Nearly all the themes in John Tosh's The Pursuit of History are reflected directly or obliquely in a comparison of The Return of Martin Guerre by Natlie Zemon Davis and the 1982 French film Le Retour de Martin Guerre. Apart from the fact that the historian Davis collaborated on the film script in question, which gave it a far higher level of historical authenticity than is usually the case with historical dramas, an examination of how print and film media present an historical event in different ways is highly relevant to understanding how mass media operate in our era.
The difference between print and audio-visual media is a profound one. Although most films and TV programs have a written script and dialogue, that is where their common ground with written works ends. Reading a book is a private experience. One is free to skip back and forth in the text, rereading a passage to improve clarity, taking as much time as desired.
Unless one uses TiVo or watches a video or DVD at home, the events depicted by films and television flow relentlessly to their conclusion without the viewer having the power to stop them. Missing a point or snatch of dialogue is only a minor consequence. The basic analytical problem of electronic audio-visual media is that one can only retain a dim memory of previous scenes as the immediacy of the viewer's experience of image, camera movement, editing, dialogue, action, and music displace them with the ever-fascinating filmic present.
Try remembering three commercials back during a station break, and you will appreciate the difficulty. While this characteristic of audio-visual media is not directly relevant to how a film is written, filmed, and edited, it is extremely
relevant to the propagandising power of the moving image. The Russian Communist revolutionaries were the first to grasp the political and historical power implicit in film. The Nazis consolidated their power by showing Leni Riefenstah...