Cinema and the production of historical knowledge

On the film adaptation project of the Battle of Bouvines

Abstract

French historian Georges Duby (1919-1996) has always conceived History as a communication craft. Therefore, he sought to broaden his audience, and made use of different modern means of communication (radio, television, and cinema). In the early 1980s, Duby was invited to be part of the film adaptation of his book, Le Dimanche de Bouvines, with Miklós Jancsó as director, Serge July as screenwriter, and Gérard Dépardieu and Nastassja Kinski as the leading actors. Although abandoned during production, this film project will lead Duby to question the ways in which historical knowledge is produced. Through a study of Duby’s private archives, kept at the Institut Mémoire de l'Édition Contemporaine (IMEC), this paper aims to go behind the scenes of the cinematic adventure of Le Dimanche de Bouvines and bring to light Duby’s important reflections on cinema as a screen where the very limits of knowledge produced by medievalism are rendered visible. This article seeks to demonstrate the difficulties arising from the tension between the commercial ambitions of the film project and Duby's own demand for historical accuracy, discussing how this demand — along with his refusal to make any concessions to anachronism — may ultimately become obstacles to a meaningful encounter between history and cinema.