Milcho Manchevski

....History, Film and This Issue

....The topic of history and film is normally confined to the margins of professional discourse because, for the most part, historians in their role as historians do not know what to do with and about film. Of course we often enough use films in our classrooms: October for the Bolshevik Revolution, Triumph of the Will for Nazism, Glory for African Americans in the Civil War, Battle of Algiers for decolonization, The Return of Martin Guerre for early modern France, Born on the Fourth of July for the Viet Nam war, Ceddo for social change in sub Saharan Africa. Each person reading this will no doubt have a list of favourites that can be used to introduce difficult topics to students who are baffled by the endless details and arguments of historical writing.
....But as historians it is still difficult for us to know exactly where and how film sits with regard to our own endeavours to tell the past. Does the historical film really do history - that is, make the past meaningful in some important way? Are historical films at all worth our while? Or are they just another form of entertainment, a dumbing down of the past for the mass market?
....As some readers will know, I have devoted a decade or so of my scholarly career to the historical film, to thinking about how we can think about it, to attempting to understand what, if anything, such a film adds to our discourse. In the course of this decade I have become convinced (surprise!) that film does provide a way of doing history, but only if you see it on its own terms, as a historical form that has its own rules of engagement with the past. During this period I have had occasion to attend more than a few conferences and symposia on the topic, but have never been satisfied that at any of these events there was a real meeting of the minds. The problem that has plagued all these conferences has been a certain lack of coherence - scholars approaching a diversity of films (often unknown to the other conferees) with diversity of methodologies. Over time the idea grew in me that if the latter seems inevitable, the former need not be. In other words: why not a history and film conference devoted to a single text? Would that not be a way of coming to grips with or reading more intensely and deeply the issues of history and film.
....This notion underlay the spring 1999 conference/workshop entitled "One Film - Many Histories", an event sponsored by the Robert Schuman Centre of the European University Institute in Florence, and held under the auspices of and ongoing Research Project, "The Cultural Construction of Community". The organizers were, along with yours truly, Professor Bo Strath, head of that project at EUI, and Erik Tangerstad, of Lund University in Sweden. All three of us are historians, and together we agreed on the general strategy of the workshop: no formal papers but, instead, participants speaking from notes meant to stimulate discussion Our sessions at the two-day workshop were lively and informal, and the resulting papers, which comprise most of this issue of Rethinking History, were mostly written subsequent to the work-shop. Along with those who publish in this issue of Rethinking History, other participants included Anton Kaes, UC Berceley; Thomas Elsaesser, University of Amsterdam; Keith Brown, Lampeter University; Bengt Holmen, University of Oslo; along with Hayden White, Reinhard Koselleck, some of the faculty and students of EUI and visitors from such other universities as Bologna, Munich, Ohio State, and the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.
....The overall aim of the workshop was to try to get a broader, deeper, wider (yes these descriptions are suspect), different, more comprehensive understanding of how a historical film can express the issues and meanings of the past. Particularly the consciously historical film that sets out to tell us what happened and why it happened and what we should think or feel about this happening. Given this aim, it may seem odd that our choice of film, Before the Rain, is not a "historical" in the strictest sense of the word, since it is set in present day Macedonia or, even, slightly in the future. Yet we felt that it is a film in which every frame, every speech, every action, every moment seems suffused with the memory and history. Also in its favour was its aesthetic, the fact that the film walks a fine line between the commercial products of Hollywood (where one can always argue that a film was only made to turn a quick buck) and the art house cinema of Europe (where one can always say the auteur has a quirky and personal vision of the world). Before the Rain is clearly serious about the meaning of history, yet accessible to those outside Macedonia. This was one reason it was nominated for an Academy Award as Best Foreign Film and won prizes at a number of film festivals.
....Perhaps the two major reasons we conference organizers chose the film was for its topic, ethnic conflict in contemporary Europe, and its problematic narrative, one that presents a past which is neither linear nor circular, that incorporates a temporal sense that is, literally, disjunctive and impossible. Such an innovative narrative strategy is bound to fascinate all of us who like to think that film can provide new ways of writing and revisioning the past.
....Before the Rain turned out to be a strange choice in another way - at least it was a choice overtaken by events. When we began to plan the workshop in the spring of 1998, the ongoing conflict in the former Yugoslavia was in a Kosovo and vast numbers of Albanian refugees were swarming into Macedonia. In one sense, the near future as depicted in Before the Rain had become the present, not quite the same as the present of the film, but like all presents, a period which alters past and future. We conferees, almost near enough to hear the airplanes but wholly safe in Florence, could only worry about such questions as the danger of our lack of perspective on events. Over us hovered the question: how can we know the now? How can we talk about a film that proposes a future that events have upstaged? Yet as academics, how can we not go on talking? As academics, what else can we do?
....In terms of scholarly interchange, the workshop was a success. For two days people from different fields - history, linguistics, cinema studies, political science - came together to discuss a single historical film. As good, inquisitive, forceful scholars they refused to adhere strictly to the themes we organizers had set. Often they strayed from the topic of history on film and the questions that we had posed. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that each approached the topic in his/her own way. The result, as seen in this volume, is an unusual, multi perspectival analysis of a single film that deals with history. In the following essays, Before the Rain is put into context and explicated from a variety of overlapping perspectives: the personal by filmmaker Milcho Manchevski, Macedonian culture by Victor Friedman, Balkan culture by Dina Iordanova, the national and global by Robert Burgoyne, traditions of historical landscape by Ian Christie, narrative strategies by Eric Tangerstad, and finally, film as history by yours truly. Taken together, these essays show that the Rashomon effect is not confined to telling the past but also to reading it. Each scholar has seen the same moving images, but each understands and explicates Before the Rain in a different way. The resulting collection should convince the most sceptical of historians that in its density and seriousness, film can be a least as complex a way of rendering the pas as the written word.
....A different but equally unusual relationship between visual and written history is exemplified by the one essay in this issue that does not derive from the workshop. "History as Voyeurism" was initially inspired by the recent French film, Queen Margot. When Moshe Sluhovsky became intrigued by the sexual stereotyping in that film, he was moved to a detailed examination of the whole tradition of how (mostly male) historians have over the centuries represented Marguerite de Valois - which means how they have been seduced by her image (mostly the one created by Alexander Dumas) and how Queen Margot, as they insist on calling her, became an object on which to play out their own sexual fantasies. For those who can accept the idea that history can exist on film, there is something particularly bracing (if not embracing) in such an argument. At least is shows that behind the discipline of history lies the indiscipline of desire. Maybe it is time for we historians to recognize this simple truth that every filmmaker historian already has to understand.

....Robert A. Rosenstone
....US Editor

Rethinking History Volume 4, Number 2, Summer 2000
........	Back
	C o n t e n t s 123 Editorial History, Film and This Issue One Film-Many Histories: An Inquiry Into Before the Rain 127 Synopsis of Before the Rain Robert A. Rosenstone 129 Rainmaking and Personal Truth Milcho Manchevski 135 Fable as History: The Macedonian Context Victor A. Friedman 147 Before the Rain in a Balkan Context Dina Iordanova 157 Ethnic Nationalism and Globalization Robert Burgoyne 165 Landscape and Location: Reading Filmic Space Historically Ian Christie 175 Before the Rain - After the War? Erik Tangerstad 183 A History of What Has Not Yet Happened Robert A. Rosenstone A r t i c l e 193 History as Voyeurism: From Marguerite de Valois to La Reine Margot Moshe Sluhovsky R e v i e w s 211 Kelly Boyd (1998) Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing Alun Munslow 215 Ewa Domanska (1998) Encounters: Philosophy of History after Postmodernism Bonnie Smith 217 Carlo Ginzberg (1999) History, Rhetoric and Proof Alan Spitzer 220 Richard Price (1998) The Convict and the Colonel: A Story of Colonialism and Resistance in the Caribbean Greg Dening 223 Steven Spielberg, Robert Rodat, & Frank Darabont (1998) Saving Private Ryan Terrence Malick (1998) The Thin Red Line Maria DiBattista 228 Donna Merwick (1999) Death of a Notary: Conquest and Change in Colonial New York Sheryl Kroen 231 Abstracts and Keywords 237 Notes on Contributors
Editorial
	....History, Film and This Issue ....The topic of history and film is normally confined to the margins of professional discourse because, for the most part, historians in their role as historians do not know what to do with and about film. Of course we often enough use films in our classrooms: October for the Bolshevik Revolution, Triumph of the Will for Nazism, Glory for African Americans in the Civil War, Battle of Algiers for decolonization, The Return of Martin Guerre for early modern France, Born on the Fourth of July for the Viet Nam war, Ceddo for social change in sub Saharan Africa. Each person reading this will no doubt have a list of favourites that can be used to introduce difficult topics to students who are baffled by the endless details and arguments of historical writing. ....But as historians it is still difficult for us to know exactly where and how film sits with regard to our own endeavours to tell the past. Does the historical film really do history - that is, make the past meaningful in some important way? Are historical films at all worth our while? Or are they just another form of entertainment, a dumbing down of the past for the mass market? ....As some readers will know, I have devoted a decade or so of my scholarly career to the historical film, to thinking about how we can think about it, to attempting to understand what, if anything, such a film adds to our discourse. In the course of this decade I have become convinced (surprise!) that film does provide a way of doing history, but only if you see it on its own terms, as a historical form that has its own rules of engagement with the past. During this period I have had occasion to attend more than a few conferences and symposia on the topic, but have never been satisfied that at any of these events there was a real meeting of the minds. The problem that has plagued all these conferences has been a certain lack of coherence - scholars approaching a diversity of films (often unknown to the other conferees) with diversity of methodologies. Over time the idea grew in me that if the latter seems inevitable, the former need not be. In other words: why not a history and film conference devoted to a single text? Would that not be a way of coming to grips with or reading more intensely and deeply the issues of history and film. ....This notion underlay the spring 1999 conference/workshop entitled "One Film - Many Histories", an event sponsored by the Robert Schuman Centre of the European University Institute in Florence, and held under the auspices of and ongoing Research Project, "The Cultural Construction of Community". The organizers were, along with yours truly, Professor Bo Strath, head of that project at EUI, and Erik Tangerstad, of Lund University in Sweden. All three of us are historians, and together we agreed on the general strategy of the workshop: no formal papers but, instead, participants speaking from notes meant to stimulate discussion Our sessions at the two-day workshop were lively and informal, and the resulting papers, which comprise most of this issue of Rethinking History, were mostly written subsequent to the work-shop. Along with those who publish in this issue of Rethinking History, other participants included Anton Kaes, UC Berceley; Thomas Elsaesser, University of Amsterdam; Keith Brown, Lampeter University; Bengt Holmen, University of Oslo; along with Hayden White, Reinhard Koselleck, some of the faculty and students of EUI and visitors from such other universities as Bologna, Munich, Ohio State, and the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. ....The overall aim of the workshop was to try to get a broader, deeper, wider (yes these descriptions are suspect), different, more comprehensive understanding of how a historical film can express the issues and meanings of the past. Particularly the consciously historical film that sets out to tell us what happened and why it happened and what we should think or feel about this happening. Given this aim, it may seem odd that our choice of film, Before the Rain, is not a "historical" in the strictest sense of the word, since it is set in present day Macedonia or, even, slightly in the future. Yet we felt that it is a film in which every frame, every speech, every action, every moment seems suffused with the memory and history. Also in its favour was its aesthetic, the fact that the film walks a fine line between the commercial products of Hollywood (where one can always argue that a film was only made to turn a quick buck) and the art house cinema of Europe (where one can always say the auteur has a quirky and personal vision of the world). Before the Rain is clearly serious about the meaning of history, yet accessible to those outside Macedonia. This was one reason it was nominated for an Academy Award as Best Foreign Film and won prizes at a number of film festivals. ....Perhaps the two major reasons we conference organizers chose the film was for its topic, ethnic conflict in contemporary Europe, and its problematic narrative, one that presents a past which is neither linear nor circular, that incorporates a temporal sense that is, literally, disjunctive and impossible. Such an innovative narrative strategy is bound to fascinate all of us who like to think that film can provide new ways of writing and revisioning the past. ....Before the Rain turned out to be a strange choice in another way - at least it was a choice overtaken by events. When we began to plan the workshop in the spring of 1998, the ongoing conflict in the former Yugoslavia was in a Kosovo and vast numbers of Albanian refugees were swarming into Macedonia. In one sense, the near future as depicted in Before the Rain had become the present, not quite the same as the present of the film, but like all presents, a period which alters past and future. We conferees, almost near enough to hear the airplanes but wholly safe in Florence, could only worry about such questions as the danger of our lack of perspective on events. Over us hovered the question: how can we know the now? How can we talk about a film that proposes a future that events have upstaged? Yet as academics, how can we not go on talking? As academics, what else can we do? ....In terms of scholarly interchange, the workshop was a success. For two days people from different fields - history, linguistics, cinema studies, political science - came together to discuss a single historical film. As good, inquisitive, forceful scholars they refused to adhere strictly to the themes we organizers had set. Often they strayed from the topic of history on film and the questions that we had posed. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that each approached the topic in his/her own way. The result, as seen in this volume, is an unusual, multi perspectival analysis of a single film that deals with history. In the following essays, Before the Rain is put into context and explicated from a variety of overlapping perspectives: the personal by filmmaker Milcho Manchevski, Macedonian culture by Victor Friedman, Balkan culture by Dina Iordanova, the national and global by Robert Burgoyne, traditions of historical landscape by Ian Christie, narrative strategies by Eric Tangerstad, and finally, film as history by yours truly. Taken together, these essays show that the Rashomon effect is not confined to telling the past but also to reading it. Each scholar has seen the same moving images, but each understands and explicates Before the Rain in a different way. The resulting collection should convince the most sceptical of historians that in its density and seriousness, film can be a least as complex a way of rendering the pas as the written word. ....A different but equally unusual relationship between visual and written history is exemplified by the one essay in this issue that does not derive from the workshop. "History as Voyeurism" was initially inspired by the recent French film, Queen Margot. When Moshe Sluhovsky became intrigued by the sexual stereotyping in that film, he was moved to a detailed examination of the whole tradition of how (mostly male) historians have over the centuries represented Marguerite de Valois - which means how they have been seduced by her image (mostly the one created by Alexander Dumas) and how Queen Margot, as they insist on calling her, became an object on which to play out their own sexual fantasies. For those who can accept the idea that history can exist on film, there is something particularly bracing (if not embracing) in such an argument. At least is shows that behind the discipline of history lies the indiscipline of desire. Maybe it is time for we historians to recognize this simple truth that every filmmaker historian already has to understand. ....Robert A. Rosenstone ....US Editor
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