ABSTRACT
In countries as diverse in culture and history as Japan, Russia, England, and Denmark, some of the earliest dramatic films involved the depiction of historical events and characters. A French drama critic in 1908 described the aspirations of film as not only the ability to reproduce the contemporary world, but also 'to animate the past, to reconstruct the great events of history through the performance of the actor and the evocation of atmosphere and milieu'. The ability to elicit strong, immediate emotion, the emphasis on the visual and aural, and the resulting embodied quality of the film experience in which we seem to live through events we witness on the screen – all these are no doubt the practices that most clearly distinguish the history film from history on the page, especially that produced by academics. Factors other than the quality of films kept historians from considering motion pictures a serious way of recounting the past.
