We have a problem regarding how we understand history in movies. Our criterion seems to be “objectivity at any cost,” so that any liberty being taken with the actual, concrete “event” disqualifies it from laying claim to being based on actuality. This misunderstands both film and history—two things that I care a lot about—because it acts like either/both of them are anything other than narratives that are designed to impart certain ideas. In the same way history books don’t read as dry lists of objectively presented facts, films that use history as material do not need to strictly adhere to some pseudo-omniscient objectivity of what “really happened” that distances us from the past, and acts like it isn’t part of a complicated, ongoing story.
And yes, I’ve already written some about this, but I want to go back to “Selma,” because while there’s been some (overblown) controversy over its portrayal of LBJ, and the idea that it somehow makes it “bad” history, it does something that I think makes it function better as a historical film, capable of imparting a deeper understanding of the past and its relevance to us now, than, say, a film like “The Imitation Game.”
See, for a film that’s been described as a “biopic” of Martin Luther King Jr., it spends an awful lot of time on scenes that aren’t about him. In fact, as it goes on, the movie becomes less about King, or his actions, or the actions of any one person, and instead focuses on creating an image of how the Selma to Montgomery march took shape. To this end, we get scenes involving people contemplating the cultural atmosphere they find themselves in, and how they fit into it. Coretta Scott King meets with Malcolm X to discuss how the different strains of the Civil Rights Movement represented by him, and her husband could align to achieve progress. King and another woman discuss the types of roles women are playing in the movement, and student activists and leaders discuss whether or not to join King’s march or to keep doing their own work. And, of course, the meeting of Lyndon Johnson, George Wallace and J. Edgar Hoover to discuss reactions to the movement.
All these perspectives are presented to create a network of views that contextualize and are contextualized by each other. Taken in isolation, any one of them could be a dry, straightforward account of 1965; LBJ has to balance the challenges of managing a nation while trying to reform it. Martin Luther King feels the tremendous weight of serving as spokesperson for a massive, popular movement. Malcolm X grapples with his public image, and tries to find ways it can be used to affect real change. But taken altogether, they create a broad, cohesive image of the complexity that activist movements throughout history have had to face.
“Selma” doesn’t just tell a story, it builds a deep understanding of historical processes by approaching an event the way actual historians would. Director Ava DuVernay is just using different tools; instead of citations she has dramatic beats, in place of statistics, she has scenes. But the end that she deploys it to is the same as any good piece of history: to create a full, textured understanding of the complexity of events, to deny any simple or flat interpretations and to impart a real sense of how activism is created and enacted.
And this is why film can be a fantastic medium for history. It has a capacity to put us directly into the shoes of the people who dealt with these issues, to help us understand what it would be like to try and organize all the messy, disparate pieces of reality into a unified front that is capable of expressing a cohesive message, let alone actually achieving progress. It’s an unbelievably daunting task, and “Selma” conveys it with all the insight, gravity, humanity and art needed to make us understand this. It’s a perfect demonstration of cinema’s ability to take the abstract notion of “the past,” and make it direct, communicative and personal. It generates the immediacy we need to truly empathize with and comprehend someone else’s reality.
And of course this is going to speak most directly to the point of view of a protest movement; she’s trying to generate a sense of how these groups form, operate, react to challenges and consider factors far beyond their control. The nuancing of what is typically a white-washed, broadly defined “Civil Rights Movement” becomes reality, a complicated image that acknowledges internal conflicts and divisions and imperfections. I would argue that this is a more valid examination of the role than what a single politician did. It is, at any rate, far more educational.
