ABSTRACT
FILM AS AN INSTRUMENT OF PUBLIC MEMORY This section of my study takes up the question of the role of historical films in managing collective memory. Film-and other “nonprofessional” forms of social remembrance in television, journalism, and the popular press-have not been welcomed by the ranks of academic historians, who have often complained about the media’s lack of method and training and their tendency to sacrifice truth to drama and emotion. However, the importance of cinema in this social endeavor is undeniable. Indeed, historians acknowledge that filmic representation has such power that it overwhelms other forms of recollection by imposing indelible images of the past on the public imagination. They are at a loss in their efforts to combat and correct what they consider erroneous but compelling representations. Historical “fictions,” they argue, tend to replace the real documents of events in the public imagination. Marc Ferro laments in an article from 1987: “Are not the images of the Revolution of 1905 which dominate our memory those from Eisenstein’s work [in The Battleship Potemkin]?”1
