ABSTRACT
Film clearly changes the rules of the historical game. The medium and its practices for constructing a past – all ensure that the historical world on film will be different from that on the page. In terms of informational content, intellectual density, or theoretical insight, film will always be less complex than written history. Film creates its own sort of truth, one that involves a multi-level past that has so little to do with language that it is difficult to describe adequately in words. Certainly the historical world created by film is potentially much more complex than written text. Film also utilizes data, if in a rather more casual way, before it too launches into the same realm. Vision, metaphor, overall argument, or moral is precisely the point at which film and written history come the closest to each other.
