A Review

A modern film is a creative synthesis of word and image, imagination and technology. A fine film rings true to the domains and dimensions of human experience.

An historical film is by definition a perspective of one era on a past period. It is an expression of what C. G. Jung, in The Red Book, called the ‘spirit of the times’, which shapes and colours the retrospection of an earlier epoch. Its agenda, motive, interpretation, and lens are time-specific. Such films are Rorschach-like projections, free-association experiments, as subjective and exotic as the fantasies of the alchemical adepts and their soror mystica who peered into alchemical retorts and saw imaginal shapes in the fumes.

Because our minds are streaming with fluid moving pictures, a film about an historical era cannot erase all that has since occurred from the mind's eye of the contemporary beholder, any more than our later view of our earlier selves can suspend our current consciousness. A screenwriter and film director cannot fully enter the frames of inner fantasies, the timbre of relational dynamics, and the context of external realities. Even when dialogue is taken from the written words of the relevant individuals, they are registered in the scales and intonations of the interpreter.

Whether in art or life, the mythopoeic nature of memory and the presence of the present inform the re-transcription and revision of the past. In this sense, each memory is as much or more a marker of today's template as the moment re-told and re-viewed. In his book, A Most Dangerous Method, The Story of Jung, Freud, and Sabina Spielrein (1993), John Kerr alludes to philosopher Paul Ricoeur's notion of history as ‘a story about the past told to the present for present purposes’ (1993, p. 13). If the purposes are artistic and commercial, the past is submitted to the domination of present ambitions, and the characters' actions and interactions are remoulded to fit the tastes of the desired audience.

In The Rhetoric of Fictio