Splitters vs. Lumpers or How I Learned to Love the History Police

Stange on the set

It was a moment of perfect revenge. One of our historical advisors volunteered to play the role of Joseph Coulon de Villiers de Jumonville, the unfortunate Frenchman whose head was bludgeoned in during the first engagement of the French and Indian War. The scene was being shot toward the end of a grueling two months of production--much of it outdoors in heavy rain. Frustration ran high on all sides, and I have to admit there had been moments when to me, as director, it seemed the biggest problem was the historians. So for a delicious few minutes I relished setting up the scene. After all, the historian in question, Scott Stephenson, had been instrumental in helping me understand the significance of this event: the wounded Jumonville sits forlornly on the ground, the Delaware leader Tanaghrisson approaches from behind, brings his tomahawk down to smash the victim's skull, and then washes his hands in Scott's--I mean Jumonville's--brains. As it turned out, Scott Stephenson makes a very convincing Jumonville, the assassination plays well, and if anyone has quibbles with the way we represent it, well, no one can complain that a historian was not on set.

The project is The War That Made America, an innovative four-hour series for public television to commemorate the 250^th anniversary of the French and Indian War. For a variety of reasons, Stephenson and other historians are far more intimately involved than the usual "historical advisors" on a documentary. In fact, they are virtually enmeshed. Stephenson and another historian, Jay Cassell (who teaches seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French and Canadian military history at the University of Guelph, Ontario) were on set nearly every one of our forty days of shooting. And I am glad that they were there. The two of them, along with our researcher, Kerry Falvey, soon found themselves needed at the dressing rooms at 5:30 each morning to make sure the Indians were being made up properly, and that the powdered wigs didn't come out looking like Monty Python material. Then they would put in a full day on the set, helping block out battle scenes and answering a hundred niggling questions that no one foresaw until the last minute. It was anything but a glamorous gig. Several other historians, including Fred Anderson (author of Crucible of War: The Seven Years War and the Fate of Empire in North America, 1754-1766) were in touch by phone and email throughout the shoot. Darren Bonaparte, a writer, historian, and artist from Akwesasne Territory in Ontario and author of the Mohawk history web site, The Wampum Chronicles, came to provide his help.

As a result of the heavy historian presence, the stresses and strains that always accompany the marriage of television and academic history played out in a real world-- dare I say battlefield--setting, making the whole issue a little more immediate than usual. It is no wonder that one of our crew members remarked ruefully when production stopped yet again to solve some seemingly small problem of authenticity: "Man, the history police are all over this one!" There even came a point when I could not stand one more discussion about the difference between accuracy and authenticity; verisimilitude versus veracity. If anyone ever talks to me again about how many buttons belong on the leggings of the 44^th Regiment of Foot, I'll be tempted to get out the Brown Bess (or is it a Charleville).

Don't get me wrong: material details matter for all sorts of reasons. For starters, we shot these films in the new format of High Definition (HD) video. The resolution of the image is much sharper than standard video--and therefore unforgiving. A plastic button that would never show up on 16mm film or standard definition video is very clear in HD. But equally important, we wanted to get it as right as we could. A major goal of this project is to use the story of the war to help viewers, particularly younger ones, understand how life was lived in a time so different from our own. Part of that mission is accomplished through good narrative. But on television it is also a matter of making the visual atmosphere look and feel not just different, but authentically different. So we made sure every Native American had a shaved head or scalp lock, and that every soldier had long hair or a wig. Musket barrels had to be the proper length; ammunition pouches the right color, and fingernails realistically dirty. But in filmmaking, as in life, budget is everything. We could not afford to bring eighteenth-century North America back to life; all we could do is represent it as best we understood it and could pay for it.

The War That Made America goes far beyond most public television undertakings in the sheer amount and scope of its dramatized scenes. For years, the trend at PBS and the cable outlets has been to lard historical documentaries with more and more reenactments, or re-creations. (I prefer the term recreation simply because I do not believe we can ever hope to actually "reenact" an event from the past). I suspect part of the appeal is simply novelty; long, slow moves over photographs has become passé. The ubiquitous remote control is also to blame. Viewers flick through the channels so quickly now that they skip over anything that does not catch their attention within a few seconds. There is no question that a re-creation--even badly done--is more likely to stop an itchy finger than a talking head or a slow pan across a black and white photo.

But we are employing re-creations for another reason as well. If historical documentaries tell only the stories that are accompanied by archival footage or photographic images, the whole realm of prephotographic history would be off-limits to the genre. Certainly, to tell the story of the French and Indian War in a compelling way using existing images would be nearly impossible. So we made the decision early on to invest heavily in re-creating the events of the war. In effect, we are dramatizing the history based as closely as possible on documented evidence.

Additionally, in a bold step toward creating something new and different for public televison, we are eschewing "talking heads" in the programs altogether; this will be four hours of historical television without experts telling the viewer what happened or what they are supposed to make of it. Instead we have a "presenter" (a nonhistorian) who appears on camera periodically to provide explanation and analysis, and who is also the voice-over narrator.

All this requires an enormous amount of collaboration between the filmmakers and the historians. Fact-checking will be easy. What we are doing is wrestling with the enormous task of compressing a complex span of history into a short television series, without reducing the story simply to a recitation of main events over captivating pictures. A comparison of word length makes the point: our four hours of script--counting both narration and character dialogue--comes to about 25,000 words. That would be a mere 75 pages of Fred Anderson's book, which is 746 pages long.

The difference in quantity only points to the deeper problem, of course: an inherent conflict between how history is presented on television and how history is interpreted on the printed page. Television requires compromises in every aspect of the production: we are constrained by time (52 minutes for an hour-long show), by budget (historical drama is fiendishly expensive), and most of all by the demands of the medium itself. Every second of our 52-minute hour has to have an image to illustrate it. If we cannot find a way to visualize a point or an event, it does not get in the show no matter how important it may be. In addition, we have to make the program dramatic and compelling in classical narrative style: it must have cliff-hangers and reversals for the main characters; it must resolve neatly and satisfyingly at the end. "Get your hero up a tree, then get him down again," goes the sage advice.

No matter how well our historical advisors understand that entertainment is every bit as important as information in television documentaries, I think they are constitutionally incapable of letting go of their academic standards. That may not sound like a compliment, but I do mean it as one. They hold our feet to the fire, and insist that we hew to the line of what is documented evidence. But the contradiction between the fast pace and visual demands of entertaining television, and the careful nuance and patient interpretation required by serious historical inquiry will, I fear, never be resolved. They are simply two different ways of looking at the past. As a teacher once pointed out, the world is divided between the splitters and the lumpers. Being a good historian means being a splitter; making historical programs that appeal to television audiences (even on PBS) requires being a lumper.

But speaking as a lumper, I still aim to make good history--good television history. I do not expect that we will ever reach complete agreement with the historians helping us about how much context we should offer for a particular event, or how fully and carefully we portray a specific character. When Jay Cassell pointed out problems with a scene, we retorted that it worked very well for our test audiences. "Well, Survivor works for audiences too," he came back at us. "But you asked us as historians to tell you what works for history."

Fair enough. So the best we can do is to get the big picture right; to touch on the many sides of this story equally, if not completely. To make sure the big themes are clear, even when the details must be jettisoned along the way. If we cannot make a riveting narrative out of it, well, that's our fault. This television treatment of the French and Indian War is a door into the subject; we can never do it justice with anything near the completeness of a written work. But that is not our goal. Our job is to entice viewers--to pull them through the door and make them want to learn more. That is when the historians really take over.