It's Oscars time again, and this year many of the big contenders have one thing in common. Two thirds of the contenders for best film are based on historical events. History also picks up four out of five best actor nominations, two out of five best actresses, and three out of five directors. So fierce has the competition among historical films become that it was reported that academic "history assassins" were paid handsomely by marketing consultants to spot errors in other studios' films. These errors would then be filtered out subtly through blogs, undermining rivals' Oscar hopes.
It was rumoured that sniping about the liberties that Lee Daniels' The Butler took with the truth damaged the awards chances of a movie that had been seen as a hot contender earlier in the year. Three big historical films – The Monuments Men, Grace of Monaco and Foxcatcher – pushed their release dates back at the last minute, removing themselves from contention for this year's awards.
At the same time, screen history has provoked angry debate in the UK. Education secretary Michael Gove criticised representations of the first world war – he singled out Oh! What a Lovely War, The Monocled Mutineer and Blackadder – for using a "fictional prism" to present "misinterpretations which reflect an, at best, ambiguous attitude to this country and, at worst, an unhappy compulsion on the part of some to denigrate virtues such as patriotism, honour and courage".
If he is shocked by the unpatriotic inaccuracies of Blackadder, we can only imagine what Mr Gove would make of U-571 (2000), in which the British navy's 1941 capture of an Enigma machine and codebook is attributed to Americans; or Cromwell (1970), in which Old Ironsides is reinvented as a champion of freedom and democracy; or the head-explodingly incorrect historical oeuvre of Mel Gibson. I asked the Department for Education if there are any historical films Gove likes, but he declined to comment.
Since 2008, I have been writing a column on the accuracy or otherwise of historical films for the Guardian's website. Every week, I watch one, then try to work out how it relates to the truth of what happened – aware, of course, that truth itself is slippery and subjective. The best historical films entertain and educate. They include The Lion in Winter (1968), a razor-sharp Plantagenet comedy with Peter O'Toole as Henry II and Katharine Hepburn as Eleanor of Aquitaine; The Killing Fields (1984), a moving tale of Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge; and Ran (1985), Akira Kurosawa's synthesis of King Lear and the real story of 16th-century Japanese daimyo Mori Motonari. This year, Steve McQueen's 12 Years a Slave joins the list. It's immaculately researched, thanks no doubt to its historical consultant – distinguished Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.
Many film-makers try to get things right. Historian Justin Pollard has consulted on films including Elizabeth (1998) and Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007), as well as the TV series The Tudors and Vikings. He spent two years researching Vikings with primary sources. "We translate lines into Old Norse and Old English, use pre-Conquest missals for religious scenes and reconstruct locations and events from contemporary chronicles – inasmuch as that's possible in the nineth century," he says. "We do make mistakes but often what are called 'mistakes' are conscious decisions made for reasons of budget, logistics or narrative, like compressing time frames, shooting in a different location to the actual event, or reducing the cast of characters."
As with Blackadder, many films and TV programmes find comedy in history – and that doesn't always mean getting it wrong. Greg Jenner was historical consultant to the Horrible Histories TV series. "We had to balance the post-modern comic whimsy, complete with time-travelling devices and modern TV references, with communicating 4,000 historical facts, and then flagging up which were the jokes and which were the true bits," he says. "We had a puppet rat to do that." In Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure (1989), two California teenagers with a time machine establish that Napoleon is "a short dead dude", Caesar is "a salad-dressing dude" and Genghis Khan is "a dude who, 700 years ago, totally ravaged China". Some of us passed history GCSE with less. Jenner's master's thesis was on the reactions of medieval historians to films about King Arthur. "Everyone decided that Monty Python and The Holy Grail was the best because it's full of historical in-jokes."
Kate Williams, who presents history programmes on radio and TV, says there's nothing wrong with a puckish approach: "People at the time laughed, even in the trenches. Humour is vital in helping us engage with the past. Even if historical films are inaccurate, they get audiences involved." Pollard agrees: "I hope historical drama serves as an inspiration for people to go and find out more. If you look at how well sales of popular Tudor history books did after The Tudors then I think that was the case."
Some films mess about with history for more troubling purposes, though. Stalin's secret service, the NKVD, forced Sergei Eisenstein to cut accurate scenes of his Russian hero allying with the Mongols from Alexander Nevsky (1938). In The Ten Commandments (1956), the wicked pharaohs are supposed to remind viewers of the Soviets, and the brave Hebrews of the Americans. One of the film's stars, Edward G Robinson, and its composer, Elmer Bernstein, had been on the Hollywood blacklist for their alleged "un-American activities". Both were being "rehabilitated" during filming. In an Orwellian touch, Robinson's fictional character, Dathan, goes through that process on screen.
This year's Captain Phillips has the look and feel of an advertisement for the US navy – and indeed the navy provided lavish assistance, including warships and personnel. "They wanted it to be an accurate representation of the way they operate," producer Dana Brunetti told the Virginian-Pilot newspaper. "Their duty was, of course, a higher priority than supporting a movie, but they absolutely did not want us to make the movie without them, on our own." One wonders how Oscar voters would take to a film made with the armed forces of Iran, Syria or North Korea.
At the other end of the scale, it's possible to ruin a film by being too obsessed with accuracy. Che Parts I & II (2008) are faithful to Che Guevara's Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War and Bolivian Diary respectively, but scrupulously remove character and emotion. The result is an achingly boring trudge through four hours of grim guerrilla campaigns. This year, there's The Wolf of Wall Street: an accurate adaptation of delinquent stockbroker Jordan Belfort's memoir, but so unquestioning of it and of him (Belfort has a self-aggrandising cameo in the film, and stands to make a packet from it) that it undermines its own claim to be satire.
Tricia Kelleher, the teacher who first sparked my love of history, is now principal of Stephen Perse Foundation Schools. "Films and TV are a starting point to begin the conversation with students, and to engage them," she says. One of her staff recently introduced a non-examined course for year nine pupils. They watch Carve Her Name With Pride (1958), a biopic of second-world-war spy Violette Szabo. "Then they go away, read up on the real story by themselves, and come back to deconstruct the film in class." This is a perfect example of what Cambridge historian Richard Evans suggested in the Guardian last year: "History isn't a myth-making discipline, it's a myth-busting discipline, and it needs to be taught as such in our schools." It's also what Reel History tries to do, only for adults (schools might balk at screening The Wolf of Wall Street, with its 506 uses of the f-word). "We have to be sure we're educating critical thinkers," says Kelleher. "That's not just about film and TV – it's a life skill."
There is nothing wrong with fictionalising historical figures and events. It's a literary tradition, from Shakespeare to War and Peace to Wolf Hall. And everyone makes mistakes. My most embarrassing was in reviewing Elizabeth (1998). Brazenly, I asserted that Anne Boleyn had been beheaded with an axe. Commenters rightly leapt on my blunder. She was beheaded by a French swordsman. Everyone knows that. So do I. Yet somehow, when I wrote it down, I got it wrong. All the other historians pointed and laughed, and made me move my seat in the British Library next to the man who researches UFO conspiracies and smells of eels.
"Film-makers have a great responsibility," says Williams. "How they present the past is how it gets remembered." There is extraordinary power in the moving image. Many of us will know that Braveheart (1995) is tosh when we watch it, but years later bits of it may have taken root in our imaginations – and we don't always remember that they emanated from that great steaming heap of lies.
Very often, film-makers and readers reiterate the point that "it's a fictional movie, not a documentary" – though frankly some films deliberately blur the line, such as Paul Greengrass's United 93 (2006) or Oliver Stone's JFK (1991), both of which use the documentary style to present heavily fictionalised – and heavily politicised – historical cases. Even in less controversial films than those, one of the most striking things I've learned since writing Reel History is that, actually, a lot of people – including extremely smart people – are genuinely surprised when they find out that the history they see on the screen may be completely made up. Film is an incredibly persuasive medium, which is why governments across the world, led by figures as politically diverse as Joseph Stalin, Fidel Castro, Winston Churchill, Richard Nixon, Kim Jong-Il and Sayyid Ali Khamenei, have expended substantial amounts of time, money and effort making films, and/or interfering with other people's films.
While some film-makers are responsible and even gifted historians, others are dunces, bullies or class clowns. As audiences, and as historians, we can only arm ourselves with tough questions, view everything critically, and never forget the unintentional honesty in the tagline of U-571: "Nine men are about to change history."
Report cards for this year's class of historical Oscar contenders
Entertainment grade: A
History grade: A+
Personal best: A shining example of the historical genre. Director Steve McQueen is easily top of the class this year.
Room for improvement: Very little, though it's shocking that it has taken until 2014 to make a film this powerful about slavery.
American Hustle
Entertainment grade: A–
History grade: C+
Personal best: Finds infectious humour in its 1970s setting, especially the far-out hairstyle.
Room for improvement: The conmen were a lot less amiable in real life.
Captain Phillips
Entertainment grade: B+
History grade: B–
Personal best: Beautifully shot, and tries (at the beginning, at least) to engage with the Somali pirates' experience.
Room for improvement: Several of the real Captain Phillips' crewmates dispute his heroic version of the story.
Dallas Buyers Club
Entertainment grade: B+
History grade: C
Personal best: Fine performances, especially from Matthew McConaughey, who is also terrific in The Wolf of Wall Street.
Room for improvement: Makes a major point out of its questionable assertion that Aids drug AZT is "poison" and doesn't work.
Lone Survivor
Entertainment grade: C–
History grade: D
Personal best: Most interesting moment is when US soldiers in Afghanistan consider murdering civilian hostages to save themselves.
Room for improvement: Whether or not that conversation happened is highly controversial. The rest of the film is humdrum macho heroism – made, like Captain Phillips, with help from the US military.
Philomena
Entertainment grade: A
History grade: B
Personal best: Smart screenplay and fantastic, spot-on performances by Judi Dench and Steve Coogan.
Room for improvement: Totally has it in for nuns. They weren't that bad. The real Martin Sixsmith even wrote they were "lovely".
The Wolf of Wall Street
Entertainment grade: D
History grade: A–
Personal best: An extremely faithful rendering of stockbroker Jordan Belfort's autobiography.
Room for improvement: An extremely faithful rendering of stockbroker Jordan Belfort's autobiography.
