ABSTRACT
It has become a truism to observe that historical films tell us as much, and often more, about the era in which they are made than the one they choose to portray. Jean Renoir's portrait of the French Revolution, La marseil-laise, raises issues which confronted the Popular Front in 1938; Sergei Eisenstein's medieval epic, Alexander Nevsky, reveals the fear of invasion which haunted the Soviet State of 1936. Set in the past, historical films bear witness to the present even as they help form our vision of the future. No one could deny, for example, the role played by the Hollywood Western in shaping America's continuing sense of a mythic past, an imperial destiny.
