Qelves to this type of analysis with students. In some ways the most
interesting example is a selection from The Return of Martin Guerre
(1983), a film that uses a tale of marital abandonment and imposture to
present a view of peasant life in sixteenth-century France. Natalie Ze-
mon Davis, who served as historical consultant for the production of the
film, was pleased with many aspects of the finished product and disap-
pointed with others. Great effort was spent in creating the mise-en-scene
as accurately as possible. Costumes, settings, language, and music were
studied and designed with great care. Careful attention was also given
to the interpretation of the events portrayed in the filmDavis was re-
searching a book on the subject at the same timebut here she was less
successful. The pressure to make a film that would appeal to general
audiences led the producers to develop characters that would seem more
real to twentieth-century viewers and to cast the story in the form of a
whodunit, rather than as history. With regard to the characters, Davis
argued for the pastness of the past, that is, the importance of recog-
nizing that there were significant differences in the ways people thought
and acted four hundred years ago. With regard to the story line, she
suggested that a different narrative structure might have made the film
a better vehicle for history, by privileging viewers in a different way and
having them consider different issues and different points of view as the
story progressed.

25
1i
 The visual texture of The Return of Martin Guerre is so rich and
the story so engaging that any European history class would benefit
from seeing it, but a closer analysis is needed to coax from the film the
more subtle references to historical issues, such as the roles of marriage,
law, property, and interpersonal relationships in the lives of sixteenth-
century French peasants. A segmenting of the film into its major se-
quences, for example, would help to point up the treatment of these
issues and would also make evident the ways the story had been struc-
tured to provoke maximum suspense and surprise in the audience. This
structure may have optimized the entertainment value for a 1980s au-
dience, but alternative structures may have offered better opportunity
to develop key historical issues. For example, a narrative structure that
allowed a more complex characterization of the central female character,
Bertrande, would surely have addressed more of the women's history is-
sues raised by her situation. Such questions of representation involve
students in exciting discussions of the nature and meaning of history.
The video compilation also includes a segment from "Molders of Troy"
(1983), a docudrama produced by historian Daniel Walkowitz for pub-
lic television. There have now been several high-quality costume docu-
dramas, and a score or more of compilation documentaries, that have
involved professional historians from the outset, not merely as advisors
but as full-fledged partners in positions of influence and control. This
is certainly an encouraging development, but it should lead to no sense
of security about future moving-image portrayals of the past. Because
of his concern for the nature of history, historian-filmmaker Walkowitz
explained that, as a scholar, he comes to a film project from a very differ-
ent angle than the commercial producer. "I am less concerned with the
authenticity of the details in a scenefor example, whether the shoes
are authenticthan with the pattern of a set of social relationships that
exists in a period of time. Historians don't simply describe a moment in
time. We usually write because there is a problem in the past that we
want to understand and we want to find a strategy for getting people
to look at it."1 Almost all of the characters and some of the events in
"Molders of Troy" are fictional, yet as Walkowitz explains, this allowed
special attention to be paid to developing important historical issues like
the organization of workers and the role of labor unions in the histories
of communities in the nineteenth century. The observations of historian-
filmmakers can make viewers more sensitive to the creative goals of pro-
ducers. Students should also consider these questions: What is it that
historian-filmmakers would like viewers to learn from their films? How
might that compare with the objectives of traditional scholarship?
Commercially produced historical films often distort matters of his-
'Barbara Abrash and Janet Sternberg, eds., Historians and Fammake es: Toward
Collaboration (New York, 1983), 13.

26
:12
torical fact and interpretation. When commercial filmmakers, even the
more responsible ones, conduct what the industry calls research, they
do something very different from what a scholar does. Great attention
is given to the verification and duplication of costumes, props, and nu-
ances of language and expression. When studios promote these films
by bragging about scrupulous authenticity in sets and costumes, they
produce a reality effect, which like the richly detailed descriptions in a
historical novel, gives the reader the aura of authenticity. In film, such
authenticity of detail often masks drastic alteration of historical issues
and events in the interest of maximizing entertainment values.
Some years ago, in researching the production history of the film
Drums Along the Mohawk (1939), I was allowed access to the files at
Twentieth Century Fox. In the studio library I found the bundled ma-
terials collected in the name of research for that production. There were
books, pamphlets, and copied articles about the architectural style of
frontier forts in the eighteenth century, detailed commentaries on cos-
tumes for Indians and farm women, and lists of appropriate furnishings
for Albany manor homes and frontier log houses. In another building
across the studio lot were the production files, which told a very differ-
ent story. Here, in the hands of producer Darryl Zanuck, history took
a backseat to dramatic storytelling. In a series of conferences with the
screenwriters, Zanuck stressed repeatedly that their job was to "make
entertainment," not to give America a history lesson. "We must tighten
what plot we have and make it more forcefulso that we build and
build to a big sustaining sock climax where we let everything go with
a bang."16 The cavalry-to-the-rescue ending Zanuck grafted onto the
story provided the punch that he wanted, but historically it was pure
fantasy.
Some of the so-called documentary films most often used in the his-
tory classroom present even greater challenges. Compilation films and
videos made for the classroom often amount to little more than illus-
trated lectures, with an omniscient narrator providing all the relevant
information. In 'he worst of these, there is little, if any, concern given
to the authenticity of the footage used. A film such as The Twuted
Cross (1956), for example, still a standard item in many educational
film and video collections, raises serious concerns by shifting from ac-
tuality to dramatic footage borrowed from entertainment feature films
without informing the viewer of the shifts. This structure causes the
audience to presume that all the images are real and therefore provide
evidence that proves the statements rr .de in the narration. A class
project might challenge students to hypothesize about the Sources of
footage and sound-track elements in a film like The Twssted Cross and
16 "Drums Along the Mohawk: A Reaffirmation of American Ideals," in John E.
O'Connor and Martin A. !ackson, eds., American History/American Film (New
York, 1979), 102-103.

27
3
 to consider how such observations support or detract from he message
kl the production.
A sequence from Women of Summer (1986), a documentary compi-
lation film about the summer school for working women operated at
Bryn Mawr College in the 1920s and 1930s, is also included in the video
compilation. The sequence concerns response to the Sacco and Vanzetti
case and consists of film footage from several sources, some of it archival
footage from the 1920s and some of it recorded at a recent reunion of
the women involved. The point of view here is explicit: the Sacco and
Vanzetti case %as one of the first public issues that moved the women to
become social and political activists. The images are accompanied by the
comments of a narrator and the reminiscences of one of the women who
became emotionally involved in the issues at the time, and almost sixty
years later was still moved to tears by the memory. Yet another element
on the sound track is a song about Sacco and Vanzetti, sung powerfully
by activist folksinger Holly Near. The point of view thus operates on
at least three levels: the images themselves, edited to describe the ex-
perience of those who demonstrated and protested on behalf of Sacco
and Vanzetti; the tearful memories of the woman at the reunion; and
Holly Near's song, which draws connections between the social activism
of the 19208 and that of the 1980s. As is often the case in historical
documentaries, the narration and sound track are at least as important
as the visual images in conveying the point of view of the film.
One additional concern about the production of historical films and
docudramas is that their influence is long lasting. Unlike a historical
monograph, to which another scholar may respond with an article or
monograph, a film has a more permanent presence in the public mind.
This longevity is accentuated, of course, when 16-mm prints or video-
cassettes of the film go on the market for classroom use. Once feelings
about a subject have been engendered by a memorable film, they are
difficult. even impossible, to counter or replace.
Commercial filmmaking and television production are first and fore-
most business enterprises. If a film does not turn a profit at the box
office, if a television show does not win a significant audience share, few
will care how well or how poorly it was produced. As with any commer-
cial enterprise, there are institutional imperatives that drive production
and inevitably influence the end result. Some are strictly commercial,
such as avoiding issues so controversial or characterizations so complex
that the product does not appeal to a mass audience. When a filmmaker
is concerned with making a film that will sell in other countries, other
interesting commercial problems arise, as in D. W. Griffith's effort in
America (1924) to make a film on the American Revolution that would
appeal to British audiences as well as American.
In some ways the demands of film are quite different from tnose of
television. In the format of a TV miniseries, the makers of "Roots"

28
R4
had twelve hours to present their message, opening up opportunities a
filmmaker might never dream of. Since network TV programs are seen
all over the nation on the same evenings, promotional efforts can be
focused on making the viewing a mass experience; much of tb :ising
popularity of "Roots" resulted from people discussing the program as it
evolved, day after day at work and over the dinner table. On the other
hand, there are specific limitations in television, such as the need to
pace dramatic development around regular commercial breaks. In visual
terms, there are differences too. Film lends itself to vast panoramas,
while television is more a medium of close-ups and head-and-shoulder
shots.
If some scholP.rs are understandably reluctant to use films, even docu-
mentary films, to study the past, there is near common agreement on the
value of such productions for an understanding of a culture's historical
mentality. The Birth of a Nation is an intriguing document for studying
Americans' perceptions of the Civil War fifty years after its end. Of
course, all of the commercial imperatives and media conventions must
be considered in this type of analysis as well. In most cases, the filmic
interpretation of the past, like written interpretation, is influenced by
cortemporary issues and events. Thus, Little Big Man (1968) and Sol-
dier Blue (1970), both ostensibly films about white America's treatment
of the Indians, were largely about Vietnam, a topic too controversial for
many producers to address directly at that time.
Recognizing such connections adds insight to an understanding of
how a culture views both its present and its past. This is particularly
true when considering the production and reception of historical films
over time. Alain Resnais's documentary Night and Fog (1955) combines
black-and-white archival footage of the Nazi concentration camps with
color images taken a decade later. When first released, the film was
praised for its sensitivity, but perhaps due to the proximity of the events,
it was not critiqued as a historical film. Over the years it has become
standard fare for many teachers struggling for ways to introduce their
students to the plight of the Jews in Nazi-dominated Europe and the
horrors of the Holocaust. In this context, however, it has recently been
argued that the film presents a biased interpretation because it is not
explicit enough in identifying the Jewishness of the victims (the narrator
mentions the word Jew only once, and the word does not appear at all
in the English subtitles). To bring the history of the film full circle,
when Resnais was recently asked how he might explain this apparent
bias, he said that it had never been his central purpose to comment on
the Jewn and the Holocaust. Explaining his intention to communicate
a universal message about human cruelty, Resnais noted that in 1955
France was critically embroiled in Algeria. Resnais's main interest in
making the film had been to warn the ?tench against the dangers of

29
(;5
 falling into patterns of inhumanity theinselves.17. His observations reveal
the film much more clearly as a document of 1955, but the film is also
interesting because of the ways that it has influenced, intentionally or
not, the historical perception of thousands of history classes since that
time.
In evaluating and analyzing a film that purports to represent history,
teachers should endeavor to whatever extent possible to apply the same
general standards that they would to a traditional work of scholarship
or a serious historical novel. That judgment should involve questions
of content, production, and reception. Questions about content should
include: Does a close analysis of the content of the film reveal a thought-
ful and coherent interpretation of the historical issues and events being
portrayed? How does the visual style and narrative structure of the
film color its point of view? Can that interpretation be supported by
the body of scholarly evidence available? For a dramatized film, to
what extent were the script and the characters based on direct histori-
cal evidence and to what extent were they fictionalized? Such fictions,
of course, can be appropriate and illuminating, but students should be
developing some sense of where the evidence ends and fiction begins.
Similarly, are the characterizations and relationships developed (for ei-
ther actual or fictional characters) in tune with the historical period,
or have they been modernized so that contemporary audiences would
find it easier to relate to the story? For a documentary film, how is
visual evidence used? Is the theme of the film presented through the
information contained in the images themselves, or do the images serve
only as an illustrative backdrop to a dominant voice-over commentary
or narration? Are film clips from other times and places, perhaps even
from theatrical films, intercut with actuality footage in a way that the
viewer might mistake them for contemporary actuality footage? Does
the film's research effort seem to have been limited to film sources, or
are the filmmakers well-read and informed about the broader body of
evidence and interpretation on the subject? If on-screen interview com-
ments of historical participants are included, how are they used? Is it
made clear that, interesting as it may be, each memory represents only
one perspective, or are such memories allowed to stand as the uniting
interpretive theme? Does the film indicate in any explicit way that it
represents only one, or at best several, point of view, and that there
might be equally acceptable alternative interpretations?
Turning to questions of production as they relate to moving-image
documents as representations of history, students should ask: What can
be discovered about the circumstances of the film's production and how
those circumstances may have influenced production decisions? For ex-
"Charles Krantz, "Teaching Night and Fog: History and Historiography," Film &
History, 15 (February 1985): 2-15.

30 R6
ample, was the film funded in whole or in part by some organization
or agency that might have had an interest in proffering one or another
interpretation? Do the filmmakers bring to the project a preconceived
ideological point of view? If so, is this bias stated explicitly in the film,
or is there an effort to hide it or to feign objectivity? If there were
historical consultants involved, what role did they play? Were they in-
timately involved throughout the process, or were they called in at one
point simply to lend their imprimatur to the product? Were they satis-
fied with the results? What were the objectives of the film production?
Was it purely a commercial enterprise in which people might have been
less hesitant to sacrifice historical veracity for audience appeal? Was it
mane with a specific audience in mind? Did the filmmaker have any
previous experience in historical filmmaking by which to gauge the level
of sensitivity or care for detail? How might the goals and purposes of
the film compare with the objectives of traditional scholarship?
Finally, students should ask questions about reception: How was the
film received? What type of distribution did it receive, and how did
audiences respond to the film? Specifically, how did specialists it the
historical subject area evaluate the film's portrayal?18 Were theft: dif-
ferent versions of the film produced at different times for different au-
diences, and how did these changes alter responses? If the film is not a
recent production, how may audience reactions to it have changed over
time? How might these various responses improve understanding and
appreciation of the meaning of the film?

Framework Two: Moving-image documents as evidence

for social and cultural history. Most teachers who use commer-
cially produced feature films or television programs in the classroom
have sought to involve their students in analyzing the social and cul-
tural values present in them. The field is rich for studying changing
attitudes toward race, gender, urban or rural lifestyles, and scores of
other issues. Film and television also offer many possibilities for the
study of popular culture. While traditional history study lets students
know what people in the past knew or believed, film and television study
can aid in understanding what made them laugh or cry.
Theatrical and entertainment productions are not the only ones that
relate to social and cultural values. The documentary filmmaker's deci-
sion about what films to make and how to make them, and the television
news producer's decision about what stories to cover and how to cover
them, are equally relevant. Some of the richest documents for future his-
torians to study for an understanding of today's culture will be television
commercials.
"Many historical journals have begun to publish such reviews on a regular basis,
and there are two historical journals that specialize in media: Film El History and
The Historical Josrnal of Film, Radio and Television.

31
17
 Many communications scholars have taken a social science approach
to the measurement and analysis of what they term cultural indicators
in the media. As appealing as such s straightforward approach might
appear, in the context of historical scholarship there are specific method-
ological concerns that such an analysis invariably brings into play. There
is the danger, for example, of suggesting to students an oversimple con-
cept of what constitutes culture. When teachers encourage students to
concentrate on single objects as cultural indicators (books, films, or ma-
terial objects), they run the risk of characterizing culture as being too
stable and comprehensive. In contrast, modern culture is never mono-
lithic. There are always important differences of class, race, and gender
that must be considered. Moreover, tastes, values, and attitudes are
always in flux, and different groups in the society are likely to be ahead
or behind in that ongoing process.
When considering the history of the 1920s or 1930s, there is no more
lively expression of the culture of the period than its films, but there
is the danger that the films may skew historical perception. Unless
the variety and complexity of popular culture are constantly stressed,
students will be easily misguided by the films' very vitality. Students
may mistakenly assume that because the films of the 1920s and 1930s
are the most vital elements of that time for them, the same was true for
people living at the time. The naive comment of one student suggests
the unspoken conclusions of many: "Films had more impact on society
in the 1920s than they do in the 1980s because today there are so many
more interesting things going on."
In one common classroom approach, film can be used as a convincing
illustration or reinforcement of the social and cultural values current in
a period under study. Teachers may suggest to the students that the
values and prejudices inherent in the film correspond with the values and
prejudices of the broader culture. Thus, a class studying the Progressive
Era in American history might view a film such as Griffith's A Corner
in Wheat (1909), in addition to discussing the Populist and Progressive
attitudes and political beliefs of the period. There is no more effective
document for reinforcing an understanding of the social and economic
values of the time, contrasting country and city, rich and poor, capital
and labor. Moreover, a close study of this fourteen-minute film (included
in the video compilation) helps to reveal the intellectual discourse of the
period directly through the unique narrative form of the film, which
is similar in structure to the muckraking literature of the period. A
Corner in Wheat is short enough for a class to study closei1; segmenting,
analyzing specific shots and sequences, and viewing the film a second
time can all take place in the same class period. Such a lesson would
illuminate the psychology of the Progressive Era at least as well as a
discussion of any reading from Upton Sinclair or Lincoln Steffens, while
teaching important visual literacy skills.

32
1S
 A film like The Green Pastures (1936) reveals the racial stereotypes of
its era. In addition, the structure of the film creates a fantasy world in
which its all-black cast can react with one another. (In the context of the
actual iociety of the time, the main concern would more likely have been
how blacks would relate to whites.) Similarly, Charlie Chaplin's Modern
Tunes (1936) is anything but a factual representation of industrial life
in thirties America, though it clearly points up some of the economic
and social ironies that many people were sensitive to at the time. Stu-
dents can learn from moving-image documents by looking for ways the
emotions and values evoked by a document might correspond to aspects
of the society and culture already known. Both students and teachers
should be aware, however, that the full analysis of a moving image as a
social or cultural document demands more in-depth research.
Every film or television show has a production history that might rad-
ically transform its value as a document of the past. As with any major
undertaking, often a film does not turn out the way it was originally
intended. Over the months or years necessary to bring a film to the
screen, the budget may have been cut, one of the actors may have died,
or any number of other factors may have intervened to transform the
attitudes and values addressed in the film. Understanding the produc-
tion background of a film such as The Birth of a Race (1917), included
in the video compilation, demonstrates how production variables can in-
fluence the resulting film. The project, begun by a Chicago-based black
production company headed by Booker T. Washington as an answer to
The Birth of a Nation, was at first intended to trace the development
of civilization through the contributions of blacks. When the company
went bankrupt, it was taken over by whites, who changed the thrust of
the project while retaining a liberal point of view. At the start of World
War I there were pressures to add still another message to the already
compromised intent. The guide to the video compilation contains copies
of manuscript records, which document some of these transformations
and underline the importance of not presuming that the significance of
a film as a social and cultural document can be understood completely
from what appears on the screen. Sometimes understanding why certain
images were not included in the final version of a film can be even more
illuminating. To gain this understanding, more and more historians are
seeking out the archival "paper trail" that documents the production
process. Teachers should be aware of such scholarship before they invite
a class to hypothesize about the meaning of a film.
The study of reception is also extremely important when working
with moving images as social and cultural documents. After all, the
values and attitudes that historians seek to understand were never in-
herent to the moving image itself; they were in the minds of the people
who saw the film and responded to it, sometimes unconsciously. The
"Daisy Spot," the famous sixty-second television commercial from the

33
Qa
 1964 Johnson presidential campaign (included in the video compilation),
demonstrates this. Students who see the commercial today may have
a hard time understanding the controversy that led to the spot being
pulled after airing only once on TV. Producer Tony Schwartz explains
that the piece was important less because of what it explicitly stated
and more because of the frame of mind of the people who saw and heard
it By allowing President Johnson to express abhorrence of the potential
for nuclear annihilation, the piece was designed to focus viewers' atten-
tion on the widely perceived notion that Republican candidate Barry
Goldwater would be more inclined to deploy nuclear weapons. Without
stating this in any way, the commercial concentrated voters' thoughts
on perhaps the greatest liability of Johnson's opponent, because those
ideas were already in people's minds. That the commercial was televised
only once does not diminish its %alue as a barometer of the public mind,
but reading that gauge must be performed with some care if students
are to learn some important lessons about the media and politics, both
in the past and in the present.
It is important that scholars and teachers be aware of the complex-
ity of audience response and remain ever-conscious of the broader social
context in which past audiences made sense of what they saw. Thomas
Cripps has shown this clearly in the case of Stepin Fetchit, who made a
successful career for himself over several decades by playing the stereo-
typical role of a hapless black clown. While white liberal audiences may
have been embarrassed and dismayed, in black neighborhoods, where
Fetchit's name was often displayed above the title on movie marquees,
he was often seen as a hero for having made a successful career in the
movies and for earning enough money to live the life of a movie star.1
The study of films of propaganda and persuasion is best done in the
framework of moving-image documents as evidence for social and cul-
tural history. Filmmakers in Russia (Eisensteli., Kuhlesov, Pudovkin),
Britain (Grierson, Elton, Wright), and Germany (Riefenstahl) were the
first to recognize the potential of the moving image as a propaganda
device, but others, including American filmmakers, were not far behind.
Students should understand the persuasive power of the broadly inter-
pretive Russian feature films of the 1920s (Battleship Potemkin, Ten
Days That Shook the World, Mother, Earth) as well as the propagandis-
tic British social documentaries of the 1930s (Industrial Britain, Housing
Problems) and the racist and political propaganda of the Nazis (Olympia,
Triumph of the Will). A classroom project to identify the propaganda
elements, visual and otherwise, in films like these would involve students
directly in some of the most pertinent issues of both political history and
visual communication.

1For further insight into the complexities of race and moving images, see Thomas
Cripps, Slow Fade to Black: The Negro in American Film (New York. 1977).

34
 As with the "Daisy Spot," the values and attitudes present in the
population are key to understand:-, how propaganda works. The video
compilation includes Fir Uns (1937), a Nazi Party film focusing on the
anniversary of the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch in which sixteen Nazis had
been killed. Both the guide to the video compilation and the voice-
oyez commentary by historian Robert Herzstein explain how the film
used formal structure, visual language, narration, and music to play
on themes rooted deep in German culture. The film urges viewers to
associate in their minds the sixteen Nazi "martyrs" with the two million
Germans who died in World War I, resurrecting the nationalistic spirit
of the German people and urging them to unite behind Hitler. Since
Fir Uns is only fourteen minutes long, a teacher might want to screen
the film once, discuss it with the class, and then view it a second time
with Herzstein's commentary on the second sound track.
In terms of content, the analysis of a film or video production as
historical artifact for the study of social and cultural history should give
special attention to the values represented in the narrative structure
and the style assumed in establishing the compositior. and raise -en -scene
than to the accuracy or inaccuracy of the images. Students should ask
the following questions: Do the social and cultural concepts represented
relate to other known aspects of the society and culture of the period?
Does the film or television production lead or trail behind other media
in representing those ideas? Are there interpretive biases not necessarily
expLit in the narration, dialogue, or surface message of the production,
but hidden in its visual language? Are there aspects of culture not
easily pe "ceived in other types of artifacts, such as patterns of movement,
gesture, facial expression, and body language?
When considering questions of production, special attention
should be given to the purpose of the production. If the film is strictly a
work of commercial entertainment, it can be assumed that the producers
were trying to strike existing chords in the society and culture of the time
(as the producers recognized them). This sort of assumption may suf-
fice for an analysis of correspondence, but research scholars will want to
try to confirm such judgments by studying any production records that
might be available. The commercial purpose of an entertainment pro-
duction might be moderated by a particular point of view, for example,
a producer's desire to encourage improved race relations. But a big-
budget, studio-produced entertainment film involves the input of many
collaborators. The concept of the auteur may have its place, but such an
analysis is particularly vulnerable with large-scale commercial produc-
tions. Of course, there are productions that are dominated by a single
point of view, as in an independently produced art film or a television
commercial for a political campaign. In each case, access to production
records is sure to improve the insights that can be drawn. When the
production history of a film is inaccessible, students may hypothesize on

35

41
 the motives and rationale of the filmmaker, but they should remember
that a hypothesis is different from a conclusion based on a close analysis
of the documented evidence.
Perhaps the most important area in defining the social and cultural
relevance of a moving-image document is reception. Film reviews are a
good place to start, though it must be remembered that the reviewer for
The New York Times does not necessarily get the same message from a
film as the reviewer from Richmond or Kansas City, and that none of
those reviewers are necessarily in touch with the desires of the nation's
moviegoers. There are other types of paper evidence, such as preview
response cards, advertising press books, and letters to the editor, but in
making this kind of analysis the gaps will almost always be greater than
the documented spaces. In bridging these gaps, one might turn to theo-
retical approaches to reception analysis, but such approaches are always
well served by incorporating as much solid evidence as may be available.
There were many individual or group responses to any film, and differ-
ent racial, ethnic, gender, of political groups may have perceived the
production differently or recognized different meanings implicit within
it. By investigating the events and topics covered in the newspapers,
magazines, and other vehicles of popular culture during the weeks and
months that the film was in release, some part of the context in which
viewers saw the production can be established. In whatever other ways
possible, students should try to "get inside the skin" of the viewers. Fi-
nally, while a film need not have been a smashing popular success or a
television show in the top ten of the weekly Neilsen ratings to be of value
as a document, a production that strikes a chord with an audience is at
least some measure of its relevance as a social or cultural document.

Framework Three: Moving-image documents as evidence

for historical fact. Many of those who use film in their history
classes today rely on it to convey a body of facts. This is the approach
taken by the makers of most films and videotapes commercially produced
for the classroom. In addition to the convenience these films provide,
studies suggest that, combined with lecture and discussion, their use
may reinforce knowledge and improve recall. Most classroom screenings,
however, rely on the students' internalization of the surface messages of
the film. The teache hopes that they will take in the information that
the filmmaker wants them to take in. Rather than being challenged
to think and analyze, students are too often reinforced in the passive
viewing habits they have learned watching their televisions at home.
In factual footage, such as the Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassi-
nation, the factual data provided in the image itself can be unexpectedly
informative if the viewer undertakes a truly active reading. By counting
the frames of the Zapruder film, the investigators of the Warren Com-
mission were able to establish the precise amount of time between the

36 42
shots fired. The Zapruder film is so memorable because its factual testi-
mony was so unusual. The very nature of film and television images, the
limits of point of view within a shot, and the opportunities for misrep-
resentation in the editing process make most film notoriously unreliable
as a factual resource, but unedited factual images like the Zapruder film
offer unique material for analysis.
Newsreel and television archives contain the raw material for his-
torical scholarship, more than any other collections of moving images.
Newsreel images can add a dimension to the study of many subjects.
Among the most important are newsreels that offer the kinds of infor-
mation that can only be perceived visually. Newsreel images of Franklin
Delano Roosevelt, for example, like photographs of Abraham Lincoln,
show how his face aged during his years in office. What only the moving
images can demonstrate, however, is how Roosevelt's handicap made
his physical movement more and more tronblesome as the years passed.
Like any Elm, however, newsreels were subject to editing, and all the
factual film shot was seldom used in the final version of a newsreel. The
message of factual images can therefore be altered, affecting viewers'
perception of the message. The way FDR was protected by the news-
reels is illustrated by the Movietone News outtakes included in the video
compilation.
Television news as factual resource e^n be equally problematic. It
is especially difficult to find tapes of national television news coverage
before 1968, when the Vanderbilt Television News Archive began regular
taping of the three networks. Local news coverage is all but impossible to
study in any comprehensive way because of a lack of systematic taping.
At present, there are efforts under way to preserve some local news
programming and archive it for scholars' future reference. But even if
accsss were easily available (as hopefully it some day may be), scholars
must remain sensitive to the limitations of TV news as factual resource.
While at first glance it may seem that the images are inherently more
factual than written accounts in newspapers and magazines, moving-
image scholars must remember that all images are interpretive as well.
On the other hand, as Daniel Boorstin established so convincingly in The
Image: Or What Happened to the American Dream (New York, 1962),
today's news is largely made up of "pseudo-events." In a world driven
by public opinion, what "really happened" may not matter as much as
what was reported and how.
Television is reality for masses of people, and in an important sense,
analytical problems of reception notwithstanding, this transforms TV
broadcasts into historical fact. The video compilation includes a selec-
tion from the CBS Evening News that illustrates this point. When CBS
made the decision to focus especially on one statement made by Edward
Kennedy in his campaign for the 1980 Democratic presidential nomi-
nation, they transformed it into a much more significant event than it

37
,1 3
 otherwise might have been. The most important point to make with
students in an analysis of television news as evidence for historical fact
is that, although most electronic journalism is accurate, within the in-
evitable limitations of the medium, film and television images should
not be presumed to be more reliable sources of information simply be-
cause they are visual, that is, because they make all viewers in some
way eyewitnesses. Indeed, it is important that people be able to trust
media-based reporting in a media-dominated society. That trust, how-
ever, should be based on a clear comprehension of the conventions of the
medium and the ways it communicates its information, not on a naive
belief that the camera makes viewers eyewitnesses to events.
At Columbia University a current project takes Soviet television news
off a satellite and studies it for insight into both Soviet policy and public
awareness. because there is a degree of speculation involved in this kinci
of study, scholars must take care when they generalize about audience
perceptions. Aside from the absence of an institutionalized opposition
(immediate critical analysis of a presidential speech, for example), why
should it be presumed that Soviet audiences are any more naive than
American audiences in blindly accepting their government's interpreta-
tions of issues and events?
Historians can make effective use of certain documentary films in
their entirety as factual resources, although each reference should in-
clude a careful analysis of the filmmaker's point of view and a verifi-
cation through other sources of the facts percieved. Robert Flaherty's
Nanook of the North (1922) is a film that, is probably unreliable for spe-
cific facts (many of the scenes were purposely enacted or reenacted for
the sake of the cameras), but is wt..aderful for an overall impression
one perceptive viewof what native American life was like in the Great
North. The films of Frederick Wiseman also provide several interesting
examples. Wiseman produced an extended series of cinema verite doc-
umentaries that closely examine American institutions as diverse as an
Anglican seminary and a downtown pcnce department. The historian
of education, for example, might very profitably view Wiseman's High
School (1968) to get a feeling for the dynamics of the American high
school in the 1960s. The military historian might benefit as much from
studying 1Viseman's Basic Thasning (1971), as would the historian of
American consumer practices from The Store (1983), a close-up look at
Dallas's Neiman-Marcus department store. Of all the institutions Wise-
man has studied with his camera, perhaps the most interesting is the
mental hospital profiled in Titscut Follies (1967) because there are so
few visual documents like it. Historians must be careful to avoid accept-
ing Wiseman's view as more truthful than another source just because
it is constructed of actuality footage. Conversely, a historian who wrote
on this subject without attention to Wiseman's factual insights would
clearly be missing something. Pete, Davis'? six-part documentary series

38 44
Middletown (1982) should become a factual resource on the early 1980s
in the same way as the Lynds' famous study of Muncie, Indiana (minus
the visual dimension) has for generations served as a factual resource for
social historians of the 1920s.
Teachers should continue using film and video as a shorthand way to
present factual information to a class, but because of the special concerns
of content that arise when using moving images as factual sources, stu-
dents should be made aware that the information imparted is no more or
less reliable because it is reinforced with pictures. At least some atten-
tion should be paid in the classroom to teaching students how the form
and style of visual images, and especially the patterns and conventions of
editing, raise questions about the reliability of film or television as proof
that events happened in one way or another, or that they happened at
all.
When considering questions of production, it is important to inquire
into the purposes and biases of the filmmakers and camera operators
that may have led them to photograph, select, or edit footage in a par-
ticular way. In some cases, as with news film in a totalitarian country
or with propaganda documentaries, the intent of the filmmaker may be
the central question for analysis. There is considerable literature on the
institution of television news and the ways decisions are made regarding
what is reported and how. Students therefore should understand how
media conventions influence the information they receive.
Factual analysis of news film, in conjunc ion with press reports and
other sources, allows some estimation of what the public knew, or thought
it knew, at any particular time. It is important, however, not to presume
that the audience is totally naive and impressionable. Scholarship has
raised important questions about the extent to which populations are
taken in by propaganda, especially when characterized by blatantly fal-
sified reports. How much does the public, even in a free society, accept
the interpretation of events presented in the news?
Finally, the conditions of the reception of television news present
particular problems. As news programs assume more of the trappings
of entertainment programs, and program flow is carefully designed by
specialists in the industry to lead i.adiences from one program to the
next, it is unclear what influence such media context has on the public's
perception of issues and events. Considering such problems with a dabs
should help to make the students more critical viewers.

Framework Four: Moving-image documents as evidence

for the history of film and television. The art forms of film and
television (closely related but significantly different from one another)
and the industries that produce them are arguably among the most
historically significant twentieth-century Institutional subjects available
for study. While the impact that media have had on culture cannot be

39
A5
 proved in a specific or clinical way, it is safe to say that moving-image
media rank with other such hard-to-quantify forces as the factory sys-
tem and the automobile. The history of film and television, therefore,
deserves to be studied and taught in its own right, and there is as much
reason for this to be taught in the history department as in departments
of communications, cinema studies, or English. There have been a few
valuable and widely read studies that have tried to lay the groundwork
for such activity including Garth Jowett's Film: The Democratsc Art
(Boston, 1976) and Robert Sklar's Mone-Made America (New York,
1975). There is also the Historical Journal of Film, Radso and Telen-
ston, which specializes in work by historians about the history of the
media. But there has yet to be a recognition of the importance of the
institutional history of film as part of the larger mainstream of history.
It is one thing for an author to refer to a film or to the popular image
of Hollywood to help characterize a period, but it is quite another to
recognize the importance of self-regulation and censorship within the
American film industry as a characteristic in American economic life.
Of all the textbook treatments of American history available, none does
real justice to the mass media as an industry, an art form, or a force itil
modern civilization.
There has been a continuing and appropriate distinction made be-
tween what has commonly been known as film historythe popular and
somewhat nostalgic tale-telling about the public and private lives of the
Hollywood stars and their studiosand the more serious analytical work
of traditionally trained historians. It is wrong to presume, however, that
historians are the only ones who were dissappointed with what passed
for film history. Although fan biographies and pictorial histories con-
tinue to be published, these has been a significant transformation in the
practice of film history over the past decade, as specialists trained in
cinema studies have developed a substantial body of scholarship on the
historical analysis of film and television. Two recent books of particu-
lar importance to those teaching the history of film and television are
David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson's The Class:cal
Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Product:on to 1960 (New
York, 1985) and Douglas Gomery and Robert Allen's Film 11:story: The-
ory and Practtce (New York, 1985). Reading these books should be an
important step in raising the consciousness of any history teacher un-
dertaking a course in film history. Bridging the gap necessary to in-
telligently read historical articles published in such important cinema
journals as Wtde Angle, Cinema Journal, Screen, or Quarterly Renew
of Film Studies will be easier for those historians who are conversant
with recent trends in the philosophy of history. The work of thinkers
such of Hayden White and Michel Foucault have been central to these
new historians who were trained first in cinema studies.
Art history is another field that should inform historical investiga-

40 '1 f;
tion of film and television. There are striking resemblances between the
new directions in art history over the past decade and the development
of serious scholarship for film as social and cultural artifact. One basic
theme in art history has been stimulated by the recognition that styles in
painting, sculpture, architecture, and other plastic arts, rather than be-
ing strictly formalistic extensions of earlier styles, are invariably related
to other forces in the society. This can be readily seen in such studies as
Samuel Edgerton's Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective (New
York, 1975), which demonstrates in detail how the new style in drawing
came to represent a visual metaphor for many aspects of the contempo-
rary culture of Florence, from the increasing rationality in banking and
commerce to the growing political dominance of the Medici family. This
is the obverse side of the framework for analyzing moving-image docu-
ments as evidence for social and cultural history. Films can be studied
for what they can tell about the social and cultural values of the time,
but people primarily interested in the close historical analysis of a film
itself, or a genre of films, should be using social and cultural history to
help them understand the film as a work of art.
One particularly interesting avenue of recent film history research
has centered on the founding and early development of the industry. In
addition to tracing the invention of the technology and the establishment
of the production companies, research has focused on the creation of new
narrative and nonnarrative structures, new ways to tell stories made
possible by the plasticity of space and time in film. Edwin S. Porter's
The Life of an American Fireman (1902) provides what may be a unique
example of such a process. Most prints of this short film that exist today
are based on one that was restored several decades ago. Unsure of the
original order of the shots in the climax of the film, the restorers put
the shots together in a way that made sense to them. They intercut the
footage so that the point of view shifted freely from exterior to interior
and back again, maintaining a continuity of time in telling the story of
the rescue of a woman and child from a burning building. Research has
recently established that the original film first presented one long interior
shot showing the entire drama of the firemen breaking into a smoky room
and carrying the woman and child down the ladder. The camera then
switched to the outside of the building to show the same events repeated
a second time from that point of view. For these early filmmakers,
continuity of space was more important than continuity of time; it would
have been more disconcerting for turn-of-the-century audiences to have
the camera move from one vantage point to another than it was to have
the same events repeated. The development of new ways to tell stories
meant that spectators had to learn new ways to make gneaning from
stories as wel1.2°
20See the video compilation and guide.

4 41
 The field of film history has been radically transformed and profes-
sionalized in the last two decades. What might have been acceptable
as a film history course fifteen years ;.go simply wi'.1 not suffice in the
face of so much new scholarship. Any teacher who undertook to offer a
film history course today that jumped from twenties comedies to thirties
social realism and forties film noir by simply discussing the films them-
selves, or using a popular survey such as Arthur Knight's The Liveliest
Art (New York, 1957) as a text, would be doing a disservice to the stu-
dents. There are different opinions about the relative value of various
theoretical orientations, but one cannot responsibly teach the history of
film or television today without careful attention to institutional organi-
zations, economic imperatives, technological developments, patterns of
spectatorship, and a host of other factors. Most important, one cannot
present a film as an artifact in the history of an industry or art form
without engaging in close analysis. The contexts of content, produc-
tion, and reception must be filled out as in the traditional manuscript
research in which all historians are trained. There is a growing body
of scholarship based on this kind of research that will offer teachers of
film history the materials they need for designing the more substantial
courses that the field demands today. (For examples, see the study guide
materials on The Birth of a Race, A Corner in Wheat, The Return of
Marlin Guerre, and The Plow That Broke the Plains that accompany
the video compilation.)
Studying the content of a moving-image document in the context of
the history of th_ industry and art form of moving images involves recog-
nizing that a careful viewing of the films themselves provides important
evidence for film history. Until recent years, most historians of popu-
lar film have been content with summarizing plots and general stylistic
elements in the films they discussed, most of which were recognized as
masterpieces and seen most widely on 16-mm rental prints and on TV.
This has at least in part been due to the inaccessibility of film archives
and the special projectors or viewing tables necessary for close visual
analysis. The video revolution and the growing availability of videodisk
technology is changing this, as more and more titles become available
in formats that invite close analysis. The video compilation designed to
accompany this publication has been produced in videodisk (as well as
videotape) to encourage the deeper analysis that disc technology facili-
tates.
Just as art historians need to understand the background of a painter's
work and the techniques of line and brush, so film historians require an
understanding of the mode of moving-image production. Today, seri-
ous film history cannot be conducted without investigating the archival
record of the industry to understand how the production process of a
specific film worked Current scholarship begins to pro 'le this kind of
background.

42
4S
 The study of moviegoing is a part of social and cultural history, but in
a slightly different way it also reflects the consumption side of industrial
history. Students should ask: How were the expectations of viewers
influenced by the promotional efforts of the studio or TV network? How
much was dependent on matters other than tho film or TV program
itself, such as the offering of air conditioning, the sumptuous design of
movie palaces, or the use of videocassette recorders to "time shift"
certain programs for later viewing? Such factors cannot be forgotten in
the teaching of film and television history.
Strategies for the Classroom
Teachers use films to convey information (often for class review),
to sensitize students to a past era, and to stimulate discussion. Each
of these approaches can be enhanced when applied more thoughtfully.
Those who use film to convey information should do so sparingly and
should caution students to accept such information only after it has
been verified through other sources. Students must be reminded that
information derived from moving images is no more inherently truthful
than information gained from reading or class lecture, despite what they
"saw with their own eyes." Teachers who use film to sensitize students
to a past erashowing The Return of Martin Guerre to make the life of
the sixteenth-century French peasant more realshould take care not to
reinforce habits of passive viewing. Certainly every lesson cannot focus
on production background and visual language, but at least one lesson
each term should help keep students aware that the feelings they get from
watching a film are not coincidental. Students will then become more
cognizant of the powerful tools filmmakers may use to move their audi-
ence. In the classroom it is particularly appropriate for history teachers,
at least on occasion, to approach moving images as historical documents,
reinforcing concepts of historical thinking while teaching visual literacy.
The central purpose of this book is to encourage and assist teachers
in incorporating a few more critical viewing lessons into their otherwise
traditional history classes. Those interested in a more expansive ap-
proach should be aware that in a number of high schools and colleges,
elective courses have been completely structured around the study of
history through film and television. A teacher could easily de,,ote an
entire semester to the concerns expressed in this book. A college class
could spend several productive weeks working through a textbook on
the critical analysis of moving images. Models also exist for courses that
concentrate on Hollywood feature film, documentary and news film, or
film and photography.21 A semester-long concentration on film and his-
tory study would allow an in-depth analysis of a number of different
21 In some ways the critical reading of photographs can be even more challenging
than film and TV. See Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York, 1973) and Roland
Barthes, Camera Lueida: Reflections on Photography (New York, 1981).

el 9 43
 films, but the number of films addressed should be decided conserva-
tively. Courses structured around one feature film a week seldom leave
enough time for close study. In certain circumstances, it might not be
unreasonable to spend two or three weeks on a single film, studying its
content, re-viewing and discussing particular scenes, comparing the film
with other film treatments of the period, tracing the film's production
history through a reading and analysis of primary or secondary sources,
examining its reception, including an analysis of the broader context of
popular culture at the time the film was originally released, and applying
each of the four frameworks for inquiry.
In a film and history course for college juniors and seniors at New
Jersey Institute of Technology, I have devoted this kind of attention,
for example, to The Plow That Broke the Plasn', spending four eighty-
minute class periods (two weeks of class time) on a twenty-eight-minute
film, with rewarding results. The class began by reading sections of
Donald Worster's Dust Bowl: The Southern Plants sn the 1930s (New
York, 1979) and viewing The Plow with the shorter ending (the way
the film was distributed by the government between 1936 and 1940, and
again after 1962 when the film was cleared once more for educational
distribution). On the blackboard we broke the film down into its seven
major sequences, so that the class could concentrate on individual images
and discuss how they worked as symbols in the film. Because The Plow
was produced by the government and is free of any copyright restrictions,
I did not hesitate to make a series of slides from the screen for close
analysis in class.22 Moreover, I made videotape copies of the seven
major sequences of the film, which students could borrow to study on
their own (all but two or three had video recorders at home). The class
was divided into seven groups, and each group was assigned one sequence
for an in-depth analysis. At the close of the first eighty-minute class, we
viewed a dozen of the slides that depicted some of the visual symbols in
the film. The class was given a packet of photocopies of contemporary
reviews of the film and manuscript papers23 relating to its production,
and told to read them by the next class.
When the class met again three days later, the students could not
understand how the film they had seen and discussed could have caused
the controversy that was evident from the documents they had read.
Could the congressmen who had been so upset about The Plow in the
22There are attadunents that will allow direct copying of a 16-nun fr ,r, with a
35-nun camera, but I have been able to produce adequate copies for classroom use by
setting up a camera on a tripod next to the projector in a dark room, stopping ..:...
action of the projector, and simply snapping pictures off tne screen. Teachers must
be aware of the limitations, but there are situations in which the making of slides in
this manner for classroom reference may be considered fair use under the copyright
law. Your school should have a general policy regarding fair use. If not, you should
urge them to develop one that includes film and video.
23Some .f these papers are included in the guide to the video compilation.

44
5u
1930s have been looking at the same film? At this point, I showed
them the didactic pro-New Deal epilogue that was originally attached
to the film and tried to impress on them the importance of verifying
the completeness of any document they would analyze. In an effort to
discover why and how the epilogue was removed, the class discussed the
extent and impact of the dust bowl and why it happened; Republican
and Democratic politics in the 1930s; the state of agriculture in the
United States in the thirties and the varying ideas people had about how
to respond to the plight of the farmers; and the nature of the New Deal
and how it was reflected in the film. The class based their discussion in
part on what they had been assigned to read in Worster's book. Because
Worster presents a rather pointed interpretation, arguing that the dust
bowl was the result of the same capitalist values that had brought on
the economic depression, part of the discussion considered alternative
points of view.
The third class period devoted to The Plow began with a review of
what had been discovered about the content, production, and reception
of the film. The students were then challenged to consider how the
film might be infused with different meanings, applying each of the four
frameworks for inquiry. First, they discussed how the film lends itself
to analysis as historical interpretation. The Plow presents an especially
simplistic interpretation of the economic background that led to the
plight of the plains farmer. After farmers had applied new technology
and geared up for wartime production, peace brought overproduction
and falling prices. But even in the 1930s it was understood that the
economic problems involved were much more complex; the film makes
no mention of the tenancy problem, for example. By stressing the en-
vironmental dimension of the farmers' troubles, the film does lay the
rationale for more active government planning for agricultural develop-
ment, but it avoids a fuller critique of either technological methods or
the capitalist system.
Second, the class analyzed the film as a document of social and cul-
tural history. Students recognized the obvious images of social and cul-
tural interest in the film, such as the migrants seeking a place where
they could begin to put together new lives for themselves The class
understood that in this context there was less concern with the factual
accuracy of the images than with the social and cultural values the film
songht to touch in its audience. Camera angles and editing were seen as
important for the ways they characterized individuals and issues, help-
ing spectators unconsciously to develop the point of view the producers
intended (the slides were helpful again here). The filmmaker, Pare
Lorentz, was clearly attempting to create sympathy in the audience for
people who had been victimized. The farmers of the plains had been
brought there by very basic American social and cultural values. Once
settled, the unpredictabilities of the economic system, combined with

45
51
 the vagaries of the environment, -1 aped their lives. A more biting social
critic might have sought to deflate widely professed American ideals as
empty rhetoric or as opiate for the otherwise ill-informed masses, but
Lorentz did not go this far. Rather, his film suggested that the sys-
tem could be made sound again and the values reaffirmed under the
leadership of FDR and the enlightened policies of agenciea such as the
Resettlement Administration.
Third, the class discussed tile reliability of The Plow as a resource
for the facts it reported. They had read about people in the 1930s who
had challenged the factual accuracy of the film. In addition, they were
made aware that the compilation filmmakers who repeatedly return to
The Plow in search of footage on the 1930s seldom if ever question the
validity of the images. Although individual shots from the film may
provide visual verification for the written record in much the same way
as still photographs of the time, using such images to get an idea of
the enormity of the dust storms or some more intimate sense of what
they were like requires special attention to the photographic decisions
madeat what angles were pictures shot, what kinds of lenses or filters
were used, what film speedeach of which might unknowingly influence
the viewers' perceptions of what actually appeared before the camera.
Moreover, for images to be used as evidence, it must be clear that they
were not staged and that they represent exactly what they purport to
represent. In short, the class was helped to see that although The Plow
is commonly used as a factual source on the dust bowl and the problems
of the rural depression, such reference is frought with difficulty from the
historian's point of view.
Finally, the class considered how The Plow could be studied as an
important artifact in the history of documentary film and the subsequent
making of documentary films by the United States government. The
production of The Plow and Lorentz's later film, The River (1937), led
to the establishment of a new agency, the United States Film Service,
with Lorentz at its head. The administrators of the service, like the
promoters of The Plow, struggled against political opponents until 1940,
when a congressional committee forced the shutdown of the agency and
the end of distribution of The Plow until 1962, when distribution was
again permitted in recognition of the importance of the film for students
of the medium.
By the fourth class period (at the end of the second week), the stu-
dents were ready to discuss the work they had done on their own. They
had been asked to analyze and evaluate the effectiveness of the interpre-
tation presented in each of the major sequences and to include analyses
of specific shots and specific editing transitions, with explanations about
how the creative use of these visual elements, as well as the sound track,
either contributed to or detracted from the message that the filmmaker

46
was trying to convey.24 This last class period on The Plow centered on
discussing once again the seven major sequences of the film, with exten-
sive references to the students' own observations about how the visual
and aural elements of the film helped to accomplish the overall purpose
of the production.
This history-through-film course took a similarly in-depth approach
to The Return of Martin Guerre. The class read Natalie Zemon Davis's
book of the same title (Cambridge, Mass., 1983) before they saw the film.
Discussion of the film centered on the nature of history and how the
creative demands of the moving-image medium challenged traditional
ways of representing the past. The class began by considering the ways
the intent of the filmmakers, necessarily concerned about entertaining an
audience and turning a profit, differed from the more altruistic concern of
the historian for expanding understanding of sixteenth-century French
society. The students then considered how these different goals may
have influenced the film presentation, in which important details of the
story were collapsed or deleted and the characterizations simplified. The
book opens with the explanation that the story is one of imposture.
Throughout it shows the complexities of Bertrande's character: she is a
woman capable of plotting to trick the entire community into thinking
that the man who "returns" is the real Martin Guerre, yet concerned
enough with protecting her own interests and those of her children to
bring the legal indictment against him. On the other hand, because the
film is tied to the conventions of romance and mystery movies, there was
strong reason to neither suggest the potential disloyalty of the woman
(breaking the spell of the romance) nor reveal the solution to the mystery
(the real nature of the imposture) until the end of the film, when all of
the suspense value had been spent.
The Return of Marton Guerre is a film rich in historical mise-en-
scene. The research devoted to settings, costumes, and props as well as
to language, music, and characterization make it wonderfully effective
in evoking the texture of sixteenth-century life. The questions raised in
class discussion led the students to consider the relative suitability of
film and television for developing such detail in the way things looked,
in contrast to the suitability of print for describing people's thoughts
and feelings. The class was also assigned to read Davis' interview on the
making of the film in Film & History, in which she discussed how the
questions rais( i in creating the mise-en-scene for the movie challenged
her to think differently about historical questions and led her to new
insights about the past.25
The Return of Martin Guerre opens with a narrator's statement to
24The appendix to this book includes a sample of the class assignment and the
information sheets provided for the analysis of shot and editing transitions.
ThEd Benson, "Martin Guerre, The Historian and The Filmmakers: An Interview
With Natalie Zemon Davis," Film El History, 13 (September 1983): 99-65.

47
 the effect that it is a true story. As Davis asks in her commentary on the
video compilation, what does such a claim to truth mean? In what ways
and to what extent can any film be true to history? The class recognized
how such a claim could confuse and mislead viewers. The film required
a secord viewing for students to understand that the person in the film
who says that the story is true is the judge whose published account
provides the fullest evidence for the story. The class was able to note
that the film could at least have indicated more clearly that the story
was true to one person's account. More importantly, they came to better
understand that every work of history represents an interpretation or
point of view, and that there might be alternative narrative structures
that would allow a more thoughtful approach to historical representation
in film. One option might be based on the model of the Japanese film
Roshamon (1950), in which the same event is repeated several times
through the eyes of different observers.
Few teachers are likely to be in a situation where this kind of compre-
hensive strategy for teaching The Plow or The Return of Martin Guerre
would be appropriate. However, part of the analysis might prove valu-
able to many teachers in very different contexts. For example, while
most teachers might not want to survey all four frameworks of inquiry
in studying The Plow, they could have their students consider the types
of questions most appropriate to one selected framework. Care has been
taken in this essay and in the video compilation to provide examples
of shorter films that lend themselves to integration into regular history
classes. It is important that the films the teacher chooses for close anal-
ysis have been researched and written about in terms of their content,
production, and reception. For the vast majority of films, a "paper
trail" either does not exist or has not yet been treated in published
scholarship, but there are scores of films tl.,t have been studied on the
basis of such archival sources. The screenplays to hundreds of feature
films have been published in book series, such as the critical editions
of Warner Brothers screenplays from the University of Wisconsin Press;
in collected volumes, such as Sam Thomas's Best American Screenplays
(Ne& 7 ',I, 1986); or summarized in such useful guides as Leonard Leff's
Film Plots 3cene-by-Scene Narrative Outlines for Feature Film Study,
vol. 1 (Ann Arbor, 1983).
Films or television programs to be treated in class as historical docu-
ments should be chosen at least in part according to the accessibility of
production and reception information. If there are pressing reasons to
utilize a film for which no background and contextual data is available,
it is still important to keep matters of background and context in mind.
Tentative interpretations are possible, of course, and may be provocative
as devices for students, but it should always be made clear that no full
determination about the overall historical significance or insight to be

48
i4
drawn from a moving-image production can be made in the absence of
such information.
There is good reason, for example, for using some of the recognized
classics like Citizen Kane (1941). In twenty years of teaching college
history students I have never found a class where more than a few had
ever seen this film, and only a handful had looked at it critically. There
art now wonderful resources for the close study of this film, includ-
ing the published screenplay, Robert Carringer's recent volume on the
The Making of '`Citizen Kane" (Berkeley, 1985), and the release of a
CAV videodisk edition of the film, which permits flescibility in studying
and comparing individual scenes (the disk even includes the advertising
materials developed by RKO to sell the film and a large collection of
production stills). The materials, especially the visual, on Citizen Kane
are extraordinary, but there are scores of other feature films that have
been fully researched. There are also good sources for information on the
production and reception of at least some documentary films, newsreels.
and television news. For designing a lesson in critical analysis, therefor..,
rather than starting with film catalogs to find the moving-image mate-
riai3 for a class, teachers should look first at the books and journals of
film scholarship to identify film and video materials about which they
can readily find documented information on content, production, and
reception.
Teachers must be careful not to use films for the pur..ose of manipulat-
ing their students' perceptions. There are good film 1,,.d video resources
on controversial issues in recent history, films that when screened in
class would leave the students emotionally agitated or drained, and in a
frame of mind that would allow the teacher to ea,ily drive home a per-
sonal point of view. This happens far too often without teachers even
realizing it. For example, a teacher who is committed to a particular
interpretation of the American role in the Vietnam War ought to offer
at least some reference to opposing positions. Showing the film Hearts
and Minds (1974) in a class on Vietnam would have students at the edge
of their seats, ready to understand and accept any arguments presented
about why the war was a waste of American youth and a crime against
the peeplc of Southeast Asia. But using the film in this way is tanta-
mount to manwilating and propagandizing the students. At the very
least, class discussion of such a film should address the ways its powerful
images and editing techniques may serve to move viewers unconsciously
toward an antiwar position. There are scores of productions that address
the United States as a world power, the role of women in society, politics
in the Third World, and numerous other issues. Teachers who decide to
use them in class owe it to the students to help them understand the
ways the films may work on their emotions.
It is also important that history teachers remember the goals of their

49
 lessons, without straying too much into the interesting questions con-
cerning film and television or the popular perception of the media today.
These subjects would be appropriate at some level, but they may often
lead discussion away from the historical issues that should be central to
a history class. -
Where the equipment is available, one particularly effective way to
familiarize students with visual language is to have them produce their
own short films or videotapes. Even without production equipment,
students often enjoy projects that involve scripting or storyboarding a
production without actually filming it, or they might put together a
slide-tape presentation of some kind. Such projects should be carefully
designed to keep historical questions in focus. Students might be re-
quired to outline several alternative narrative structures for a Pim on
a particular historical subject, considering how the narrative structure,
the types of visual materials available, or the mix of music and narration
chosen for the sound track of each potential film might influence the way
it interprets its historical subject. Whenever history students make films
or videotapes as class projects, they should be asked to consider their
interpretive approach and how the narrative structure and the visual
a. .,,iral content contribute to, or detract from, that p It of view.
A goo.' approach for dealing with television news is to ask students
to compare stories covered in newspapers and on TV. They will quickly
discover th - television news gives them only a tiny percentage of the
information they can get from the newspaper, but they should be en-
couraged to make the comparison on a deeper level. The class should
consider the other news of importance during a given day or week. As
an activity, the students can do a shot-by-shot breakdown of a particu-
lar TV news story and study how the visual context and use of sound
may have influenced the perception viewers had of the information pre-
sented. It may help to take a few moments to contrast the relatively
subtle elements of bias in today's television news with the comparatively
bombastic commentaries and musical sound tracks of the newsreel ex-
amples provided in the video compilation. Students can then compare
the ways different TV news broadcasts and different newspapers covered
the same story. By surveying the news of an entire week, students will
be able to note trends in the ways different media handle developing sit-
uations. For a modest fee to cover their costs, the Vanderbilt Television
News Archive will compile thirty minutes of television news stories on
any topic from he three networks and lend this tape for use in research
or classroom study. An effective lesson m' ,iit be designed around some
event of national importance that took place locally since 1969 (when
Vanderbilt started taping), by ordering a compilation of stories about
the event as covered on the various networks and comparing that with
local newspaper and national news magazine coverage.
The most effective way students can learn from moving images is

50
through discussion. The teacher should try to guide classroom film dis-
cussions, without controlling the response of the class too strongly or
too obviously. If the self-evident purpose of the film discussion is to
draw out only a specific set of responses desired by the teacher, partic-
ipation by those students who are too afraid or embarrassed to risk a
"wrong" answerone different from that the teacher wantedmight be
discouraged. For this reason it is often best to begin the discussion by
asking questions that do not require the students to reach independent
judgments about the meaning of a film. If the film adds insight to a
theme the class has been studying, the students will usually find it for
themselves, and particular points that are missed can always be made
later.
One especially effective way of encouraging this unpressured partici-
pation, which lays the groundwork for productive discussions, is called
the sight-sound skim. The object of this method is to begin the dis-
cussion of a film by asking the students simply to describe what they
saw, that is, to describe the images that were projected on the screen as
they come to mind. The teacher might reduce the descriptions to one-
or two-word image labels and fill the blackboard with the words that
identify the images. If the film has a story line, the teacher might try
reconstructing the plot with the parlor-game technique in which student
after student retells the story one incident after another. From here
the discussion can progress in several different directions, but already
the students have been able to participate in a natural and unpressured
way, and the sometimes subliminal images from the film have been trans-
formed into conscious, shared ideas for the class to consider.
When considering a more or less didactic educational film such as
The Twenties (1969), a class discussion might proceed as follows: The
teacher would prepare a blackboard list of image labels, including flap-
pers, speakeasies, Calvin Coolidge, the stock market, automobile as-
sembly lines, the Wall Street crash, and several dozen more. Students
might be asked to group the words into appropriate categories. What,
if anything, have flappers and speakeasies to do with Calvin Coolidge?
Should automobile assembly lines and the Wall Street crash be consid-
ered as somehow tied together? The teacher might also ask the class
to reconstruct the order ir. which the images were presented and decide
if some reordering might alter the historical interpretation suggested by
the film. A group of students could be assigned to create its own sce-
nario for a film on the same subject or arrange still photographs in a
way that conveys an interpretive message different from the one they
have just seen.
Under some circumstances, the teacher might decide to let the class
lead itself. Especially when dealing with short experimental films, many
of which are plotless, full of animation and cinematic devices, and open
to individual interpretation, it may be worthwhile to allow the sight-

51
 sound skimming to continue, with the students exploring more deeply
their own personal reactions to the film. The short film Time Piece
(1965) can be used in this way. This film uses animation, trick pho-
tography, a playful musical sound track, and some obvious cinematic
symbols to comment on life in the urban-suburban rat race -t the mid-
1960s. The students can discuss the images until
an interpretation of
the film starts to emerge. Then they might be asked to identify other
images that support or refute this interpretation. At first glance, an
experimental film like Time Piece might seem to have little practical ap-
plication in the history classroom. Its contrived plot and frenetic style of
editing make it totally unsatisfactory for imparting factual information.
But when it is used as the basis of a freewheeling class discussion, such
an imaginative film can provide an effective exercise in the techniques of
visual communication and result in a heightened potential for historical
thinks g and critical evaluation.
Another valuable approach in teaching with film is to have students
consider their own feelings and emotions when discussing how the film
influenced them. The teacher might ask the students what they experi-
enced while watching Triumph of the Will: What emotions were evoked
by particular imagesthe plane descending from the cloudi, or the uni-
formed men marching into the stadium with shovels on tivir shoulders
in place of guns? How and why might the feelings of Germans in 1935
have differed from the students' own? Which of the images in the film
were intended primarily to convey information, to introduce the German
people to the new Nazi leaders, for example, and which were meant to
engender an emotional response of pride or fear? Perhaps for students
today the emotions evoked by the 1964 "Daisy Spot" would have more
meaning. Students might be asked to consider what they felt when the
screen was engulfed in the nuclear explosion and then discuss whether
the emotion was more the creation of a skilled advertising film producer
or a reasonable response to the issues at hand.
There are some films so emotionally powerful that they defy frame-
by-frame analysis. Alain Resnais's Night and Fog, for example, presents
a stark view of the Nazi concentration camps and contrasts pictures of
the camps in full operation with tranquil scenes of the camps ten years
later. The film includes confiscated German movies of Jews helping
each other into cattle cars and postwar pictures of the gas chambers
with fingernail marks scratched into the concrete ceilings. The feelings
of shock and revulsion, especially for students who cannot quite believe
that such things really happened, are beyond the scope of a typical c-
discussion, and a sight-sound skim might even diminish the impact of the
experience. What the teacher might do, however, is wait a day or two
after showing the film and then have the students discuss the Nuremberg
trials; the discussion should give the teacher some idea of the impact the
film had on the class. Alternatively, the teacher might ask the students

52
to write about the role of individual moral judgment within society, then
view the film, and a day or two later reconsider their own ideas.
There are three basic rules for the teacher using film. First, the
teacher should be as well prepared as possibi... On the day a teacher
brings a film into class, more work may be required than on a typical
day. The teacher should always preview a film before showing it to the
students. In addition, the teacher should always prepare the class for
a film and provide an introduction. One exception to this might be
with short, experimental films intended for individual interpretation, in
which the teacher's introductory comments might undermine the stu-
dents' personal involvement with the film. Most films shown in the
history classroom, however, have a specific message to convey, and a few
preliminary remarks will help the students to observe more carefully.
When showing a film for analysis as a document, the teacher should
identify it as specifically as possiblea newsreel, a historical documen-
tary, a feature filmand provide background information so students
can view the film with some points of reference. Finally, with all this
preparation, the teacher must be ready to learn with the students too.
Second, the teacher should use film and video only when it works well
as film or video. Some educational films, like televised lectures canned
for replay, picture a teacher standing by a blackboard or sitting in an
easy chair. These films may be convenient for the classroom teacher and
profitable for the producers, but they are definitely not film experiences
for the students, and they should, as a rule, be avoided. If the major
value of any film is only in its didactic sound track, the teacher should
seek some alternate way to present the material. Full use should be
made of audiotapes, sound filmstrips, still photographs, and slides when
these can make the point as well as film. These forms are usually less
expensive, and using and understanding them will help the student to
appreciate the real value and meaning of moving images when they are
brought into the classroom.
Finally, the teacher should always integrate the film into the text
material of the course and use it as a teaching tool, never as a lesson
in itself. A film should not be treated as entertainment or as a reward
for a good class. The teacher must always be certain that the students
think about the film and consider it a formal and important part of
the course. There should be some follow-up to a film experience. If
teaching with film involves any threat to good education, that danger is
represented by the teacher who tries to let the film do the teaching. Film
and television in the classroom should serve to bring the teacher and the
students closer together in a mutual learning experience; it should not
place an impersonal screen between them.
If such lessons ase reinforced with other films, more discussions, read-
ings, and other class materials, the students will become more aware of
the psychological and emotional elements of the film experience and more

53
 appreciative of the creative potential of the filmmaker's art. Particularly,
they will become more critical viewers when they are next faced with a
commercial for a political candidate, a television news story on a con-
troversial subject, or a docudrama purporting to tell the complete truth
about some historical issue. In addition, the experience of reaching judg-
ments independent of the preordained objectives of the teacher's lesson
plan, supplemented with the information gained from the observations
of their fellow students in class discussions, cannot alp but improve the
classroom situation for more traditional units of study. Most important,
the students will come to understand some of the dynamics of visual
communications and have an opportunity to practice the skills of visual
literacy so essential to historical reasoning in the electronic age.

54
6u
 VISUAL LANGUAGE
An Introduction for Historians and History Teachers

*sithen using film or television in a history class, teachers often mistak-

enly assume that students who have grown up with television, sometimes
becoming familiar with the kids on Sesame Street before they know the
on who live next door, are particularly sensitive to visual communica-
tions. They are not. Recognizing that most students spend the literal
equivalent of years before the television screen, teachers should not con-
fuse familiarity with sensitivity or critical understanding.
Another false assumption is that people do not have to be taught
to look at pictures, that unlike learning to read, understanding what is
seen is a function that comes naturally. On the contrary, the kind of
visual skill that people develop more or less automatically over years
of familiarity with a medium such as television is an ability to identify
its conventions and decode its surface messages. Viewers can (and do)
teach themselves to "get the message" that they are intended to get.
What they must be taught is how to comprehend more deeply. This
skill can provide viewers with the capacity to appreciate more fully the
creative artistry of film and television and, on a more important level,
teach them to identify bias and avoid erroneous conclusions.
Cliches such as "the camera can't lie" and "a picture is worth a
thousand words" are often used to defend the supposed infallibility of
visual evidence. Students beginning to study visual language will im-
mediately see the foolishness of such statements. For almost a century
filmmakers have been convincing audiences to accept artifice as reality,
at least for the time spent in the theater before the screen. Similarly, a
picture may be worth tens of thousands of different words to different
people because, in comparison with a verbal expression, a picture is so
much more open to individual interpretation. As with any verbal set
of signs or symbols, the language and idiom of the moving image can
be understood on numerous levels. Graduate students in filmmaking or
television production must be fluent in that language if they are to learn
to be creative in it. Critical viewers may require a different level of vi-
sual literacy, but it is no less important that such learning be addressed
directly in the history classroom.
This introduction to visual language is meant to serve as a general
and selective guide for history teachers new to the critical use of moving-
image media in the classroom. It is keyed to two comprehensive vol-
umes on the subject, which are recommended fot further study: James
Monaco's How To Read a Film, rev. ed. (New York, 1981) and David
Bordwell and Kristin Thompson's Film Art: An Introduction, 2d ed.
(New York, 1986). Although these books may provide more information

55
pi
 than the average history teacher needs to know, each is a valuable re-
source to have on hand to answer questions that may arise while "read-
ing" visual documents in the classroom. In combination with further
reading, the following summary should assist teachers in training their
students for visual literacy, so that the use of audiovisual materials in the
history classroom will take on new importance. In addition to offering
interesting information and motivating further study of historical ques-
tions, informed moving-image lessons will help develop in students a new
set of skills necessary for full participation in today's visual civilization.

The Historical Development of the Moving Image

One convenient way for the history teacher to encourage students to
think about the differences between verbal and visual communications is
to trace the events leading to the invention of moving-image technology.
In this context, there were thr se historical preconditions that had to be
met before the Lumiere brothe.s could set up their first public exhibition
of moving pictures.
First, there had to be a recognition of the physiological respse that
makes movies "work" for people. It is worth making the point with
students that moving pictures really do not move. What appears on
the screen is a succession of still images, a phenomenon that was ap-
plied in parlor toys such ap the zoetrope as early as the 1830s (see the
illustration in Monaco, 55; Bordwell and Thompson, 3). The traditional
explanationthe persistence of visionholds that the retina of the hu-
man eye retains an image for a fraction of a second before it is replaced
by another image. Current authorities prefer other explanations based
in perceptual psychology (see Bordwell and Thompson, 16-17), but all
agree that human perception of the moving-image media is a trick that
the eyes play on the mind. Noting this in class will help students to
realize the vast potential for psychological influence and interpretation
of the moving images they see.
The second precondition for the invention of the movies was the de-
velopment of photography. The zoetrope device used stick figures or
drawn images, because in 1834, when the zoetrope was patented, the
invention of photography was still five years in the future. Teachers
should present the historical evolution of photography, from the camera
obscura of Leonardo da Vinci's time to the early photographic processes
of the 1840s and 1850s, which for the first time allowed the permanent
recording and reproduction of an image. Subsequently, pnotographic
technology had to be improved and exposure speed increased to allow
photographing of eighteen to twenty-four frames per second, the mini-
mum necessary for the succession of images to convey the appearance
of motion. By the mid-1880s exposure speeds had shortened to the
point where John Muybridge could experiment with flanks of cameras

!.36 P0
that could stop the action of a galloping horse, in an effort to establish
whether all four hooves left the ground at the same time.
The third precondition for movies, at least silent movies, was the in-
vention of the moving-picture camera, which allowed a series of pictures
each second to be exposed through the same lens, and the moving-picture
projector. By the mid-1880s George Eastman had developed and mar-
keted a flexible film to replace the glass plates in use by photographers.
In 1889 Thomas Fdison and his colleagues developed the first practical
moving-picture camera, which could manipulate the flexible film so that
it could be brought to a complete stop before the aperture, exposed, and
moved on again at least eighteen times per second. For the next decade
Edison devoted considerable money and effort to the marketing of the
kinetoscope, a peephole viewing device that was set up in public viewing
parlors (see Monaco, 58-59).
The development of equipment to project a moving image was left
to two Frenchmen. The challenge to project eighteen :o twenty-four
discrete images successively within one second, including a fraction of
a second of black screen between each image (without the screen going
black between each frame, viewers would see a blur instead of the illusion
of smooth, even motion), was met by the Lumiere brothers, who first
publicly presented projected moving pictures in Paris in 1895.
Although new technological developments in recorded sound, color
photography, and the entirely new medium of television would alter the
way people looked at film, the basic elements of the moving-image media
were in place by 1895.

Functional Components of Moving-Image Media

The basic element of a film is the shot. Although it might vary in
du. -ition from a fraction of a second to several minutes, a shot is defined
as a single, unedited, continuously exposed piece of film. One or more
shots that detail a single action at a single location make up a scene. One
or more scenes that constitute a natural unit of narration are referred
to as a sequence. Thus, there might be a sequence that begins with
a scene on a railroad track where a man catches his foot. That scene
might be several shots long, as the camera offers an establishing shot
of the location, a medium shot of the man walking, and a close-up of
his foot as it slips into a crevice next to the track, followed by another
close-up of the look of fright on his face as he hears the whistle of a train
approaching from around the bend. At this point, the film might cut to
another scene inside the locomotive, where the engineer casually lights
his pipe and checks his gauges. Subsequent scenes would be made up of
other combinations of shots and strung together on a unifying theme to
complete the sequence.
Many film scholars would say that it is too limiting to the film medium

57
f;3
 to suggest the following comparison, but beginning students may find it
helpful to compare the parts of a film to the parts of a book:
shot = sentence
scene = paragraph
sequence = chapter
film = book
In the same way that a sentence, rather than a word, is the basic con-
stituent element of verbal language (unless it is a one-word sentence ex-
pressing a complete idea). so the shot, rather than the individual frame,
is the basic unit of film. The various elements within a shot and the
editing devices through which shots, scenes, and sequences are linked
together are what give the moving-image media their creative capacity
to mold time and space for dramatic effect. The two essential visual
components of moving-image communication are therefore the elements
of the individual shot and the editing devices through which shots are
given meaning in relation to one another. The meaning of individual
shots and edited scenes and sequences is also influenced by the sound
track, and sou,;(1 therefore contributes as much information as the im-
ages it accompanies.

Elements of a shot. When authors write sentences, they have

certain creative tools at their command. They can choose from a dictio-
nary full of words, combine words in various ways, and use punctuation
to accent their meaning. They can organize phrases within sentences to
modify one another, limiting or accentuating ideas or adding nuances of
meaning. Filmmakers have at least as much creative latitude.
The elements of a motion-picture shot are of two general types. First,
there is mise-en-scene, the things literally put in the shot to create its
narrative content. Mise-en-scene includes aspects of staging, creative
design, and dramatic direction that would be present whether a produc-
tion were being prepared for the stage yr for the movie screcn. Elements
of mise-en-scene in a historic dramatization, for example, would include
the setting (whether a scene was shot on a studio set or on location),
the props and costumes that identify the scene with the appropriate his-
torical period, the casting of characters, and the elements of dramatic
expression that actors bring to their parts.
It is possible for mise-en-scene to be handled with particular sensitiv-
ity in a historical film, especially when filmmakers rely on the expertise
of professional historians as consultants, such as Natalie Zemon Davis
in the production of The Return of Marian Guerre. In the video com-
pilation Davis comments on the care that went into documentation of
mise-en-scene, including the color of the wedding dress, the words of the
marriage vows, and the nature of the dowry offerings, though some de-
tails were still overlooked. Mise-en-scene can also contribute to historical

58
interpretation. The scene in which a notary draws up the marriage con-
tract while the newlywed couple sits quietly by, includes many ordinary
daily activities (tending the fire, making the bread, plucking a chicken),
which reinforce the point that matters of marriage and the extended
fam. y were central concerns in the everyday life of the time. On the
other hand, it was not historically correct to include a large gathering of
townspeople in the back of the room in the final court scenes :....f the film,
but the filminv.V.Ins wanted to show reactions to the testimony being
given and to emphas:Te how the issue of Martin Guerre's identity had
come to concern the en ;ire community. The Return of Martin Guerre
was given a heightened a'ira of authenticity through recently developed
light-sensitive camera lenses and film stock, which allowed photograph-
ing of the interior of sixteenth-century houses with light levels roughly
as they must have been, thereby avoiding the use of obtrusive artificial
lighting.
More commonly, a film is considered historically accurate in terms of
mise-en-scene as long as there are no glaring incongruities or
anachronismsno eyeglasses on Julius Caesar or jet trails in a cloudless
eighteenth-century sky. Obviously, the theatrical filmmaker can have
more influence over mise-en-scene than can the documentarist, who does
not costume the people being interviewed or direct them in delivering
their lines for dramatic effect. When coproducers Suzanne Bauman and
Rita Heller took their cameras to a reunion of participants in the Bryn
Mawr summer program for women, interviewees were given no scripted
lines to read. Like all other filmmakers, however, Bauman and Heller
retained ultimate control, deciding whether to include any or all of an
interview in the completed film and arranging the interview segments in
an order (intercut with stills and archival footage) that supported the
message that Women of Summer was intended to convey (see the video
compilation).
The photographic elements of a shot make up the second general cat-
egory, and they are as important in working with documentaries as they
are with theatrical films. Because images are observed "naturally," and
because so many people have had the experience of taking their own
casual snapshot pictures of family and friends, viewers may assume that
the photographic images presented in moving-image media simply hap-
pened that way. Most filmmakers strive for the look of naturalness, but
the skillful filmmaker maintains intimate control over all visual elements,
continually working to assure that each contributes to conveying both
the information and the feeling that is to be projected. Just as no sen-
tence in a serious work of literature can be thought of as an unplanned
jumble of words, no shot in a creditable film simply "happen:* before
the camera.
Some of the major creative elements that the filmmaker or televi-
sion producer uses to make each shot communicate specific ideas and

59

P3
 emotions include duration, lighting, color, field size, composition, cam-
era angle, camera movement, focus, lens characteristics, film stock, and
projection speed. (With the exception of duration, camera movement,
and projection speed, each of these elements relates as well to the still
photograph.)

Duration. The length in time that a shot is on the screen varies

from a fraction of a second to several minutes and can influence
a shot's meaning significantly. Depending on the complexity of
the shot, a certain time will be necessary for the viewer to absorb
the information. Generally, the eye needs more time to read a
wide-angle establishing shot than it does a close-up. The viewer's
attention may be directed from one part of the image to another
by changing compositional elements and camera movements. An
image that stays on the screen longer than is necessary for its in-
formation to be conveyed invites the viewer to ponder its meaning
more deeply, to good or bad effect. (See Bordwell and Thompson,
187-91, 205-207.)

Lighting. The direction and intensity of lighting and the use of

shadow can have an overpowering impact on the meaning of an im-
age. Dark shadows can convey an air of mystery. By showing huge
combines harvesting at night (Figure E) as part of the "Twenties
Boom" sequence of The Plow, Pare Lorentz was able to indicate
a passion for productivity. By showing them lit starkly from be-
hind, he was able to add a note of ominous foreboding (further
accented by the music). Facial features can be altered dramati-
cally by lighting, as many an aging actor can attest. (See Monaco,
158-59, 166-69; Bordwell and Thompson, 126-31.) Bordwell and
Thompson include lighting as an element of mise-en-scene, and,
;ndeed, it is one of the elements of stage and set design most im-
portant in both live theater and theatrical film, but it should be
recognized as a photographic element as well.
Color. Both hue and intensity of color are important for their
overall emotional influence and for specific color symbolism. Light-
ing, film stock, and lens filters offer varied creative possibilites
(See Monaco, 96-98, 156-57; Bordwell and Thompson, 130-31, 136-
37, 152-53, 192 -93.)

Field Size. The distance of the action from the camera affects
viewers' relationship with what they see. The field size may result
in a long shot, a medium shot, a close-up, or a limitless variety
of shot distances in between these general parameters. Typically,
a long shot, especially when used as :n 1 establishing shot, con-
veys context by establishing the orientation between setting and

60
CC
characters, while a close-up (of a facial expression, for example)
has more potential for dramatic interpretation. The image of an
overflowing grain hopper (Figure F) in The Plow accentuates the
volume of production because the sides of the bin are not shown.
(See Monaco, 161; Bordwell and Thompson, 169-74.)
Composition. The way a shot is composed affects the balance
of the image and guides the viewer's eye to the most important
elements. Images may be composed sparely or loaded with de-
tail. They may be closed (strictly limited to the boundaries of
the frame) or open (implicitly or explicitly referring to charac-
ters and spaces outside the camera's view). There are also rec-
ognized conventions of composition, such as the establishing shot
and the reverse-angle shot, and important symbolic codes regard-
ing gesture and body language. (See Monaco, 140-60; Bordwell
and Thompson, 136-37, 162-87.)
Camera Angle. High angle, low angle, dutch angle, and the
many angle variations in between influence attitude toward the
action and the subjects. If a woman is shot from a low angle, she
seems dominant and powerful. The opposite is usually true of high-
angle shots, which put the viewer on a higher or superior plane.
A tilted, or dutch, angle might suggest disorientation of either the
subject, the viewer, or both. The extreme low-angle shot near
the opening of The Plow, which highlights individual blades of
grass against the sky (Figure G), can be read as emphasizing their
vulnerability. Later in the film, the low-angle shot of a farm buried
in wind-blown dust (Figure H) makes the situation appear much
worse than would a shot photographed from an elevated platform.
(See Monaco, 164, 172; Bordwell and Thompson, 168ff )
Camera Movement. Each movement of the camera serves
to extend and change the frame and the composition in ways that
can advance the narrative thread of a film or offer interpretive
comments. The camera can pan, track, dolly, tilt, or crane, as well
as vary in speed of movement. (See Monaco, 77-80; Bordwell and
Thompson, 174-87.)
Focus. There are many ways focus can be used within a shot.
Focus can direct viewers' attention within the frame, and it can
be altered within the context of the shot to redirect that attention
elsewhere. Sharp focus may convey a realistic, sometimes harsh
impression; soft focus may convey a dreamy, romantic feeling. (See
Monaco, 162-64; Bordwell and Thompson, 156-59.)
Lens Characteristics. Various lensestelephoto and wide-angle
are the most commonand the characteristics specific to them can

61
R7
 Figure E

Figure F
CS
A

.==.11INIM=1115

c
 alter the scope and relative size of the image photographed. Lenses
also affect the speed of action to and from the camera. A telephoto
lens slows the action and a wide-angle lens speeds it up. Depth of
field wiL also affect the image; more depth is in focus in a wide-
angle shot and less in a telephoto. A zoom lens allows shifting
from one set of characteristics to another within the same shot,
but its effects should not be confused with camera movements like
dollying in or out from the scene. (See Monaco, 60-64; Bordwell
and Thompson, 156-61.)

Film Stock. Qualities of the film stock play an important role

in the qualities of the image produced. Characteristics of film
emulsion, speed of exposure, and differences in the processing of
film in the laboratory contribute to such visual qualities as grain-
iness and color quality. The differences are comparable to the
effects achieved by a portrait photographer, who uses slow film,
as opposed to a newspaper photographer, who characteristically
works with very fast film to increase contrast and stop action.
r,See Monaco, 81-82, 159; Bordwell and Thompson, 151-54.)
Projection Speed. While most film is recorded and projected
at the same speed, action can be artificially slowed or accelerated
by altering either the speed of the camera or the projector. This
can also be accomplished in the laboratory by repeating individual
frames in such a way as to extend and slow action. (See Bordwell
and Thompson, 155-56.)

The experience of watching any moving-image presentation on film

or video inevitably involves the viewer in decoding these various ele-
ments. To a large extent, that decoding goes on unconsciously, as view-
ers respond to the cues they have been informally taught to respond
to through years of movie and teleiision watching. Viewers usually see
what filmmakers intend them to see, and they "get the message" they
are supposed to get.
The idea of visual literacy, especially when understood in the con-
text of history and social studies, involves being able to see beyond (or
through) what the filmmakers intended, to become aware of the ways cre-
ative elements may have been used by the filmmaker to produce the de-
sired impression on the audience and then reasonably evaluate whether
that point of view is sr.,ported by facts and evidence. In the same way
that people learn to critically identify words or phrases that are loaded
or colored with bias and may influence their overall perception of an
article or a book, visually literate people should also be conscious of
the ways in which individual images and combinations of images can be
loaded or colored.

62
 Editing: Joining image to image. In addition to understand-
ing the elements of the individual shot, the visually literate person must
have an appreciation of the importance of editing for creative communi-
cation in the moving-image media. On a simple level, editing devices can
be thought of as punctuation marks, which may give hints, though not
always reliable indications, of the relationship that is intended. There
are a limited number of ways that shots or sequences can be joined
together:

Fade. The introduction (fade in) or removal (fade out) of the

image Into a blank screen usually indicates either the beginning
or end of some dramatic action, or some passage of time.
Dissolve. The gradual overlapping of images in which one comes
to replace another usually suggests a relationship between the two
shots. Like a fade, a dissolve can happen quickly or be drawn out
over several seconds.
Wipe. The mechanical moving of one image of the screen and the
replacing of it with another is called a wipe. Examples of wipes
include directional replacement of images (such as from right to
left), replacement from the center of the screen with an iris, or box
replacement from a corner of the screen, which expands until the
screen is completely filled with the new image. The wipe is an old-
fashioned device more common in silent film than in recent cinema,
but it is used today in television, especially for special effects in
sports programming. It is generally used to break continuity ,uid
mark the beginning of or radical shift to some new action.
Cut. The instantaneous replacing of one image with another is at
once the most common editing device and the une most open to
interpretation. The cut can, for example, be used in a shot/reverse
shot sequence to reinforce the continuity of action happening at the
same time and place; in a cross-cutting situation (relating images
of a maiden in distress, for example, with those of the hero rushing
to her rescue), in which action may be happening at the same time
but in different places; or, at 0 extreme, in a jump cut that leaps
across continents of space or .uries of time.

Since history is to a very considerable extent concerned with matters

of place and time, editing is of special significance, for it is in joining
images one i,o another that moving-image media's ability to creatively
represent (or misrepresent) space and time is most evident. Within the
individual shot, for example, there are ways that time can seemingly be
expanded or compressed: through under- or overcranking of the camera,
through use of lenses that appear to slow or speed action to or from

63
 the camera, through laboratory processes such as the use of the optical
printer. There are also ways place can seemingly be altered, such as
through camera movement or changes in focus, but none of these has
the potential for altering place and time that the editing together of
images has.
In the 1920s the Russian filmmaker and theorist Lev Kuhlesov ex-
perimented with the ways audiences understood images presented one
after another, without the help of an establishing shot to give viewers
their bearings. When he reproduced the same image of a face (that of
a famous Russian actor) several times, and presented it in conjunction
with an image of a bowl of soup, a baby, and a dead woman laid out in a
coffin, viewers praised the subtlety of the actor in expressing hunger in
relation to the soup, love in relation to the baby, and grief in relation to
the corpse. Though the images of the actor's face were exactly the same,
people saw what they expected to see. In the absence of evidence to the
contrary, such as establishing shots that might have indicated that ...e
images were not related to one another, viewers assumed that the shots
paired on the screer took place at the same place and time aria, 0..ng
one step further, presumed that the images were related to one another
causally. (See Monaco, 323; Bordwell and Thompson, 160-61.)
The Kuhlescv effect is usually thought of in relation to individual
pairs of images, but the impetus of an audience to associate shots to one
another, and to see what they are led to believe they are seeing, goes
much farther. Almost all historical compilation films (those compiled
from various pieces of archival footage on some historical issue or event)
are forced to rely on some amount of stock footage to fill in taps in the
extant actuality materials. A shot of planes flying overhead may cut to
an anti-aircraft gun shooting into the sky, and then to a plane in flames
hurtling toward the earth. The likelihood that a camera operator was
in the perfect position to rec -rd these three shots of the shooting down
of an individual plane is slim. It is much more likely that the sequence
was constructed from three separate shots taken at different locations at
different times, and edited together to provide the desired effect in the
mind of the viewer. This does not necessarily destroy the information
content of the film. Planes may actually have been shot down. But
the editing of the scene should provide a warning that the truthful r -ss
of the message of a film may have relatively little connection with the
specific images that appear on the screen.
What members of an audience thought they saw, or were tricked
into thinking they saw, may be of special interest historically. Nicholas
Pronay of the University of Leeds studied British newsreels of the early
days of World War II, which were carefully constructed (with the en-
couragement of the British government) to reassure the English people
as they suffered through the dark days of the blitz. One newsreel story
that especially interested Pronay extolled the abilities of British anti-

64
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aircraft units and their weapons. The newsreel included a long shot of a
gun firing at a range far beyond that which British weapons could reach.
By studying the image closely, Pronay established what audiences of the
time could not have noticed from the screen: the film was actually of
a German gun. Pronay's work is instructive not only for the ways he
demonstrates how footage was falsified in newsreel film, but also for the
propagandistic effect it reveals. In this case, it is more important for the
historian to understand what people thought they saw than what they
actually did see.
Perhaps the ultimate example of such falsification in a historical film
involves "Victory at Sea" (1952), one of the first great television com-
pilation series. When interviewed by historian Peter C. Rollins, series
producer Isaac Klienerman claimed to be most proud of the program on
the Battle of Leyte Gulf, still used in the 1970s for strategic study at the
Naval War College. Making this film presented a particular challenge,
because there were no cameras at Leyte Gulf. The producers made
up the film completely of stock footage and film shot of other battles.
Such wholesale falsification certainly raises questions about the reliabil-
ity of compilation films, but the historical information and interpretation
presented in a film depends on more than the veracity of the archival
footage. There may indeed be very valuable historical observations in
the Battle of Leyte Gulf program that have nothing to do with where
the pictures of the ships came from This film is more important as it
illustrates the importance of critical viewing. Viewers must be able to
comprehend and evaluate the messages of a presentation based on real
evidence. They should not allow themselves to simply be swept along by
a film on the false premise that, though the film, they are on the scene
themselves, reliving the experience of the time, and therefore capable of
making their own judgments about it.
In contrast to the production methods employed in the ' ttle of Leyte
Gulf program, most makers of historical compilation films today, espe-
cially those trained as historical s_holars who have in addition become
filmmakers, make it a cardinal rule to use only footage that can be ver-
ified as being from the same time and place (or at least from the same
general period) as the subject they are working on. This does not mean
that most errors in historical films are due to the falsification of footage.
On the contrary, most of the potential for problems, like most of the
potential for success, lies in the ways the filmmakers choose the footage,
and how that footage is edited into a final product. Viewers must be
aware that even guarant e: that a film was made solely from archival
footage of the time and place a question in no way assures that the film
presents a complete or truthfu: account.
The newsreel archives in which producers of historical compilation
films conduct much of their research are rich with examples of how
footage was selected and edited for the presentation of news stories. The

65

73
 outtakes are sometimes more valuable to historians than the footage the
newsreel companies put on the screen. The video compilation includes
several examples of the ways newsreel film was selected and edited for
release, including footage of President Franklin D. Roosevelt not used
in the newsreel because it showed him in a position that made obvious
his physical infirmity, and a story on the Berlin airlift that demonstrates
the extent to which events were often staged for the newsreel cameras.
Like newsreels, television news offers important nightly examples of
the creative use of editing in the presentation of actuality footage. Time
constraints and the capsulized nature of most television news stories
make it likely that fuller coverage can almost always be found in the
printed media, but the concept of the viewer as an eyewitness is a pow-
erful one. It suggests that viewers relate to news on television at least in
part with the rationalization that they are better able to see and evaluate
a situation for themselves than they might be when reading a newspa-
per story. To counteract this assumption, students should be helped to
understand how editing can influence viewers subconsciously. On one
level, the ordering of stories in a broadcast, and their organization ir.
relation to commercials, suggests their relative importance. On another
level, as it should be clear to visually literate viewers, the editing of each
story, from thirty seconds to four minutes of video that might include
several interviews, voice-over comments on otherwise silent footage, and
on-camera commentary by the anchor person, is crucial to the message
the story conveys. On the most basic level, critical viewers must learn
about the construction of the typical television interview.
A basic TV news crew includes a reporter, a camera operator, and a
sound person. When the crew goes on location to interview someone,
their first concern is to photograph the person speaking words that they
can later use in an edited story. Typically, they will set up the camera
for an establishing shot of the interviewee and the reporter, and then
concentrate the camera on recording the person's responses to the re-
porter's questions. After they have the material they needoften after
the interviewee has left the scenethey will set up the camera again
in reverse angle to photograph the reporter, who repeats the questions
once more. Since it is rare for more than one camera to be sent out with
a news crew, this process is necessary to give the editor raw material
to work with when constructing the final piece for broadcast. Presum-
ably, the reporter repeats the questions in exactly the same words, using
exactly the same inflection as the first time, but it is easy to imagine
how, having already heard what the subject is going to say, there might
be some changes. At this point, the reporter may also do a few silent
reaction shots, trying to appear as though listening to the interviewee's
response, and a stand-up intToduction to the story with some identifiable
landmark in the background.
When the news crew returns to the station with the raw footage,

66
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the work is only half finished. The various pieces photographed in the
field then have to be arranged in such a way that they present the
story as clearly and concisely as possible, in accordance with the time
constraints - the broadcast. Viewers frequently assume that the various
elements of a completed story took place in the order in which they were
presented, not stopping to think that the editor of a televised news story
frequently writes the introduction last. Most viewers are also unaware
that the actual order of interview comments or other recorded elements
may have been rearranged in a number of different ways.
One selection in the video compilation illustrates how such inter-
views are created, showing how comments from an extended conver-
sation, recorded with a single camera, can be reduced, rearranged, and
reoriented through editing with cutaways. The interview begins with a
two-shot (a sl of showing two persons, in this case an establishing shot),
in which the person being interviewed is photographed from behind the
shoulder of the interviewer. In the same shot, the lens zooms in so that
the interviewee is speaking directly into the camera. The second shot
is a cutaway, or reaction shot, of the interviewer listening attentively to
the interviewee, who is still heard speaking on the sound track. In the
third shot, the camera is shifted back to the interviewee. In the first
and third shots, the sound is synchronized with the image, but in the
second, where the sound synch is lost, it becomes possible to delete or
rearrange words, sentences, or entire paragraphs of what the interviewee
is saying. If there is even an approximate match in the tone and cadence
of the voice and the logic of what is being said, viewers (and listeners)
would not be likely to notice the audio cuts.
There might be several editing shifts even in a one- or two-minute in-
terview. In a more lengthy exchange, additional cutaways might be used
for visual variety. One of the most interesting sequences in Edward R.
Murrow's "See It Now: Report on Senator McCarthy" shows McCarthy
speaking at a Washington's Birthday celebration in Philadelphia in 1954.
Viewers questioned after watching this sequence (included in the video
compilation) think that they have just watched two-and-one-half min-
utes of McCarthy making a speech; they presume that what they have
seen on the screen took place just as they saw it, in real time. A closer
viewing reveals that the sequence was made up of nine shots edited to-
gether to allow a compression of McCarthy's forty-minute speech into a
tight and coherent statement for the program. The sequence contains
three cutaways, one to the upper part of the mural in front of which Mc-
Carthy spoke and two to the audience. Each provided an opportunity
for the editors to trim McCarthy's comments down to what they could
use. Without the outtakes from the editing session or a transcript of
McCarthy's entire speech, viewers cannot know how much was deleted.
They can be quite sure, however, that the attentive audience members
shown in the cutaways were not being attentive to McCarthy saying

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'7 5
 what is heard on the second track. CBS had only one camera present
at the event, and it would not have been focused anywhere but on the
platform while the senator was speaking. The audience shots would have
been photographed either before or after McCarthy spoke so that the
editors would have material to vary the news report.
The cutaway is an essential tool for television news and documentary
producers, who must almost always cut down a longer interview to fit a
short time slot. The editors can delete much from a person's responses,
even combining the answers to several questions into one, by simply
making the audio cuts coincide with a visual cutaway. Another option
is to delete material while cutting to a shot of the reporter asking (actu-
ally repeating) a different question. The viewers unsuspectingly assume
that the interview is taking place in real time and that the sequence
of questions and answers is a seamless record of what happened. In
any television interview, but especially in footage that includes repeated
cuts back and forth from the reporter to the subject, viewers should be
aware that every reaction shot and every cut to the interviewer with a
new question provides an occasion for a reduction or rearrangement of
the audio.
It should be stressed that rather than mea_ to misrepresent what
is said, TV news editors usually intend only to avoid distracting visual
choppiness in the finished product. Although the subjects of TV in-
terviews may come across better in edited form, sometimes they react
negatively to being edited. Perhaps the most famous controversy over
cutaways involved CBS News and its 1970 documentary "The Selling of
the Pentagon." Claiming that cutaways were used not only to condense,
but also to rearrange and garble responses made by Pentagon spokes-
men, the government forced the issue until hearings were held before a
congressional committee on the practice of television news editing.
To teach students about such basic processes in the production of
television news is not to call for different standards in TV news editing.
The problem lies less with the producers and editors (people performing
their craft the best way ihey know) than with viewers who may prefer to
watch TV news because it seems like se much less work than reading the
newspaper. Students must be brought to understand that critical view-
ing of a moving image, especially an important one such as a news story
on a significant public issue, should demand at least as much attention
as the careful reading of a printed page.
The main concern of the theatrical or documentary filmmaker in mak-
ing decisions about editing is similar to the concern of the TV news ed-
itor. The filmmaker's goal is to create film sequences h. which viewers
are encouraged to concentrate on the point being made without being
unnecessarily distracted by confusing shifts in subject, camera location,
camera angle, or composition. Continuity editing is the procedure of
joining together pieces of film in ways that prevent such disorientation.

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Camera angle, for example, is important in retaining continuity. If a
woman is seen leaving a room in one direction, it is important that the
shot showing her entering the adjoining room be at an angle that does
not disorient the viewer. An audience would certainly find it hard to
follow a chase scene in which the train robbers were portrayed riding
from the left to the right side of the screen intercut with a posse trailing
them from right to left. There are various ways shots can be joined
together to emphasize a sense of continuity, such as the seamless contin-
uation of some motion or sound element from one shot to the next, or
the composition of the second shot so that the focal point of interest is
in the same location on the screen that it was in the preceding shot.
Over the years, a series of editing conventions developed that influ-
enced the ways in which viewers interpreted what was going on in the
narrative of a film story. The editing conventions of the classical Hol-
lywood cinema of the thirties and forties, for example, dictated that a
scene between two characters begin with an establishing shot and then
progress through a series of shot/reverse shots showing close-ups of each
character speaking to the other. The selection in the video compilation
that includes two alternate editing patterns for the climactic sequence
from The Life of an Amencan Fireman '1902) demonstrates how audi-
ences at the turn of the century had different expectatic 6 when they
tried to make sense of a filmed story. Peihaps because of their experi-
ence with live theater, the audiences for early motion pictures were more
comfortable with editing patterns that preserved the continuity of space,
preferring to see all the action from one point of view at a time, even
if that action had to be repeated from the start to show them another
point of view. In contrast, classical Hollywood cinema style was based
on a continuity of time in which editing shifted freely from one point of
view to another, but never showed the same event twice. The version
of The Life of an American Fireman that was subsequently re-edited
according to the more modern style illustrates the power of editing in
leading viewers through a narrative. Careful viewing of the original ver-
sion reveals a number of incongruities (people entering the room from
the wrong side and windows broken in rather than out, for example),
which are difficult to recognize when the logic of the more modern edit-
ing style leads the viewer through the scene. Editing conventions do
change over time, and they are not always used in the expected ways.
Indeed, art may e said to disappear when, through rigorous adherence,
convention becomes cliche. (For more on continuity editing and the
classical Hollywood cinema, see Bordwell anthThompson, 211-20.)
There are alternatives to continuity editing. Some of the highlights
of film history are centered around the creative use of editing to break
continuity and interpret reality in artistic ways. An important example
is Sergei Eisenstein's use of editing to create a collision of images to
visually convey what he saw as the essence of the class struggle, a point

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he thought would have been much more difficult to convey in a seamless
narrative continuity. Other examples include the juxtaposition of indi-
vidual images in an otherwise traditionally edited film. In Hearts and
Minds (1974), a documentary tour de force against American involve-
ment in Vietnam, Peter Davis sacrifices continuity for dramatic contrast
when he cuts directly from an interview with General William West-
moreland, who is explaining that Oriental people have little respect for
life, to a Vietnamese woman weeping openly over the grave of a loved
one killed in battle.
Editing is also used to integrate dramatic symbolism into a scene.
In the opening shot of Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times (1936), a mid-
shot of sheep (including one black sheep) being herded, presumably to
the slaughter house, cuts directly to a shot of workers pouring out of a
subway exit on their way to work. The rest of the film deals with the
ways in which industrial civilization threatens to dehumanize the lives
of ordinary people, providing Chaplin's tramp character (a black sheep)
with numerous dramat, c situations, both humorous and pathetic.

Sound and image. A motion picture or television program en-

gages the ears as well as the eyes. Edison experimented with movies
with synchronized sound as early as 1912, and until sound technology
was fully implemented in the late 1920s, films were almost always shown
with some musical accompaniment (ranging from a concert orchestra
to a phonograph record) and even with live sound effects. Once sound
technology was in place in theaters, silent films all but disappeared.
Tony Schwartz, the producer of hundreds of successful radio and tele-
vision commercials, argues that the sound element of a film is almost
always more important than the visual. He encourages exercises in which
b.udents watch films without the sound and try to work out the mean-
ing before watching them again with the sound. Chris Marker's Letters
From Siberia (1957) invites viewers to think about the influence of sound
by showing the same visual footage three separate times with three dif-
ferent, widely contrasting sound tracks. (See Bordwell and Thompson,
232-33.)
Sound can be diegetic (emanating from a character or object that is
part of the story space of the film) or nondiegetic; it can come from
on or off screen; it can be internal (relating only to what is going on
in the mind of one character) or external; it can be synchronized of
asynchronous; and it can extend from shot to shot as a bridge between
scenes. The three general types of sound are: the spoken word (dialogue
or narration), music, and sound effects. (See Monaco, 178-83; Bordwell
and Thompson, 232-57.) The selection in the video compilation from
Women of Summer provides an especially good opportunity to study all
of these various uses of sound.
Sound can contribute significantly to the illusion of realism created

70 7;
in a film. It not only reinforces the believability of what is seen on the
screen, but allows the filmmakers to use the area beyond the frame more
creatively, for example, with the sound of an approaching locomotive
that is heard but not seen. Synchronized sound gives the greatest rein-
forcement to realism, especially when the sound of voices is lip-synched
to the faces doing the speaking. People look natural when speaking on
film, but such synchronized sound is v,ry difficult to attain. When a
film is projected, the light cell on the projector that picks up the opti-
cal sound track comes later in the film path than the lens that projects
the image; therefore, the recorded sound on the film must be placed
twenty-six frames before the image it accompanies. Although synchro-
nized sound may seem natural to the audience, the filmmakers had to
manipulate the materials very unnaturally in order to m.-ke it sound
that way. (In videotape, the same recording and playback heads handle
the audio and video tracks, making the editing of synchronized video
considerably more simple.)
When live sound is recorded for film, usually on a tape recorder cabled
to the camera, it is crucial that the same speed in the Image and the
sound track be maintained. Depending on the movement taking place in
the frame, the image can be accelerated by as much as 20 percent before
the viewers will think the movement unnatural, but the slightest change
in the pace of the sound track will alter the pitch of a person's voice
and make sound effects seem unreal Part of the creative flexibility
enjoyed by the silent filmmaker was the ability to vary the speed of
the camera or the projector for dramatic or humorous effect. Students
should be informed, however, that when they see a silent film today
in which people seem to be moving about and talking at a faster than
normal speed, it is not because the figures were hyperactive or because
the filmmakers necessarily intended a Keystone Kops effect. On the
contrary, the students are probably watching the film projected at one-
and-one-half times the speed that was originally intended In the early
days of moving pictures, film was ordinarily shot and projected at sixteen
frames per second. Today, unless step-printed to compensate for the
change, early films are often projected at the modern standard of twenty-
four frames per second, which results in the unnatural (and unintended)
accelerated movement.
Ironically, there are occasions when sound that did happen naturally
would seem unreal and confining in a film. For example, in a war movie
in which shells are fired at pknes in the distance, the camera cuts quickly
from image to image, conveying the excitement of the moment with the
pace of the editing. In reality, the sound of the explosion taking place at
an altitude of one thousand feet, a half-mile from the camera, would be
heard several seconds after the flash was seen. The filmmakers, however,
would likely have the sound coincide with the flashes on the screen, so

71
79
 as not to confuse the audience with sounds of explosions accompanying
unrelated images.
The use of music on the sound track for a film can be atmospheric,
simply setting a tone for the action or the relationships being developed,
or it can be a central unifying core of the film's contents. The Nazi
propaganda film Fir Uns (1937) demonstrates this point powerfully,
especially if viewers understand the meaning that the musical selections
had for Germans in the 1930s. In the opening scenes of the film, as the
sixteen martyrs of 1923 are honored as party heroes, the music is the
party anthem, "The Horst Wessel Song," played as a mournful durge.
Later in the film, when the purpose is to transform these party heroes
into national heroes, the party song is replaced with the national anthem.
At the close of the film, the music reverts back to "The Horst Wessel
Song," played triumphantly in recognition of the Nazis' place as the
leaders of the German nation.

Making Meaning from Film and Television

Through the creative combination of mise-en-scene and photographic
elements of shots with editing and sound, motion pictures and television
communicate meaning in a variety of ways. Because the perception of a
moving image requires a level of subconscious psychological involvement,
an individual's personality, catalog of previous experiences, and frame
of mind are extremely influential on the ways images will be interpreted.
Even recognizable symbols convey complex levels of denotative and con-
notative meaning driven by a variety of physiological, psychological, and
cultural factors. Some of these factors are unique to film, while others
are drawn from literature and other arts For example, students unfa-
miliar with the musical selections in Fir Uns might simply think of the
music as atmospheric background accompaniment and miss the central
symbolic role it played in constructing the Nazis' propaganda message.
In film and television, form and content are inseparable. The form
and structure of a moving-image production can significantly affect the
message presented. Like a painting, a piece of sculpture, or an architect's
design for a house, every film has an artistic form, an arrangement of
elements intended to interest and involve viewers. In addition to visual
and aural elements, there are narrative elements, bits of information
about the plot or the characters of a film that lead, maintain, and direct
viewers' interest Not all films are narrative in their formal organization.
The Plow, for example, like Fir Uns and the "Daisy Spot," is rhetorical
in its structure, intended more to convert its viewers to a point of view
than to involve them in a story. (See Bordwell and Thompson, 44-80.)
The range and depth of story information a film reveals, the functions
of characters and other plot elements, and the ways the presentation of
time is structured (using flashbacks, for example, to fill out a plot) are

72
oU
often the deciding factors when viewers make meaning from a film. They
may be allowed an omniscient point of view, seeing many different types
of events as they interact with one another, or events may be presented
only from the point of view of one of the characters, restricting the
information conveyed and building suspense. Viewer expectations are
influenced by the film's genre; people watch a mystery film differently
than they do a musical. Patterns of developmenthow the situation
at the end of the film differs from the situation at the beginning (has
some journey or investigation been completed, has the boy married the
girl, has a lesson been learned)also affect viewer expectations. (See
Bordwell and Thompson, 82-112).
By the end of "Molders of Troy," for example, the film has shown how
conditions in the iron-molding trade in upstate New York after the Civil
War moved the workers to organize and strike. It has also shown how
the factory owners responded to the workers with violence and with the
decision to move the factories to other cities. The final scene (included
in the video compilation) takes place in a tavern, where Jim Donovan,
a former worker and union organizer who left the mills to become a city
alderman, confronts Brian Duffy, his stepson who is unemployed after
being blacklisted as a union agitator. Fearful that Duffy will be hurt
if he stays in Troy, Donovan tries to convince him to move to another
city, but Duffy resists in the name of principle. The tension between
the two characters, and the e; amination of the issues at hand, is all
the more evident to viewers because they have been privileged with
information that Donovan does not have. Immediately before Donovan
entered the room, Duffy had explained to the bartender that he was
already thinking of moving to another town to continue his organizing
activities there. Duffy's resistance is a front, a face he puts on for his
stepfather, a working man who has succombed to the establishment. It
is not the acting style, the editing, or even the scripted lines themselves
that allow the audience to make meaning from this scene. It is the
narrative structure, in which the line about Duffy's plans to move is
inserted immediately before Donovan sits down with him. A structure
that withheld this information until after the confrontation, or raised it
much earlier in the film, would have radically altered the meaning.
Form is inseparable from content in the narrative strategy of The
Return of Mart:n Guerre, the mixing of visual and aural elements in
Women of Summer, and the editing techniques in The Life of an Amer-
wan Furman. Perhaps the most interesting example of innovative cin-
ema form in the video compilation is D. W. Griffith's A Corner :n Wheat
(1909). The film tells three separate stories, intercutting images of a
poor farm family, the "wheat king" who corners the iarket and thereby
increases his fortune, and consumers in a bakery store, some of whom
are unable to meet the rising price of bread. The characters from the
three parallel plots never come into contact with one another in the film.

73

SI
 The wheat king makes his foam e and at the moment of triumph falls
accidently to his death. The consumers face growing hardship as prices
rise and the charity fund reduces its level of assistance. The farmer, who
can show nothing for all his work, is left at the end of the film as he
was found at the beginning, sowing seeds that offer little promise for his
future. The film is structured so that the unifying themea progressive
critique of capitalism---takes shape only in the minds of the viewers,
who draw their own connections between the different parts of the story.
Thus, the structure of the film keeps the message clear. If the three
plots intersected more directly, or if characters were allowed to confront
one another on the screen, the central philosophical message might have
been muddled by the specifics of the stories or the characterizations.
Many films rely on symbols familiar from literature and theater to
communicate ideas, for example, the candle that goes out on the table
as an old man dies in bed. One of the most effective sequences in The
Return of Martin Guerre deals with the impostor's first day in Artigat.
At the end of the day Bertrande takes him to her bed, but first she
is seen quickly removing the crucifix that has been left on her pillow.
The meaning of the symbol is somewhat clouded because up to this
point the film has led the audience to believe that the man is the real
Martin Guerre. Once the audience realizes that he is an impostor, the
significance of Bertrande removing the crucifix just before commiting
what she must have considered the first of a series of mortal sins becomes
more meaningful.
In the last two decades many film scholars have sought to study the
making of meaning in film through an approach to linguistics known
as semiology Serniologists draw upon the work of linguist Ferdinand
de Saussure, who defined a sign as made up of both the signifier (some
visual element) and the signified (the concept or idea that the signifier
stands for). A donkey, for example, can be signified by a drawing or by
the letters d-o-n-k-e-y. In each case, a visual symbol (the signifier) stands
for the meaning of a four-legged animal with long ears (the signified).
The image of a donkey in a film carries with it the direct and overt
denotative message. "Here is a four-legged animal with long ears." But it
is the connotative meaning of visual images that makes film interesting.
Semiotic analysis considers the additional connotative meanings that
might be connected with the presence of the donkey, whether consciously
intended by the filmmaker or unintentionally constructed in the mind of
the viewer, and how that meaning is created Typically, semiologists look
for such meaning through analyses, which they term either paradigmatic
(how this donkey is different from other donkeys or other animals that
might have been shown) or syntagmatic (how this image of a donkey
relates to the other images that precede or follow it within the film).
The analysis would proceed through a careful categorization of possible
denotative or connotative readings and a consideration of possible codes
of meaning drawn from the broader culture, from other arts, or front the
nature of the cinema.
Luis Bunuel's classic short film, Un Chen Andalou (1929), is a won-
derful artifact for the study of surrealism and the intellectual history of
the 1920Q From the opening sequence, whic:i climaxes in the slicing of
a woman's e, , N\ ith a razor, Un Chien Andalou shocks its viewers with
its destruction of contemporary aesthetic standards, thus accomplishing
one of the central goals of surrealism as an artistic and intellectual move-
ment. Many of the other images in the film have more or less obvious
symbolic meaning. In one shot, a man, to approach a woman sexually,
must drag behind him Qvmbols of the repressive forces of bourgeois cul-
ture (a grand piano), organized reiigic,n (two priests), and moral corrup-
tion (the carcasses of two dead donkeys). The meaning of the donkeys in
this image comes from the composition of the shot, which forces viewers
to relate to the priests, the piano, and the donkeys at the same; from
the half-decomposed state of the carcasses (a paradigmatic observation);
and from the placement of the shot within is a Him that dwells on the
moral corruption of the main character (a syntagmatic observation).
Those who apply the theories of structuralism or semiology are some-
times faulted for taking their analyses too far. A thoroughgoing semi-
ologist, for example, concentrating on the identification and de-coding
of every sign, might fail to appreciate the aesthetic qualities of a film.
Overly rigorous attention to the internal analysis of a moving-image
production might lead scholars to undervalue, or even ignore, historical
context. But historians concerned with he moving iniage cannot afford
to turn their backs on film theory. The symbolic meaning in many film
_inages might be discerned without necessarily resorting to the technical
terminology of cinema theory, but there are surely occasions where a
judicious application of such principles might offer new insight.
It is important to recognize that differences do exist in analyzing im-
ages in film and television. Television productions are almos' Always
designed to fit more precise time limits than commercial entertainment
films. Characteristically, television programs are also internally struc-
tured to allow for the insertion of commercials. A dramatic program is
therefore likely to string out a series of mini-climaxes in su.:h a way that
the viewers' attention will be held until after the commercial break.
In addLion, there are significant visual differences between film and
television. The small TV screen does not lend itself to the vast panora-
mas and long shots that are so powerful in moving pictures, especially in
Cinemascope and other wide-screen formats. Television footage, much
more than film involves head-and-shoulder shots of individual 'ctors or
small groups of actors. This was at least one reason why the makers
of "Molders of Troy" decided to focus on the experience of one fam-
ily, trying to represent the complex of worker, industry, and community
history in the Eves of a handful of people. There is also some degree

75
,i3
 of difference between the production techniques of film and television.
White almost all of network television today is presented on videotape,
only a small percentage (and a significantly larger percentage of local
television) is broadcast live or almost live (taped earlier but shown as
shot without editing). The typical sitcom, which may be carefully re-
hearsed and revised over several days, is usually shot as a run-through of
the entire episode. This is very different from the :hooting of a typical
film or dramatic TV series, which is almost always shot with little, if
any, attention to the order of the sequences as they will appear in the
completed production.
There are many communications scholars who would argue that film
and television are so unlike one another that they defy common treat-
ment, but the interests of most history teachers should not demand such
precision. There are distinctions between the content, production, and
reception of the two media, but lessons should concentrate on the basic
visual and aural elements that do raise similar if not identical, analytical
concerns.

76 Ri
 FOR FURTHER READING

This book for teachers was prepared as part of a larger project funded
by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The other elements
to result from the project are the video compilation, which has been
referred to throughout this discussion, and a book of essays to be entitled
Image as Artifact: The Historical Analysts of Film and Television, in
which twelve scholars concentrate on filling out the four frameworks for
inquiry. Arrangements are nct yet complete regarding the publication of
Image as Artifact, but when it appears, it should prove especially helpful
to teachers trying to apply the concepts proposed in this discussion.
The field of film and television scholarship has become so rich in the
past decade that it would be i:npos:-Ible to adequately summarize it
here. A few of the most influential publications in each area are listed
on the following pages, but teachers are strongly encouraged to turn to
the fuller bibliographies in James Monaco, How To Read a Film, rev.
ed. (New York, 1981), and David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film
Art: An Introduction, 2d ed. (New York, 1986).
There are two journals that should be of special interest. The Histor-
ical Journal of Film. Radio and Television is published in Great Britain
for the International Association for Audio-Visual Media in Historical
Research and Teaching (IAMHIST). Film e.4 History is the quarterly
journal of the Historians Film Committee, an affiliated society of the
American Historical Association based at New Jersey Institute of Tech-
nology, Newark, NJ 07102.

General Guides for Evaluating Films and Television

Blackaby, Linda, Dan Georgakas, and Barbara Ma.golis. In Focus: A

Guide to Using Films. New York: Zoetrope, 1980.
Ferris, Bill, and Judy Peiser, eds. American Folklore Films and
Videotapes-An ...ndex. Memphis, Tenn.: Center for Southern Folk-
lore, 1976.
Guidelines for Off-Air Taping of Copyrighted Programs for Education
Use: Thirty Questions Librarians Ask. Chicago American Library
Association, 1982
Klotman, Phyllis Rauch. Frame By Frame: A Black Filmography.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979.
Limbacher, James L., comp. and ed. Feature Films on 8-mm, 1C-mm,
and Videotape. 7th ed. New York: Bowker, 1982.
Loy, Jane M. Latin America, Sights and Sounds Gainesville, Fla.: Latin
American Studies Programs, 1973.

77
 Pettit, Arthur G Images of the Mexican American in Fiction and Film
College Station, Texaq Texas A & M University Press, 1980.
Peyton, Patricia, ed. Reel Change A Guide to Social Issue Films. San
'rancisco: Film Fund, 1979.
Pitts, Michael. Hollywood and American Reality. A Filmography of
Over 250 Motion Pictures Depicting U.S. History. Jefferson, N.0
McFarland, 1984.
Samples, Gordon. How to Locate Reviews of Plays and Films: A Bibli-
ography of Criticism from the Beginning to the Present. Metuchen,
N.J Scarecrow, 1976
Sullivan, %aye. Films for, by, and about Women. Metuchen, N J.:
Scarecrow, 1980.
Weatherford, Elizabeth, ed. Native Americans on Film and Video. New
Muz,:.suir of the American Indian, 1981.
Won, Allen L., and Randall M Miller, Ethnic and Racial Images in
American Film and Television Historical Essays and Bibliography.
New York: Garland, 1987

Sources on Film
Aldgate. Anthony. Cinema and History: British Newsreels and the
Spanish Civil War. London Scholar Press, 1979.
Arnheim, Rudolf. Film As Art. Berkeley: University of California Press,
1957.
Ballo, Tino. United Artists: The Company Built by the Stars. Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1976.
---, ed. The American Film Industry. Rev. ed. Madison: University
of Wisconsin Press, 1985.
Barnouw, Erik. Documentary. A History of the Non-Fiction Film. New
York: Oxford University Press, 1983.
Barsam, Richard Meran Non-Fiction Film: A Critical History. New
York: E. P. Dutton, 1973.
---, ed. Non-Fiction Film Theory and Criticism. New York: E. P.
Dutton, 1976.
Bergman, Andrew. We're in the Money Depression America and its
Films. New York: New York University Press, 1971.
Bordwell, David, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson. The Classical
Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960.
New York: Columbia University Press, 1985.
Burns, E. Bradford. Latin American Cinema Film and History Los
Angeles UCLA Latin American Center, 1975
Cripps, Thomas. Slow Fade to Black: The Negro in American Film,
1900-1942. New York: Oxford University Prpqq, 1977.
Fielding, Raymond. A Technological History of Motion Pictures and
Televison. 3d ed Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979.

78
G
 . The American Newsreel, 1911-1967. Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press, 1972.
Gomery, Douglas, and Robert C. Allen. Film History: Theory and Prac-
tice. New York: Knopf, 1985.
Griffin, Patrick. "The Making of Goodbye Billy." Film 8 History, 2
(May 1972): 6-10.
Isaksson, Flake, and Leif Furhammar. Politics and Film. New York:
Praeger, 1971.
Jarvie, lan. Movies and Society. New York: Basic Books, 1970.
Jowett, Garth. Film: The Democratic Art. Boston: Little, Brown, 1976.
Jowett, Garth, and James M. Linton. Movies as Mass Communication.
Beverly Hills: Sage, 1980.
Jowett, Garth, and Victoria O'Donnell. Propaganda and Persuasion.
Newbury Park, Calif: Sage, 1986.
It: acauer, Siegfried. From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History
of the German Film. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947.
I eab, Daniel J. From Sambo to Superspade: The Black Motion Picture
Experience. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975.
Maltby, Richard. Harmless Entertainment: Hollywood and the Ideology
of Consensus. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow, 1983.
Marsden, Michael, John G. Nachbar, and Sam L. Grogg, Jr., eds. Movies
as Artifacts: Cultural Criticism of Popular Film. Chicago: Nelson-
Hall, 1982.
Mast, Gerald, and Marshall Cohen. Film Theory and Criticism: In-
troductory Readings. 2d ed. New York: Oxford University Press,
1979.
Mast, Gerald, ed. The Movies in Our Midst: Documents in the Cultural
History of Film in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1982.
May, Larry. Screening Out the Past: The Birth of Mass Culture and
the Motion Picture Industry. New York: Oxford University Press,
1980.
Mellencamp, Patricia, and Philip Rosen. Cinema Histories, Cinema
Practices. Frederick, Md.: University Publications of America,
1984.
O'Connor, John E., ed. Film and the Humanities. New York: Rocke-
feller Foundation, 1977.
Pronay, Nicholas, and Derek W. Spring. Propaganda, Politics and Film,
1918-45. London: Macmillan, 1982.
Reader, Keith Cultures on Celluloid. London: Quartet Books, 1981.
Rollins, Peter C. "The Making of Will Rogers' 1S20s." Film 8 History,
7 (January 1977): 1-5.
, ed. Hollywood as Hie4aman: American Film in Cultural Context.
Lexington, Ky.: University Press of Kf -ducky, 1983.

79

.i,7
 Short, K. R. M., ed. Film and Radio Propaganda in World War II
Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1983
Smith, Julian. Looking Away: Hollywood and Vietnam. New York:
Scribner, 1975.
Sklar, Robert. Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American
Movies. New York: Random House, 1975.
Suid, Lawrence. Guts and Glory: Great American War Movies. Read-
ing, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1978.
Taylor, Richard. The Politics of the Soviet Cinema, 1917-1929. Cam-
bridge, U.K.: Cambridge Univer;ity Press, 1979.
Welch, David. Propaganda and the German Cinema, 1999-1945. New
York: Oxford University Press, 1983.
Wollen, Peter. Signs and Meaning in the Cinema. Bloomington: Indi-
ana University Press, 1969.
Wood, Michael America ;n the Movies. New York: Basic Books, 1975.
Wright, Will. Sirguns and Society: A Structural Study of the Western.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975.

Sources on Television
Adams, William, and Fay Schreibman, eds Television Network News:
Issues in Content Research. Washington, D.C.: George Washing-
ton Univerity, 1978.
Berger, Arthur Asa. Media Analysis Techniques. Beverly Hills: Sag,,
982.
Bar,,uuw, Erik. The Image Empire. New York: Oxford University Press,
1970.
---. Tube of Plenty. New York: OA' 7d University Press, 1975.
. The Sponsor: Notes on a Modern Potentate. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1978.
Bergreen, Ldrence. Look Now, Pay Later: The Rise of Network Broad-
casting. Ga.den City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1980.
Boorstin, Daniel. The Image: Or, What Happened to the American
Dream. New York: Atheneum, 1962.
Brown, Les. Television: The Business Behind the Box. New York:
Harcourt, Brace, and Jovanovich, 1971.
Chester, Edward W. Radio, Television, and American Politics. New
York: Sheed and Ward Publishers, 1969.
Comstock, George, Steven Chaffee, Nathan Katzman, Maxwell Mc-
Combs, and Donald Roberts. Television and Human Behavior.
New York: Columbia University Press, 1978
Diamond, Edwin, and Stephen Bates. The Spot: The Rise of Political
Advertising on Television. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1984.
Epstein, Edward Jay. News From Nowhere: Television and the News.
New York: Random House, 1973.

30 cS
Fiske, John. Reading Television. London: Methuen, 1978.
Gans, Herbert. Deciding What's News. New York: Pantheon, 1979.
Gitlin, Todd. Inside Prime Time. New York: Pantheon, 1983.
, ed. Watching Television. New York: Pantheon, 1986.

Glasgow University Media Group. Bad News. Vol. I. London: Rout-

ledge St Kegal Paui, 1976.
Levinson, Richard, and William Link. Stay Tuned: An Inside Look at
the Making of Prime Time Television. New York: St. Martin's,
1981.
MacDonald, J. Fred. Television and the Red Menace: The Video Road
to Vietnam. New York: Praeger, 1985.
. Blacks and White TV: Afro-Americans in Television since 1948.

Chicago: Nelson Hall, 1983.

Mankiewicz, Frank, and Joel Swerdlow. Remote Control: Television
and the Manipulation of American Life. New York: Times Books,
1978.
Marc, David. Demographic Vistas: Television in Amencan Culture.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984.
Meyrowitz, Joshua. No Sense of Place. The Impact of Electronic Media
on Social Behavior. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.
Newcomb, Horace, ed. Television: The Critical View. 4th ed. New
York: Oxford University Press, 1987.
Postman, Neil V. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the
Age of Show Business. New York: Viking, 1985.
Ranney, Austin. Channels of Power: The Impact of Television on Amer-
ican Politics. N'w York: Basic Books, 1983.
Robinson, John P., and Mark R. Levy. The Main Source: Learning
From Television News. Beverly Hills: Sage, 1986.
Rollins, Peter C. "Television's Vietnam: The Visual Language of Tele-
vision News." Journal of Amencan Culture, 4 (Summer 1981):
114-35.
Sklar, Robert. Prime-time America: Life On and Behind the Television
Screen. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980.
Westin, Av. News watch: How TV Decides the News. New York: Simon
and Schuster, 1982
Williams, Raymond. Television. Technology and Cultural Form. New
York: Schoken, 1975

Sources on the Connections Between History

and the Moving Image

Abrasli, Barbara, and Janet Sternberg, eds. Historians & Filmmakers.

Toward Collaboration. New York: The Institute for Research in
History, 1983.

81
Burns, E. Bradford. "Conceptualizing the Use of Film to Study History."
Film & History, 4 (December 1974): 1-11.
Ferro, Marc. "1917: History and Cinema." Contemporary History, 3
(October 1968): 45-61.
Fledelius, Karsten, Kaare Riibner Jorgenson, Niels Skyum-Nielson, and
Erik H. Swiatek. Studies in History, Film and Society I: History
and the Audio-Visual Media. Copenhagen: Eventus, 1979.
Leab, Daniel J. "Writing History With Film: Two Views of the 1937
Strike Against General Motors by the UAW." Labor History, 21
(Winter 1979-80): 102-12.
O'Connor, John E., and Martin A. Jackson., eds. American History/
American Film: Interpreting the Hollywood Image. New York:
Ungar, 1979.
O'Connor, John E., ed. American History/American Television: Inter-
preting the Video Past. New York: Ungar, 1983.
Pronay, Nicholas, Betty R. Smith, and Tom Hastie. The Use of Film in
History Teaching. London: Historical Association, 1972.
Raack, Richard C. "Clio's Dark Mirror: The Documentary Film in His-
tory," Flistory Teacher, 6 (1972): 109-18.
. "Historiography and Cinematography: A Prolegomenon to Film

Work for Historians." Journal of Contemporary History, 18 (July

1983): 411-38.
Reimers, K. F., and H. Friedrich, eds. Studies in History, Film and
Society III: Contemporary History in Film and Television. Munich:
Verlagalschlager, 1982.
Short, K. Ii. .M., and Karsten Fledelius, eds. Studies in History, Film
and Society II: History and Film: Methodology, Research, Educa-
tion. Copenhagen: Eventus, 1980.
Short, K. R. M., ed. Feature Films as History. Knoxville: University of
Tennessee Press, 1981.
Smith, Paul, ed. The Historian and Film. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge
University Press, 197g.
Sorlin, Pierre. The Film in History. Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble,
1980.
Top lin, Robert Brent. "The Making of Denmark Vesey's Rebellion."
Film & History, 12 (September 1982): 49-56.
Walkowitz, Daniel. "Visual History: The Craft of the Historian Film-
maker." Public Historian, 7 (Winter 1985): 53-64.

82
 APPENDIX A

Sample Class Assignment

Your assignment involves an analysis of The Plow That Broke the
Plains (1936). This U.S. government-produced documentary film focuses
on the problems of the dust bowl of the thirties and, by tracing the
history of the settlement and development of the region, seeks to explain
how humans contributed to environmental tragedy.
Your paper should concentrate on one of the seven major sequences
of the film (as screened and discussed in class):

"Prologue"
"Settlement"
"Warning"
"Wheat Will Win the War"
"Twenties Boom"
"Dust Bowl"
"Migration"

Using at least three of the historical sources from the bibliography

provided, analyse and evaluate the interpretation presented by the film.
How well does the film present the facts of the situation? How does
its interpretation of issues and events fit into the view offered by the
literature, dun and now?
Include in your analysis specific reference to at least three shots and
two editing transitions from the sequence chosen that, to your mind,
contribute significantly to the message of the film. Consider how the
information and point of view offered by the film is supported (or not
supported) by the visual and aural elements contained in them. To help
you focus on these shots and transitior; in detail, fill out one of th-
Shot Analysis sheets and one of the Editing Analysis sheets for each and
submit them with your paper.
Papers should be five to six pages (typed, double-spaced), plus cita-
tions, bibliography, three Shot Analysis sheets, and two Editing Analysis
sheets.

83
9'A.
 Shot Analysis
I. Sketch the image as it appears on the sceen. Use more than one
sketch if camera movement significantly alters the composition of
the shot. Use the back of the page if you need to make more than
two sketches.

2. In one sentence, describe each of the following elements of the

shot and, if applicable, the way it contributes to the meaning of
the shot:
duration
lighting
color
field size
composition
camera angle
camera movement
focus
lens characteristics
projection speed
3. Is the shot, in your view, primarily denotative or connotative?
Explain. If it is both, explain how it functions in each way.
4. What codes are operative? Are they primarily cultural or cine-
matic? Explain.
5. How does the sound track (narration, music, sound effects, etc.)
contribute to the message of the shot?
6. Explain in your own words how this shot contributes to the point
the filmmaker is trying to make in the sequence of which it is a
part.

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 Editing Analysis
1. Sketch each of the shots connected by the edit in question.

2. Identify the type of editing device used (is it a slow dissolve, fast
dissolve, jump cut, match cut, etc.).
3. Explain how the sound track influences the association of the two
shots.
4 Describe in your own words how the association of these two shots
contributes to the point the filmmaker is trying to make in the
sequence in question.

85
Q3
 APPENDIX B

Video Compilation

Selection 1. The Return of Marim Guerre (excerpts)

Selection 2. "Molders ofilliy" (excerpt)

Selection 3. Women of Summer (excerpt)

Selection 4. The Cutaway and the Editing of a Television

News Interview

Selection 5. The Plow That Broke the Plains

Selection 6. The "Daisy Spot"

Selection 7. Universal and Movietone Newsreels (excerpts)

Selection 8. "See It Now: Report on Senator McCarthy"

(excerpts)

Selection 9. CBS Evening News, December 2, 1979 (excerpt)

Selection 10. The Bulk of a Race (excerpts)

Selection 11. Fir Uns

Selection 12. Life of an American Fireman (excerpts)

Selection 13. A Corner in Wheat

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