Critical Reflections on Film as a Historical Source: A Case of the Military Regime in Brazil

The relationship between historians and film has been difficult. The first step for historians was to recognize film as a worthwhile source to study, a process which started in the 1960s. Paul Smith‘s The Historian and Film, published in 1976 (Smith, 1976) was the first publication in the English language on this topic and has been regarded as a milestone (Jackson, 1977: 713). By then, films were generally accepted as additional evidence with the potential to elucidate incidents in the past (Pronay, 1983: 366). This development was related to general historiographical changes, in the course of which historians increasingly opened up to alternative sources – most importantly, the influence of cultural relativism. Cultural relativism rejects what historians wrongly name ―Rankean History,‖ a history that is ―fact‖-based and ―objective‖ in the pursuit of ―historical truth‖ (Burke, 1995: 3, 5-6). Today, historians regard historical writing as ―bias‖ and ―opposing voices,‖ for, as Burke puts it, ―every historian reflects reality indirectly depending on his culture‖ (Burke, 1995: 5-6). In particular, postmodernism has drawn upon these thoughts and questioned the idea of historical knowledge as a coherently understandable past. The skepticism formerly shown towards films has been transferred to traditional sources including archive documents. The historian Robert A. Rosenstone has promoted postmodern historical films as supplementary sources to ―traditional written‖ history (Rosenstone, 1995). Thus, historiographical developments have contributed to establishing films as historical sources.