American Film Revised

If one were to sit up and pay attention to Jon Lewis’ American Film: A History, they would realize that the history of American cinema is not merely a linear progression of historically significant dates or landmark moments, but a story in which history shaped the motion pictures and motion pictures shaped history. Like history, the story of cinema is not a dead thing – an easily understood as the story of artifacts left behind, but a story in which relationships bring things to the surface.

Film is shaped by history as it chronicles the fears and hopes of an era, and its zeitgeist, just as it skews and re-frames, like any other form of artistic expression, our perception of our own history. In Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) director Stanley Kubrick makes satirical work of Cold War geopolitics by hypothesizing an absurdly inadvertent nuclear attack. Kubrick and his screenwriters also milk the material for a good puerile laughs by depicting war imagery as a series of comical psycho-sexual symbols.

While the film was produced and released at a time when few outspokenly criticized geopolitical thinking, its timeliness has accorded it a relevance that cannot be said for similar war satires produced in later decades. Contrast that with D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915), a politically charged interpretation of post-Civil War events. Unlike Strangelove, it was produced a whole five decades after the events it depicts. The Birth of a Nation functions as historical retrospective – conjuring up a period-based narrative openly hostile to the African-American people.

Griffith’s film rejects the notion that black people could ever be integrated into the civilized Aryan world by portraying them as savage Other infiltrating respectable white living. One novel form of historical signficance is the referential motion picture, which gives topical emphasis on film making itself. This is best exemplified by Singing in the Rain (1952) in which glamorous star Lina Lamont’s voice proves to be utterly unappealing for the ears and hearts of potential moviegoers and gets dubbed over by voice Kathy Seldon, an under-employed chorus girl.

A historical picture in its own right, Singing in the Rain is set in the period after Jazz Singer (1927) brought sound to the movies, and gives audiences a comical look at the awkward transition from silent pictures to talking features in the late 20s. Other films, like Blade Runner (1982) are historical in how they hypothesize the future. It would be a mistake to call the film a majestic exercise of futuristic prognostication. Instead, it functions as a historical document by examining present concerns and where they may go if they continue their course into tomorrow.

A rather uncomplicated romance mystery involving synthetic humans infiltrating Earth, Blade Runner examines society’s xenophobia towards immigrants while contrasting it against an ironic reliance on technology. All this happens in Los Angeles, 2019 – where the world is highly globalized, politically corporatized and environmentally devastated. Presenting history in film is also a means to reconcile the neuroses of individuals, if not generations with past events. Using advanced technology, director Robert Zemeckis revises history to assuage the boomer generation’s discomforts in Forrest Gump (1994).

A low IQ simpleton manages to stumble his way into just about every important event in American history from the 50s to the 80s. Armed with nothing but good old Southern morals, he survives three decades of social tumult in America while his self-aware peers succumb to AIDS, war injuries and other sorts of misfortune. History is smoothened out by digital technology, allowing a static view of history to prevail: one where the survivors never question their assumptions about the ways of the world.