I am looking foward to this class a lot because I have always been fascinated by movies. One of my favorite hobbies is watching a movies’ director’s commentary, but I have never really researched a movie/ a movie’s particular historical subject to any great depth. At the beginning of each semester I think about my expectations for a class, and one of my expectations for U.S. History in Film is that I will forever view movies in a new way. Furthermore, I expect that I will always ponder the veracity of the story being told on screen. These expectations excite me, I want to be an active watcher of films, I want to always question what is being shown by “Hollywood”.

I believe it is extremely important to watch with a critical eye, for many of the reasons that we discussed last Thursday. For one, movies are ubiquitous. Movies are marketed, they are seen by mass audiences, and (if done well) they have a long shelf- life. With breathtaking cinematography, astute direction, and award winning acting it is no wonder that Americans accept a rewriting of History through film. I would say that if a historical film makes a powerful emotional appeal, audiences will identify with the human interest story so much that the historical “nuts and bolts” become secondary.

One historical film that always makes a strong emotional impact with me is, A League of Their Own. I did not do my 299 on Women’s baseball during World War II, so I generally accept that representation as historically accurate. Frankly, the emotional climax of the sisterhood storyline of Kit and Dottie at the Hall of Fame reunion effectively places the historical accuracy of the film into the background. It could be argued that A League of Their Own was not produced to tell the historical story of the Woman’s Baseball League, or that it is as much a sports drama as anything else. Regardless, in my opinion it serves as one of the most prominent representations of the 1940s homefront. I also think it is a good example of the larger point I am trying to make which is that a film’s emotional storyline will often diminish its historical focus. In turn, Americans look at a film’s Historical setting as a subtext, taking it as the truth, “it looks like the ’40s, it sounds like the ’40s…it is the 1940s”. This is dangerous because by not representing a historical time with accurate depictions, important lessons to be learned from history could be lost. For example, if you downplay or eliminate misogyny from A League of Their Own, you eliminate a part of our nation’s historical narrative and a chance to educate future generations