Gender in Orlando (1992)

In the heyday of figurative painting, it was customary to classify and evaluate works of art by their subject matter. This tendency is reflected by French chronicler of the arts André Félibien, writing in 1667 that “the most noble of all these [kinds of painting] is that which represents History in a composition of several figures” (qtd. in Duro 2). While the genre of historical painting in contemporary Western art has almost vanished, re-presentations of historical subjects in other forms of art, such as film, occupy very prominent positions. As filmmaker and film scholar Jeffrey Skoller suggests, “fiction and history are genres that signify in the same manner, producing the effects of self-contained verisimilitude” (xxii). Some movies, like Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998) and Titanic (1997), create their own verisimilar narratives, providing a mediated experience of official history shaping national and cross-national collective memory. Curiously, other films, such as The Alamo (John Lee Hancock, 2004) and Miracle at St. Anna (Spike Lee, 2008), despite having what seemed like the right ingredients and following the usual recipe, fail in all possible respects.
Movies created with some degree of independence from studio systems (either from major entertainment industries, like Hollywood, or from state-sponsored ones) tend to display more flexibility in form, content, and audience impact. Oftentimes, alternative cinema dealing with historical subjects strives to unsettle both historical and fictional verisimilitude. Skoller characterizes James Benning’s Utopia (1998) as a film that “constructs history as a complex interplay between ‘what actually happened’ and the virtualities and imaginings to which such events give rise” (101). On a more mainstream end of the spectrum, Mabel O. Wilson discusses Jim Jarmush’s Mystery Train (1989) in comparison to the re-presentations of official history in The National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tennessee,

Cited: Duro, Paul. The Academy and the Limits of Painting in Seventeenth-Century France. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Ferro, Marc. Cinema and History. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988. Glaessner, Verina. “Fire and Ice.” Sight and Sound 2.4 (1992): 12-15. Guynn, William. Writing History in Film. New York: Routledge, 2006. Kaes, Anton. “History and Film: Public Memory in the Age of Electronic Dissemination.” History and Memory 2 .1 (1990): 111-29. Landsberg, Alison. Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” 1975. Media and Cultural Studies: KeyWorks. Ed. Meenakshi Gigi Durham and Douglas M. Kellner. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006. 342-52. Nozick, Robert. Anarchy, State and Utopia. New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1974. Skoller, Jeffrey. Shadows, Specters, Shards. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. Wilson, Mabel O. “Between Rooms 307: Spaces of Memory and the National Civil Rights Museum.” Sites of Memory: Perspectives on Architecture and Race. Ed. Craig Evan Barton. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2001. 13-26. Woolf, Virginia. Orlando: A Biography. 1928. London: The Hogarth Press, 1960.