"Selma" highlights intersection of cinema and historical accuracy
By Austin Wellens | Mar. 10, 2015We 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.