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History and all that jazz….

Date with historic events Scenes from blockbuster movies ‘Gladiator,’ ‘300’ and ‘Braveheart’

The Battle of Thermopylae (480 B.C.) was a gruesome affair. A small army of 300 Spartiate warriors, under King Leonidas, held off against a horde of Persian invaders led by Xerxes I until Ephialtes, a Greek, betrayed them. Thus, the Spartans were overwhelmed and massacred. Can you spot the factual errors in the sentence?

If your source of knowledge about the Spartans or the Battle of Thermopylae is Zack Snyder’s ‘300’, you probably wouldn’t be able to because in the interest of theatrics, the movie conveniently ignored to mention the 6,000 Peloponnesian allies who fought along with the 300 Spartans. Most historians call Snyder’s interpretation of both Spartan society and the events of the battle as highly inaccurate.

While movies like ‘300,’ ‘Gladiator’ or ‘Braveheart’ tend to dramatise events, they still manage to tell the audience about historic events. Not many people knew about a young Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara’s trip across the South American continent with his friend Alberto Granado on an old, leaky Norton motorcycle nor did many know that he had written a book called ‘The Motorcycle Diaries’ on his experiences until a movie of the same name was made. Examples like this are many.

Divya Kannan, a postgraduate student of history at Jawaharlal Nehru University says: “Undoubtedly, historical films reach a larger audience than academic works and are bound to create a lasting impression on people. These films provide an insight into what and how certain historical events would have been and try to assess their relevance in our present situation.”

In most cases, it sparks a renewed interest to know more about or to even cross-check the clarity of the events as they were portrayed on screen. The flipside to this is that it precludes many from making their own judgments. The average cinema fan needn’t necessarily reach out for a reference book to verify facts after they watch a movie.

Arash Fazli, a research scholar in Cultural Studies and mediaperson from Hyderabad says: “It’s the intellectual equivalent of instant coffee – get all the ‘fundas’ about the whole thing in three hours flat; have a great time in the process, and come out of the theatre well-informed and well entertained. History, however, is far more complex than what a cinematic narrative would suggest. The popular format with its clear cut heroes and villains and its dramatic plot does not allow you to think critically. The problem is not with the medium of cinema per se. It is with the popular format of mainstream cinema which seeks to entertain and thrill more than to educate.”

The problem is when historical events are used in a popular format they inevitably get diluted. People are drawn to this caricatured, sensationalised, dramatised version of history and they love it because of the melodrama. For example, anyone who has seen movies like Bernardo Bertolucci’s ‘The Last Emperor’ or Sir Richard Attenborough’s ‘Gandhi’ comes away with a highly embellished view of these historical individuals and they think with that three hour movie they’ve understood who that person was and what the whole issue was about. When actual events are altered to suit the storyline, authenticity-which is often expected from these movies, gets sacrificed in the process.

The films do harm when they are not founded on real academic research and are loosely based on mythology and folktales or even rumours for that matter. Of course, objectivity and veracity are not easy to adhere to since historical writing itself often tends to be a selective and biased activity. Historians face the same issue of accuracy when they have to translate the epideictic narratives of the bards and court historians.

Cinematic history is best when partnered with historiography, but the problem is when the visual substitute tends to replace real academic study. Well, if Herodotus, the father of history himself was allowed to juxtapose fact, fiction and mythology in his works, maybe we must allow our filmmakers a certain degree of poetic license. No human narrative, after all, is perfect.

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