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By admin

I watched the pilot episode of the TV show Sleepy Hollow, which is a reinterpretation of Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. The episode sets up the concept of the show, in which a Revolutionary War-era Ichabod Crane is thrown into the modern day town of Sleepy Hollow, NY with the purpose of killing the reanimated Headless Horseman (one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse described in the book of Revelations).

As I was watching the episode, I noted the show’s use of icons and objects. As Ichabod explores the 21st century, he is fascinated with modern inventions, particularly instruments of communication such as a video camera and a polygraph machine (which communicates information about a subject’s internal experience to an outside observer). However, the story revolves around an object that transcends the years between the Revolution and 2013: George Washington’s Bible. The Bible physically travels time in that when it is opened and read in 2013, it is in the same condition as when buried in 1781. The elaborate binding of the book, and the images we see of George Washington in his General’s regalia, serve as what Sorlin calls “historical capital.” These are characters and icons that allow the audience “to know that it is watching an historical film and to place it, at least approximately.”[1]

In regards to the Sorlin article, I noticed a central subject of the filmmaker’s connection to–or separation from–his work. Avery mentions in her blog post that Sorlin “spends the rest of the article illustrating the ways that films reveal the morality of the filmmakers.” If we assume that this to be true, it follows that the content of Sorlin’s discussion is incongruous with one of his arguments–that the director’s purposes in creating a film should be analyzed separately from the film itself.

I would argue that Sorlin does not intend to discuss how morality of filmmakers reflected in their work. For example, he approaches the topic of bias in newsreels (which one may rightly demand be, by nature, unbiased) without assigning any moral judgements to the filmmakers. He chooses to view the “slants” or agendas that influenced the creation of newsreels as valuable information, because it can inform historians of the makers’ opinion of an event, or the opinions they wanted the public to have. To use a specific example, Sorlin writes, “Knowing that newsreels are composed entirely of shots chosen to produce a desired effect . . . we should not conclude that the British were more satisfied with the results of the Munich Conference than the French were” (33). Without discussing the historical event in question, we can see here Sorlin acknowledging the bias of a newsreel, but using it to support a conclusion about the dominant public opinion of an event.

[1] Sorlin, Pierre. “How to Look at an ‘Historical’ Film.” In The Film in History: Restaging the Past. Basil Blackwell, 2001. p. 37.