Gerry Flahive is a documentary producer at the National Film Board of Canada in Toronto. His projects have included Just Watch Me: Trudeau and the ’70s Generation and The Man Who Might Have Been: An Inquiry Into the Life and Death of Herbert Norman. He is currently developing three history documentaries.

History gets tossed around a lot.

Certainly the term ‘historic’ does. On Oct. 28, the day the 400-odd delegates at the World Congress of History Producers in Toronto sipped their first cups of coffee in preparation for the opening address by Lord Black of Crossharbour, the word ‘historic’ was being applied in the media to many things, from the World Series win by the Boston Red Sox (well, yes, but who’s counting?), China’s decision to raise interest rates (we’ll see), the discovery that miniature humans lived about 13,000 years ago (fair enough) and Newfoundland and Labrador Premier Danny Williams’ decision to leave a first ministers meeting in Ottawa ‘in a huff.’ (C’mon, we don’t even treat really old events in Canada as ‘historic.’)

Deciding what’s historic enough to make a film or television program about wasn’t really a point of contention at the congress, as this broad-minded, international group is, if anything, eager to shake off its dependent relationship with World War II (for example) and reach new audiences who might otherwise assume that anything labeled history – or anything in black and white – isn’t for them.

Delegates chewed over the research of, shaping of, telling of, packaging of, marketing of, broadcast of and consumption of history in three days of panels and debates. Lord Black set a suitably, dare I say it, historic tone – opinionated, rigorously researched, contemporarily relevant – with a summary of his 1,360-page biographical work, Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion Of Freedom. With a lesson to producers and broadcasters who might indeed think it has all been done already, Black labeled those historians who felt that there was nothing new to say about FDR as ‘mere chroniclers.’

There are always aspects of a story as huge as FDR’s to appreciate anew that connect with our own experience. Black cited FDR’s radio address to the Arab population of North Africa: ‘We the American holy warriors have arrived… to fight the great Jihad of Freedom… we have come to set you free.’

Paris 1919 author Margaret MacMillan chaired the panel ‘Desperately Seeking Women,’ which revealed that ‘a typical audience share for history programs is 70% male and 30% female.’ However, it appears some are seeking women more desperately than others, with a representative of PBS indicating that they want audiences of any gender, and seeming to accept as a law of nature that men like to watch historic stuff blow up, while women are interested in social history, i.e., programming that has ’emotional accessibility.’ Hmm, have we traveled in a time machine back in history?

Different voices, different subjects were also on the agenda at ‘Whose Story Is It? History from the Indigenous Perspective.’ Raymond Waru, a Maori producer, cited the history of the TV stereotype of the Maoris in New Zealand, from the 1960s-era ‘dancing Maoris’ to the 1980s ‘drunken Maoris,’ the ’90s ‘unemployed Maoris,’ to the present-day ‘money-grubbing (i.e., re: land claims) Maoris.’ His own work, including The Natural World of the Maori and Our People Our Century, made for Television New Zealand, are efforts to change this attitude.

Moderator Barbara Hager, of Victoria’s Aarrow Productions, said it is vitally important for filmmakers to understand and respect that many aboriginal peoples want to have a stake in the films made about them, and not be ‘informants’ or ‘mere subjects.’ She revised the old joke about two aboriginal people asking one another ‘So, who’s your anthropologist?’ to ‘So, who’s your documentary filmmaker?’

The history of history program-making itself was on view in the session ‘Desert Island Docs.’ Yes, but if you are marooned, will you be able to make a DVD player out of a coconut? Panelists showed clips from decades-old favorites, seminal works, for them, that revealed (e.g. the 7Up series) that without today’s tools, from CGI to dramatic reconstruction, to elaborate titles effects and soundscapes, history filmmakers made powerful and creative films that hold up well after decades. One might even say they are… historic.

Next year’s congress will take place in Rome.

-www.history2004.com