Now the objectives for today's topic.
Firstly, having gone through Flags of Our Fathers yesterday in great depth,
I want to deal with Clint Eastwood's other Iwo Jima movie,
Letters from Iwo Jima.
Principally, I wanna talk about the film and the books that they are based
on but it's a very different relationship than the one we were discussing yesterday.
I want to talk about the merits of the film,
but also want to explore some of the academic criticism that's coming
around these particular pieces of, again, public history.
Criticism in the general sense.
It is a much lauded film.
I think it's the better of the two films although I said the
last time we filmed that you might want to see the two movies back to back.
And it is a globe,
a Golden Globe winner and it had an Oscar nomination for both best picture,
and also Clint Eastwood for best director.
However, quite a few people are gonna have to be brave to sit
through a movie which is the better part of two and a half hours,
almost entirely in Japanese.
So, to a certain degree I'm quite pleased that this reached
a wider audience and was also praised back in Japan as well.
So this is something we're gonna talk about in this context.
But I started this course with the idea that
we ground out in a more general discussion from page to screen,
and the discussion of public history.
So, for the second part of today's work we're going
to have an extended Q&A between James and myself.
What I am gonna do is actually take for a framework a course we run at
Royal Holloway called History and Meanings Part 2.
James did Part 1,
I think, as an undergraduate.
So, Part 2 is gonna be a new experience. So, that's...
Okay! And everyone in the department teaches on that course.
So, to take you through some of the themes about
public history as we introduce our first years to it and
considering the idea of
source material representations and whether it
is history as we understand it or whether it is entertainment.
What I'm basically going to do is use
all the seminar questions that we actually ask our students over a semester.
Royal Holloway's semesterized, but not a fully semesteri... not a full semester system.
So, over about 11 weeks we will have a number of seminars.
And to give you a broader view into this,
rather than lecturing about public history,
I am actually gonna use the cues for the questions that
we ourselves ask our first year students.
So, that gives you the way we gonna deal with this
and I am gonna encourage James to comment and ask
questions as we go through the filming and it will
also be a spare round for you to think about other topics as they come up as well.
Dr Emmett SullivanSenior Tutor
