Using Film in History Class

What to look out for when using film in history class

Introduction
General factors to consider
Determining the quality of documentaries
Determining the value of fictional or fictionalized accounts
Contextualizing footage
Age appropriateness

Films and TV series listed according to time periods

Early Modern Britain
The French Revolution
Slavery and Civil Rights in the United States
The American West
The US Civil War
World War I
World War II
Nazi Germany
The Holocaust
The American Vietnam War
Communist East Germany
Cold War and Post-Cold War History

A possible website to consult

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What to look out for

Introduction

Documentaries, history dramas (films, TV movies and series), and historical footage can augment student learning in history class.

Below is a list of films, TV series, and footage I have used or partially used in class or plan to use at some point in the future, as well as some material I would not use in class for various reasons.

Please note that these are not movie reviews as such—I am not a qualified film critic—but simply my thoughts about the usefulness of films and TV shows in history class.

General factors to consider

Before discussing the individual movies, one must consider why and how film generally should or should not be used in class.

The goal is not to entertain

While watching something on a screen will entertain students and will thus hopefully facilitate learning, entertaining students must not be the primary goal of using film in class.

Aural and visual learners

Nevertheless, there are many students who are visual and aural learners who will benefit from information presented on film. Nowadays, students tend to watch YouTube videos at home about a history topic instead of reading about it. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Several of my students have learned quite a bit about a topic by watching YouTube videos.

Problems with YouTube learning

There are two major issues when students attempt to study a history topic exclusively by means of watching videos. One, students are so used to watching videos online for entertainment, their brains often end up consuming, rather than learning.

They will watch the video and think that now they’ve done their work, without grasping what this work they supposedly have done should actually entail, i.e. thinking critically about sources, understanding cause and effect, learning about change and continuity, etc.

The second problem with learning history only through watching videos is that videos will inevitably tell a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. This may reinforce teleological views of history (the idea that “history” equals objectively observable past events that took place on a linear timeline moving toward progress and a better future, and that these events had to take place more or less in the way they did as part of humankind’s journey toward a better present).

Having students compare and contrast various written primary sources in class will hopefully counteract the effects the teleological storytelling of videos has on students.

Making sure students still read

Because of YouTube, teachers need to make sure that students still also read about history. Studies have shown that when students read material, annotate, underline/highlight and take notes, they will retain and comprehend more information.

Teachers have a number of options to make sure students still read, such as making students read in class or having them take quizzes or entire tests about homework reading assignments.

Plus, one should remind them that all their exams will consist of reading and writing. Especially in the case of British and international standardized exams, watching YouTube videos and documentaries alone will not help students do well. The textbooks available for such exams prepare students specifically for the types of questions they will have to answer on those exams. Hence, to do well on such exams, students must read the textbook and not just watch videos.

Determining the quality of documentaries

One should not show random YouTube documentaries in class, but stick to documentaries made by established documentary filmmakers. Yet, even in the case of the latter, one should make sure they are factual and avoid teleology and explicit bias as much as possible—every documentary will inevitably look at a topic from specific points of view; completely objective documentaries do not exist.

One could of course make such issues as inaccuracies or teleology the subject of a class discussion or exercise. If there are several issues with a documentary, but one still uses it in class, one must at the very least point those issues out to the students.

Determining the value of fictional or fictionalized accounts

1. The more obvious but ultimately less important issues:

Non-historians will most likely focus on whether a fictional account of a past event is factually accurate, i.e. did every scene in the movie really happen? Did all the people actually say the things they say in the film and act like they act in the film? Did they actually wear what they are wearing in the movie, and does everything in the movie look exactly the way it looked back then?

No matter which movie or past event may be at issue, the short answer to all these questions must always be a resounding no. With some movies one would hope that this is obvious even to the casual viewer—when for example a main protagonist in twelve-century England mysteriously turns out to have highly developed Karate skills.

Yet, even when numerous period experts and costume designers have been employed and meticulous research has been conducted to ensure that a movie is in terms of the way it looks and the way people talk and behave in it as accurately as possible, it will never depict some sort of “objective, historical truth.”

A movie will forever remain an interpretation of something that happened and will tell the story from a specific point of view. If, for example, a war movie focuses on the experience of ordinary soldiers, the point of view of the generals, of the civilian population, of enemy soldiers, etc. will be missing. It will always remain impossible to recreate on film an event one-to-one and from a 360 degree angle, even if it is filmed with a camera able to provide the latter visually.

Furthermore, movies aim first and foremost to entertain and make money. Consequently, they need to tell stories with a beginning, a middle, and an end, and with interesting characters, plot developments, visually attractive shots, etc. Real life, whether in the past or present, does not happen in accordance with the prerequisites of telling a good story.

2. The less obvious but more important issues:

From a historian’s point of view, there are issues that are much more problematic than the questions listed above, although some of the problems overlap. Such problematic issues include:

2.1 Did people at that time actually think, speak, and act the way they do in the movie?

The question here is not as much whether any individual actually said something verbatim, but rather, whether she would have said the things she says in the movie at all.

And this goes beyond the problem that far too many people in far too many movies set in far too many time periods and locations speak present-day American or British English.

Having most people speak English in movies can be avoided by hiring actors who can speak the original languages and by providing subtitles for international audiences.

Using present-day versions of languages is a different matter. There are certainly movies that have been filmed entirely in the accurate language of a time period. Still, few audience members would likely be interested in a movie or television series spoken entirely in, say, Latin or Old Japanese. In both cases, present-day audiences would not only need subtitles, but nobody knows exactly how words in those languages were pronounced.

But the real problem is that dialogue especially in Hollywood movies is too often written as if people were having a conversation according to a present-day (often Western or American) zeitgeist and (often Western or American) present-day sensitivities and values.

If actors speak this way, it suggests to audiences, without explicitly stating it, that aside from wearing different clothes and having fewer amenities and less developed technology, “they were just like us.”

This, in turn, encourages viewers to think teleologically about history:

Since people back then were just like us, they would have wanted all the things we have today and thus, in successive generations, must have worked toward having those things. It also reinforces such silly ideas as “nothing ever really changes in history” and “if we don’t learn from history, it repeats.”

The following are some of the present-day notions often appearing in movies about historical events that make those movies historically inaccurate:

a) People using present-day idioms.
b) People acting in accordance with present-day notions of nationalities and nation-states.
c) People acting in an enlightened manner centuries before the Age of Enlightenment, e.g. early medieval peasants speaking about “individual rights,” etc.
d) People defying societal, cultural, or religious conventions in the manner of present-day rebels (unless there is historical evidence that some actually did so, e.g. people defying gender conventions long before the 1960s).
e) People fighting for the creation of something resembling present-day democracies before the eighteenth century.

2.2 Hero worship

In many genres, to tell an entertaining story, movies need to have a hero and a villain. The problem is often not as much whether this hero existed or whether he (and movies still more often focus on male than on female heroes) really looked, talked, or acted like the Hollywood star who plays him.

Rather, the concepts of a “hero” and a “villain” are problematic in themselves. Any hero or villain, whether entirely fictional or based on a historical figure, will inevitably turn out to be somewhat one-dimensional—if a hero has too many flaws, he will cease to be a hero. If a villain has too many good qualities, he will cease to be a villain.

Real people are usually neither literal heroes nor literal villains because human individuals tend to be more complex than that.

In the case of fictional movie characters this is, aside from lacking or boring character development, not much of an issue. But when historical figures—or characters who could have existed in a certain time period—are portrayed in a one-dimensional way, a film should be used only with caution, if at all, in history classes.

That real people are usually not one-dimensional characters is not the only problem. Movies starring such characters reinforce the ahistorical and by most professional historians long abandoned “great man” approach to studying history, which is the perception that individual and heroic “great men”—rulers, generals, inventors, etc.—are responsible for “progress” in history and made it possible for their supposed descendants to live today in “the best country in the world”. Those are fairy tales, not history.

Contextualizing footage

Historical footage must be treated like a primary source. Students must know who made it (if known), and when and where it was made. Students must be made aware that the footage does not depict universal truth, but looks at something from one specific angle.

And finally

One of course always needs to make sure that anything one shows in class is age-appropriate and does not violate school or community standards. Several of the movies discussed below are R-rated and could thus not be shown in most classes below Year 13. However, watching or re-watching some of these films may also provide teachers with a better grasp of some history topics.

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Some films and TV series to consider

Early Modern Britain

To Kill a King (Mike Barker, 2003)

A fictionalized depiction of the friendship between Oliver Cromwell and General Thomas Fairfax and the killing of King Charles I after the end of the Second English Civil War (1648–1649), this movie seeks primarily to entertain not to inform in a historically accurate manner. While it does succeed in doing the former, several scenes, especially the killing of the king, could be used in history class to make a discussion of the English Civil War and its consequences more interesting to students.

The French Revolution

La Révolution française (The French Revolution; Robert Enrico, Richard T. Heffron, 1989)

This is a six-hour, two-part French, German, Italian, British, and Canadian co-production made for the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution. This dramatization of the events is quite remarkable insofar as it aims, quite successfully and accurately, to show “what happened” without taking sides or using a fictional plot at the center to move the story along.

There are some scenes where the creators took some artistic license. And occasionally they do create plotlines by focusing on the personal lives of Danton, Desmoulins, and Robespierre. There is also an emphasis on Danton’s speech in defense of himself in front of the revolutionary tribunal toward the end of the film that makes him look heroic. Historians to this day remain divided about Danton, with some considering him violent and corrupt and others thinking he was genuine and patriotic.

Nevertheless, many scenes in this long film very nicely bring to life events students usually study when a class covers the French Revolution. Those studying the revolution for the A-Level exams or equivalent could be encouraged—with the necessary caveats—to watch the entire production at home (it is available on YouTube with English subtitles) to help them remember the basics of what happened.

Slavery and Civil Rights in the United States

Roots (ABC Television miniseries, 1977)

Based on Alex Haley’s 1976 novel Roots: The Saga of an American Family, this TV miniseries traces the roots of an African-American family from the Gambian man Kunta Kinte’s enslavement and transportation to the Americas to the lives of his freed descendants after the US Civil War. If one has the time, one might want to show the entire series to students studying the history of the transatlantic slave trade and slavery in the Americas.

13th (Ava DuVernay, 2016)

This brilliant documentary shows how first the Jim Crow laws, then the so-called war on drugs, and finally the prison industrial complex in the United States have prevented slavery from being truly abolished.

Today, African-Americans and Latinos are disproportionately incarcerated in the US by a for-profit prison system. Although the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution passed by Congress in 1865 officially abolished slavery, it also states that slavery shall not exist, “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted…”

This documentary illustrates how a racist justice system prevents many African-Americans and Latinos from “being duly convicted”, and how the prison industrial complex often detains them without trial, sometimes for years.

This documentary should be watched by every student in the world. It is available on Netflix.

The American West

The West (Ken Burns, Stephen Ives, documentary series, 1996)

This documentary series provides a good overview of the history of the American West and could be particularly useful for Years 10 to 13 studying the topic, mostly because it does not gloss over the genocide committed against Native Americans.

Son of the Morning Star (Mike Robe, ABC Television miniseries, 1991)

This US TV miniseries portrays the life of George Armstrong Custer ending with a detailed depiction of the Battle of the Little Bighorn (1876). It could be quite useful in history class because it does not portray Custer as a hero (which has been done far too many times in fictional accounts since 1876), but shows that he committed war crimes, (for example the slaughter of women and children at the Washita River massacre in 1868 by Custer’s 7th Cavalry Regiment); abandoned his post to visit his wife; and prevented necessary medical attention from being given to captured deserters.

The series is partially narrated from the point of view of Custer’s wife and from the standpoint of a Lakota woman. This provides different angles and, most importantly, also tells the story from the perspective of Custer’s Native American victims.

The US Civil War

The Civil War (Ken Burns, documentary series, 1990)

This documentary has several serious flaws: It neglects to discuss slavery as the main cause of the war; relies too much on the commentary of the arguably pro-Confederate writer Shelby Foote; and in part perpetuates the myth that the South was fighting for a heroic lost cause. Nevertheless, once one has pointed out and discussed these very serious flaws, students studying exclusively the military aspects of the war might find the documentary helpful.

Gettysburg (Ronald F. Maxwell, 1993)

Much too positive a portrayal of Robert E. Lee and the Confederacy, the film, like the Ken Burns documentary, might only be beneficial to students studying exclusively the military aspects of the war.

World War I

Joyeux Noël (Christian Carion, 2005)

This is a British, French, German co-production about the 1914 Christmas Truce at the Western Front. The latter parts, although well-done and very entertaining, veer too much in the direction of Hollywood sentimentality and are only tangentially based on the events.

However, several scenes at the beginning of the movie are extremely useful to history teachers because they illustrate such things as nationalism, militarism, and the indoctrination of school children in the belligerent countries, as well as young men’s enthusiasm at the beginning of the war. A bit later, a scene in which Scottish and French troops attack the German lines expertly depicts the horrors of trench warfare.

World War II

I do not discuss World War II documentaries here due to their ubiquity. Suffice to say that one should avoid the ones that include space aliens or whose narrator sounds like he is narrating an American pickup truck commercial. World War II is a historical subject, not an action movie.

It is also particularly difficult to find entire fictional movies based on actual events that will be helpful in the classroom.

Darkest Hour (Joe Wright, 2017)

A film like this about Winston Churchill’s coming to power in 1940 and his struggle to convince Parliament and his ministers—while British troops remain trapped at the beaches of Dunkirk—that Britain should fight on and refuse ever to negotiate with Nazi Germany will inevitably include its share of patriotic kitsch. Although Churchill did occasionally show up among the masses unannounced, the scene in the London Underground is completely made up, as is Churchill’s interaction in that scene with a British citizen of African descent. It reeks of the presentist imposition of twenty-first century attitudes upon the 1940s. Churchill was a racist.

However, the film could be very useful in history class to help students understand how uncertain Britain’s future and the future course of the war were in May 1940. Since Poland, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxemburg had fallen, and France was in the process of being overrun, many leading British politicians pressured the newly appointed prime minister to negotiate with Hitler.

This movie could thus be a useful tool in class to counteract teleological views of history. That is, the film can show students that nothing is ever predetermined. Things did not have to turn out the way they did.

Band of Brothers (Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks, TV miniseries, 2001)

This TV miniseries dramatizes the experiences of the American “Easy” Company, 2nd Battalion, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, of the 101st Airborne Division during World War II. It is based on extensive research and interviews (some of them contemporary) with participants and survivors. It has rightfully received rave reviews from critics, since it does not shy away from controversy, showing various military failures and war crimes, including the murder of German prisoners of war.

Nevertheless, it is a Hollywood production and as such tells the story of heroes from a very American point of view. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it has to be kept in mind and discussed with students.

Also, given that the historian Stephen E. Ambrose (1936–2002), on whose book by the same name the series was based, was found to have committed plagiarism in some of his other works, one might want to proceed with caution. Ambrose’s major achievement was to have provided a large audience with academically researched and well-written public history books, even if his talent for story-telling might occasionally have gotten in the way of a potentially more scholarly approach. Still, I would not assign his writings in a history class.

Saving Private Ryan (Steven Spielberg, 1998)

This is without a doubt an excellent film. Nevertheless, in class, I would only show the Omaha Beach landing, which is brilliantly done. The rest of the movie, for all its unquestionably superb quality as a film, involves in my opinion too much patriotic American flag waving to make it a useful history teaching tool—unless one makes sure to discuss this particular aspect in depth with students. The Omaha Beach scene may also be too violent to show in class.

Stalingrad (Joseph Vilsmaier, 1993)

The movie depicts the battle of Stalingrad (August 1942–February 1943) from the point of view of a German platoon. In terms of its general portrayal of the fighting in World War II and the Battle of Stalingrad, this film is an absolutely excellent piece of work.

The problem, which tends to be one of the main issues with a number of German World War II dramas, is that it attempts to divide the German forces neatly into, on the one hand, honorable Wehrmacht soldiers who tragically just did their duty and fought for their country and, on the other hand, fanatical Nazis who were responsible for the vast majority of war crimes. Numerous studies have shown this distinction to be inaccurate. In many cases, the Wehrmacht actively and willingly committed war crimes.

Thus, if one uses this in class—aside from the brutality shown, which is most likely inappropriate for secondary school students—one must discuss this problem thoroughly with students.

Generation War (Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter; Philipp Kadelbach, German TV miniseries, 2013)

Aside from possibly a couple of illustrative scenes, I would not show this in class.

Much like Stalingrad, in terms of its portrayal of World War II combat, this TV series is very well done, and it does not shy away from showing German atrocities committed on the Eastern Front.

However, the series’ flaws seriously overshadow its qualities. One will not gain a deeper understanding from watching this series of how the actions or the inaction of a vast German majority made the Holocaust possible. Rather, viewers will get the impression that most Germans were victims of Hitler and the Nazis, just like everyone else—a factually entirely false point of view still put forth to this day by those who seek to minimize the responsibility of the German people as whole. The series shows the SS and Eastern Europeans doing most of the killing of Jews on the Eastern Front, while “normal” Germans tend to be horrified. The final scene is also pure Hollywood-style kitsch.

Charité at War (German TV miniseries, 2019)

The Charité hospital in Berlin was first established in 1710 for victims of the plague. Since then it has in various incarnations been one of the most prestigious university hospitals in the world. From 1946 to 1989, it was the most important medical institute in communist East Germany.
From 1933 to 1945, all Jewish personnel was expelled from the Charité, and the hospital staff was confronted with the reality of the Nazi regime’s horrific medical experiments and the murder of the mentally and physically ill.

The internationally celebrated surgeon Dr. Ernst Ferdinand Sauerbruch was the head of the surgical department at the hospital during this time and is one of the central characters of the series.

The series succeeds in portraying Sauerbruch as a medical celebrity in Nazi Germany who was at the same time never a dedicated Nazi and who participated in subtle resistance activities, such as support for his Jewish friends, especially talented surgeons and other doctors who were not allowed to practice. Sauerbruch was also among the few medical professionals who protested publicly against the Nazis’ Euthanasia program. And he was peripherally involved in the Stauffenberg plot and interrogated several times, but never arrested. One gets the impression that Sauerbruch was simply too brilliant of a doctor (and he counted Joseph Goebbels among his high-profile patients) for the Nazis to get rid of him.

Yet, in 1933, Sauerbruch was also one of the signatories of the “Vow of allegiance of the Professors of the German Universities and High-Schools to Adolf Hitler and the National Socialistic State”, which he supported with a personal letter. Also, as a member of the Nazis’ Reich Research Council and as the head of its General Medicine Branch, Sauerbruch personally authorized the financing of mustard gas experiments on prisoners at the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp.

Thus, although the series thankfully does not portray Sauerbruch as a one-dimensional hero, it also does not mention these issues. Furthermore, several of the main protagonists working at the hospital fulfill the role of the good Germans who are shocked by the cruelty of the Nazis. While one would hope that there were more than a few German medical professionals who were indeed at the very least privately disgusted by the Nazis’ medical and other crimes, the narratives of Charité at War at times veer dangerously close to those of Generation War.

Still, for a discussion of war-time hospitals and the Nazis’ approach to “medicine”, parts of this series might work in class, as long as one discusses all the problematic aspects with the students as well.

Nazi Germany

Charité at War (German TV miniseries, 2019)

See above.

The Milgram Experiment (1961) and The Stanford Prison Experiment (1971)

Rather than showing too many documentaries or badly done dramas about Nazi Germany, a useful exercise involving filmed material could be a discussion of the infamous Milgram Experiment and the Prison Experiment.

The former showed how quickly many people will follow orders from someone they consider an authority figure, even if doing so meant possibly harming someone else. The latter attested to how rapidly people will start abusing their power—even in a staged setting in which all the participants are aware of the situation being staged.

Fictionalized films of both experiments exist, but one might be better off just using the actual footage available on YouTube in class.

An analysis of either or both experiments will nicely complement any discussion about why so many Germans welcomed the rise of Hitler and the Nazis, and why most Germans did not resist, or why they willingly participated in the totalitarian state apparatus once the Nazis were in power. The two experiments suggest that many people, not only Germans between 1933 and 1945, have tendencies to be submissive and/or cruel under the right circumstances.

Downfall (Der Untergang; Oliver Hirschbiegel, 2004)

This is a brilliant film about Hitler’s last days with an exceptional performance by Swiss actor Bruno Ganz as Hitler.

I do not agree with the criticism that the film unjustifiably humanizes Hitler, on the contrary. Hitler was responsible for evil, monstrous acts, but he was a human being who was capable of being kind to his dog Blondi, to his lover Eva Brown, to armaments minister Albert Speer, and to his secretary Traudl Junge, on whose memoirs the film is partially based.

This is precisely why at least the part of the film focusing on Hitler and his inner circle in the bunker is so valuable: At no point in the film does one actually feel bad for Hitler. He is shown to have been the narcissistic, inhumane megalomaniac he was. But not even Hitler acted like an enraged monster 24/7. Even he had his moments where he behaved more or less like a normal human being.

It is essential for students to understand that Hitler did not do what he did because he was a monster—he did what he did, despite the fact that he was a human being, and as such, should have had the capacity to feel empathy toward other people beyond his dog, his girlfriend, Albert Speer, and his secretary, but did not.

If we depict Hitler as a monster, we diminish the enormity of his crimes more than if we agree that he was an absolutely horrible human being. Can monsters be held truly accountable for doing monstrous things?

Hitler was guilty precisely because he was a human being who failed to live up to the most basic level of decency one usually expects from a human being.

It is rather telling that the film received as much criticism as it did for portraying Hitler as a human being. Making Hitler out to have been a one-dimensional evil monster allows Germans to avoid feeling guilty about what happened during the Third Reich; it allows them to make Hitler and his henchmen single-handedly responsible for the crimes of Nazi Germany, instead of having to admit that without the active support of the German population, Hitler and the Nazi leadership would never have been able to do what they did.

Moreover, having to admit that Hitler was only human forces all of us, not just Germans, to question whether we, too, would be capable of committing atrocities under certain circumstances.

Because this film asks the tough questions, it is particularly useful in a history class.

Aside from Hitler, the film also skillfully depicts the fanaticism of Joseph Goebbels and his wife Magda, Heinrich Himmler, the SS officers populating the Führer Bunker, and the children of the Volkssturm—the Nazis’ last ditch attempt to ward off the inevitable through the forced recruitment into militias of men as old as 60, and teenagers, including girls, as young as 14.

Unfortunately, not even Downfall can escape the need for a heroic “good Nazi”. Part of the movie focuses on SS Doctor Ernst-Günther Schenck’s efforts to save as many lives as possible before Soviet troops arrived in the emergency casualty station constructed in the basement of the Reich Chancellery. While Schenck certainly did this, he was earlier during the war in charge of forced labor programs and so-called hunger experiments in the Dachau and Mauthausen concentration camps, which reportedly led to hundreds of deaths. If one uses Downfall in class, one might thus either want to show only the relevant bunker and Volkssturm scenes or make sure students understand who Ernst-Günther Schenck really was.

Problematic films and TV shows about Nazi Germany

One should not show just any documentary or film about Nazi Germany on YouTube or on the History Channel. It probably goes without saying that one should avoid anything involving space aliens and other conspiracy theories, and this goes for any history topic. However, when it comes to Nazi Germany in particular, I would not recommend using Hitler: The Rise of Evil in class:

Hitler: The Rise of Evil (Christian Duguay, Canadian TV miniseries, 2003)

The problems start with the title in this fictionalized TV miniseries about Hitler’s rise to power: As I have mentioned elsewhere, evil is not a category of historical analysis. “The rise of evil” implies that the world and Germany were not evil until Hitler and his henchmen rose essentially like demons from the depths of hell and made Germany evil.

And the series includes so many inaccuracies that historian Ian Kershaw, one of the world’s foremost experts on Hitler, who was originally going to contribute to the production, withdrew his support.

The Holocaust

Many fictional or semi-fictional films about the Holocaust have been made over the years, and while some are well made, they do not necessarily contribute to the audience’s understanding of the Holocaust. One can of course also find numerous documentaries on YouTube.

When teaching the Holocaust, and particularly when using film to do so, teachers must keep in mind the gruesome nature of the subject and prepare students accordingly. Plus, depending on where in the world one teaches, one may have students in class whose relatives died in the Holocaust. However, even if this is not the case, this topic must always be approached with the utmost sensitivity, as must any topic involving genocide.

Documentaries

Night and Fog (French: Nuit et brouillard, Alain Resnais, 1956)

It is only 32 minutes long and can thus easily be shown in class. The film alternates between historical black and white footage and contemporary (at the time of filming) footage in color. A very effective and highly praised film, it has been called the best film of all time by French director, screenwriter, producer, and film critic François Roland Truffaut, and in a 2004 Sight & Sound magazine poll of the best documentaries of all time it was ranked number 4.

Shoah (Claude Lanzmann, 1985)

This film received numerous prestigious awards and was ranked number 2 in Sight & Sound magazine’s poll of the best documentaries ever made. It mainly focuses on the Chełmno, Treblinka, and Auschwitz-Birkenau death camps, and on the Warsaw ghetto, and uses testimonies from survivors, witnesses and perpetrators. It is almost nine and a half hours long; teachers will thus inevitably have to show only a few excerpts.

Historical footage

The Eternal Jew (antisemitic Nazi propaganda film, 1940)

This is among the absolute worst material ever officially put to film since the invention of film. It is a disgusting, vile, hateful Nazi propaganda film my by Joseph Goebbels’ Ministry of Propaganda and should only be shown to mature students with the necessary preparations and the approval of the school and parents.

Nevertheless, it may help students better understand Nazi propaganda and Nazi antisemitism. It is also interesting to note that the film was not very successful when it was shown in German cinemas at the time, and some Germans reportedly felt that it was too extreme. However, many members of the Nazi Party and the Hitler Youth were required to see it. It could therefore contribute to students’ understanding of how the perpetrators of the Holocaust were able to do what they did. The first step toward genocide is the dehumanization of future victims. Propaganda filth like The Eternal Jew contributed to this process.

Fictionalized accounts

There seems to be relatively little need to show fictionalized accounts of the Holocaust in a history class. Still, some movies include scenes that are so effective, they could indeed be helpful in class. They include:

Escape from Sobibor (ITV, Jack Gold, 1987)

This is a British television film about the most successful uprising by Jewish prisoners in a Nazi death camp. One may want to show the selection scene at the beginning of the movie in class. It is slightly less disturbing than similar scenes in Schindler’s List, but, as far as I can tell, not less accurate, particularly because it shows the great lengths to which the Nazis went to prevent newly arriving prisoners from realizing most of them were about to die. Also, I do not know how factually accurate the rest of the film is (no film ever really is, of course), but I do think it is worthwhile showing students that Jews did resist.

Schindler’s List (Steven Spielberg, 1993)

This of course remains the most famous and most highly praised fictionalized account of an aspect of the Holocaust—Sudeten-German businessman Oskar Schindler’s saving of the lives of over a thousand Jews by having them work in his factories.

While movie critics have for the most part loved the film, several Holocaust historians have criticized it. Omer Bartov, Professor of European History and German Studies at Brown University, wrote that the film uses the Jewish victims mostly to provide the setting for the struggle between good (Schindler) and evil (camp Kommandant Amon Göth) and called the final two scenes of the movie “repulsive kitsch.”

See Omer Bartov, “Spielberg’s Oskar: Hollywood Tries Evil”, in Loshitzky, Yosefa, eds., Spielberg’s Holocaust: Critical Perspectives on Schindler’s List (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1997) 41–60.

There are nevertheless scenes in the movie that could be used in class, including the selection and the arrival in Auschwitz scene. Especially the former is very disturbing and should not be shown to younger students—and to older student’s only with the school’s and the parents’ permission.

The Pianist (Roman Polanski, 2002)

This film is a fictionalized account of how the Polish-Jewish pianist and classical composer Władysław Szpilman survived the Holocaust in the Warsaw Ghetto, first with his family, and later, after his family’s deportation to the Treblinka death camp, hiding on his own in the city.

The filmmakers have succeeded particularly in recreating the Warsaw Ghetto, and several scenes may thus be informative for students studying the Holocaust.

The American Vietnam War

Documentaries

The Vietnam War (Ken Burns, documentary series, 2017)

This 10-part television documentary series will provide a good overview of the American Vietnam War for students, especially since it includes commentary from North Vietnamese and National Liberation Front veterans. Despite this, however, the documentary fails to put the war into the larger context of Western imperialism, a fact which one would have to address in class.

The Fog of War (Errol Morris, 2003)

This excellent documentary charts the life of Robert McNamara (1916–2009) through the use of historical footage and personal interviews conducted with McNamara in 2001, when he as 85 years old.

McNamara was Secretary of Defense under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson and was one of the key figures responsible for the military involvement of the United States in Vietnam. The film tells the story of McNamara’s life from his childhood, his service in the US Air Force (at that time called The United States Army Air Forces) during World War II, his time as the president of the Ford Motor Company, to his role in the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) and the American Vietnam War.

The picture of McNamara that emerges from the documentary shows him as a highly intelligent man who always put his complete trust into numbers and statistics. The documentary pulls no punches, and McNamara remains mostly candid and admits to having made serious mistakes, his eyes more than once filling with tears. He uses the expression “the fog of war” to describe how difficult it can be to make decisions in times of war.

This movie is of great value to history teachers and students. Not only can it be used to add to students’ understanding of the Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the American Vietnam War, it also illustrates how complex human history is, and how highly intelligent, educated, rational people can cause the world to come within a hair’s breadth of nuclear annihilation.

Fictional films

Hollywood has made far too many American Vietnam War movies that are essentially action flicks. Even movies that are well-made usually portray the war entirely through an American lens. This can be somewhat useful if students are studying the war and are learning about the experiences of American GIs.

Still, I would not necessarily recommend films like The Deer Hunter (1978), Apocalypse Now (1979), or Platoon (1986) for this purpose. Although especially The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now are fantastic movies, if one was going to show this kind of movie or parts of it (which would probably be impossible in most secondary schools, because they are R rated) I would not pick any of them.

But if Year 13 students are old enough, one may want to show them Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987). The screenplay is based on the American Vietnam veteran Gustav Hasford’s semi-autobiographical The Short-Timers (1979) and was written by Hasfor, Kubrick, and Vietnam War reporter Michael Herr, whose book Dispatches remains one of the best American books ever written about the war.

Yet, a less macho and less American-centric and thus better choice may be Oliver Stone’s adaption of Le Ly Hayslip’s memoirs When Heaven and Earth Changed Places (1989), titled simply

Heaven & Earth (1993)

The movie also uses material from Hayslip’s follow-up work titled Child of War, Woman of Peace (1993) about her life in the United States after she fled Vietnam.

Although the reviews of Heaven & Earth were far less enthusiastic than for Stone’s films Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July (1989), one may want to show some scenes from the movie, since they at least provide a genuine female Vietnamese perspective, which is rare in US Vietnam War movies.

Da 5 Bloods (Spike Lee, 2020)

This Netflix release provides another rare perspective—that of African-American Vietnam War veterans. While it is still an American perspective, and the film thus, as Viet Thanh Nguyen pointed out in the New York Times, falls short of being the kind of critique of US imperialism it in part attempts to be, it still deserves credit for addressing the connections between the war, US racism, the Civil Rights movement, and Black Lives Matter.

The Killing Fields (Roland Joffé, 1984)

Based on the experiences of two journalists, this is an excellent film about the genocidal rule of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia (1975–1979), a topic that is often neglected in classes about the American Vietnam War, although it is directly related to that conflict. Given the graphic violence of the film, one would probably not be able to show it in its entirety in class to students below Year 13, if at all.

But there are a number of instructive scenes one could screen, particularly the one in which members of the Khmer Rouge confess to the “anti-revolutionary” thoughts they have had, which shows to what extent communist ideology could be internalized and function as a secular religion.

Communist East Germany

I have noticed, appreciatively, that the international version of at least one British exam board has recently introduced East German history as a GCSE topic. And it just so happens that in recent years several outstanding movies have been made about the German Democratic Republic (GDR; Deutsche Demokratische Republik, DDR).

The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, 2006)

This is the story of a lonely Stasi agent who for a while spends his life in the attic of a building using surveillance equipment to spy on a handsome playwright and his girlfriend, a famous actress, who live in one of the apartments below. The pair is suspected of harboring anti-government views.

The ending is in my opinion too Hollywoodish, but the film or at least some scenes from it, could help students understand the nature of the complete surveillance society in which the inhabitants of the GDR lived, and the constant fear and stress that accompanies such an existence. It also shows how pathetic the system really was in the end, and how sad the life of a Stasi spy could be.

Good Bye, Lenin! (Wolfgang Becker, 2003)

In this tragicomedy the mother of the main protagonist is a dedicated SED (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, Socialist Unity Party of Germany) member whose husband is said to have left her several years ago for his mistress in the West. The mother falls into a coma shortly before the 1989 revolution. When she wakes up eight months later, the doctors tell her son that the slightest shock could kill her.

Aware that learning about the collapse of the GDR, which has taken place in the meantime, would bring about such a shock, the son goes out of his way to reconstruct the GDR for his bedridden mother, feeding her various recreated GDR products and even producing fake GDR television news she can watch on her TV.

This is a very entertaining, well-made film. Although students will not necessarily learn that much about the GDR, they will get a good sense of how revolutionary, drastic, and fast the changes really were in Germany from 1989–1990.

The Tunnel (Der Tunnel, Roland Suso Richter, 2001)

Der Tunnel is a film about West Germans digging a tunnel underneath the Wall that divided West and East Berlin from 1961 to 1989 to help family members escape the GDR. Although the movie is only loosely based on real events, such tunnels were constructed to help people escape, along with various other schemes concocted in the East and the West to be able to cross the Wall.

The film will be helpful to show students how desperate people were to leave the GDR, and how dangerous it was to try to do so.

Cold War and Post-Cold War History

The Baader Meinhof Complex (Der Baader Meinhof Komplex, Uli Edel, 2008)

Based on Stefan Aust’s 2008 non-fiction book by the same name, this film is a detailed reconstruction (the extended cut is 164 minutes long) of the West-German far left terrorist group led by Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof that called itself the Red Army Faction (R.A.F.) and operated from 1967 to 1977. The graphic violence and the length make it impossible to show the entire film in class. However, there are a number of scenes that could be shown in class to explain to students the mechanisms of political extremism that help convince members of groups like the R.A.F. that their views are objectively correct, and that their actions are thus morally justified.

Why We Fight (Eugene Jarecki, 2005)

An extremely important documentary, this film exposes how and why the military -industrial complex (about whose development President Eisenhower warned the public in his farewell address) on which much of the US economy is based, has required the US to fight a foreign war at an average of about every ten years since the end of the Korean War (1950-1953).

These US foreign wars have not been about preserving freedom; they have been about keeping the military-industrial complex in business.

Such foreign wars also lead to what the CIA calls “blow-back”—the unintended consequences of foreign operations.

Osama bin Laden’s creation of al-Qaeda and the attacks on the US on September 11, 2001, fall into this category:

During Operation Desert Strom (January–February 1991), when the US successfully expelled the forces of their former ally Saddam Hussein from Kuwait, they used military bases in Saudi Arabia, the location of the holiest Muslim cities, Mecca and Medina, to launch their campaign. This enraged Osama Bin Laden, a Saudi citizen, and yet another former ally of the US—supported by the US, he had fought with the Mujahedin against the Soviet invaders of Afghanistan (1979–1989). As a result, Bin Laden started a terror campaign against the US, which culminated in the 2001 attacks.

The military-industrial complex and “blow-back” are not conspiracy theories; the film includes interviews with former CIA agents, Republican Senator John McCain, and neoconservatives like Washington insider Richard Perle and political commentator William Kristol, but also critic of American empire Gore Vidal and members of the Eisenhower family. It should be required viewing for students around the world.

NSU German History X (Mitten in Deutschland: NSU, German TV miniseries, Netflix, 2016)

This is a fictionalized account of how three members of a German neo-Nazi terrorist organization which called itself the National Socialist Underground (NSU) were responsible for bombings in Nuremberg in 1999 and in Cologne in 2001 and 2004; the murders of nine immigrants to Germany between 2000 and 2006; the murder of a German police officer, and the attempted murder of another officer; and 14 bank robberies.

The first of three episodes shows how one of the terrorists, Beate Zschäpe, came to know the other two, Uwe Mundlos and Uwe Böhnhardt, and how all three became neo-Nazi terrorists. The second episode focuses on the lives and deaths of the nine immigrants the terrorists murdered. The final episode is a fictionalized account of the police investigation that finally ended the group’s activities and led to the arrest of Zschäpe. Mundlos and Böhnhardt killed themselves.

Much like The Baader-Meinhof Complex, this series could be help students understand how hatred and political extremism function and how they can turn people into terrorists.

A possible website to consult

This website could be somewhat helpful when one uses film to teach history:

https://www.historyvshollywood.com/

This website could be somewhat helpful when one uses film to teach history.

It discusses the historical accuracy of a large number of films (including TV movies) and television series. This includes not only “historical” movies and TV series and movies and TV series “based on actual events” (of all kinds, including sports, music, comedy, etc.), but also films and television series in which only certain individual characters or events may have been based on actual people or events.

However, this is not an academic website, and as such appears (I have not read every entry) to limit its investigations concerning the accuracy of films to whether or not an event “really happened” or a person “really did something” or “really said something.”

In other words, it does not look at larger and more complex historical issues and does not take into consideration how a film or TV show represents or does justice to such issues.

Nevertheless, the website could serve as a starting point for a student assignment or larger project about the historical accuracy of films. For such a project to be pedagogically sound, student analyses would then have to go beyond the straight forward “is this or that factually correct?” question.