ABSTRACT
This chapter claims about the film-maker as historian – about what such a phrase can and might mean. It argues that certain historical films are able to render the past in a meaningful way, render it well enough so that the issues surrounding the history of race in America, or the Bolshevik Revolution, are brought before us anew. The chapter explains how certain film-makers have over their careers created a large enough body of works to be considered not just as one-shot historians of a single topic, but as historians in a broader sense – ongoing interpreters of a nation, an era, a field. To suggest that film-makers can be historians is to reach for a meaning of that word that long predates our current idea, which dates from the nineteenth century, that history is a matter of telling the past as it really was – or in the case of film, showing us the past as it really was.
