JFK: Historical Fact/Historical Film

Abstract

To THOSE OF US INTERESTED IN HISTORICAL FILMS, the fuss in the media overJFK feels familiar. Complaints that the film bends and twists history; accusations that director Oliver Stone willfully mixes fact and fiction, fails to delineate clearly between evidence and speculation, creates characters who never existed and incidents that never occurred-these are the sorts of charges made every time a historical film on a sensitive subject appears. With JFK, the controversy is particularly heated because of both the topic and its treatment. The film hits us with a double whammy: one of America's most popular directors not only explores our recent history's most touchy subject but does so in a bravura motion picture that (maybe it's a triple whammy) also takes a highly critical stance toward major branches of the American government. Complaints over the misuse of history in film seem to be based on two notions: first, that a historical film is no more than a piece of written history transferred to the screen and thus subject to the same rules of historical practice; and, second, that a fact is a fact and history is little more than an organized compilation of such facts. We who write history should find these assertions questionable. At the least, we have to be aware that never stand alone but are always called forth (or constituted) by the work in which they then become embedded. In order to evaluate the way in which any work of history-including the motion pictureuses facts (or data) to evoke the past, we must investigate the aims, forms, and possibilities of the kind of historical project in which those data appear. All this is to say something simple but important: a film is not a book. To judge the contribution of a work like JFK, we must try to understand just what it is a historical film can do. As a dramatic motion picture,JFK comes to us in a form that has been virtually unexplored by people interested in the study of past events. Neither historians nor filmmakers have given much thought to the most basic questions about the possibilities and standards of history when it is represented in the visual media. Evaluations of historical films in essays and reviews are always made on an individual basis. Certainly, the historical profession has no agreed-upon way to answer any of the following questions: What kind of historical knowledge or understanding can a historical film provide? How can we situate it in relation to written history? What are its responsibilities to the historical fact? What can it tell us about the past that the written word cannot?

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