{"id":128,"date":"2014-11-25T11:58:40","date_gmt":"2014-11-25T11:58:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gallipoli100.info\/?p=128"},"modified":"2014-12-16T12:14:27","modified_gmt":"2014-12-16T12:14:27","slug":"actors-and-history-add-up-to-a-terrible-myth-match","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gallipoli100.info\/?p=128","title":{"rendered":"Russell Crowe in The Water Diviner: Rewriting history"},"content":{"rendered":"

BY GUY WALTERS
\nLONDON DAILY TELEGRAPH<\/strong><\/p>\n

From Braveheart to The Imitation Game, the tradition of Hollywood playing fast and loose with historical fact is ancient<\/h3>\n

Actors are used to playing other people \u2013 and not just on stage. Today\u2019s Hollywood celebrities seem to be UN ambassadors one minute, novelists the next, and politicians every other Thursday. But there\u2019s one role they love to play most of all \u2013 historian.<\/p>\n

Whenever actors are interviewed about their roles in historical films or plays, they start talking about \u201call the research\u201d they have done, and how their performances will help people \u201cunderstand the true story\u201d much better than if it were presented in some dull old book or musty lecture theatre. The latest celebrity to strut the boards as a Regius Professor of Modern History is none other than Russell Crowe, who we will shortly see starring in The Water Diviner, a movie about a man who travels to Turkey after the Battle of Gallipoli to try to find his three missing sons.<\/p>\n

Crowe, who also directed the film, seems to have decided that this gives him a lectern from behind which he can sound off about the ill-fated Allied attempt to wrestle the Dardanelles from Turkish control in 1915. In Crowe\u2019s eyes, the campaign \u2013 which cost the lives of some 9,000 of his fellow Australians \u2013 has been treated as \u201cmythology\u201d.<\/p>\n

In a recent interview, the Oscar-winner claimed that \u201cafter 100 years, it\u2019s time to expand that mythology\u201d. Australia, he said, \u201cshould be mature enough as a nation to take into account the story that the other blokes have to tell. You know, because we did invade a sovereign nation that we\u2019d never had an angry word with. And I think it\u2019s time it should be said. For all the heroism you want to talk about, you know, for me, a fundamentally more important conversation is the waste of life and these things should, you know, we shouldn\u2019t celebrate the parts of that mythology that shouldn\u2019t be celebrated.\u201d<\/p>\n

These comments do not, perhaps, represent the actor at his most coherent. But from what I can deduce, Professor Crowe is stating that there are three ways in which Gallipoli is viewed incorrectly. It is mythologised; it is celebrated; and people forget that enemy soldiers \u2013 or, to use the phraseology of this august military historian, \u201cthe other blokes\u201d \u2013 were also killed.<\/p>\n

The problem is that Crowe\u2019s position is utterly without foundation. The horrific losses at Gallipoli certainly mean that the event has a special place in the hearts of Australians and New Zealanders \u2013 but the event is certainly not \u201cmythologised\u201d. In fact, both nations are fully aware of the true and terrible story of the campaign.<\/p>\n

Next April marks the centenary of Anzac Day, which was initially held to commemorate those who had fought and fallen in the Dardanelles. The idea that such a commemoration is a \u201ccelebration\u201d is fatuous. As Barry John Clark, the president of the New Zealand Veterans Association, has said, \u201cfrom our point of view, Anzac Day isn\u2019t celebrated. Anzac Day is a day of remembrance.\u201d<\/p>\n

Moreover, while Turkish losses were indeed huge \u2013 at an estimated 218,000 to 251,000 men \u2013 the idea that Australians, or indeed anyone else, has forgotten that is equally ludicrous. As Major General David McLachlan, the president of the Veterans Association in Victoria, quipped, \u201cRuss must have been asleep during that lesson at school.\u201d<\/p>\n

And yet because Crowe is a Great Actor, his words are taken as being authoritative. His film will be watched, and treated, as if it were actual history.<\/p>\n

Of course, this phenomenon of the actor-turned-revisionist historian is nothing new. But much to the chagrin of historians, it isn\u2019t going away.<\/p>\n

Take the recent example of The Imitation Game, starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Alan Turing, the Bletchley Park cryptanalyst and mathematician who is widely regarded as being instrumental in cracking the German Enigma machine, and perhaps shortening the war by years.<\/p>\n

In interviews, Cumberbatch has made a great deal of noise about wanting to play the tragic figure of Turing, who was later prosecuted and chemically castrated for being gay, as faithfully as possible.<\/p>\n

But ironically, the film is a load of junk history. The catalogue of offences against the truth is too long to list here, but the most egregious falsehood is the notion that Turing covered up the treachery of John Cairncross, the Soviet spy, on the grounds that Cairncross was about to out him.<\/p>\n

In truth, the men never met. But most of the British public will now believe that Turing abetted treachery. So much for honouring the poor man\u2019s memory.<\/p>\n

Of course, the worst offender is Crowe\u2019s fellow Australian, Mel Gibson, who has produced a whole handful of films that have as much relationship with reality as the events of the recent Paddington Bear movie.<\/p>\n

In Braveheart, his biography of William Wallace, Gibson made so many errors that the film has now become a laughing stock. Battles are fought that never took place. Meetings occur between people who weren\u2019t alive at the same time. The Scots wear kilts 400 years too early.<\/p>\n

Gibson\u2019s film about the American War of Independence, The Patriot, is similarly historically dire. Among other sins, it presents a world in which slavery really isn\u2019t too bad, and General Cornwallis somehow contrives to lose a battle at which he was never present. No matter. So long as the Brits get a kicking, the audiences are happy.<\/p>\n

But we should take this problem seriously \u2013 and not just stop listening to actors and directors, but stop trusting the history that they project. The problem with this glib approach is that audiences will develop a completely skewed, and often false, knowledge of the past. What filmmakers are effectively doing is implanting fake memories in our collective consciousness. That will clearly have an extremely damaging effect not just on our understanding of the past, but how we explain it to ourselves \u2013 and therefore how we regard ourselves, and how we act as nations or peoples.<\/p>\n

Indeed, it is not the public who are creating mythologies, but those such as Crowe, who depict historical events through the filter of their own contemporary mores. At its worst, the process seems to be inspired by a line from Steve Coogan\u2019s comic creation, Alan Partridge, who thinks that he can \u201cgen up on any subject to university standard in an hour\u201d, since \u201cWikipedia has made university education all but pointless\u201d. As a historian who spends weeks of his life in archives, it\u2019s maddening when the likes of Crowe, Gibson and Cumberbatch \u2013 a Dickensian firm of lawyers if there ever was one \u2013 lecture us on the \u201ctruth\u201d, because they have done so much \u201cresearch\u201d.<\/p>\n

Although I would never accuse any brilliant performing artist of relying on Wikipedia, I do wonder who assembles the material on which they draw to issue their oracular statements. To be frank, it\u2019s not often I see famous actors at the National Archives in Kew. But maybe I\u2019ve just been lucky.<\/p>\n

Perhaps it\u2019s unfair of me just to single out movie-makers. After all, Jeremy Paxman managed to produce not just a book but a whole TV series on the First World War without knowing the fate of Lord Kitchener. And the author Terry Deary has produced an entire range of history books aimed at children, Horrible Histories, while reviling the very historians whose work he must use, claiming they are \u201cnearly as seedy and devious as politicians\u201d.<\/p>\n

I suspect my plea to abandon junk history, especially at the movies, will fall on stony ground. The only other solution, as far as I can establish, is for a special Oscar or Bafta to be awarded each year to the movie that is most faithful to history. My only fear is that the winner will always be that year\u2019s dullest film.<\/p>\n

Guy Walters<\/strong>\u2019s latest book is ‘The Real Great Escape\u2019 (Transworld)<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

BY GUY WALTERS LONDON DAILY TELEGRAPH From Braveheart to The Imitation Game, the tradition of Hollywood playing fast and loose with historical fact is ancient Actors are used to playing other people \u2013 and not just on stage. Today\u2019s Hollywood celebrities seem to be UN ambassadors one minute, novelists the next, and politicians every other…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":134,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-128","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-articles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gallipoli100.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gallipoli100.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gallipoli100.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gallipoli100.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gallipoli100.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=128"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/gallipoli100.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":132,"href":"https:\/\/gallipoli100.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128\/revisions\/132"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gallipoli100.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/134"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gallipoli100.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=128"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gallipoli100.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=128"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gallipoli100.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=128"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}