Fables of the Reconstruction

Ah, history. To quote Catherine Morland, “I often think it odd that it should be so dull, for a great deal of it must be invention.” The reasons are familiar: not just a tendency to focus on content rather than form, as if the two can be separated, but also a determination to deny or obscure its invented nature by being as dull as possible. And even as some professional historiography has become more interesting and adventurous in its techniques of representation, history written for students or for a general audience defaults time and again to good old-fashioned naive realism, with predictable results.

I had two thoughts about the minor spat over Mary Beard’s recent remarks about eschewing programmes that include historical reconstructions: “No B list or A list actors, C list actors dressed up in sheets, saying, ‘Do pass the grapes Marcus’ and the like.” Firstly, that the problem is, as Beard notes, not the actors themselves, but what they’re asked to do: no actual acting, but only striking poses in costume. They are merely illustrative, with the effect of presenting the past as something fully known (rather than as fragmentary and disputed) – and, inevitably, presenting it largely or entirely in visual terms that conform to the viewers’ expectations (or the production company’s beliefs about those expectations). As Manu Gustin (@Manu_Gustin) remarked to me on the Twitter: it’s the Blackadder problem, that you’re constantly having to work with the images and ideas people have of the past – and Blackadder took the chance to play with and subvert those expectations, visually as well as verbally, whereas the historical documentary template at best confines its critique to the words.

Secondly, that the supposedly preferable alternative of an expert presenter talking to camera in front of ancient ruins or examining artefacts in a museum is no closer to authentic history, but is just as much a cliched trope of representation, a simulacrum of historical investigation. We appear to be offered the thoughts and accumulated knowledge of an authority – with the personal presence and reputation of that authority playing a significant role in making those thoughts credible – where, mostly, we are being offered a prepared script, based on the work of multiple historians and writers and editors, read from autocue. Of course it is – how else could it be done, given that we’ve long passed the days of just pointing a camera at A.J.P. Taylor and asking him to talk at it? But, given that the script for a historical documentary can only be such a collaborative effort, what is the effect of presenting the material as if it is actually just the product of the historian?

The obvious explanation for this practice, exactly as with historical reconstructions, is that this is what the viewer expects and likes (hence also, I was once told, the shift away from multiple talking heads to a single charismatic presenter). Beard partly engages with this point in her lecture, emphasising that her documentaries are always a team effort and admitting that she had to learn the importance of providing the viewer with something to look at (“I had needlessly and foolishly austere views about not getting on rivers or boats or going up in drones. I now see that that’s very important. I’ve learnt hugely about how to make people visually interested”). But there is still a tendency to imply that it’s the historian’s contributions – the contributions on screen, that is, rather than the contributions to the research and the script – that provide the elements of argument and debate in such programmes.

That may well be true in fact, without it being necessarily true: rather, it’s an artistic choice about how to present an argument, by putting it into the mouth of the aforementioned authority figure rather than developing it in different ways. You could instead develop the argument by careful orchestration of the views of multiple authorities (apparently they still like this in continental Europe); you could develop it by giving a script to a voiceover artist (the US preference, apparently); you could dispense with the words altogether and develop the argument through images and sounds. Taking Beard’s contribution out of the US version of Civilizations didn’t actually remove all argument from the programme: it removed her argument, the overt argument, so that the programme ended up offering a different and less obvious (and probably much less coherent) argument – just as historical reconstructions are not in fact argument-free, but rather embody and subtly promote different and less explicit perceptions of the past.

If you take the historian presenter out of the historical documentary, do you lose the history? Clearly not; what matters is the historical input into the programme overall, not whether or not there is a historian playing the part of a historian on screen. Conversely, ensuring that historical documentaries genuinely promote historical knowledge and understanding isn’t just (or even necessarily) a matter of explicit argument, but of using the whole range of available techniques to open up questions and debates and provoke thought. Including historical reconstructions – why ever not? Just more interesting, dramatic, exploratory ones, with actual acting…

It is odd that historical documentaries should be so dull, or at any rate predictable, when there is such a rich film and televisual tradition of exploring multiple timelines and counterfactuals, uncertainty and ambiguity, different perspectives and so forth – and audiences who thrive on this stuff. Maybe the audience for historical documentaries is utterly conservative in its tastes – but maybe that’s just what they’ve been trained to expect, and in any case there must be new audiences out there to be won.