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What is the greatest historical movie of all time?
00:40:15
Roger Luckhurst and Alex Von Tunzelmann reflect on the results of HistoryExtra's recent poll to identify the greatest historical film of all time
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- [00:01]
Alex von Tunzelman
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- [01:00]
Roger Luckhurst
This episode is brought to you by Amazon.
- [01:02]
Alex von Tunzelman
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Roger Luckhurst
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Alex von Tunzelman
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- [01:21]
Roger Luckhurst
Thanks to Amazon Pharmacy and Amazon One Medical Healthcare just got less painful.
- [01:31]
Kev Lotchen
Welcome to the History Extra podcast. Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History Magazine. What makes a great historical movie? Is it an accurate portrayal of a period? A nostalgic look back at the past? Or is it enough to simply tell a great story? Well, on our website, historyextra.com, we've been running a poll to crown the greatest historical movie of all time, nominated by historians and then voted on by you. The results are in. And Kev Lotchen spoke to the historians and cinema experts Roger Luckhurst and Alex von Tunzelman to get their take on it all.
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Host
Welcome to this episode of the History Extra podcast in which we're discussing the results of History Extra's poll to find the greatest historical movie of all time. 22 historians nominated 100 movies and then it was left to you, the History Extra audience, to rank them and crown a winner. So which movies won, which films made the cut and which didn't? And what does that say about us? I'll be talking that through with two esteemed guests. First, we have Alex von Tonzelman, historian and screenwriter and the author of books including fallen idols, 12 statues that made History. Alex, welcome to the podcast.
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Alex von Tunzelman
Thanks for having me on.
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Host
And alongside Alex, we have Roger Luckhurst, the Geoffrey tilson Chair of 19th Century Studies at Birkbeck University of London, who specialises in film and culture from the 19th century. His books include Gothic and Illustrated History. Roger, I'm delighted to have you here with us also.
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Roger Luckhurst
Yeah, lovely to be on. Thank you.
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Host
So, if you're listening to this podcast, you can find results right now at www.historyextra.com. 100 movies. But let's dive straight into the list itself. Roger, I wonder if we might start with you. You were not one of the nominators. I should have said Alex was one of the nominators. You are not. You're coming to this fresh. What did you make of the film picks that made the hundred? What surprised you?
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Roger Luckhurst
Well, I think when I was reading through it, this is the great thing about lists, isn't it? You're so outraged that certain things are there and certain. And so I was instinctively reading down the list and going, that's not a historical film. Hang on, why isn't that one there? But that one is, you know. So I was looking at lots of my instinctive reactions, actually, which meant that I realised I did actually have a definition of what a historical film is. I was, you know, excluding certain things on a. Not quite an instinctive basis, but sort of saying, well, you know, Henry V is actually a Shakespeare play, it's a Shakespeare adaptation. It's not a historical film about Henry V or Sense and Sensibility. That's a Jane Austen novel. That's not a historical film. So those sorts of instinctive responses. And I got more and more entertained as I went on, I think, over my own kind of blind prejudice. It was quite interesting.
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Host
Alex, what about you? How did you find the inclusions?
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Alex von Tunzelman
So I absolutely had the same response. I mean, personally, for something to qualify as a historical movie, for me, it has to include either some real historical characters or a real historical setting, a distinct one, like, say, a battle or something you can really get your teeth into. And I mean, you know, Sense and Sensibility was written as a contemporary novel at the time it was written. I'd say the same about Les Miserables, which I was very surprised to include it because I think it's a completely unwatchably bad film, but there it was nonetheless in the top 100.
- [05:00]
Roger Luckhurst
Yeah. And. Absolutely. And things like all the President's Men is a contemporary political film in 1976 about events in 1974. I don't think that's a historical film, but, I mean, it is now. Obviously, we look back at it and that's obviously why I think people included it.
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Alex von Tunzelman
I would speak up a little more for all the President's Men, because I would say that does include what was at the time a real historical character, several real historical characters and events, and it was a kind of attempt to put history on screen, to document it at the time. So I think that one you can argue a little more, but no Jane Austen novels. No.
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Roger Luckhurst
But I did come up with quite a few kind of interesting limit cases. So Remains of the Day is clearly an adaptation of a novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, a very brilliant novel. It's got a historical setting. It's not, as it were, a real historical setting, but I think it is saying something very profound about the 1930s and complicity of British aristocracy with the rise of fascism and so on. I think, yeah, I can see that that is making a set of judgments or statements or asking you to think about complicity in a new kind of way. So maybe that is a historical film in the way that Sense and Sensibility isn't. So I think you could kind of split hairs for a really long time, which is, of course, what historians love to do.
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Host
I mean, there is something in that. And so the way we asked this poll, the question was it was for the historians to nominate the films and justify them. Alex, you made, I think, one of the most interesting choices, which was Bill and Ted's excellent adventure.
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Alex von Tunzelman
Several real historical characters are represented in the film, not especially well, somewhat in their actual contemporary time periods, you know, in that Bill and Ted, equipped with a time machine, having to put together their school history project, travel back to various periods to collect such people as Napoleon, Socrates, they call him Socrates. Freud, they call him Freud. And various other historical figures, you know, Genghis Khan, so on that they. Abraham Lincoln. So we do get a tiny glimpse of their time periods. But what we really get in that film and what I've argued for, is that that film actually speaks incredibly about what we would call historical reception, about how we understand history and use history in the modern day. Does it tell you much about Abraham Lincoln? Not really, but it tells you quite a lot about his cultural place at the time in the way it was being thought about in modern America.
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Roger Luckhurst
Yeah, I entirely agree. I really approve of that because again, I was thinking there are some things that are foregrounding historical narrative itself and how we construct narratives. And that structure for Bill and Ted is so perfect for that sense of both how school history perhaps is narrated through the great man theory of history, but also how it's fantastically subverted, I think, by these complete airheads. It's brilliant film.
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Host
So, Bill and Ted. Excellent. Not bogus. That came in at number 44. It had a good showing. If we move on to, say, the top 10, just to contextualise a bit. So number 10, we had the lion in Windsor from 1968, number nine, Das Boot from 1981, then the King's Speech from 2010, A Man for All Seasons in 1966, Master and Commander from 2003, going into the top five, Saving Private Ryan from 1998, Zulu from 1964, Lawrence Verber from 1962, Gladiator from 2000, the second and at the top of the list was Schindler's List, 1993. Roger, is this any surprise to you?
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Roger Luckhurst
I think there are two films in the short term that I would really struggle to see as historical films, and they would be Master and Commander. I think it does have a historical setting and so on. I totally get that. But Gladiator particularly was quite surprising to me in that it is an adaptation of a novel. It had a hilariously complicated history as a script, not least because Oliver Reed died halfway through the making of it, so they had to readjust the whole kind of narrative around that. Yes, of course it has a historical setting, but it is barely, I think, a historical film. I don't actually have a problem with Schindler's List being number one, but I think as a historian, I'd want to see maybe it alongside other representations of the. Of the Holocaust and how that history is dealt with. Because when Schindler's List came out in 1993, there was a huge controversy about whether Steven Spielberg had completely overstepped the mark in terms of his representation of the camps. There's a very strong position that you shouldn't try and fictionalise anything, actually, from that kind of moment, particularly not go into the showers as happens in that film. Claude Landsman, who did the eight hour documentary Shower, which I think is one of the most important Holocaust films, totally despised Schinder's List for its kind of fictionalization of this sort of stuff. And I think that pairing almost needs to be seen at the top so that it, again, it foregrounds the sense of how precisely are you going to turn this set of events into historical narrative?
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Host
Alex, I wonder if I might bring you in there for thoughts on Schindler's List.
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Alex von Tunzelman
Yeah, I think it's really interesting that it's made number one. I do suspect that most people haven't watched that film more than once. It's a very, very harrowing film. It is, of course, a fictionalization, again based on a novel about real events. But nonetheless, it is a fictionalization based on those things. There are lots and lots of fictionalizations of the Holocaust, including ones done by survivors and by people who were there at the time. And it is a really, really interesting field and there's a huge amount of films in it. You know, this is one of probably the most heartbreaking and difficult to watch of the fictionalizations. Not talking about, obviously, documentaries, I'd say, is a rather different category of how that's being approached. And that's sort of why I wonder what people are using to choose. I mean, it is an incredibly well made film. Unquestionably, the quality is very high of the performances, the cinematography, all of this. It's beautifully made. But because it's so harrowing, people clearly haven't picked what would I like to watch tonight? Because I suspect it's not that. I think far more likely that they would turn to Gladiator, second on the list, or one of the others. So it's very interesting. I think people kind of pick it because they think it's an important film because it says to them something about history and about how we perhaps should approach the Holocaust. Although I think that's, should we say, a very, very open subject for debate. It's interesting that that's the one that has stuck in people's heads as this is the big, serious one. And we should therefore vote for it because it's a big, serious film.
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Roger Luckhurst
Yes, I do think it is problematic in the sense that it picks on a gentile hero, one of the righteous. So this is a narrative that lots of audiences have a point of identification that actually many Jewish viewers found problematic in various ways. I mean, I was struck, actually, if you want a representation from current cinema, something like Zone of Interest is truly extraordinary in that this is a film about the commandant of Auschwitz. And it's actually filmed on the other side of the wall of Auschwitz. So his lovely, beautiful house is right on the edge. And that's where the filmmaker Jonathan Glaser actually filmed it. So you never see inside the camp. You only hear it, and you only hear it kind of intruding into their banal, bourgeois family life. So that, I think is making a really rigorous, profound kind of statement about representation in the way that Schindler's List becomes a very kind of conventionalized Hollywood melodrama.
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Alex von Tunzelman
We also have some very different Holocaust movies. I mean, just A couple of years ago, Taika Waititi's film Jojo Rabbit had a real range of responses. Certainly not everyone loved it. And in it, Taika Waititi, who is a Jewish man, also Maori, played Hitler as a comedy character. But in a sense, that film was very much in the tradition of books like Philip Roth's the Ghostwriter, or of people like Charlotte Solomon, who was an artist during the Holocaust, who wrote comic books about her life when she was in hiding. You know, it owed a lot to actually. To those Jewish traditions of storytelling about the Holocaust. So, you know, there are lots of different ways to approach this, and that film hasn't made the list, but actually, I think it's not a question of you would choose one or the other. It's a question of, you know, there are lots and lots of ways to approach an enormous, very, very traumatic historical event.
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Host
So this might be a really interesting point to move on to the wider top 10. It's quite war and heroism heavy. And I just wondered, why do certain films imprint on the popular imagination, not just within the voters, but also within nominators as well? Alex, I wonder if I could get your thoughts there.
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Alex von Tunzelman
Well, what struck me about the top 10 as well is it's very blokey, isn't it? I mean, this is a highly gendered list. I mean, I nominated Lawrence of Arabia and also A Lyne in Winter, both of which I'm very, very happy to see in the top 10. I absolutely love Lawrence Arabia, but that is a film with no women in it. Quite deliberately and appropriately for the subject matter that it's covering. That's perfectly fine. Zulu is a film with almost no women in it. I almost nominated that, too, but I'm very pleased to see somebody else did it. So it's a fantastically interesting film. A Lion in Winter at least has a woman as Eleanor of Aquitaine, represented fantastically by Katharine Hepburn in it. But most of these films are very, very male. Very male point of view. It's a certain view of history that I think a lot of historians have chosen challenged in the last, I mean, my God, 50 years at least. Like, it's not exactly revolutionary now to say that women were part of history. This is hardly news. And yet this doesn't seem to have filtered through to all these titles. Now, in the longer list, of course, we can see some titles that do take a different point of view or whatever. That's absolutely fine. And obviously, on one level, you might say, well, you know, historically, sexism existed, so it's not very surprising. That lots of these films will be about mental. On the other hand, I do think historical films tell us an awful lot about how we see and use history today. And it's very interesting from that point of view that the choice is still to do that because there were equal numbers of women in history doing things. The fact that we're choosing to celebrate men is still a choice.
- [15:15]
Roger Luckhurst
Yes, again, I do. I totally agree with that. I think it is changing, obviously. So just recently, Leigh, the Kate Winslet film about Lee Miller, seems to have to tell that story again about the centrality of her in wolf photography. The difficulty of trying to do that persuaded, persuade people that she can do that. We've got hidden figures in there, which again, is about the, you know, the lost history of African American women in post war American NASA projects and so on. And I did think, you know, just to go back to Chinda's list, one of the other brilliant Holocaust films is by Bridget Stigler, who is Steve McQueen's partner, who did alongside his interest in Second World War. So Blitz has just come out. She did this amazing film called Three Minutes, a Lengthening, which is just footage, three minutes of footage from a Polish Jewish shtetl. And that's all that survives of that population. After the war, they were completely kind of erased. And so she just. She just stretches and analyzes that kind of material and actually even starts to identify people, survivors within it. It's really very remarkable. And again, formally really interesting. And you're getting a very different voice.
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Host
This comes perhaps into a broader point where the historical films tell us more broadly about the time they are set in versus the period in which they're actually made.
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Alex von Tunzelman
I mean, historical films are 100% about the time they're made in historical fiction is fiction. It's very important to understand and underline that. And the concerns of filmmakers, you know, which are largely commercial, to be honest with you, you know, the. There are artistic concerns and Roger's spoken brilliantly about some more arthouse films that take different approaches. But the vast majority of film that is made and watched is commercial. And so the point of that is that they're trying to find a modern audience. And that's why I think when you get people complaining about, oh my God, you know, it's so historically unbelievable that all these women in this film have, like, feminist sensibilities in the 17th century. Well, the reason is that nobody's going to watch it. If they don't, it's got to feel relatable to people today. And that's kind of the point of it, you know, historical films are not documentaries. If you want watch a documentary, there are loads of really excellent documentaries which are available, which speak much more, of course, intentionally about what history actually was, rather than what we rather fantasize about it being in the present day.
- [17:40]
Roger Luckhurst
Yeah. And I would also just note, I think, that the Second World War is so still very politically important in virtually every debate and culture war that we've had, both in the United States but also in the uk. So it's really striking that the Darkest Hour, which is the Churchill film Dunkirk, which is a famous heroic running away of the English forces, and then also, you know, Blitz again, just coming out recently, we're really kind of circling around that same kind of moment, because in the uk, since Brexit, that has become a kind of light motif moment, that this, you know, identification with Churchill, standing alone against the darkness of Europe, et cetera, that kind of narrative has been so politically fired up in culture wars that I'm not surprised to see them there still. And you get that, of course, in America, too. So Saving Private Ryan and Schindler's List, they're wanting to tell particular, perhaps more redemptive narratives about the nation.
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Host
But on that note, is there kind of any. I suppose responsibility is the word I'm thinking of, for films to have some adherence to telling their own stories about the times they're set in. Well or accurately. Or is that something we shouldn't actually be too worried about?
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Alex von Tunzelman
I'm not sure who filmmakers would be accountable to in that respect, apart from their audiences. Now audiences can make choices about what they go and see. There are some amazingly inaccurate films on this list. The Imitation Game is an absolute travesty. And there it is, you know, and actually a real insult. Insult to the memory of Aaron Turing in a lot of ways. The fact is that it was a story that people clearly responded to because they voted for it here. In terms of making films, I think we have to be realistic that filmmakers making fictional films have a responsibility to their investors, their producers, cinema chains. They don't have a responsibility to history. And if we care about that as audiences, then we should vote with our money.
- [19:46]
Roger Luckhurst
Yeah. I always think when you talk about accuracy, there was a brilliant mock paper by a physicist who pointed out the 15 errors in hot tub time machines. Because, you know, this couldn't possibly happen in this way. You might be able to travel through time this way, but not in this way. And again, I was talking recently to the director Robert Eggers, who's just about to release Nosferatu. So his remake of this 1922 classic based on Dracula. So it's a vampire film, but he's obsessed with getting certain historical details right. He did lots of anthropological research. But then he also said that a lot of the reactions of the female characters were based on historical documents of photographs of hysterics in the 19th century. So he was looking at Jean Martin Charcot's famous, very disturbing photographs of hysterics. And then he did say, yes, I know that the film is set in 1838 and that Charcot was doing that in the 1880s, but I think I can get away with it. It's a horror film, and yet he's still very, very concerned with historical detail. So I think it also goes the other way as well. I think you have to give filmmakers absolute latitude to do what works for the narrative. And you can get cross about that if you want. But I think, as Alex is saying, it's another form that demands changes to a historical record.
- [21:07]
Host
People do get very cross, quite often quite vociferously.
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Alex von Tunzelman
But then that's an interesting reaction. I mean, you see, this is why I always think it's really interesting. I mean, obviously, I've spent a lot of my career watching and discussing historical movies and the differences between fact and fiction and all that. And I think that's a wonderful exercise to do. You can do it, for instance, in schools, show a historical movie and then say, okay, why have they made these choices? What are the reasons that they've changed these things? Those are really good questions to ask people, to make them engage in some critical thinking and really think about why those things are being done. And the answer might be yes, because they think it's commercial. The answer might be because they're lazy and haven't done any research. But actually, in my experience, as Roger has said, I think a lot of filmmakers actually care quite deeply about it, but they do sometimes also find themselves up against huge difficulties. Difficulty. I've certainly been on sets where, for instance, the light is fading, a certain piece of military costume hasn't turned up, and you pretty much have to go ahead and film it anyway, because you can't delay the entire movie just for this one thing. And then, of course, people will criticise it later. But actually, you know, making a movie is hugely complicated and difficult. And sometimes errors happen, even if people really are quite committed to getting them right and know that they're errors and want to avoid them, because the logistics of producing something like this are so Enormous, Yeah.
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Roger Luckhurst
I was also thinking about the current series of Wolf hall, just how different it is actually from the previous one, which was about eight years before. You can see this is supposed to be continuous. And yet clearly the decision to cast in a race blind way has kind of moved really massively in the last eight years. But also the very rhythm of editing and cutting has changed. It's a completely different pace, and that's only a matter of eight years. And changing how we represent history in quite significant ways, I think. So that's a really good example that people can test at home.
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Alex von Tunzelman
And the visuals of that matter enormously, too. So something that's really changed in the last five, 10 years. Camera technology's improved massively. You can now film in candlelight. You could never do that in the past. There was a wonderful online streaming series about the young Elizabeth, first filmed almost entirely with candlelight. It looked spectacular. I mean, you just couldn't have made that, you know, 10 years ago, let alone 20 years ago.
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Roger Luckhurst
Well, that's why Barry Lyndon is such an important pedal.
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Alex von Tunzelman
That's. Oh, my God. Every historian always bangs on about bloody Barry Lyndon. It's the obsession, because it's like. But, I mean, if you look back at something like the Glenda Jackson Elizabeth series, it is brightly, brightly lit throughout, and it's beautifully written in all of this, but, my goodness, it does not look like a Tudor interior would have looked. And so, again, that changes our whole conception of how history might appear and how people might interact with each other.
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Host
Roger, if I might come to you. You brought up Barry Lyndon for the benefit of the podcast. Could you introduce us to it very briefly and why it's such a big deal?
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Roger Luckhurst
Yeah. So Barry Lyndon is a Stanley Kubrick film from the mid-70s. Kubrick was obsessed with camera technology and trying to really push the limits. And so this is one of the first films that tries to shoot in natural light with candlelight as well. I do think it's an extraordinary attempt to try and render the 18th century in film. It's got a very slow rhythm. It's obsessed about natural light and historical detail. But also the voiceover is, I think, one of the closest you get to a kind of 18th century sort of picaresque narrative voice. So for all of those reasons, I think it does really feel like, although it's fiction, an incredibly dedicated historical film. So I think that's why it's in there.
- [24:38]
Host
And Alex, I saw nodding very vociferously as well. To my shame, I have to go and watch it because it's not one of the ones I've seen from this list. Probably shouldn't have admitted that, but here I am. It's recorded.
- [24:50]
Roger Luckhurst
There's lots I haven't seen, lots on this list I haven't seen. So that's fine.
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Host
I love this admission. It's a safe space. We've been dancing around this question for a while, but I wonder if I could put you both on the spot. Is, what is a historical film? How do we find it? It's not Sense and Sensibility we've discovered. It could be the Remains of the Day. Alex, maybe if I come to you first.
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Alex von Tunzelman
Well, for me, it's. And, of course, like all of these boundaries are extremely fuzzy and gray, and you can include or exclude things. There's not some kind of really neat definition of it. But in terms of. If I'm wanting to talk about historical film as an interesting cultural factor, then as I say, I would like to see at least one real historical character or a distinct historical setting in it. Because if it's something very general, like this is just set in the past, it may give you an interesting image of the past. Remains of the Day does, actually, because that engages quite strongly with the kind of cultural context it's in. But if it's just a question of this is filmed in nice dresses, it doesn't necessarily give us much to get our teeth into as historians, Whereas I'm very interested in things like representations of specific figures or specific moments. But on the other hand, I would say. I mean, historical these days is an incredibly broad genre because you can include things like historical, historical fantasy, Game of Thrones, for instance. You know, got dragons in it. Not accurate. That's not the conversation. But it speaks a bit to how we experience history, how we fantasize about history, how we use it culturally. And you could say the same about Bridgerton, which, again, I would say, is a sort of historical fantasy. It's a fantasy of some delightful version of kind of Jane Austen time, which is racially blind. Everyone's still got the massive houses, but they didn't pay for them through slavery. They did some other way that we don't know. And everyone's just got. And that's what that is. But that's also a very interesting historical fantasy. So, I mean, I think you can talk about these other genres, but if we're kind of trying to get to it as historians, then I think we want a little more generally to get our teeth into.
- [26:55]
Host
Roger, what do you make of it?
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Roger Luckhurst
Yeah, I mean, I think it's important to be really relaxed about the boundaries as well. And I think there is a very, very kind of distinct set of films that are costume dramas but aren't necessarily saying anything very interesting about history itself or the historical period in which it's set. That's totally fine. Hollywood in the 1910s referred to things in costume as historicals. So that sort of sense of an early genre emerging and the sort of magic, I guess, of cinema, which is that it can reanimate the past in a way that other forms can't. So that sort of sense of the amazing immersion feeling you get in Gladiator, perhaps that's the spectacle of it. That's the sword and sorcery stuff and all of these biblical epics. There's a sense of falling into and immersing yourself in historical space, which is very difficult to recreate just purely through text or through painting, whatever. So I think there is an element of that which is about falling into. I would always want it to be saying something, perhaps on a formal level, about historical narrative. I'm not necessarily concerned that it has real historical figures in. Because that might be. You might be able to do that without historical figures.
- [28:12]
Host
Now we've defined what a historical film is, perhaps. Roger, there's something I asked of you before we started. You've come to this as not one of the nominators. You've not had sight of what we did beforehand. If you were to pick five movies that perhaps didn't make the cut, what would they be? And as a lead into this, we had a little conversation first about how there was too much Ridley Scott, but there was a missing Ridley Scott.
- [28:37]
Roger Luckhurst
Well, yeah, so here's a good example of what we were talking about. Ridley Scott's first film, the Duellist, is an adaptation of a Joseph Conrad story, but it's set in the 19th century. And it's about two military men who keep meeting in various wars and keep duelling all the way through. It's a really interesting film about war and 19th century notions of honour and so on, but, you know, hardly seen at all. But I think it's much more interesting than the Gladiator kind of choices. But that's just personal taste, I think. I mean, as for the rest of it, I think the thing that really surprised me was that A Birth of a Nation was not on this list. And I probably would put that at number one. That's D.W. griffith's film from 1915. It's about the birth of America, and it was hugely influential. I mean, why we probably are still making historical films, but also influential in unexpected ways. I mean, this was a depiction of a problematic racial history. There is a scene where a blacked up white actor is menacing and raping a white woman and who rides to the rescue. But the Ku Klux Klan, and that film was actually responsible for the reinvention of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s, where it had its peak. So, you know, in all kinds of ways, Birth of a Nation is a really important film that I would. Even if you don't watch silent cinema or you hate the content of that in terms of influence and importance, I think A Birth of a Nation would really be there. And then just another one, I think, to continue to bang on about the importance of narrative and perspective. Kurosawa's, one of his films, late films, is in the list, I think, but I would go for Rashomon, just because this is a narrative about an event that is told from seven different points of view and is precisely about how you interpret a particular kind of moment or eventually from different angles. It's an immensely inventive film, but also, you know, talking about the trustworthiness of what it is that you see, what you witness, how history is narrated. So I would have that quite high up as well.
- [30:45]
Host
More films that I need to see. I personally was very surprised that Robin, Prince of Thieves didn't make it on there. That's my guilty pleasure. Historical film. Alex, as a way of drawing this conversation to a close, I wonder your thoughts on historical film's role as a gateway to new audiences coming into history tallies against that whole historical accuracy vein. Alex, I wonder if I'd start with you.
- [31:14]
Alex von Tunzelman
Well, I think this is the aspect that I think is actually really positive of historical films, is that I think from a historian's point of view, rather than getting anxious about accuracy and misrepresentation, what we see is that people who watch historical drama or comedy, or even fantasy, whatever they do, actually tend to continue their interest in history. And very often what you find is that somebody watches a film, first thing they'll do is go and look up Wikipedia, which is quite good these days.
- [31:39]
Host
I'm just going to say that maybe History Extra as well.
- [31:41]
Alex von Tunzelman
Very well. Yes, absolutely. Yes. One of the first things they do when they watch a historical film is go and look up whether it's accurate or not. Probably in History Extra. A great way to find that out. But yeah, I mean, I think it does actually provoke an interest. And you could see that, for instance, when the Tudors came out on tv. A lot of historians very anxious about the sort of misrepresentations in it and all that. Actually, it's wildly enjoyable. So first of all, you know, put your feet up and enjoy it. But actually, sales of Tudor books went up. People were interested and actually that made a real difference to how people thought about it and they sought out the real story. So I think it's hugely to the benefit of historians that people watch this. And I have to admit, myself, a big part of the reason I'm a historian is because I was completely obsessed with Raiders of the Lost Ark as a kid, wanted to be an archaeologist. That kind of turned into being a historian. So the fact is that these things do influence us. But I think that can be a hugely positive thing. And as historians, rather than being frightened of that, I think we should embrace it.
- [32:39]
Host
Roger, over to you for a closing thought.
- [32:41]
Roger Luckhurst
Yeah, I also think that it's a really useful way of thinking about history. And even mainstream popular films tell you very, very interesting things about shifting perspectives as well. I mean, I was talking earlier about Steve McQueen's split that completely changes or alters the perspective on what we think of as a very kind of familiar moment in British history just by not commenting on it, but by massively diversifying the actors involved in the stories. So this is centered on a small mixed race boy who runs back from being evacuated into the Blitz itself. And the encounters that he has through that night are so strikingly odd and diverse and tell you a lot about London that has not been in the historical narratives but is increasingly being opened up to people. And that's what film can do. It can give you a really fantastically good, compelling, melodramatic narrative, but also tell you that history itself is changing the more we look into it.
- [33:50]
Kev Lotchen
Kev Lotchen was speaking to Roger Luckhurst, Geoffrey Tillotson, chair of 19th century studies at Birkbeck University of London, and the historian and screenwriter Alex von Tunzelman. To explore the list of 100 movies in full, the final rankings, and why each one was nominated, Then visit his historyextra.com 100movies. That's historyextra.com 100movies. Thanks for listening. This podcast was produced by Jack Bate.