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History in film: The Lives of Others and Black Book.

Article Excerpt
About half-way through Night and Fog (1955), Alain Resnais' great film documenting the holocaust, the narrator remarks that 'No description, no picture can restore their true dimension: endless, uninterrupted fear'. All the same, Resnais tried to represent what could not be restored, and Night and Fog's power to horrify has seldom been matched. The viewer may not know, and may well be glad not to know, the extent of the fear felt by those whose shadows are seen on the screen, but Resnais' film invites a mimetic engagement from the viewer, an act which completes the representation.

Representation depends upon convention. If documentary film seems more like an index, having the direct connection with its subject that a fingerprint has with a finger, then realist film is an icon, an image and likeness of reality. If the documentary invites its audience to consider what has been, the realist film confuses the past, the film itself and what it represents and the present of the viewer's narrative engagement through a suspension of disbelief. The realist historical film brings the past to life in its viewers' engagement: like the historical novel, what it tells us about our ideas of history and historical consciousness is worthy of note. Recently, two quite different films have taken on the task of representing historical periods in a serious way. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's The Lives of Others (2006) is set in East Germany in 1984, the dying years of communism, while Paul Verhoeven's Black Book (2006) takes us back to Holland in 1944, the last year of World War II in Europe.

Verhoeven's film is a rip-roaring yarn, a highly entertaining pumped-up B movie in brilliant colour, full of wide establishing shots, enough shot-reverse-shots to send one into...

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