Based on a true story

Steven Spielberg’s Amistad (1997) and Saving Private Ryan (1999) were lambasted by some historians for their trite rhetorical flourishes and sledgehammer sentimentality, as well as their overall untruthfulness and ‘creative reimagining’ of the past.

As I write this, Ridley Scott’s latest film Napoleon has been slated in some quarters for its fabrications (apparently, Napoleon never actually fired cannons at the Pyramids during the French invasion of Egypt).Yet when was history ever a completely objective science? And should it be?

The creative joints between history and film have long been a topic of interest to filmmakers, historians, audiences and historical consultants. There is the ‘film as history’ concept that proposes that film offers a window on the past (through, say, the Lumière brothers’ extensive recording of everyday French life in the 1890s) that can be read alongside written historical accounts.

Alternatively, ‘history on film’ recreates historical events and figures with as much authenticity as possible, while often taking liberties with the truth by inventing new characters, blurring timelines and overlooking key events. They often radically subvert stable, fixed versions of history, and instead serve as creative connecting points that allow their makers to explore contemporary issues.

Offering a highly entertaining vision of the past – and events that ‘might have happened’ – are just as important these days to consumers of on-screen history. Joaquin Phoenix, who plays Napoleon in Scott’s film, admitted in an interview that Napoleon is an “experience told through Ridley’s eyes”, adding: “If you want to really understand Napoleon, then you should probably do your own studying and reading.”

Many films take liberties with the truth by inventing new characters and neglecting key events. Yet does this make them lesser works? Any film dealing with the past, especially one from Hollywood, will be accompanied by all the regular brouhaha that surrounds the thorny issues of race, war, miscarriage of justice and social turbulence. Moreover, should we now condemn Shakespeare because his history plays depart from the accepted truth (did Richard III really do all those bad things?), or pan Herodotus’s Histories which notoriously mingled fact and fiction?

The past should never be a different country, but a living, breathing re-creation of a bygone era that can at once entertain and instruct.

As someone obsessed with both history and film, I’ve often been struck by how hesitant filmmakers can be when examining problematic or thorny issues from the past. In France, for example, huge public disputes often erupt over history films that deal with resistance and collaboration during the Second World War. Directors there are often accused of airbrushing out any inconsistencies that may jar with the intended depiction of ‘how things really happened’.

Think about Bruce Beresford’s 1980s film Breaker Morant. This much-loved and respected Australian historical film – which deals with the 1902 court martial of lieutenants Harry Morant, Peter Handcock and George Witton – is regarded as the best film ever made about the Boer War. And yet it contains a number of historical inaccuracies.

The same applies to Baz Luhrmann’s Australia (2008), in which we are led to believe that the Japanese invaded ‘Mission Island’ off the coast of Darwin. At the time, Germaine Greer called such factual errors ‘a disrespect bordering on contempt’. Critics of Greer reminded her that Australia was not meant to be a documentary.

And herein lies the problem – should films be true to the spirit of the story (and therefore not obliged to get all the facts correct), or is it the responsibility of the filmmakers to show what actually happened? After all, the all-important tagline in a history film is ‘Based on a true story’. But where does ‘true’ begin?

I think the most successful films are those that explore historical events from multiple angles and perspectives. Last year, Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer bundled three history films into one – the first hour shows us Oppenheimer studying at Cambridge and meeting Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg. Part Two sees the establishment of the Manhattan Project and the successful detonation of the plutonium bomb at Los Alamos. The final part is the aftermath of that momentous event and the profound effects it had on Oppenheimer’s personal life and career.

THE PAST SHOULD NEVER BE A DIFFERENT COUNTRY, BUT A LIVING, BREATHING RE-CREATION OF A BYGONE ERA THAT CAN AT ONCE ENTERTAIN AND INSTRUCT.

Oppenheimer could easily have ended at the end of Part Two, with the bomb a success and the war shortened by many months. But Nolan’s historical interest in the post-Los Alamos fallout, of congressional hearings, betrayal and treachery in the US political system and the growing spectre of the Cold War means that the final third adds depth and nuance to this story. History is often messy and inconclusive, and Oppenheimer shows us those processes at work.

Directors like Ridley Scott, Christopher Nolan or Steven Spielberg show us that any accurate, agreed-upon portrayal of history at a given moment in time can never escape from the director’s own artistic aims and ambitions. Some want to entertain, and others to educate. Others offer a neutral, detached view and others a warts and all version of a particular time and place.

Whether made in Hollywood, Australia, or anywhere else in the world, films about contested moments in history will always, it seems, be an uneasy blend of the accurate, the contested, and the invented.

Dr Ben McCann SFHEA is Associate Professor of French Studies – and an avid film scholar and writer. Illustration supplied: A still from the movie Oppenheimer.