WHETHER WITTINGLY OR UNWITTINGLY, films that depict history play a part in constructing national narratives. Films typically referred to as “heritage films” or “costume dramas” generally rely on presumptions about their audience and therefore about the audience’s collective or national past. The memories created by such films — memories that frequently come to stand in place of experience for audience members who were not witnesses, and even for some who were — tend to overwhelm eyewitness accounts. Most viewers, particularly ones born after 1944, recall events such as D-Day through the lens of war films like Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998) rather than through accounts based on contemporaneous encounters with newspapers or on eye-witness testimony. Apart from the question of whether memory can ever be unmediated, the question of whether historical narratives may be constructed for a population through cinematic representation is a settled score. This type of history writing through cinema is generally accomplished by way of identification: we are meant to experience the past though film protagonists’ eyes as though we ourselves had been there.

The success or failure of heritage films, historical films, or costume dramas is generally predicated on their capacity to inspire an affective connection to the past, yet this generally depends on who is doing the connecting and with whom. Presumptions made along these lines become problematic when one considers the range of different possible forms of connection and identification. Writing specifically about the uses and abuses of Second World War memory — memories of both the war and the Holocaust — Marianna Torgovnick posits the necessity of seeking out an appropriate “middle distance” or “a feeling of spatial, temporal, or emotional connection” with victims of the Second World War. She writes a good deal about film in her study, not only because film is a popular medium that reaches many people simultaneously, but also because the very structure of film seems to command strong feelings of identification. She describes the middle distance as a standpoint from which the reader or viewer is “not immediately or genealogically connected but connected nonetheless through a pervasive feeling of identification based on a feeling of belonging akin to that of a citizenship” (82).