Professional historians have always been dismissive of audio-visual accounts of the past. Feature films are regarded as little better than romantic fantasies. Documentaries, however well intentioned, are panned for their simple-mindedness. These two presentations on the American and French Revolutions set out to make the case for taking audio-visual accounts of the past seriously. The first is built around two six-hour feature films: the TV biopic John Adams (2008); and the made-for-cinema epic, La Révolution française (1989). The second is built around two documentaries: Washington (2020) and Terror! Robespierre and the French Revolution (2009). All four films are honest attempts to reconstruct the past on the screen. But because they are filmed, not written, histories they use techniques and conventions to present their narrative which are either unavailable or unacceptable to the professional historian. The two presenters will introduce a cross-section of these techniques and conventions. They will show their economy as well as their power in informing the poorly informed about past events and firing their interest to learn more. They will also emphasise that of the two filmic genres – the feature and the documentary – the latter has the greater potential as a form of history making.
Laurence Brockliss is a historian of eighteenth-century France; Justin Hardy is a prizewinning filmmaker who has made a large number of documentaries about eighteenth and early-nineteenth century Britain. They are the authors of the forthcoming The Filmmaker as Historian.