The Filmmaker as Historian

This book examines the potential of audiovisual accounts of the past as a form of history making and dismisses the view of academic historians that history films are of no value. While this may be true of most, whether Hollywood features or television documentaries, this is not invariably so. As evidence, the book examines a mix of recent costume dramas and presenter-led documentaries dealing with episodes in the history of Britain, France and the United States between the American Revolution and the First World War. For the most part, the authors accept that the documentary is structurally the better of the two genres as a reliable vehicle for introducing past events in our modern audiovisual age. But they emphasize that the greatest potential lies in a hybrid genre which is a costume drama, but one where the filmmaker uses documentary techniques to balance confirmations of truth with dramatic narrative.