Cinema has replaced state education as the most effective historical falsifier

Evidence

The misrepresentation of the past in the cinema is probably the most fertile and effective source of such misinformation at the present time—certainly since the disappearance of the Soviet educational system, and I am not at all sure that it couldn’t compare favorably even with that, in terms of skill and effectiveness in historical distortion and perversion. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 1851

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Said-adjacent work on Orientalist representation — how mass media, not scholarship, now shapes Western images of Islamic history and the East.
• SHARE: A film-historian friend would enjoy the Rotten Tomatoes-level taxonomy of errors in the Robin Hood film debrief that follows.