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For each week of our seminar I have listed one or more films that relate somewhat to the theme for that week. Many of these films are, to be frank, awful. Some of them use a historical event as a backdrop for their own plots. Some generally focus on the historical event or some historical figure in it, but almost all of them deviate significantly from the historical events and generally should be treated as fictional accounts.
However, I am a very strong supporter of watching bad historical films, especially around the time when one is studying the same period with good historical accounts and primary sources. A great pioneer of this is Henry Smith and other historians who put together the book Learning from Shogun (1980) to allow students to learn something about Tokugawa period Japanese history from the very popular novel (and later horrible but also very popular TV series) called Shogun. This work was my own first encounter with Japan as a child, and like for many of us, seeing these films or television shoes, for better or for worse, leaves us with incredibly long-lasting images of a historical event. Thus, instead of ignoring them, dismissing them contemptuously, or merely non-critically accepting them as pure entertainment, I think it can be productive to watch them while you are studying a historical period and critique them.
When I say critique them, I do not mean to complain about anachronistic historical dress, or invented composite characters, or impossible to recreate dialogue, or even more blatant distortions of historical events. I mean to think of them as a narrative, because, like the narratives of historians, these films are forced every minute of the way to make important decisions about what to show and not to show, who to highlight and who not to, what aspects of a historical story are important and which ones aren't. Critiquing this in films is a fun and perhaps easier way to practice the art of being sensitive to these decisions made by historians in their own writings.
These films are listed for your reference and I welcome student comments in class who have seen them and wish to raise thoughts they have about them. However, you are not required to watch any of these films during the semester and, indeed, many of them are very difficult to get a hold of, and some cannot be found with official or fan based subtitles.