The first of several climaxes in Quentin Tarantino’s 2012 epic “Django Unchained” is a lengthy negotiation around plantation owner Calvin Candie’s dinner table. The titular Django, a runaway slave, and his German friend, the traveling dentist Dr. King Schultz, engage in a tense attempt to buy Django’s wife back from Candie. As the meal progresses, the plantation owner becomes increasingly suspicious of the duo’s motives.

While devoid of the frenetic movement and violence for which Tarantino is known, the scene is still remarkably detailed. Slaves bring each course to the table in a meticulously choreographed routine while Tarantino’s camera hones in on each character’s handling of their silverware and napkins. The scene is just as focused on the culture and intricacies of Southern life as it is on the individuals; the auteur clearly thought through every detail and historical flourish. Tarantino wrote the film in addition to directing it, but he did not approach the project just happening to have a firm grasp on the aesthetics of the late antebellum period. That’s why the guidance of John Stauffer, a professor of English and American Literature and African American studies at Harvard, was so important.

Stauffer is just one among a bevy of Harvard humanities professors who have worked as historical consultants for feature films. He’s an actor in a scholarly exchange that takes place during the production of virtually every narrative historical movie. Despite the ubiquity of consulting, though, there is no consistent formula for how the historical consultant is approached or what they do for the director and creative team. What’s more, the interaction isn’t something that many professors are eager to discuss, either out of prior agreement or lack of passion about the projects on which they worked.  

Those who are willing to talk, though, reveal a world of nuanced intellectual discourse with the writers and directors who solicit their help. The sincere desire evinced on both ends to present a compelling and artistically free vision of the past is the only constant in the otherwise case-by-case world of academic film consulting.

GETTING THE PICTURE

I expected the central tension in this piece to be the push and pull between the factual vision of the past that historians present and the fantastical realm of the filmmaker. I was ready to tell stories of fights between directors who wanted to change the location of Gettysburg and scholars who felt an ideological obligation to stop them. Minutes into my conversation with Stauffer, however, I realized that this was not at all the dynamic.

Stauffer rejects the notion that a history professor consulting on a film should act as fact-checker. “A scholar can’t expect for a film to be historically accurate—it’s a separate genre,” he says. Rather than chase large-scale accuracy, Stauffer focuses on making the filmmaker’s images and scenes as detailed and evocative of the era in question as possible.

According to the professors interviewed for this article, the path to becoming a consultant on a film varies on a case-by-case basis. In the case of “Django Unchained,” Tarantino’s producer contacted Stauffer and told him that the crew needed help. “My role was to read the script, assess it for authenticity, and mainly give them descriptions to help with their images,” Stauffer says. Many of those descriptions went toward furnishing the details for the elaborate dinner scene.

“Tarantino asked me, ‘What kind of food would they serve? How many slaves would be serving the dinner? How would they dress? What’s the table setting like?’” Rather than give Tarantino direct answers, Stauffer provided the director with literature that offered him a number of options. “There are contemporaneous books about what table settings were like at that time, so I led him to the literature,” Stauffer explains.

The professor’s methods fit into his philosophy about the malleability of representation.  Stauffer says his flexibility is just as much based on audience expectation as it is on ceding creative control to the director. “A lot of scholars are upset––they assume that a film can somehow perfectly mimic a historical narrative, which is absurd,” Stauffer says. “You can’t bog down a film with too much context…. Hollywood screenwriters are writing for an eighth grade readership.” While other director-consultant teams might espouse different philosophies, Stauffer and Tarantino believe that the most effective way to relay history to the masses in a film is through the detail and sumptuousness of its visual presentation as opposed to the exactitude of its script.

ROSENSTONE’S RULE

The work of cultural theorist Robert Rosenstone played a significant role in making Stauffer comfortable with stylized history films. In his essay 1995 “The Historical Film as Real History,” Rosenstone argues that the historiography, or critical examination of history, presented in a film almost always mirrors that which exists in the academic community.

Django is no exception—the film suggests that the evil of slavery necessitated the violent response that ultimately sparked the Civil War. “Virtually every scholar will say that the essential cause of the conflict was slavery,” Stauffer says. “Yet today, two-thirds of white Southerners still thinks that slavery was incidental, almost irrelevant, in the case of the Civil War.” In Stauffer’s mind, films provide a means of introducing historiographical realities to populations that are still digesting stale concepts.

As long as films mesh with the prevailing historiography, Stauffer argues, they can serve as vehicles for the spread of scholarly analysis. “A history film is the greatest source of evangelism for the works of history used to construct it,” he says.

The exceptions to Rosenstone’s rule, which arise when filmmakers avoid prevailing literature on their subject, cause a major problem for Stauffer. The historian cites “Gettysburg,” a six-hour long 1993 film about the Civil War battle, as egregiously sympathetic to the cause of the South. “There are still relatively recent films that I would call neo-Confederate,” he says. While most films do reflect prevailing historical narratives, Stauffer is careful to keep his eyes open for potentially dangerous portrayals of bygone times.

Eric Rentschler, a Germanic Languages and Literatures professor and another Tarantino consultant, takes Stauffer’s message of factual leniency a step further. Rentschler says he believes that films that present counterfactual representations of the past can be just as valuable as those that try to reflect history exactly.

Rentschler worked with Tarantino on “Inglorious Basterds,” a film set late in World War II that culminates in the slaughter an entire cadre of Nazi leaders by a troop of Jewish-American soldiers. The GIs takes out Hitler and company in a bloody barrage of machine gun bullets during a night at the movies while the Nazi aristocracy around them burns in a simultaneous fire. “The film takes out Hitler in the most brutal, savage, and merciless way, not granting him a final shot or any last words,” Rentschler says. “The film is trying to dispel the fascination of fascism, and in that regard is doing something fundamentally different from what all the other Nazi retro films have done.”