Relationship Between Cinema and History

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| |Relationship Between Cinema and History |

The relationship between film and history comes in through the interaction of the two within the society in which the film is produced. By itself, film can function as history or part of history by being a source of the aesthetic type of history or just history in general. In the same way, history cab be presented or stored in the form of a film. This is done through the genre of movies called historical movies. Films therefore compete for attention with other material that presents historical facts such as reports amongst other historiography material (McCrisken, Trevor, and Pepper, 23).

Film and history make an interesting relationship, especially when viewed from the point of view of each of them. Therefore, history as film and film as history may represent two different disciplinary approaches, although they are closely related. The debate about how the two fields of film and history are related is not new. Film has been used for a long time to represent historical facts as well as preserve true happenings that occur during any point in time for reference in the future. The successful use of film as a historical tool is brought about by the fact that it supplies the exact or almost exact memories of an event and hence registers all unique historical phenomena.

A film would therefore record more precise historical facts than would any human observer because its memory would not be depleted or worn out over time. Even some people refer to films when they need to understand some historical facts. By 1924, D.W. Griffith wrote in one of his article that he is convinced that the film would be used in the future to show its place in history in a context that is different from cinema.

According to him, it would only take a century or so for film to be used by students as a...