| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

J. E. Smyth. Reconstructing American Historical Cinema: From Cimarron to Citizen Kane. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press. 2006. Pp. xiii, 447. $50.00.
J. E. Smyth's book is a controversial, innovative, and meticulously researched text that reconfigures timeworn conceptions of what constitutes history on and in cinema. Smyth punctures the prevailing mythologies of historical films disseminated by professional historians and by popular writers and film scholars on Hollywood's fascination with American history. European theorists identified with the Cahiers du cinema have also contributed to undermining the claims of films to history in their "crusade to legitimize American directors as auteurs" and mythmakers (p. 309), thus impeding long-overdue considerations of popular cinema's uses of the American past.	1
In order to dissipate these various positions on Hollywood's historical films, Smyth is compelled to provide a rigorous model for analyzing history on film. The discussion wisely confines itself to a critical moment in Hollywood—the decade from 1931 to 1942—a moment of social and technical reconstruction and an exemplary time for the production of historical films. This interwar moment coincided with the creative possibilities afforded by the advent of sound on film and by the questioning of American history on the part of professional historians that resulted in an anastomosis of traditional cinematic forms and language with modern and modernist perceptions for a revision of history on film.	. . .

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