The Washington Post reports on three University of Virginia professors assessing the historical accuracy of the new film Cold Mountain.
…[I]f you want to understand the way Americans process their past, the analysis of such fictional “history” is a perfectly reasonable enterprise. For, as real historians know all too well, the Hollywood Version has more influence on what we believe than all their efforts combined….
But Gallagher, who is one of the most prominent students of Civil War, knows what he’s up against here. “I think ‘Gone With the Wind’ has shaped what people think about the Civil War probably more than everything we’ve written put together, or put together and squared,” he says. Nobody thinks this film will have that kind of impact, but it will surely have more than his own work or that of any other academic historian.
Before this night’s discussion is over, Gallagher and his U-Va. colleagues will field questions about the film’s take on slavery, on the role of Civil War women, and on the nature of home-front vigilantism in “our beloved South.” Ed Ayers will respond in part by pointing out that Minghella’s movie is structured more like a western than a true Civil War film.
t’s an interesting, lengthy assessment of history and cinema.