It is better to learn the way people lived in the past through films and video records than written documents. To what extent do you agree or disagree?
It is sometimes argued that films and video recordings are superior to written documents when it comes to learning about past people’s daily lives. In my opinion, while visual media offers vivid insights, written records remain irreplaceable for a comprehensive understanding of history, so I mostly disagree with this view.
Admittedly, films and video records bring past scenes to life in an intuitive way that written words often cannot. Footage of ordinary families’ meals, street scenes, traditional festivals, and spoken dialects, for instance, allows viewers to directly observe details like clothing, body language, and ambient sounds of a certain era, making history feel tangible rather than abstract. This is especially helpful for casual learners or young people who find dense texts boring.
However, written documents provide far deeper, more accurate information about past lives that visual media can rarely deliver. Unlike commercial films which often exaggerate or fictionalize plots for entertainment, first-hand written records such as diaries, letters, local gazetteers, and government archives record unfiltered thoughts, social rules, economic conditions and hidden sufferings of people that cameras did not or could not capture. For example, the diary of Anne Frank offers deeply personal, detailed accounts of Jewish people’s hidden life during WWII that no documentary film could fully replicate, as it conveys inner fears and hopes no camera could record. Moreover, most of human history before the 19th century has no video records at all, so written documents are the only access we have to how people lived in earlier times.
In conclusion, although films and videos are engaging supplements to learning about the past, written documents are more reliable, in-depth, and cover a much longer span of history, making them the better source overall.