{"id":363,"date":"2010-09-24T09:30:05","date_gmt":"2010-09-24T09:30:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/pandora\/?p=363"},"modified":"2010-09-25T08:52:28","modified_gmt":"2010-09-25T08:52:28","slug":"where-has-the-past-gone-erasing-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/pandora\/2010\/09\/24\/where-has-the-past-gone-erasing-history\/","title":{"rendered":"Where has the past gone ? Erasing history"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I watched <a href=\"http:\/\/www.imdb.com\/title\/tt0070909\/\" target=\"_blank\">Westworld<\/a> again recently, a Michael Crichton film from 1973 in which two characters go on holiday to a mock Western resort, populated by gun-toting robots. Holiday-makers can live out their fantasies of being cowboys, and shoot these robotic residents: alas, one of the robots malfunctions in a shoot-out and pursues the pair throughout the film on a relentless quest for revenge (the robot in question played with menacing remorselessness by a fantastic Yul Bryner.)<\/p>\n<div class=\"kent-video-wrapper\"><span class='embed-youtube' style='text-align:center; display: block;'><iframe class='youtube-player' type='text\/html' width='840' height='503' src='https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/oYvyiruWzYo?version=3&#038;rel=1&#038;fs=1&#038;showsearch=0&#038;showinfo=1&#038;iv_load_policy=1&#038;wmode=transparent' frameborder='0' allowfullscreen='true'><\/iframe><\/span><\/div>\n<p>The formula of historical theme-park-going-wrong is one Crichton would repeat with greater commercial success with dinosaurs in <em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.imdb.com\/title\/tt0107290\/\" target=\"_blank\">Jurassic Park<\/a><\/em>, and to a certain extent in the disappointing novel <em><a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Timeline_(novel)\" target=\"_blank\">Timeline<\/a><\/em> with knights.<\/p>\n<p>Seeing the film again made me reflect that its whole scenario is akin to the way in which we perceive our own history, and how sometimes we experience it. Much of our view of history can come from film and literature \u2013 think of the multitude of Vietnam films such as <em>Platoon<\/em> or <em>Full Metal Jacket<\/em>, or Norman Mailer\u2019s Vietnam-novel <em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.co.uk\/Naked-Dead-Flamingo-Modern-Classics\/dp\/0586091157\/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1281969095&amp;sr=8-4\" target=\"_blank\">The Naked and the Dead<\/a>,<\/em>or Ridley Scott\u2019s swords-and-sandals vision of Rome in <em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.imdb.com\/title\/tt0172495\/\" target=\"_blank\">Gladiator<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n<div class=\"kent-video-wrapper\"><span class='embed-youtube' style='text-align:center; display: block;'><iframe class='youtube-player' type='text\/html' width='840' height='503' src='https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/IvTT29cavKo?version=3&#038;rel=1&#038;fs=1&#038;showsearch=0&#038;showinfo=1&#038;iv_load_policy=1&#038;wmode=transparent' frameborder='0' allowfullscreen='true'><\/iframe><\/span><\/div>\n<p>Our learning about the past can come filtered though the film-maker\u2019s lense \u2013 Spielberg\u2019s account of the Holocaust in <em>Schindler\u2019s List<\/em> \u2013 or the novelist\u2019s imagination \u2013 Bernard Cornwell, Henry Treece, etc.<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_366\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-366\" style=\"width: 180px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><img loading=\"lazy\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-366 \" style=\"margin-left: 5px;margin-right: 5px;border: white 5px solid\" title=\"westworld\" src=\"http:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/pandora\/files\/2010\/08\/westworld2-300x258.jpg\" alt=\"Yul Bryner in Westworld\" width=\"180\" height=\"155\" srcset=\"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/pandora\/files\/2010\/08\/westworld2-300x258.jpg 300w, https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/pandora\/files\/2010\/08\/westworld2.jpg 326w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 180px) 85vw, 180px\" \/><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-366\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Yul never walk alone<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>Re-enactments and displays are popular ways of bringing historical events to some sort of \u2018life;\u2019 mock jousting tournaments at English Heritage castles across the country, or air displays featuring the dwindling number of aircraft from World War II. Like Crichton\u2019s automaton-populated holiday resort mock-ups, these create an artificial snapshot of a generalised sense of a moment in the past, and purport to bring it to life for popular consumption.<\/p>\n<p>But are we losing a real sense of our past, our history, buried under (or papered over by) a fictionalised representation of it ? And, like the remorseless robot in <em>Westworld<\/em>, will populist reinventions of our past, in representing it, actually destroy us in the end ?<\/p>\n<p>Real history \u2013 if it possible to define something which we haven\u2019t experienced for ourselves, because it occurred before we were born, as such \u2013 is being eroded by our reinventions, or re-imaginings of it; the glare of Hollywood\u2019s limelight fails to illuminate most of history\u2019s shadowed corners: in fact, it <em>creates<\/em> those obscuring shadows precisely because it spotlights heroes and villains for our entertainment. The same\u00a0strobe lighting up the hero necessarily blinds us to the realities lost out of sight beyond the lit circle in which they stand.<\/p>\n<p>Ironically, it\u2019s almost as if the very media working to preserve history, whether for our education or entertainment, are instead serving, as the writer and cultural analyst Fredric Jameson puts it, \u2018as the very agents and mechanisms for our historical amnesia.\u2019 (\u2018Postmodernism and consumer society\u2019 in Gray &amp; McGuigan, 1993: 205.) Fredric makes this point in relation to the function of news media, but arguably it\u2019s also a pertinent definition of the methods by which film, television and historical novels are making history disappear in the very act of trying to bring\u00a0it alive.<\/p>\n<p>Where has our past gone ? Or, more accurately perhaps: where did we begin to erase it ?<\/p>\n<p>Posted by <strong>Dan Harding<\/strong>, Deputy Director of Music at the <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/pandora\/www.kent.ac.uk\/music\" target=\"_blank\">University of Kent<\/a>. <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/music-matters\/\" target=\"_blank\">Click here<\/a> to read his music blog, \u2018<a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/music-matters\/\" target=\"_blank\">Music Matters<\/a>.\u2019<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I watched Westworld again recently, a Michael Crichton film from 1973 in which two characters go on holiday to a mock Western resort, populated by gun-toting robots. Holiday-makers can live out their fantasies of being cowboys, and shoot these robotic residents: alas, one of the robots malfunctions in a shoot-out and pursues the pair throughout &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/pandora\/2010\/09\/24\/where-has-the-past-gone-erasing-history\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Where has the past gone ? Erasing history&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":620,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1123,1201],"tags":[1258],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/pandora\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/363"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/pandora\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/pandora\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/pandora\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/620"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/pandora\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=363"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/pandora\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/363\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":401,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/pandora\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/363\/revisions\/401"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/pandora\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=363"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/pandora\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=363"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/pandora\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=363"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}