The filmmaker as historian.

Every artform is ideal for tracking humanity's trajectory, and that agenda (I guess) has contributed to each one's own history. Be it through Shakespeare's histories, Austen's explorations of Victorian England, Sidney Nolan's paintings of Ned Kelly or even contemporary political protest songs, many of the most enduring classics are ones that either recreate or try to revise the past. And cinema, the 20^th century's most prominent artform, has offered a surplus of them.

From D. W. Griffith's technologically seminal but thoroughly racist 1915 American Civil War epic The Birth of a Nation to 1939's Gone with the Wind (based on Margaret Mitchell's novel) ­and (worst of all) Walt Disney's notorious 1946 flick Song of the South, early Hollywood's treatment of race was, sadly, very reflective of pre-Civil Rights Movement America, but even if their industry could be more diverse today, they do at least treat race issues in American film more sensibly now. Not just with movies about blacks or Asians et cetera but also those subjected historically to religious or ethnic persecution, like in Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List (1993).

   

    

Stepping away from Hollywood briefly, world cinema deepens the barrell exponentially. Akira Kurosawa, probably the most famous director not in the English language, put his own stamp on Samurai legends and subsequently influenced a broad sweep of Hollywood filmmaking from the '60s on. Italian Sergio Leone did likewise after he took the Western – a genre which, of course, nostalgically reimagined America's Old West – and concocted the Spaghetti Western. And in Australia, we have produced many highly successful and important movies about Indigenous peoples' history, like Phillip Noyce's Rabbit-Proof Fence (2002), Fred Schepisi's The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1978) and even Rachel Perkins' fanciful musical Bran Nue Dae (2010), along with strong studies of war and political conflict like Robert Connolly's Balibo (2009), Mel Gibson's Hacksaw Ridge (my #1 movie of 2016) and my top Aussie film ever, Peter Weir's Gallipoli (1981). Europe, perhaps inevitably, has produced many of its own great Holocaust movies, like Roman Polanski's The Pianist (2002), Roberto Benigni's Life Is Beautiful (1997), Louis Malle's semiautobiographical Au Revoir, Les Enfants (my #1 of 1987) and Agnieszka Holland's Europa Europa (1990).

           

And then there are the revisionist period movies that turn history on its head, whether intentionally or not. Rather than be a grumpy arsehole and focus on the unintentional ones, I'm going to celebrate some of the deliberately anachronistic (and good) ones. Those that come to mind are Milos Forman's Amadeus (my #1 of 1984), an adaptation of Peter Shaffer's play which presents the fictional rivalry between Mozart and Italian composer Antonio Salieri and which won eight Academy Awards including Best Picture; Quentin Tarantino's WWII epic Inglourious Basterds (2009), which discusses how we use cinema to trace or rewrite history, and most of all Robert Zemeckis' Forrest Gump (1994), based on Winston Groom's novel, whose hero comes to embody his whole generation as he becomes intertwined with many significant Cold War-era events. A more recent example is Martin Scorsese's Hugo (my #1 of 2011), based on Brian Selznick's novel, about an orphaned boy living in a train station whose automaton had a role in the invention of cinema. And for two rather looser examples, the Star Wars Saga is littered with historical inspiration (namely, Richard Nixon and the Vietcong respectively became Emperor Palpatine and the Ewoks) and, according to IMDb.com, the Nazi rallies in Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will visually inspired, of all things, the “Be Prepared” sequence in The Lion King (1994)*.

   

However it's used, and whatever their intentions, history and filmmakers are mutually indebted bedfellows.

* http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0110357/trivia?ref_=tt_trv_trv