Just archiving these notes into the website.
Right off the bat I should tell you that this podcast will discuss world history through the lens of movies. Each week I’ll talk about a movie and use that as a launching point to touch on some event or time period in history. We’ll go roughly chronological and this intro episode will get a bit into creation theory after a bit of background on myself and this project.
I’ve always been interested in stories and by the stories behind stories. For me, history and movies have always been equally fascinating, granted movies tend to be more entertaining. The idea for a project like this first developed years ago and I had thought to do it as a coffee-table style book, but never found the time. There are two movies that stick in my mind as triggering the idea for me. The first is Braveheart. Yes, it has some key historical inaccuracies that I’m sure we’ll get to down the line, but we meet Edward I of England, known as Longshanks. The cruel old king trying to keep down the Scots. The other movie is Becket from 1964 staring Peter O’Toole as Henry II of England, who was the great grandson of William the Conqueror.
Now, what’s the connection? Well, Henry II had two sons you’ve no doubt heard of – Richard the Lionheart who fought in the crusades and John, or Prince John as he was called in the Robin Hood tales. Well, though you wouldn’t know if from any version of Robin Hood, John did later become king of England, famously signing the Magna Carta in 1215. John was succeeded by his son Henry III, who was in turn, succeeded by his son — Edward I. So, Longshanks, was the grandson of ol’ Prince John. And if you go a few generations after Longshanks, you’re into the War of the Roses (famously one of the inspirations for Game of Thrones). And the War of the Roses came to end with Henry VII, father of Henry VIII.
I know that’s a lot to take in, but you see how much ground we can cover by looking at just a few key stories and the backgrounds surrounding them. We could probably run through the whole lineage of British monarchs if we selected the right movies to watch.
Now, ever the masochist, I’ve chosen the more daunting task of trying to conquer all of world history.
My goal is to make this a sort of World History 101, using movies to point us in the direction of some historical topic of discussion – 100 or so movies that attempt to cover human history. It’s not going to necessarily be the best 100 choices and I’ve no doubt left big gaps that will offend somebody.
I don’t want to paint myself too much in a corner here as far as: Where do we start, where do we end, what do we include? But I’ll do my best and hopefully get feedback from you along the way.
Here were my two main criteria when choosing movies for the list:
1) available to view online legally in the US through Netflix, Amazon, or iTunes – YouTube as well, but only if it was offered to rent, not just posted probably illegally where it could get pulled down.
2) be a good movie; this is obviously subjective, but basically a movie with more favorable reviews than negative reviews; I may have lowered the bar in a couple places to hit topics I needed, but I’m not interested in watching a lot of bad movies… I’m actually really looking forward to this as I haven’t seen about 1/3 of the movies on the list.
So, while I want to be well-rounded, I found several otherwise good, foreign choices, that I just didn’t have access to. And, despite my attempts to avoid being too focused on Western culture, my available selections certainly skew a little that way. Likewise the list skews modern. My halfway point in the movie list is about 1900. Again, it was much harder than I anticipated to find pre-1900 movies unless I just wanted to make the whole list about Great Britain. So I chose modern, geographical and cultural diversity over choosing a film for each and every British monarch. The goal will be to include as much historical context as I can leading in to each story, without boring you or myself.
Next, who am I and how am I qualified to do this? Well, it’s 2017–qualifications are meaningless. But I’ll have you know I made it 2/3 of the way through my first semester as a grad student in history before, wait for it, dropping out and opening a DVD rental store in 2004. I’ve seen every Oscar winner for best picture and all but about 40 of the best picture nominees. And, finally, I wrote a young adult novel about three time traveling teenagers who visit a few places we also see along the way (Magic Carpet Ride, details in show notes).
So, I’m a storytelling history lover and movie buff with enough time on his hands to tackle this project. Basically I’m the perfect host for this.
[So, how do we know what we know about history? Like any academic field, histories come from a consensus view of events based on physical and written records. Theories and stories can be amended based on new evidence and by its very nature, much of history is just unknowable.
We now know that in the modern criminal justice system, for example, that even eyewitness testimony can be very unreliable, so any written record of the past, even if it was written at the time, has to be taken with a grain of salt. And, of course, as the saying goes, “History is written by the winners.”
History does refer to the time of written records; which is why the term prehistory or prehistoric exists. Prehistory was the time before which people wrote about themselves or had other contemporaries write about them. There is considerable overlap throughout the world though. We have written Chinese and Egyptian records dating back around 3500 and 5000 thousand years, respectively, but someplace like England was later to the game with its agreed upon recorded history being less than 2000 years old and King Arthur, for example, being technically only a legendary figure despite his hypothetical reign being only about 1500 years ago.
Modern historians can examine past histories and archeological evidence to try to give us a clearer picture of the past, but again, in the end it is unknowable. Movies rarely, if ever, claim to be historical documents, but since we’re taking everything with a grain of salt in the first place, I think movies can be a fine place to start a discussion.]
It would be easy to make this a giant list of war movies and there will certainly be more than a few battles along the way, but we’ll also look at the origins of major religions (which, actually, will include some battles still), but I’ve chosen The Prince of Egypt for the Judeo-Christian relevance, The Message about Muhammad the founder of Islam–which makes a point not to show any depiction of him on screen, and the controversial Last Temptation of Christ when we look at the origins of Christianity.
You’ll note, especially early in the list, myth, history, and legend are all intertwined, but that’s exactly what I plan to discuss along with each movie.
There will be plenty of movies of kings, queens, and emperors from not just Europe but China and India and others around the world.
We’ll watch plenty of classic movies like Ben-Hur, A Man for All Season, and Casablanca; but also films I’d never even heard of such as Sansho the Bailiff, Myn Bala, and Embrace of the Serpent.
For this intro episode, let’s briefly look at creation. Modern science is in agreement that the universe began with a Big Bang where all matter was contained in a single point before exploding out in all directions. Atoms coalesced over billions of years creating galaxies, stars, and planets. On (at least) one such planet, life emerged. Eventually a certain primate developed advanced enough brains to communicate and come up with their own theories, myths, and stories about how life and humans began.
We’ll start more in earnest next week, but I would like to use the opening sequence from a 2011 Hungarian animated film called The Tragedy of Man; based on a play from 1861. My plan had initially been to start the list with pre-historic man in Quest for Fire, but Tragedy of Man entered my radar when I had over 90 movies in place. I’d never seen it before but I saw it dealt with creation. It’s a little too artistic for my taste, little to no plot, but beautifully animated. In the beginning, it shows the cosmic soup science describes then begins to interlace it with Judeo-Christian tradition. The voice of God created these clouds of dust from which the universe as we know it will form. We see a Lucifer who says he’s the yin to God’s yang. When Earth forms, we see a paradise populated by only Adam and Eve. The Lucifer in this story describes Eve as the world’s first philosopher who asks the question, “why NOT eat the apple of knowledge?”
Again, plot isn’t the focus here; the movie quickly jumps to cavemen painting on walls by torchlight; hunting and dancing and domesticating dogs. We’ll get more into early man next week, but if you’re curious to check out The Tragedy of Man, it’s available to rent on YouTube. If you liked Terrance Mallik’s Tree of Life, it might be right up your alley. For today let’s stick briefly with creation stories just based on the cursory research I did for this.
Muslims, Christians, and Jews all believe in Adam and Eve and the six-day creation by God.
Buddhists have a repeating cycle of life, death, and rebirth that I don’t really understand. Basically, the world has no beginning and no end and at the same time is constantly being created and destroyed. I apologize if I’ve completely butchered that.
Ancient Egypt had multiple creation myths but the common thread seems to be that there was a lifeless watery abyss called Nu that existed before time itself. From this the world arose as a pyramid-shaped mound.
The Greeks, Romans, and Norse mythologies shared common threads of Gods spawning Gods and residing in realms separate from the Earth. We’ve even seen them show up in some movies – Clash of the Titans has the Greek gods playing with humans like toys and Marvel Comics have brought us the Norse realm of Asgard with Thor and Loki.
I really like the Sikh idea of creation. They seem to have no creation myth and simply say only God knows when and how the world was created and it’s not for us to know. For our purposes, let’s leave it there. I don’t intend to spend a lot of time on pre-history. However we arrived and evolved, humans have always been social creatures. There were certain key advances to get us on the path to civilization and we’ll look at a key one next episode in 1981’s Quest for Fire.