 Think, Tecawaii, civil engagement lives here. OK. We're back. We're live. We're talking about Asia, but we're talking about Asia from an historical point of view and from a media point of view. We have with us Scott Bailey. Scott is an assistant professor of history at Kansai Gaidai University in Hyogo, Hyogo. It's in Hirakata City. Hirakata City. Yeah. In Japan. We're here in Hawaii to sort of, you know, have a visit of his old stomping grounds because he has a PhD, his initial PhD in history here at UH Manoa. That's correct. And he studied under Jerry Bentley there. That's correct. In fact, Jerry Bentley was the reason you came here, isn't it? Very much so. Yes, originally back in, when I applied for PhD programs 15 years ago, I really wanted to study world history and Jerry Bentley was, you know, a giant of that field. And you were on the mainland. You knew of him there. Yeah. Actually, I was in Central Asia at the time working in a university and I wanted to continue on with my PhD study and University of Hawaii was the place that I really wanted to go because I wanted to study under Jerry Bentley and the dream came true and I was here for about five years and earned my PhD in 2008. What did you focus on in the PhD? My PhD coursework focused on world history for the most part but the dissertation itself was about the Russian colonization of Central Asia in the 19th century and that's a project that I'm continuing to work on to some degree. I'm revising it now into a book format. It's to be published as a book next year, early next year by a press. I'd like to have another show with you sometime. Thank you. We talk about Russian colonization of Asia and the book. Thank you for having me by the way. Absolutely. So what other areas have you studied and published in your career? Besides my interest in colonization and imperialism in general, I'm also doing a lot of interested work now in the relationship between film and history and that's where my teaching interests have kind of lied in the last few years. I started developing a course about six years ago at University of California Berkeley during the summer called Recent World History Through Film and that led to creating a second course which was called Cross-Cultural Encounters on Film. Since coming to Kansai Gaidae, my university, I now use film and history in a lot of the topics and some of my publishing efforts now are directed towards the relationship between film and history and especially trying to look at how filmmakers' representation of the past should not be discounted by historians because I think there is some perception that it's somehow inferior as a form of history. So just to be clear, you're not only talking about filmmakers who are filming current events, that is events that have happened since Thomas Edison invented the motion picture camera. But filmmakers who have done, I guess, documentaries or maybe fiction films about events sweeping right back to Charlton Heston in ancient Rome. Well, personally, I do less work on ancient history or those types of films, but the representation of history in any film is something that's interesting to me and for trying to get my students to think critically about. I want them to really challenge themselves to think, what is the statement that this filmmaker is trying to make about the past? And in some cases, I think in most cases, films are not just commenting on the past, they're commenting on the present, and they're trying to send a message to the audience about the present or the future. The old takeaway. Even in a documentary, there's always a takeaway. Sure. Absolutely. So you have to look into the mind of the filmmaker. You have to know your filmmaker before you can appreciate his vision, what he has seen, before you can look through his eyes. Absolutely. How do you do that? Well, one way is to study, and this is what I encourage my students to do, is to study not just the historical context of the subject matter of the film, but the historical context under which the film was made, that is, the place that it was made, the production company or studio that made that film, who paid to produce that film, what was the location, what was going on in politics at the moment that the film was being made, and how does that maybe reflect how the narrative was presented historically? It comes to mind, the film is fairly recent, but I think it's historic. And that's Ai Weiwei's film called Human Flow, where he takes us for a journey around the world for all these camps where people are held as migrants and the like, and it's a chakaroo in the sense that you didn't know there were 60 million people in these camps. And he uses drones, very high tech, and he gets right there on the ground. But the thing about Ai Weiwei is that he's a troublemaker. He's a dissident. So if you want to know what he's doing, you have to look at it through his eyes, you have to know him. Right, right, right, absolutely, absolutely. And we were talking before the show started a little bit about the movie JFK, which was produced by Oliver Stone, and Stone is one of my favorite filmmakers, who's obviously, he's made a lot of films about American history, and kind of exposing some of the maybe lesser known elements of American history, and maybe kind of a darker side. And sometimes. And sometimes. Because he's spiritual. Sometimes, he's been labeled as a conspiratorial director, you might say. But on the other hand, among people who study film and history like myself, many scholars believe that Stone is actually very historically minded. And that the kind of effort that he makes in producing films, in getting consultants who are professional historians, is actually really admirable. And you can certainly agree or disagree with his whatever kind of narratives that he presents. If nothing else he does in most of the films that he's produced, I think, raise a kind of question in the line of the audience to make them want to know for themselves, okay, was this actually what happened or not? And I think he likes to choose kind of assumptions and maybe kind of a question. He wants to provoke you. He wants to take a leap in some way in order to make you think about other possibilities. And I think what's important there, as I was going to ask you about this, is how important is it that the theatergoer, the average person, not the PhD in history, the average person, study up on Stone before you go to see that movie. In Stone's movies, we all knew because there was a lot of press about what he did and how provocative he was. But potentially that's the case with every film. Well, yeah, I think I would encourage everyone, and I think this is a broader issue for the media in general, everyone should really be doing a more active job of trying to analyze who are the producers of the media that they're consuming. I think most people, as you kind of alluded to, are somewhat passive, you know, receptors for the media that they consume. But it's important for all of us to at least know, okay, what are the basic beliefs that this person is bringing? What is the background that this person is bringing to their projects? Because that helps us to be better educated as citizens. And when we read newspapers, when we watch local news or television news, that often gets lost, and I think that shouldn't be. Well, if you're watching CNN, you have to know what CNN is so you can more fully appreciate what their message, the message they want to convey to you. Something with Fox News. So you have to appreciate the source, and I find this interesting because this is really touching on the First Amendment. So if I see a film, and I know that it's trying to provoke me or trying to sell me a bill of goods, sell me a takeaway that's troublesome, I mean this happened in the 30s in Germany where the films were propaganda, and people bought them, and it sounds to me like there's a risk that people will buy into a film and believe it as truth. It's a big word these days in the Trump administration. They will buy into it and treat it as truth when it has a takeaway that isn't true at all. So aren't we talking about that? Well, I think any filmmaker who's producing a film about a historical topic is trying to aspire to the truth. However, we know as scholars of film and history that all filmmakers engage in a certain amount of adjustments and fabrications and elaborations of the truth, but that's inherent to the nature of all historical sources in that you're presenting your own narrative, you're presenting as a historian or as a historical filmmaker, you're presenting your viewpoint of how you think things happened. You're not presenting, it's not as if we had a camera on the wall where we can replay and watch a historical event from start to finish in most cases. It's not that simple, right? As historians, we're trying to reconstruct from a variety of sources what we think happened, our best estimation of what happened. But not all historians agree on not all issues. I mean, what pops into my mind is the story of the Turner Joy, the Gulf of Tonkin, just before the Vietnam War. And right now, you could walk down the street or on the military bases of this city and find some military people who believe that the Turner Joy was a legitimate event, a provocation, justifying 10 years of Vietnam War. Others will say, no, this was a government manipulation. It was not real. And so you could take two filmmakers in the same way. Maybe Oliver Stone's one of them, but there's another one too. And we examine it, and we make it look a little different because there's no cameras on scene at the time. So you have to build the story, the narrative, by what you produce with your cameras today. So I could be selling you a bill of goods, and as a historian, you're going to put your own imprimatur on that, whether it's true or not. Others love to second guess historical filmmakers when the film comes out that's within their particular area. But I think to some extent, that's often a bit premature and maybe uncalled for in some cases. I mean, a lot of popular films are intended to be entertainment, right? I mean, documentaries are different, like we were talking about Ken Burns films. Those are basically his genre of filmmaking that he's created and others have kind of emulated in the last 20 years is much closer to a traditional historical source. Of course, it's much, it's very entertaining to watch what he has to do. You care about what happened in the world. Right. I mean, I am entertained by that. Maybe entertainment is not exactly the right word, but I am fascinated with it. And you know, I went through that period as part of my life. So I'm very interested to see what he picked up when he researched it and then chose it to me. But what is really interesting is this. So I had a certain perception of the Vietnam War. I was in the service at the time. And I come away from all of that with a certain mental set. Now I see Ken Burns Vietnam today. It changes my mind. What did you think of it? Yeah. I thought it was great. It taught me so much that I didn't know and it accentuated some points that I wasn't sure about. And I felt I was getting for the first time the real deal. Right. That's what I felt. Other people may not feel exactly the same way. So now, now, now raise the level of distribution of this film. And it was at a very high level to 300 million Americans. Okay. They all saw the film. Right. It colors their impression of what happened in the Vietnam War. Right. It now, it has an effect on them. And I wanted to talk to you about this really. Yeah. It has an effect on them. The perception of Vietnam War has probably changed. That's mine was. Right. And when those issues come up again, whether there's another turn of joy incident in the Gulf of Tonkin, when there's another effort by people in the military or in the Defense Department to get us into a war, they're going to be thinking differently than they might have been before they saw that movie. Absolutely. And they should. They should be able to learn from the information that was presented in Byrne's documentary. But I think in a free society, in an open society, that's not the only interpretation that's out there. And people should actively try to read books about the Vietnam War and try to get different interpretations so that they're not just relying strictly on what Ken Byrne's interpretation of the Vietnam War is. That's the difference between living in a free and open society versus an authoritarian state where the access to that kind of information may not exist and there may only be a film or a single book or something that interprets that entire event and is the authoritative voice of that event for the entire body politic. And that's what we, as a society, I think should try to steer clear of. We should better understand where we are because we really need to understand history to know where we are and where we're going. And we should have as sophisticated as nuanced an understanding as we possibly can to find the reality. But I think, you know, I'm with you, of course, we are all together trying to find the truth here, but sometimes the truth isn't obvious. Sometimes people may get the wrong message and we live in a time when the media, including film, can give you the wrong message. And so this is the point I'd like to discuss right after we finish our break is that the film is portraying history, but the effect of the film on the public, 300 million Americans or 8 billion people in the world, that film may have an effect on what they do. So what you have is a two-way street, a feedback loop, two-way street. And so I can see why you're so excited about this subject. That's Scott Bailey, he's an assistant professor of history, trained here in Hawaii as a PhD history student world history. And he is teaching at Kansai Gaidai University in Hirakato City, Japan. We'll be right back after this short break. Hi, I'm Ethan Allen, host on Think Tech Hawaii of Pacific Partnerships in Education. Every other Tuesday afternoon at 3 p.m., I hope you'll join us as we explore the value, the accomplishments, and the challenges of education here in the Pacific Islands. Hello, my name is Stephanie Mock and I'm one of three hosts of Think Tech Hawaii's Hawaii Food and Farmer series. Our other hosts are Matt Johnson and Pamai Weigert. And we talk to those who are in the fields and behind the scenes of our local food system. We talk to farmers, chefs, restaurateurs, and more to learn more about what goes into sustainable agriculture here in Hawaii. We are on at Thursdays at 4 p.m., and we hope we'll see you next time. Aloha, I am Howard Weig. I am the proud host of Cold Green for Think Tech Hawaii. I appear every other Monday at 3 p.m., and I have really, really exciting guests on the exciting topic of energy efficiency. Hope to see you there. OK, we're back with Scott Bailey, and we're talking about films and history. This is really an interesting connection. The films are history and history are films. Yeah, I see that right. So what kind of films are we talking about for your examination of things? Well, one film that I really enjoy showing to my students is an old film from the early 1960s by an Italian director named Ponte Corvino. And the film was called The Battle of Algiers, which is a black and white film about the Algerian Revolution and war against the French colonization. What year? This was in early 1960s when the film came out. But it's portraying events from the 1950s. But what's interesting about the film, it's not a strict documentary account of what happened. It's a drama that mixes known bits of what happened into the narrative. And in the film, it basically provides kind of an understanding for my students of how revolutions can work and how revolutions have happened in the 20th century. And so I use that film in comparison with other films that also portray the process of decolonization in the 20th century to kind of give them a comparative look at how different states moved away from colonization in the middle of the 20th century. What a great study. I want to be in that class. Thanks. So what you signal to me is that the film itself doesn't have to be specifically accurate on every point, that we can allow some fiction in there. We can allow a kind of broader treatment of a subject. What we are looking for, at least in comparing these films, is the gestalt of how colonization came to an end, which is really important. And the films which were made at the time reflect the filmmaker's concept of what was happening at the time in terms of the reduction, the diminution of colonization. That's right, that's right. And part of the reason that films cannot provide a 100% documentary kind of portrayal of the event is they're what, two hours long. So there's a lot of selection process that has to go into what do you include in the film, what do you leave out, how do you, you know, you can't have more than maybe five or six main characters, or it gets too confusing for the audience to understand, right? So exactly, we don't have 20 hours to watch the film. So there's a lot of that process that happens, but, you know, that's the nature of the genre. Yeah, but suppose I came to you and said, Scott, look, I need to know about how colonization really ended here in that period, 50s, 60s, for that matter after. And I would like to find out what people were thinking about it at the time. I'd like to see through the lens of their filmmakers' experience in these various countries to see how it declined. So can you please find me half a dozen movies that treated the subject and take clips from them, assuming you had the right to do that. You know, you have to ask people, I guess. And make me a movie where you have the, you know, essential story from each one of those locations and colonies where you can show me the underlying process as sort of as a universal truth. Can you do that? Would you do that? Do you want to do that? Can I be there when you do that? It would take a while, but it would be a noble pursuit, I think, to try that. You know, what I do in my classes is I try to have a comparative approach. And it's not intended to be an encyclopedic approach. We're not getting our students to know every single detail of what happened in the past. That's not really something that's necessary. What we're trying to get is to get them to engage with the ideas and to get them to become familiar with a range of different scenarios that happened. So, you know, when I show the Battle of Algiers movie, I compare it with the film Gandhi, which was in the early 1980s. And that, you know, that's a very different process of how essentially Indian independence happened. South Asian independence, I should say, happened in the 1940s versus what happened in Algeria in a place where there was more of a violent revolutionary effort. So films, you know, can help students get the basic foundational understanding of how historical processes like decolonization or revolution have happened in different places. Yeah. Well, that really goes to the whole thing about history. My observation, by the way, full disclosure, I minored in American history in college. Yeah, it was a long time ago. Journalism major, I see. Well, my point of reference was what they called the Mumford Decades between the Civil War and 1890. That was my favorite time. But, you know, I think you're making a point that I want to explore, that is that history is not a matter of going through the gouge and saying, on this day, this happened, on that day, that happened. At all, you want to feel the, may I use Ai Wei Wei's term, human flow. That's right. You want to feel the flow of history. You want to feel the way the species has changed, the way that the thinking among millions, billions of people has changed. That's correct. And our goal is not to memorize information. It's not to become computers. We have computers to do that. We have the internet to help us with keeping track of that information. Our goal is to create engaged learners who can critically think for themselves. And to me, films can stimulate a certain part of a student's consciousness and make them become interested and engaged and want to go out and research for themselves. How did Indian independence actually happen? What did Gandhi and the non-violence movement in India, how did that work? How did Algeria eventually gain its independence? So films can provide that kind of platform to get that, to spark that interest and to get them to want to really think independently. And that's really, to me, the ultimate goal of history education. Yeah, and actually, it goes beyond history. It's the human condition. It's all these millions and billions of people. How do they conduct themselves in the world? If you learn how they have conducted themselves, then maybe you can get a beat on how they will conduct themselves. That's not easy, but maybe that'll help. And I suggest that maybe your students, they see some films, they hear your discussion, they try to develop critical thinking about the connection between the film, which is portrayed in the film and the real history, and they take something away from that. Now they go out into the world where they're surrounded with films. I mean, so many films. You get to watch films day and night and never come to one person. Been watching. And from these films, which turn out to be very educational, they learn a lot about the world. I mean, is that you're trying to foment that sort of process? I would, yeah. I mean, intellectual curiosity for other parts of the world. I mean, so many students do not have the opportunity to travel for economic reasons or other reasons. And so to see other places, to experience other viewpoints, I think that that helps create this kind of cross-cultural understanding that's really hard to get across in just in books or reading articles versus kind of seeing that on screen and ideally watching films that are in foreign languages so that students get even more of a sense of an otherness or a different cultural difference that they can become interested in. And so I try to show more foreign films as well with subtitles. Yeah, absolutely. Although students often complain that they don't want to read the subtitles. I mean, really, this is an education in global terms. It's an education of the whole enchilada. And I mean, I think everyone should do this. And what's an interesting point, though, is that you talk about people who can't travel. Well, a lot of us can't travel anymore. Why? It's too dangerous out there. That's why. And I think the strange thing is that sometimes you take a trip through the movies you watch when you could never actually go to that place. That's true. So you're relegated. You have to rely on the film to teach you about the place. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. And it's better than nothing, right? I mean, it still can provide some exposure to other viewpoints and other other societies. And I think that's a good thing. Well, you describe a world where these students have the benefit of this extra sort of extra level of education, extra level of creative thinking. And I just have one more question for you before our time is up. And that is, are you the only one are you in touch with collaborating with other professors of history who make the same comparison with film and see it through the lens of the filmmaker? And the second part be on that question is. Where is this study going? Is this going to be bigger in five or ten years? Is this going to have more effect on the products of our universities? Great question. Thank you for asking. Yeah, there is an increasing number of history educators who are like me employing the use of film and turning to film as something that's really important for the classroom and very beneficial for the classroom. And so, yes, there are more and more professors who are going towards the use of this in the classroom. And, you know, personally, from my own perspective, I am hoping to to, you know, go with a publishing agenda in this area towards the teaching of film and world history, because I think it's something that that is very beneficial for the students. And it's something that, you know, I've found this the students overwhelmingly enjoy. And I think the learning outcomes are also quite significant from a properly structured class that employs the use of film and history. And this process is this phenomenon among the students. It's universal, isn't it? It's everywhere in the world. Yeah. It's every country, every university, every possibility. Right. Right. So then think, take order, stay in business and expand its operations, including filmmaking. Why not? Maybe documentaries more and more. Absolutely. Thank you. Thank you, Jay. Not Bailey. Thank you. Great to talk with you. Great to talk with you. Thank you.