What are the benefits and the dangers of using film as evidence for historical events?

What are the benefits and the dangers of using film as evidence for historical events?|||It depends on what time of film you're using. Are you using actual footage, i.e. footage of the Vietnam war shot during the war, or are you using a film adaptation? Film can be very useful for analyzing historical events, but remember that they represent the biases of the writers and the director, and do not always have a large amount of accuracy. Many historical films are created for entertainment purposes only, with small amounts of truth.





So, if you are using a film, do your research about it first.





Also, see "History on Film, Film on History" by Rosenstone.|||editing...you can always take out what you don't want others to see.|||You have to make sure it is news or documentary film to know it is truth. If you use movies it is a fictionalized account, even if it is based on true events. The good thing is you don't have to read and you get a better idea of why it was important at the time.|||Film is great evidence...if it is shot on the scene. MOVIES are no evidence whatsoever, they are entertainment, first, foremost and ONLY.|||Films would be a heavily biased source of information. If you had film from Nazi Germany, say, it would be to promote Nazis. Film from wwii America - even in newsreels - would be biased in favour of American nationalism.|||The above answers are very good, but in general film is just as likely to be tainted with bias as any other form of historical documentation. Specifically, the person who shot the film (or directed the shooting of the film) could be preserving images either helpful or hostile to a pre-existing agenda, or may be looking for the preservation of images of an embarrassing event or statement to hurt one side while hindering another.





However, (actually, I was writing this when Naz F placed his post so...) there is another danger that has not been covered in the earlier posts. As film is both an educational as well as an entertainment tool, it is often likely to be manipulated to fit into a story line rather than standing on its own merits. Specifically, in such venues as documentaries from mass media providers, film clips are chosen for their visual impact and ability to illustrate a certain point or idea regardless of whether the image employed is actually legitimately from the incident being discussed (for instance, I have seen documentaries on the later stages of the Second World War in the Pacific that use images of American bombing airplanes that had actually become obsolete by the time of the actual battle but the image was used because the visual impact was far more compelling than a similar image of a more relevant airplane, among many other things). This is also because, since film and television (and now digital computer images) have been employed so readily and so overwhelmingly that such an enormous pool of visual resources almost screams out to be cherry-picked to please an intended audience.