Before looking at workers as subject and audience of films in the essays that follow, it seems essential to ask some important questions to define the relationship of films to history per se. Can films teach us history? Can they in any way, comparable to printed scholarship, recreate the past in all its complexities and incompleteness? The attempt to integrate films into historical studies is quite recent. The main direction of such efforts has been to examine present and past films dealing with historical themes or episodes and to judge their historical accuracy to determine if the films taught us history the way printed studies do. One consequence of such exercises has been to dismiss film makers as ignorant of their “historical subject” and their films as misleading if not downright falsifications of the past.