Historiography and Historiophoty

Author(s): Hayden White

Reviewed work(s):
Source: The American Historical Review, Vol. 93, No. 5 (Dec., 1988), pp. 1193-1199
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the American Historical Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1873534 .
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 AHR Forum
Historiography and Historiophoty

HAYDEN WHITE

ROBERT ROSENSTONE'S ESSAY RAISES AT LEAST TWO QUESTIONS that should be of

eminent concern to professional historians. The first is that of the relative
adequacy of what we might call "historiophoty"(the representation of history and
our thought about it in visual images and filmic discourse) to the criteria of truth
and accuracy presumed to govern the professional practice of historiography (the
representation of history in verbal images and written discourse). Here the issue
is whether it is possible to "translate" a given written account of history into a
visual-auditory equivalent without significant loss of content. The second question
has to do with what Rosenstone calls the "challenge" presented by historiophoty
to historiography. It is obvious that cinema (and video) are better suited than
written discourse to the actual representation of certain kinds of historical
phenomena-landscape, scene, atmosphere, complex events such as wars, battles,
crowds, and emotions. But, Rosenstone asks, can historiophoty adequately convey
the complex, qualified, and critical dimensions of historical thinking about events,
which, according to Ian Jarvie, at least, is what makes any given representation of
the past a distinctly "historical" account?
In many ways, the second question is more radical than the first in its implications
for the way we might conceptualize the tasks of professional historiography in our
age. The historical evidence produced by our epoch is often as much visual as it
is oral and written in nature. Also, the communicative conventions of the human
sciences are increasingly as much pictorial as verbal in their predominant modes
of representation. Modern historians ought to be aware that the analysis of visual
images requires a manner of "reading" quite different from that developed for the
study of written documents. They should also recognize that the representation
of historical events, agents, and processes in visual images presupposes the mastery
of a lexicon, grammar, and syntax-in other words, a language and a discursive
mode-quite different from that conventionally used for their representation in
verbal discourse alone. All too often, historians treat photographic, cinematic, and
video data as if they could be read in the same way as a written document. We are
inclined to treat the imagistic evidence as if it were at best a complement of verbal
evidence, rather than as a supplement, which is to say, a discourse in its own right
and one capable of telling us things about its referents that are both different from
what can be told in verbal discourse and also of a kind that can only be told by
means of visual images.
1193
1194 Hayden White

Some information about the past can be provided only by visual images. Where
imagistic evidence is lacking, historical investigation finds a limit to what it can
legitimately assert about the way things may have appeared to the agents acting
on a given historical scene. Imagistic (and especially photographic and cinematic)
evidence provides a basis for a reproduction of the scenes and atmosphere of past
events much more accurate than any derived from verbal testimony alone. The
historiography of any period of history for which photographs and films exist will
be quite different, if not more accurate, than that focused on periods known
primarily by verbal documentation.
So, too, in our historiographical practices, we are inclined to use visual images
as a complement of our written discourse, rather than as components of a discourse
in its own right, by means of which we might be able to say something different
from and other than what we can say in verbal form. We are inclined to use pictures
primarily as "illustrations" of the predications made in our verbally written
discourse. We have not on the whole exploited the possibilities of using images as
a principal medium of discursive representation, using verbal commentary only
diacritically, that is to say, to direct attention to, specify, and emphasize a meaning
conveyable by visual means alone.

ROSENSTONE PROPERLY INSISTS THAT SOME THINGS-he cites landscapes, sounds,

strong emotions, certain kinds of conflicts between individuals and groups,
collective events and the movements of crowds-can be better represented on film
(and, we might add, video) than in any merely verbal account. "Better" here would
mean not only with greater verisimilitude or stronger emotive effect but also less
ambiguously, more accurately. Rosenstone appears to falter before the charge,
made by purists, that the historical film is inevitably both too detailed (in what it
shows when it is forced to use actors and sets that may not resemble perfectly the
historical individuals and scenes of which it is a representation) and not detailed
enough (when it is forced to condense a process that might have taken years to
occur, the written account of which might take days to read, into a two or
three-hour presentation). But this charge, as he properly remarks, hinges on a
failure to distinguish adequately between a mirror image of a phenomenon and
other kinds of representations of it, of which the written historical account itself
would be only one instance. No history, visual or verbal, "mirrors" all or even the
greater part of the events or scenes of which it purports to be an account, and this
is true even of the most narrowly restricted "micro-history." Every written history
is a product of processes of condensation, displacement, symbolization, and
qualification exactly like those used in the production of a filmed representation.
It is only the medium that differs, not the way in which messages are produced.
Jarvie apparently laments the poverty of the "information load" of the historical
film, whether "fictional" (such as The Return of Martin Guerre)or "documentary"
(such as Rosenstone's own The GoodFight). But this is to confuse the question of
scale and level of generalization at which the historical account ought "properly"
to operate with that of the amount of evidence needed to support the generali-
 Historiographyand Historiophoty 1195

zations and the level of interpretation on which the account is cast. Are short books
about long periods of history in themselves non-historical or anti-historical in
nature? Was Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall, or for that matter Fernand
Braudel's The Mediterranean,of sufficient length to do justice to its subject?' What
is the proper length of a historical monograph? How much information is needed
to support any given historical generalization? Does the amount of information
required vary with the scope of the generalization? And, if so, is there a normative
scope against which the propriety of any historical generalization can be mea-
sured? On what principle, it might be asked, is one to assess the preference for an
account that might take a hour to read (or view) as against that which takes many
hours, even days, to read, much less assimilate to one's store of knowledge?
According to Rosenstone, Jarvie complemented his critique of the necessarily
impoverished "information load" of the historical film with two other objections:
first, the tendency of the historical film to favor "narration" (Rosenstone himself
notes that the two historical films he worked on "compress[ed] the past to a closed
world by telling a single, linear story with, essentially, a single interpretation") over
"analysis"; and, second, the presumed incapacity of film to represent the true
essence of historiography, which, according to Jarvie, consists less of "descriptive
narrative" than of "debates between historians aboutjust what exactly did happen,
why it happened, and what would be an adequate account of its significance."2
Rosenstone is surely right to suggest that the historical film need not necessarily
feature narrative at the expense of analytical interests. In any event, if a film like
The Return of Martin Guerreturns out to resemble a "historical romance," it is not
because it is a narrative film but rather because the romance genre was used to plot
the story that the film wished to tell. There are other genres of plots, conventionally
considered to be more "realistic"than the romance, that might have been used to
shape the events depicted in this story into a narrative of a different kind. If Martin
Guerreis a "historical romance," it would be more proper to compare it, not with
"historical narrative" but with the "historical novel," which has a problematic of its
own, the discussion of which has concerned historians since its invention in much
the same way that the discussion of film today ought properly to concern them.
And it ought to concern them for the reasons outlined in Rosenstone's essay,
namely, because it raises the specter of the "fictionality" of the historian's own
discourse, whether cast in the form of a narrative account or in a more "analytical,"
non-narrative mode.
Like the historical novel, the historical film draws attention to the extent to which
it is a constructed or, as Rosenstone calls it, a "shaped" representation of a reality
we historians would prefer to consider to be "found" in the events themselves or,
if not there, then at least in the "facts" that have been established by historians'
investigation of the record of the past. But the historical monograph is no less

' Edward Gibbon, TheHistoryof theDeclineand Fall of theRomanEmpire(London, 1776-88); Fernand

Brandel, The Mediterraneanand the MediterraneanWorld (New York and London, 1972).
2 Robert A. Rosenstone, "History in Images/History in Words: Reflections on the Possibility of Really
Putting History onto Film," AHR, 93 (December 1988): 1174; I. C. Jarvie, "Seeing through Movies,"
Philosophyof the Social Sciences, 8 (1978): 378.
1196 Hayden White

"shaped" or constructed than the historical film or historical novel. It may be

shaped by different principles, but there is no reason why a filmed representation
of historical events should not be as analytical and realistic as any written account.

JARVIE'S CHARACTERIZATION OF THE ESSENCE OF HISTORIOGRAPHY ("debates between

historians about just what exactly did happen, why it happened, and what would
be an adequate account of its significance") alerts us to the problem of how and
to what purpose historians transform information about "events" into the "facts"
that serve as the subject matter of their arguments. Events happen or occur; facts
are constituted by the subsumption of events under a description, which is to say,
by acts of predication. The "adequacy" of any given account of the past, then,
depends on the question of the choice of the set of concepts actually used by
historians in their transformation of information about events into, not "facts" in
general, but "facts" of a specific kind (political facts, social facts, cultural facts,
psychological facts). The instability of the very distinction between "historical" facts
on the one side and non-historical ("natural" facts, for example) on the other, a
distinction without which a specifically historical kind of knowledge would be
unthinkable, indicates the constructivist nature of the historian's enterprise. When
considering the utility or adequacy of filmed accounts of historical events, then,
it would be well to reflect upon the ways in which a distinctively imagistic discourse
can or cannot transform information about the past into facts of a specific kind.
I do not know enough about film theory to specify more precisely the elements,
equivalent to the lexical, grammatical, and syntactical dimensions of spoken or
written language, of a distinctly filmic discourse. Roland Barthes insisted that still
photographs do not and could not predicate-only their titles or captions could
do so. But cinema is quite another matter. Sequences of shots and the use of
montage or closeups can be made to predicate quite as effectively as phrases,
sentences, or sequences of sentences in spoken or written discourse. And if cinema
can predicate, then it can just as surely do all the things that Jarvie considered to
constitute the essence of written historical discourse. Moreover, it should not be
forgotten that the sound film has the means by which to complement visual
imagery with a distinctive verbal content that need not sacrifice analysis to the
exigencies of dramatic effects. As for the notion that a filmed portrayal of historical
events could not be "defend[ed]" and "footnote[d]," respond to objections, and
"criticize the opposition," there is no reason at all to suppose that this could not
in principle be done.3 There is no law prohibiting the production of a historical
film of sufficient length to do all of these things.
Rosenstone's list of the effects of historians' prejudices against "historiophoty"
is sketchy but full enough. He indicates that many of the problems posed by the
effort to "put history onto film" stem from the notion that the principal task is to
translate what is already a written discourse into an imagistic one.4 Resistance to

3Jarvie, "Seeing through Movies," 378.

4 Rosenstone, "History in Images/History in Words," 1175.
 Historiographyand Historiophoty 1197

the effort to put history onto film centers for the most part on the question of what
gets lost in this process of translation. Among the things supposedly lost are
accuracy of detail, complexity of explanation, the auto-critical and inter-critical
dimensions of historiological reflection, and the qualifications of generalizations
necessitated by, for instance, the absence or unavailability of documentary
evidence. Rosenstone seems to grant the force of Jarvie's claim that the "infor-
mation load" of the filmed representation of historical events and processes is
inevitably impoverished when he considers the question of whether a "thinning of
data" on the screen "makes for poor history." While pointing out that film permits
us to "see landscapes, hear sounds, witness strong emotions. . . , or view physical
conflict between individuals and groups," he seems unsure whether historiophoty
might not "play down the analytical" aspects of historiography and favor appeals
to the emotive side of the spectator's engagement with images. But, at the same
time, he insists that there is nothing inherently anti-analytical about filmed
representations of history and certainly nothing that is inherently anti-
historiological about historiophoty. And, in his brief consideration of the film
documentary, Rosenstone turns the force of the anti-historiophoty argument back
on those who, in making this argument, appear to ignore the extent to which any
kind of historiography shares these same limitations.5
He grants, for example, that, although the film documentary strives for the
effect of a straightforwardly direct and objective account of events, it is always a
"shaped"-fashioned or stylized-representation thereof. "[W]e must remember,"
he writes, "that on the screen we see not the events themselves ... but selected
images of those events."6 The example he gives is that of a film shot of a cannon
being fired followed by another shot of an explosion of the (or a) shell some
distance away. Such a sequence, he suggests, is, properly speaking, fictional rather
than factual, because, obviously, the camera could not have been simultaneously
in the two places where first the firing and then the explosion occurred. What we
have, then, is a pseudo-factual representation of a cause-effect relation. But is this
representation "false" thereby, that is to say, is it false because the explosion shown
in the second shot is not that of the shell fired in the first shot but rather is a shot
of some other shell, fired from who knows where?
In this case, the notion that the sequence of images is false would require a
standard of representational literalness that, if applied to historiography itself,
would render it impossible to write. In fact, the "truthfulness" of the sequence is
to be found not at the level of concreteness but rather at another level of
representation, that of typification. The sequence should be taken to represent a
typeof event. The referent of the sequence is the typeof event depicted, not the
two discrete events imaged, first, the firing of a shell and, then, its explosion. The
spectator is not being "fooled" by such a representation nor is there anything
duplicitous in such a rendering of a cause-and-effect sequence. The veracity of the
representationi hinges on the question of the likelihood of this typeof cause-and-

I Rosenstone, "History in Images/History in Words," 1178-80.

' Rosenstone, "History in Images/History in Words," 1180.
1198 Hayden White

effect sequence occurring at specific times and places and under certain conditions,
namely, in the kind of war made possible by a certain kind of industrial-military
technology and fought in a particular time and place.
Indeed, it is a convention of written history to represent the causes and effects
of such events in precisely this way, in a sequence of images that happens to be
verbal rather than visual, to be sure, but no less "fictional" for being so. The
concreteness, precision of statement, and accuracy of detail of a sentence such as,
"The sniper's bullet fired from a nearby warehouse struck President Kennedy in
the head, wounding him fatally," are not in principle denied to a filmed depiction
either of the event referred to in the sentence or of the cause-and-effect relation
that it cites as an explanation. One can imagine a situation in which enough
cameras were deployed in such a way as to have captured both the sniper's shot
and the resultant effect with greater immediacy than that feigned in the verbal
representation and, indeed, with greater factual precision, inasmuch as the verbal
utterance depends on an inference from effect to cause for which no specific
documentation exists. In the filmed representations of this famous event, the
ambiguity that still pervades our knowledge of it has been left intact and not
dispelled by the specious concreteness suggested in the provision of the "details"
given in the verbal representation. And if this is true of micro-events, such as the
assassination of a head of state, how much more true is it of the representation in
written history of macro-events?
For example, when historians list or indicate the "effects" of a large-scale
historical event, such as a war or a revolution, they are doing nothing different
from what an editor of a documentary film does in showing shots of an advancing
army followed by shots of enemy troops surrendering or fleeing, followed by shots
of the triumphant force entering a conquered city. The difference between a
written account and a filmed account of such a sequence turns less on the general
matter of accuracy of detail than on the different kinds of concreteness with which
the images, in the one case verbal, in the other visual, are endowed. Much depends
on the nature of the "captions" accompanying the two kinds of images, the written
commentary in the verbal account and the voice-over or subtitles in the visual one,
that "frame" the depicted events individually and the sequence as a whole. It is the
nature of the claims made for the images considered as evidence that determines
both the discursive function of the events and the criteria to be employed in the
assessment of their veracity as predicative utterances.
Thus, for example, the depiction, in Richard Attenborough's film Gandhi, of the
anonymous South African railway conductor who pushed the young Gandhi from
the train, is not a misrepresentation insofar as the actor playing the role may not
have possessed the physical features of the actual agent of that act. The veracity
of the scene depends on the depiction of a person whose historical significance
derived from the kind of act he performed at a particular time and place, which
act was a function of an identifiable type of role-playing under the kinds of social
conditions prevailing at a general, but specifically historical, time and place. And
the same is true of the depiction of Gandhi himself in the film. Demands for a
versimilitude in film that is impossible in any medium of representation, including
 Historiographyand Historiophoty 1199

that of written history, stem from the confusion of historical individuals with the
kinds of "characterization" of them required for discursive purposes, whether in
verbal or in visual media.
Even in written history, we are often forced to represent some agents only as
"character types," that is, as individuals known only by their general social
attributes or by the kinds of actions that their "roles" in a given historical event
permitted them to play, rather than as full-blown "characters," individuals with
many known attributes, proper names, and a range of known actions that permit
us to draw fuller portraits of them than we can draw of their more "anonymous"
counterparts. But the agents who form a "crowd" (or any other kind of group) are
not more misrepresented in a film for being portrayed by actors than they are in
a verbal account of their collective action.

Too OFTEN, DISCUSSIONS OF THE IRREDEEMABLY FICTIONAL NATURE of historical

films fail to take account of the work of experimental or avant-garde filmmakers,
for whom the analytic function of their discourse tends to predominate over the
exigencies of "storytelling." Rosenstone cites a number of experimentalist films
that not only depart from but actually seek to undermine the conventions of
commercial (especially the Hollywood variety of) filmmaking. A film such as Far
from Poland, he points out, not only does not feature storytelling at the expense of
analysis but actually brings under question the conventional (nineteenth-century)
notions of "realistic" representation to which many contemporary historians,
analytical as well as narrational, still subscribe. He specifically likens the work of
experimental filmmakers to that of Bertolt Brecht in the history of the theater. But
he mightjust as well have likened it to the work of those historians of the modern
age who have taken as their problem less the "realistic representation" of "the past"
than whatJarvie himself calls the question of "what would be an adequate account"
of "what exactly did happen, why it happened, and . .. its significance." This is
surely the lesson to be derived from the study of recent feminist filmmaking, which
has been concerned not only with depicting the lives of women in both the past
and present truthfully and accurately but, even more important, with bringing into
question conventions of historical representation and analysis that, while pretend-
ing to be doing nothing more than "telling what really happened," effectively
present a patriarchical version of history. The kind of experimentalist films
invoked by Rosenstone do indeed "subvert"the kind of "realism"we associate with
both conventional films and conventional historiography, but it is not because they
may sacrifice "accuracy of detail" in order to direct attention to the problem of
choosing a way to represent the past.7 They show us instead that the criterion for
determining what shall count as "accuracy of detail" depends on the "way"chosen
to represent both "the past" and our thought about its "historical significance"
alike.

7 Rosenstone, "History in Images/History in Words," 1183.