Writing History with Lightning: Film Depictions of History Anonymous College

The depiction of the past in film is among the most salient themes in the history of film – yet it is also among the most complex. After all, the critic Andre Bazin once referred to cinema as “change mummified.”[1] The depiction of the past in film is by necessity a depiction of the time in which the film was made, which means that most historical films are to some degree or another comments on their own times. Woodrow Wilson, thinking of history itself, once described D.W. Griffith’s problematic Birth of a Nation as “writing history with lightning.”[2] By this, he referred to the dramatic power of cinema and the ways in which he felt the light of the film increased or maintained the dramatic power of history. However, Birth of a Nation is not the only film to use this dramatic power to write history or to engage in the historiographic project. The Battle of Algiers and Battleship Potemkin both use the unique form of cinema to do something similar, albeit for different political and aesthetic ends. This essay will explore how D.W. Griffith, Sergei Eisenstein, and Gillo Pontecorvo all use the medium of cinema to write history, and the implications of this type of history writing, or historiography, for the art form of cinema...