Revisionism, history and Hollywood.

• Author: Sharrett, Christopher
• Position: Historical revisionism in motion pictures - Column

The 1991 release of Oliver Stone's "JFK" set off a huge debate about Hollywood's tendency to "distort" history or otherwise color viewers' perceptions of the past. This sensitivity to the relationship between film images and real political and historical events has increased, rather than dissipated, since "JFK." Meanwhile, the controversy contained within it some false or disingenuous assertions that need to be attended to before Hollywood's responsibility to history can be focused on.

The furor over "JFK" began with the basic premise that "real" history shows there was no conspiracy in the Kennedy assassination and that Stone was peddling a baroque lie in his three-hour paranoid epic. The point of reference for pundits on this matter was the Warren Report, which ruled that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in killing Kennedy.

In essence, then, a study sanctioned by the executive branch of government was determined to represent the reality of this particular event, notwithstanding the criticism it has received from a variety of scholars over 30 years for its lack of rigor, obvious errors and omissions, and complexion as a prosecutor's brief. Even as the media followed a government verdict equals official history argument, they ignored almost totally a 1979 Congressional study ruling that conspiracy was "highly probable" in both the John Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., assassinations.

The media's claim that cinema should reflect a government-sanctioned history especially is disturbing in the case of "Schindler's List." For more than a decade after World War II, the topic of the Holocaust virtually was ignored by the major Western powers. The European Jews had virtually no governmental representation at all, unless one counts the Nuremberg court, although these trials did relatively little to educate the world on the magnitude of the Nazi genocide. Indeed, some Holocaust scholars today contend that the revisionism "Schindler's List" rebukes came about due to an official vacuum on the subject that was filled years after the event by painstaking, independent researchers.

The irony of Schindler's List" is that it contends with a revisionism not in Hollywood, but in the culture at large, a bizarre rejection of voluminous data that is gaining credence even in sections of academe. A greater irony may be that, while "Schindler's List" is helping to carve more clearly into public memory a history of the Holocaust, this is, after all, a history via...