Children and Historical Films

Dominion, Volume 27, Issue 258, 28 July 1934, Page 20

Children and Historical Films

SYCHOLOGICALLY, educationally and also “morally,” historical H ® films (quite apart from ordinary recreational films) can be of H ■ infinite importance In the making of the child’s mind, and, if they are multiplied and also very successful, of inexhaustible imporiance, writes Sir Charles Grant Robertson, Principal and ViceChancellor of Birmingham University. An epigrammatist might, indeed, be well tempted to say: “Give me the making of a nation’s historical films, and I will give you the making of the nation’s laws or of anything else >f national value.” . Historical films (like historical plays or novels) are by the nature uf their being and- making vulnerable to different critical tests. They may, for example, be "drchaeologically” wrong, e.g.. in details of scenery, architecture, costume, speech and so forth; the incidents of the "plot” may be so misplaced and combined as to be absolutely false in fact; the events may be’ so ignorantly or deliberately selected as to place the stress on the trivial and the vulgar and to omit or minimise the fundamental, resulting in an interpretation false in the worst sense of the word; if the story is grouped round a. central figure or group of figures in a critical period of world or national history, background, episodes and leading figures may be so handled (and yet-be “picturesque”) as to make the film a grotesque or a degrading caricature. It would be the easiest thing in the world to select the tremendous era bf the Puritan Revolution and show Charles I as a wastrel, half-witted fanatic in a spectacular pantomime, or turn Cromwell into a canting half bully, half-buffoon. And when you wish to suggest causes of world-shaking changes, you dbuld (most picturesquely) reduce the Persian invasion of Greece to a curtain lecture by Atossa, or the English Reformation to “the Gospel light that dawned from Bullen’s eyes.” If the picturesque is mostly what we want in making an historical film, omission and falsification of the truth, singly or, better still, in combination, become positive merits—and the box office will subsequently clinch the conclusion.

Concurrently, the teacher (or the parent) striving to bring home to the children the meaning and value of their national heritage will have to wrestle with the visible and invisible barbed wire in the child’s mind. The child has seen the producer’s Anne Boleyn or Cromwell; what he is toid or reads in class withers into a bloodless statement that fades before the picture burned into his imagination. If you doubt it, try to convince by scientific argument a child ■who has seen a vampire on the screen, that “that thing” will not come upon him in the silent darkness of a sleepless nlgbr

The real issue at stake in historical films (as in historical plays) is not the attainment of professor-proof accuracy in detail, or chronicle-proof accuracy in the order of incident, but of interpretation, i.e., of values,. Take (if you could) 50 children to a first-rate representation of Shakespeare’s “Richard II”; follow it next afternoon by “Richard of Bordeaux”; follow it next afternoon by an hour’s lesson on the reign of Richard II as an organic episode in our national evolution and follow it by a lesson-hour next day of questions from the children. (An hour would not be enough to deal with the hail-storm that the children would hurl at you.) And then finally note the result. . .

Conversely, how easy to construct a scenario of “the private life of Charles II” or “of Louis XIV” with Lucy Walters, Nell Gwynn, Barbara Cleveland and all “the other chargeable ladies of tbe Court” (or of a similar galaxy at Paris and Versailles), with accurate scenery, gorgeous clothes galore, cloak and sword, “sex-appeal” by the ton, comic business to keep a dozen George Robeys on the romp, and close-ups of passion long drawn?out — and I would defy any teacher or parent, after the children had seen such a film, ever to get out of their heads the “lesson” burnt in by the film, or get into their heads the real significance and values of the national Issues fought out in England or France between 1660 and 1685. And when these children have become men and women, British or French citizens, what then?