French War Films and National Identity By Noah McLaughlin

and his main hypothesis is that “[n]early all films refer, if indirectly, to current events” and thus historical reconstructions offer “a view of the present embedded in the past.” ⁶ Sorlin’s work, especially the first chapter, reads like a primer for people approaching film studies for the first time—which many historians were in 1980. While The Film in History is an important first step for cinema’s acceptance into historical studies, Sorlin remains quite conservative. If one can study a movie as a “document of social history that […] aims primarily at illuminating the way in which individuals and groups of people understand their own time,” ⁷ the cinema is still not the equal of written history in its capacity to investigate the past. Sorlin admits that ambiguity can be a positive aspect of cinema, but he still praises the notion that historical reconstructions take for granted the independently existing nature of history. ⁸

There are two kinds of descendants of Sorlin’s work. The first is typified by Natalie Zemon Davis’ Slaves on Screen. Davis is clearly a traditional historian (though she is interested in untraditional and marginal areas) who comes to the study of film with the precepts of mainstream historiography. She is quite clear about the criteria for writing about history,and though she allows for some liberty in historical films, she still applies a conventional historiographic model to cinema. ⁹ This is most apparent when she asks the question, “Can there be lively cinematic equivalents to what prose historians try to accomplish […] through modifying and qualifying words [such as ‘perhaps,’ ‘it may be that,’ ‘we are uncertain’]?” ¹⁰ Films such as Hiroshima mon amour have already answered this question by performing historical investigations that overflow with contingency. Also, her metaphor is awkward if not erroneous, since it applies a purely linguistic concept to a medium which has consistently defied such methodology.

It might be an understatement to say that Robert Rosenstone has taken Sorlin’s bold notion and extended it. For Rosenstone, a film is much more than a “document of social history”; the cinematic medium presents us with a radical—but still valid—way to represent and investigate the past. In works such as Film on History/History on Film and Experiments in Rethinking History (edited with Alun Munslow), Rosenstone