Historic film has played and enormous role over the past fifty years in communicating ideas and commentary on issues in history to a mass audience. However, despite the popularity of film historians tend to dismiss it as a historical medium because of its unreliability and imaginative nature. Looking further into preliminary research for the topic I began to note the responsibility that a filmmaker has in portraying a piece of history, and difference in the way they have interpreted and re-interpreted history because of their subjectivity.

Thus, I began to question the nature of history from a post modernist viewpoint, that all history is interpretation based on social context, the role of the media in history (ultimately 'Who are the Historians?) and the contrasting approaches to a historical personality, issue or event.

This essay assumes that though the past does exist, as does the truth, all history is an interpretation of the historian because of ingrained cont

The importance of sexuality and appearance of women in film is also a prominent factor that has changed. In The Virgin Queen, as an older woman, Elizabeth is extremely egotistical. She enjoys compliments, and hates contradiction. Similarly she is also in Elizabeth R, however, the response of her courtiers is different. Although Elizabeth is vain, she does not demand compliments as in The Virgin Queen and tires of the excessive tribute paid to her. In Elizabeth R there is also little mention of the infamous Walter Raleigh. She favours him, though treats him with demeanour. In The Virgin Queen, however, she is infatuated with Walter, and treats him like her newest pet toy: ‘Kiss me Walter’. Walter, unsurprisingly, does not. Elizabeth, because of her demeanour, is not attractive to the male audience, and her clownishness in her movement makes her less so. Annette Kuhn, a feminist film theorist theorises that 'the woman is central… insofar as the woman's desire is the central problem or challenge for the male protagonist ' In many films during the 1950's, and the Virgin Queen is no exception this meant that the 'narrative then moves to reduce the image of the woman's sexuality as a threat '.

The point is that though the past is concrete our interpretations of it change as our values and attitudes do. This leads is to question whether film is really notoriously unreliable and subjective as traditionalist historians claim it is, or is it merely another interpretation, as post-modernists would claim. If the latter is true, filmmakers are indeed historians, and perhaps the most powerful group over the last fifty years. Society does indeed dictate how history is portrayed, at least to the wider public because, as this essay examined filmmakers are susceptible to their own socio-political contexts in their interpretations

By examining these films we see that Elizabeth, though the same person is undeniably different in the interpretations of each director, thus, though the past has remained the same, and Elizabeth has remained the same, interpretations of her, and the past have changes, as values and attitudes have changed. The gap of 43 years, from The Virgin Queen in 1955 to Elizabeth in 1998 was one in which societal values changed, and therefore history changed with it. Though filmmakers are not historians, the work they produce it still a work of historiography, and frankly, it is accessed by more people than the works of historians. The trouble that we face, with film, is that it has no standards, facts can be doctored, or twisted, or stretched to suit the purposes of the director. Many historians argue that filmmakers must be careful when approaching a historical subject because what they create "will not be and interpretation but appear to be a final statement about it's subject, driven home with all the force of a visual demonstration ". Film and television, dating back to the beginning of the century gave the governments, political parties and other pressure groups a new force to work with in their attempts to shape public opinion, hereby finding their own ends. Film, in this sense, can try to create attitudes and values. History creates history. Cinematic interpretations of history, tell us more about the society in which they were created, than the historical personality themselves. The post-modernist Keith Jenkins put it nicely by saying that we shouldn't study history, we should study the historians. Post-modernist thought says that all history is biased, and an interpretation and even goes so far as to suggest that 'an historical text is in essence nothing more than a literary text, a poetical creation as deeply involved in the imagination as the novel'.

The next film, Elizabeth (1998), directed by Shekar Kapur comes many years after Elizabeth R. The gap, though significant, can be explained because during the late seventies through until the eighties and early nineties, women of the world began to search fo

Some topics in this essay:
, Virgin Queen, William Hughes, Tim Bevan, Keith Jenkins, Robert Dudley, Shekar Kapur, Elizabeth Elizabeth, Lord Bradley, Patricia Mellancamp, virgin queen, feature film, wider public, societal values, values attitudes, historical personality, history film, values society, history interpretation, society created, historical personality elizabeth,