...Did that Really Happen? History Through Film

Poster courtesy Universal Pictures:  for educational use only

Courtesy Icon Entertainment, Intl.

For good or ill, much of what passes for history knowledge in our world comes from the movies. On the bright side, special effects and big budgets give us a glimpse of the scale of battles and the brutal nature of warfare of the past.  We can see the architecture, the fashion, and the geography.  It's a tremendous opportunity to be able to envision what it might have been like to be at Yorktown, or on the Titanic on the night she sank.

Dreamworks, SKG

The downside is that much of what we believe is not really true.  Hollywood needs to exaggerate differences to play up conflict and drama.  Timelines are collapsed to allow the dramatic arc to come to a tidy conclusion in two hours. Uniforms are "spiffed up" to make a more impressive presentation on film -- or people who are dead end up alive and kicking and in places they never actually inhabited.

As an educator, I believe we should not allow a medium whose creative decisions are driven by economic and artistic considerations rather than historicity to inform our understanding of events of the past. Remember, "the past is never dead." It will rise again in one way or another, and when it does, we need to be equipped with as realistic an understanding as is possible from where we sit today.  Let's use all this great film, but don't buy it hook, line, and sinker.

On this page, we will post a film and have student responses to inaccuracies in the way the director portrays the actual events.  Specific instructions to come.

Columbia Pictures

Action Item:  I'm taking historical film nominations for analysis in this section of the site.  Comment below and we'll develop a list, then we'll put them in order and begin making our picks!