ABSTRACT
Other than on television, the key form for visualised engagement with an imagined, constructed past is film. While it is important to consider the British historical film as an entity, it is also crucial to recall that the audience watching it will compare it to other historical film product, anything from Goodfellas (Martin Scorsese, 1990) to The Pianist (Roman Polanski, 2002); film is increasingly transnational and global.1 Indeed, these two examples demonstrate the reach and complexity of the historical film. Goodfellas is a highly sophisticated, self-conscious, twisting piece of work examining life as a gangster. Drawing in some ways on the Godfather trilogy (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972, 1974, 1990), it was followed through the 1990s with a number of gangster and drug films set in the 1970s including Donnie Brasco (Mike Newell, 1997), Blow (Ted Demme, 2001), Boogie Nights (Paul Thomas Anderson, 1997) and American Gangster (Ridley Scott, 2007). The Pianist is an account of a Jewish Pole’s harrowing escape from the Nazis, and is part of the ongoing filmic response to the Holocaust, including Schindler’s List (Stephen Spielberg, 1993) and Life is Beautiful/La vita é bella (Roberto Benigni, 1997). Spielberg’s Munich (2005) complicated this set of tropes by making an historical thriller out of the vengeful Mossad counter-terrorist mission following the Black September assassination of Israeli Olympic athletes in 1972, clearly questioning the decisions of the Israeli state and reflecting on Jewishness as well as the American War on Terror post-9/11. As a consequence of this variety and scope there is not space here to consider historical film in real depth. The genre is vast and global.2
