Hollywood and History

At the 2000 Oscars, a short compilation film celebrated History and the Movies. It was appropriate for the millennium Academy Awards to look back at the film industry’s engagement with the history of the tumultuous century just ending, but equally important was the recognition of the power of historical representation and interpretation that the motion picture industry gathered to itself in the last half of the twentieth century. From the sixties on, films became a looking glass through which cultures, nations, governments, societies, and individual historical figures saw themselves. Movies defined the history and culture of the latter half of the twentieth century by capturing it in a medium available and comprehensible to all. The movies became what Dominick LaCapra termed the major “instruments of diffusion”1 for the historical consciousness of the second half of the twentieth century. This was a New Historicist consciousness that called into question not only the “Grand Narratives”2 of the nineteenth century but also the sources, the methodology, and the very style of the voices of traditional twentieth-century academic history.3