HISTORY ON TV
Stainfels, Peter
HISTORY ON TV PETER STEIJMFELS THE COMMON accusation that Americans are unmindful of their past may not survive 1976. The reason is simple. No longer do we mark great public moments by listening...
...Since the great public moment at hand is the Bicentennial, and therefore a rehearsal of our national past generally, it is natural that we should be inundated with historical "specials" -dramatic reenactments of everything from the struggle for independence to the Cuban missile crisis...
...History is an active effort to understand what we are by understanding what we were...
...I have myself enjoyed "The Adams Chronicles," even when, or occasionally especially when, they seem to relax into a variety of national high-school pageant...
...My proposal would not be good for a series, will not drive Sanford and Son out of the ratings, will not slow down ABC in the great network war or make a contender out of PBS...
...the corresponding rite for our day is a "special...
...As we pose new questions about ourselves, as we shift our perspectives and reexamine our evidence, history is full of changes and, for the open-minded, surprises...
...By "history" was" meant, evidently, what "actually happened," though assuming, indeed insisting upon the necessity of some selecting, shaping intelligence...
...Though Americans may learn about their past in 1976, we may nonetheless remain ignorant about history...
...Such a production need not be dry...
...The point would be that history is not a wax museum, the spectators almost as passive in their silent contemplation as the frozen figures they observe...
...And should my fingers be mangled in my typewriter keys or some other accident prevent me from holding a good book to read, I might actually watch some of the others...
...The Times headlined its scholarly reviews with a question, "Television Celebrates Our Past-But Is It History...
...No longer do we mark great public moments by listening patiently to orations or sermons...
...It is in this sense that all the TV "specials," however good, bad, or mediocre at representing the past, have yet to communicate to their viewers anything about "history...
...One could focus on some important development, of which the television audience may be presumed to have a shadowy awareness: the Boston Massacre, the Boston Tea Party, the debates leading to the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution-or to move into later history, as some "specials" already have, the outbreak of the Civil War or the dropping of atomic bombs on Japan...
...A "special" is a unit of television time which (a) is longer than half an hour...
...b) is devoted to a single topic or entertainer...
...on the contrary it should utilize all the devices, humorous as well as serious, of dramatic narratives and investigative documentaries...
...and (c) is foreshadowed by large portentous advertisements in all the newspapers...
...I would hope not...
...The tension in that headline was wound up in the contrast between "history," presumably accurate and sine ire et studio, and "celebrates," suggestive of uncritical approval if not of unvarnished chauvinism...
...But given a few of those ads suggesting that watching Channel X tonight is a patriotic duty, given the apparent willingness of sponsors to associate themselves with the past in understandable preference to the present, and given the possible interest of official agencies like the National Endowment for the Humanities in projects like this, the idea, I believe, is viable...
...Would the point of such an exercise be only to instill a sense of relativism about the past...
...John Adams and his assorted kin, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Sojourner Truth, Abraham Lincoln, Walt Whitman, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy have been, or will be, taking their place alongside Archie Bunker, Mary Tyler Moore, and Burt and Ernie...
...but some of the "specials" met with their approval, and much of the effort at least survived their scrutiny...
...But what if, instead, one contrasted "history" with "past," thinking of "history" not as a finished order of events, lived once and "reenacted" on the small screens in our homes, but as that very process, occurring in the present, of probing, questioning, selecting and shaping the evidence which remains of past events...
...So high has the flood of historical "specials" risen that a recent "Arts and Leisure" section of the Sunday New York Times had to call upon three distinguished American historians as television reviewers...
...It could project the spirit of detection, the tension of debate, and the challenge of questions to be resolved...
...The assignment really would not be so difficult to carry off...
...Using a combination of dramatic enactments and Rashomon-like reenactments, on-camera interviews with historians, and visual deployment of symbolic places and objects such as was done so strikingly in the popular Ascent of Man series, the program could treat its subject in the manner of successive waves of historians, passing over the same episode, say four or five times, each time adding complexities, contradictions, new interpretations, political implications...
...These historians made some critical observations on the tendency of televised history to shy from political complexity in favor of accepted piety and personal drama...
...Of course we could always wait until BBC does it.C does it...
Vol. 103 • March 1976 • No. 6
