Often when studying history you will look at documentary films. How do documentary films differ from feature films? What do you expect feature films to do which documentary films do not and vice versa?

Historical films have always attracted filmmakers. Yet filming history holds certain problems for the filmmaker. Similarly films hold problems for the historian. Even documentary films have to be treated carefully. Look at the ways in which you have defined a documentary film above. Do you think that a documentary film will always tell the truth? Think about the subject of the Holocaust. Imagine two documentary films about a concentration camp - one made by Jews and one made by the Nazis. How would they be different? What sort of language would each use? What would be the different "truths" that each would be trying to put across? What would each documentary be trying to persuade its audience to believe?

Steven Spielberg made a documentary called The Last Days which was criticized by the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, Anne Karpf, as "part of a misguided Holocaust project". Her argument may help you to answer some of the questions in this section.

 

In order to consider these ideas further, try to answer the following questions:

1. What do you think is the main task of a historian?

2. What do you think is the main task of a feature filmmaker?

3. What do you think are the problems that face a feature film maker when he/she comes to make a film based on a historical subject?

4. In what ways are feature films reliable sources for historians and in what ways are they unreliable?