1873534 - hayden white, historiophoty

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Historiography and HistoriophotyAuthor(s): Hayden White

Reviewed work(s):Source: The American Historical Review, Vol. 93, No. 5 (Dec., 1988), pp. 1193-1199Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the American Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1873534 .Accessed: 06/02/2012 16:06

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AHR ForumHistoriography and Historiophoty

HAYDEN WHITE

ROBERT ROSENSTONE'S ESSAY RAISES AT LEAST TWO QUESTIONS that should be ofeminent

concern to professional historians. The first is that of the relativeadequacy of what we might call "historiophoty" the representation of history andour thought about it in visual images and filmic discourse) to the criteria of truthand accuracy presumed to govern the professional practice of historiography (therepresentation of history in verbal images and written discourse). Here the issueis whether it is possible to "translate" a given written account of history into avisual-auditory equivalent without significant loss of content. The second questionhas to do with what Rosenstone calls the "challenge" presented by historiophotyto historiography. It is obvious that cinema (and video) are better suited than

written discourse to the actual representation of certain kinds of historicalphenomena-landscape, scene, atmosphere, complex events such as wars, battles,crowds, and emotions. But, Rosenstone asks, can historiophoty adequately conveythe complex, qualified, and critical dimensions of historical thinking about events,which, according to Ian Jarvie, at least, is what makes any given representation ofthe past a distinctly "historical" account?

In many ways, the second question is more radical than the first in its implicationsfor the way we might conceptualize the tasks of professional historiography in ourage. The historical evidence produced by our epoch is often as much visual as itis oral and written in nature. Also, the communicative conventions of the humansciences are increasingly as much pictorial as verbal in their predominant modesof representation. Modern historians ought to be aware that the analysis of visualimages requires a manner of "reading" quite different from that developed for thestudy of written documents. They should also recognize that the representationof historical events, agents, and processes in visual images presupposes the masteryof a lexicon, grammar, and syntax-in other words, a language and a discursivemode-quite different from that conventionally used for their representation in

verbal discourse alone. All too often, historians treat photographic, cinematic, andvideo data as if they could be read in the same way as a written document. We areinclined to treat the imagistic evidence as if it were at best a complement of verbalevidence, rather than as a supplement, which is to say, a discourse in its own rightand one capable of telling us things about its referents that are both different fromwhat can be told in verbal discourse and also of a kind that can only be told bymeans of visual images.

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Some information about the past can be provided only by visual images. Whereimagistic evidence is lacking, historical investigation finds a limit to what it canlegitimately assert about the way things may have appeared to the agents acting

on a given historical scene. Imagistic (and especially photographic and cinematic)evidence provides a basis for a reproduction of the scenes and atmosphere of pastevents much more accurate than any derived from verbal testimony alone. Thehistoriography of any period of history for which photographs and films exist willbe quite different, if not more accurate, than that focused on periods knownprimarily by verbal documentation.

So, too, in our historiographical practices, we are inclined to use visual imagesas a complement of our written discourse, rather than as components of a discoursein its own right, by means of which we might be able to say something different

from and other than what we can say in verbal form. We are inclined to use picturesprimarily as "illustrations" of the predications made in our verbally writtendiscourse. We have not on the whole exploited the possibilities of using images asa principal medium of discursive representation, using verbal commentary onlydiacritically, that is to say, to direct attention to, specify, and emphasize a meaningconveyable by visual means alone.

ROSENSTONE PROPERLY INSISTS THAT SOME THINGS-he cites landscapes, sounds,strong emotions, certain kinds of conflicts between individuals and groups,collective events and the movements of crowds-can be better represented on film(and, we might add, video) than in any merely verbal account. "Better" here wouldmean not only with greater verisimilitude or stronger emotive effect but also lessambiguously, more accurately. Rosenstone appears to falter before the charge,made by purists, that the historical film is inevitably both too detailed (in what itshows when it is forced to use actors and sets that may not resemble perfectly thehistorical individuals and scenes of which it is a representation) and not detailed

enough (when it is forced to condense a process that might have taken years tooccur, the written account of which might take days to read, into a two orthree-hour presentation). But this charge, as he properly remarks, hinges on afailure to distinguish adequately between a mirror image of a phenomenon andother kinds of representations of it, of which the written historical account itselfwould be only one instance. No history, visual or verbal, "mirrors" all or even thegreater part of the events or scenes of which it purports to be an account, and thisis true even of the most narrowly restricted "micro-history." Every written historyis a product of processes of condensation, displacement, symbolization, andqualification exactly like those used in the production of a filmed representation.It is only the medium that differs, not the way in which messages are produced.

Jarvie apparently laments the poverty of the "information load" of the historicalfilm, whether "fictional" (such as The Return of Martin Guerre) or "documentary"(such as Rosenstone's own The Good Fight). But this is to confuse the question ofscale and level of generalization at which the historical account ought "properly"to operate with that of the amount of evidence needed to support the generali-


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Historiography nd Historiophoty 1195

zations and the level of interpretation on which the account is cast. Are short booksabout long periods of history in themselves non-historical or anti-historical innature? Was Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall, or for that matter Fernand

Braudel's The Mediterranean, of sufficient length to do justice to its subject?' Whatis the proper length of a historical monograph? How much information is neededto support any given historical generalization? Does the amount of informationrequired vary with the scope of the generalization? And, if so, is there a normativescope against which the propriety of any historical generalization can be mea-sured? On what principle, it might be asked, is one to assess the preference for anaccount that might take a hour to read (or view) as against that which takes manyhours, even days, to read, much less assimilate to one's store of knowledge?

According to Rosenstone, Jarvie complemented his critique of the necessarily

impoverished "information load" of the historical film with two other objections:first, the tendency of the historical film to favor "narration" (Rosenstone himselfnotes that the two historical films he worked on "compress[ed] the past to a closedworld by telling a single, linear story with, essentially, a single interpretation") over"analysis"; and, second, the presumed incapacity of film to represent the trueessence of historiography, which, according to Jarvie, consists less of "descriptivenarrative" than of "debates between historians aboutjust what exactly did happen,why it happened, and what would be an adequate account of its significance."2

Rosenstone is surely right to suggest that the historical film neednot necessarily

feature narrative at the expense of analytical interests. In any event, if a film likeThe Return of Martin Guerre turns out to resemble a "historical romance," it is notbecause it is a narrative film but rather because the romance genre was used to plotthe story that the film wished to tell. There are other genres of plots, conventionallyconsidered to be more "realistic" than the romance, that might have been used toshape the events depicted in this story into a narrative of a different kind. If MartinGuerre s a "historical romance," it would be more proper to compare it, not with"historical narrative" but with the "historical novel," which has a problematic of its

own, the discussion of which has concerned historians since its invention in muchthe same way that the discussion of film today ought properly to concern them.And it ought to concern them for the reasons outlined in Rosenstone's essay,namely, because it raises the specter of the "fictionality" of the historian's owndiscourse, whether cast in the form of a narrative account or in a more "analytical,"non-narrative mode.

Like the historical novel, the historical film draws attention to the extent to whichit is a constructed or, as Rosenstone calls it, a "shaped" representation of a realitywe historians would prefer to consider to be "found" in the events themselves or,if not there, then at least in the "facts" that have been established by historians'investigation of the record of the past. But the historical monograph is no less

' Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire London, 1776-88); FernandBrandel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World (New York and London, 1972).

2 Robert A. Rosenstone, "History in Images/History in Words: Reflections on the Possibility of ReallyPutting History onto Film," AHR, 93 (December 1988): 1174; I. C. Jarvie, "Seeing through Movies,"Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 8 (1978): 378.


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"shaped" or constructed than the historical film or historical novel. It may beshaped by different principles, but there is no reason why a filmed representationof historical events should not be as analytical and realistic as any written account.

JARVIE'S CHARACTERIZATION OF THE ESSENCE OF HISTORIOGRAPHY ("debates betweenhistorians about just what exactly did happen, why it happened, and what wouldbe an adequate account of its significance") alerts us to the problem of how andto what purpose historians transform information about "events" into the "facts"that serve as the subject matter of their arguments. Events happen or occur; factsare constituted by the subsumption of events under a description, which is to say,by acts of predication. The "adequacy" of any given account of the past, then,

depends on the question of the choice of the set of concepts actually used byhistorians in their transformation of information about events into, not "facts" ingeneral, but "facts" of a specific kind (political facts, social facts, cultural facts,psychological facts). The instability of the very distinction between "historical" factson the one side and non-historical ("natural" facts, for example) on the other, adistinction without which a specifically historical kind of knowledge would beunthinkable, indicates the constructivist nature of the historian's enterprise. Whenconsidering the utility or adequacy of filmed accounts of historical events, then,

it would be well to reflect upon the ways in which a distinctively imagistic discoursecan or cannot transform information about the past into facts of a specific kind.I do not know enough about film theory to specify more precisely the elements,

equivalent to the lexical, grammatical, and syntactical dimensions of spoken orwritten language, of a distinctly filmic discourse. Roland Barthes insisted that stillphotographs do not and could not predicate-only their titles or captions coulddo so. But cinema is quite another matter. Sequences of shots and the use ofmontage or closeups can be made to predicate quite as effectively as phrases,sentences, or sequences of sentences in spoken or written discourse. And if cinema

can predicate, then it can just as surely do all the things that Jarvie considered toconstitute the essence of written historical discourse. Moreover, it should not beforgotten that the sound film has the means by which to complement visualimagery with a distinctive verbal content that need not sacrifice analysis to theexigencies of dramatic effects. As for the notion that a filmed portrayal of historicalevents could not be "defend[ed]" and "footnote[d]," respond to objections, and"criticize the opposition," there is no reason at all to suppose that this could notin principle be done.3 There is no law prohibiting the production of a historicalfilm of sufficient length to do all of these things.

Rosenstone's list of the effects of historians' prejudices against "historiophoty"is sketchy but full enough. He indicates that many of the problems posed by theeffort to "put history onto film" stem from the notion that the principal task is totranslate what is already a written discourse into an imagistic one.4 Resistance to

3Jarvie, "Seeing through Movies," 378.4 Rosenstone, "History in Images/History in Words," 1175.


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the effort to put history onto film centers for the most part on the question of whatgets lost in this process of translation. Among the things supposedly lost areaccuracy of detail, complexity of explanation, the auto-critical and inter-critical

dimensions of historiological reflection, and the qualifications of generalizationsnecessitated by, for instance, the absence or unavailability of documentaryevidence. Rosenstone seems to grant the force of Jarvie's claim that the "infor-mation load" of the filmed representation of historical events and processes isinevitably impoverished when he considers the question of whether a "thinning ofdata" on the screen "makes for poor history." While pointing out that film permitsus to "see landscapes, hear sounds, witness strong emotions. . . , or view physicalconflict between individuals and groups," he seems unsure whether historiophotymight not "play down the analytical" aspects of historiography and favor appealsto the emotive side of the spectator's engagement with images. But, at the sametime, he insists that there is nothing inherently anti-analytical about filmedrepresentations of history and certainly nothing that is inherently anti-historiological about historiophoty. And, in his brief consideration of the filmdocumentary, Rosenstone turns the force of the anti-historiophoty argument backon those who, in making this argument, appear to ignore the extent to which anykind of historiography shares these same limitations.5

He grants, for example, that, although the film documentary strives for the

effect of a straightforwardly direct and objective account of events, it is always a"shaped"-fashioned or stylized-representation thereof. "[W]e must remember,"he writes, "that on the screen we see not the events themselves ... but selectedimages of those events."6 The example he gives is that of a film shot of a cannonbeing fired followed by another shot of an explosion of the (or a) shell somedistance away. Such a sequence, he suggests, is, properly speaking, fictional ratherthan factual, because, obviously, the camera could not have been simultaneouslyin the two places where first the firing and then the explosion occurred. What wehave, then, is a pseudo-factual representation of a cause-effect relation. But is this

representation "false" thereby, that is to say, is it false because the explosion shownin the second shot is not that of the shell fired in the first shot but rather is a shotof some other shell, fired from who knows where?

In this case, the notion that the sequence of images is false would require astandard of representational literalness that, if applied to historiography itself,would render it impossible to write. In fact, the "truthfulness" of the sequence isto be found not at the level of concreteness but rather at another level ofrepresentation, that of typification. The sequence should be taken to represent atype of event. The referent of the sequence is the type of event depicted, not thetwo discrete events imaged, first, the firing of a shell and, then, its explosion. Thespectator is not being "fooled" by such a representation nor is there anythingduplicitous in such a rendering of a cause-and-effect sequence. The veracity of therepresentationi hinges on the question of the likelihood of this type of cause-and-

I Rosenstone, "History in Images/History in Words," 1178-80.' Rosenstone, "History in Images/History in Words," 1180.


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effect sequence occurring at specific times and places and under certain conditions,namely, in the kind of war made possible by a certain kind of industrial-militarytechnology and fought in a particular time and place.

Indeed, it is a convention of written history to represent the causes and effectsof such events in precisely this way, in a sequence of images that happens to beverbal rather than visual, to be sure, but no less "fictional" for being so. Theconcreteness, precision of statement, and accuracy of detail of a sentence such as,"The sniper's bullet fired from a nearby warehouse struck President Kennedy inthe head, wounding him fatally," are not in principle denied to a filmed depictioneither of the event referred to in the sentence or of the cause-and-effect relationthat it cites as an explanation. One can imagine a situation in which enoughcameras were deployed in such a way as to have captured both the sniper's shot

and the resultant effect with greater immediacy than that feigned in the verbalrepresentation and, indeed, with greater factual precision, inasmuch as the verbalutterance depends on an inference from effect to cause for which no specificdocumentation exists. In the filmed representations of this famous event, theambiguity that still pervades our knowledge of it has been left intact and notdispelled by the specious concreteness suggested in the provision of the "details"given in the verbal representation. And if this is true of micro-events, such as theassassination of a head of state, how much more true is it of the representation in

written history of macro-events?For example, when historians list or indicate the "effects" of a large-scalehistorical event, such as a war or a revolution, they are doing nothing differentfrom what an editor of a documentary film does in showing shots of an advancingarmy followed by shots of enemy troops surrendering or fleeing, followed by shotsof the triumphant force entering a conquered city. The difference between awritten account and a filmed account of such a sequence turns less on the generalmatter of accuracy of detail than on the different kinds of concreteness with whichthe images, in the one case verbal, in the other visual, are endowed. Much depends

on the nature of the "captions" accompanying the two kinds of images, the writtencommentary in the verbal account and the voice-over or subtitles in the visual one,that "frame" the depicted events individually and the sequence as a whole. It is thenature of the claims made for the images considered as evidence that determinesboth the discursive function of the events and the criteria to be employed in theassessment of their veracity as predicative utterances.

Thus, for example, the depiction, in Richard Attenborough's film Gandhi, of theanonymous South African railway conductor who pushed the young Gandhi fromthe train, is not a misrepresentation insofar as the actor playing the role may nothave possessed the physical features of the actual agent of that act. The veracityof the scene depends on the depiction of a person whose historical significancederived from the kind of act he performed at a particular time and place, whichact was a function of an identifiable type of role-playing under the kinds of socialconditions prevailing at a general, but specifically historical, time and place. Andthe same is true of the depiction of Gandhi himself in the film. Demands for aversimilitude in film that is impossible in any medium of representation, including


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that of written history, stem from the confusion of historical individuals with thekinds of "characterization" of them required for discursive purposes, whether inverbal or in visual media.

Even in written history, we are often forced to represent some agents only as"character types," that is, as individuals known only by their general socialattributes or by the kinds of actions that their "roles" in a given historical eventpermitted them to play, rather than as full-blown "characters," individuals withmany known attributes, proper names, and a range of known actions that permitus to draw fuller portraits of them than we can draw of their more "anonymous"counterparts. But the agents who form a "crowd" (or any other kind of group) arenot more misrepresented in a film for being portrayed by actors than they are ina verbal account of their collective action.

Too OFTEN, DISCUSSIONS OF THE IRREDEEMABLY FICTIONAL NATURE of historicalfilms fail to take account of the work of experimental or avant-garde filmmakers,for whom the analytic function of their discourse tends to predominate over theexigencies of "storytelling." Rosenstone cites a number of experimentalist filmsthat not only depart from but actually seek to undermine the conventions ofcommercial (especially the Hollywood variety of) filmmaking. A film such as Far

from Poland, he points out, not only does not feature storytelling at the expense ofanalysis but actually brings under question the conventional (nineteenth-century)notions of "realistic" representation to which many contemporary historians,analytical as well as narrational, still subscribe. He specifically likens the work ofexperimental filmmakers to that of Bertolt Brecht in the history of the theater. Buthe mightjust as well have likened it to the work of those historians of the modernage who have taken as their problem less the "realistic representation" of "the past"than whatJarvie himself calls the question of "what would be an adequate account"

of "what exactly did happen, why it happened, and . .. its significance." This issurely the lesson to be derived from the study of recent feminist filmmaking, whichhas been concerned not only with depicting the lives of women in both the pastand present truthfully and accurately but, even more important, with bringing intoquestion conventions of historical representation and analysis that, while pretend-ing to be doing nothing more than "telling what really happened," effectivelypresent a patriarchical version of history. The kind of experimentalist filmsinvoked by Rosenstone do indeed "subvert" the kind of "realism" we associate withboth conventional films and conventional historiography, but it is not because theymay sacrifice "accuracy of detail" in order to direct attention to the problem ofchoosing a way to represent the past.7 They show us instead that the criterion fordetermining what shall count as "accuracy of detail" depends on the "way" chosento represent both "the past" and our thought about its "historical significance"alike.

7 Rosenstone, "History in Images/History in Words," 1183.

1873534 - hayden white, historiophoty

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