HUNGARIAN STUDIES 3. Nemzetközi Magyar Filológiai Társaság. Akadémiai Kiadó Budapest [1987]

Bruno de Marchi: The Red News-Reel of the Tanácsköztársaság: History Dream and Cinema Imagination

THE RED NEWS-REEL OF THE TANÁCSKÖZTÁRSASÁG: HISTORY DREAM AND CINEMA IMAGINATION BRUNO DE MARCHI Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milano In this essay, we shall try to present some practical considerations concerning the possibility of a concrete connection between cinema and history. Better, we shall present some considerations about the possibility by using a film document as a history source. Marc Ferro in his well-known Cinéma et Histoire. Le cinéma agent et source de l'histoire (Denoél-Gontier, Paris, 1977) has already explored this field with loose and rather fragmentary studies. Dedicated to Jacques Le Goff - hence owing very much to the 'Annales' school — Ferro's studies allow us to expound the question in a far more correct way. Diagram of the relations between cinema and historiography Proceeding per summa capita, the status questionis of cinema/history relations can be seen in the following way: 1. A film document is not considered as a (reliable) source of history. Ferro remarks that, at the beginning of the century at least, "sources used by sanctioned historians form a corpus which is as hierarchical as the society to which they address their work. As in this society, documents are divided into classes where one could easily distinguish privileged ones, outcasts, tramps and Lumpen. Benedetto Croce wrote: "History is always contemporary". Now, at the beginning of the 20th century, this hierarchy reflects power games; in the first rank, we find the glamorous State Archives, manuscripts or printed papers, rare documents, all the expression of His Highness the Power, of the power of families, parliaments, chambers; then follows the group of the non-secret printed docu­ments: juridical and legislative texts, first expressions of power; then newspapers and publications which do not come from the power only but from the whole of cultivated society. Biographies, sources of local history, travellers' reports all form the last rank; these documents occupy the lowest position in the making of the thesis. History is analysed from the point of view of those who arrogate the direction of society to themselves: statesmen, diplomats, magistrates and directors".1 2. A film "is part of the mental universe of a historian": partly because its language "proves to be unintelligible, because it is difficult to interpret it - just like dream language"2 ; partly because of "a blindness, an unconscious refusal, coming from more complex causes"3 ; paraphrasing Michel Foucault, Ferro gives as a proof of these more Hungarian Studies 3/1-2 (1987) Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest

Next