Re-enactment and Imagination in the Historical Film

Leidschrift : Verleden in beeld. Geschiedenis en mythe in film, 2009

Niets uit deze uitgave mag worden gereproduceerd en/of vermenigvuldigd zonder schriftelijke toestemming van de redactie.

Course Description: Memory, history and time work through the cinematic narrative in ways that make the medium significantly different from all the other art forms. Film in a variety of ways lends itself to the possibility of organizing not just historical knowledge but also comments on the nature of historical narration. As an archive of sensations, of emotions, of images and of sounds, film works as a powerful recorder of life and its events, and as a form of witnessing and testimony. Ideas of the past as they permeate the present through cinema will be analyzed in this course by looking at the different ways in which films make connections between history and evidence, between history and the present, between historical narration and the historical event, and between memory and representation. If the history of cinema is a history of the 20th century, it contains within its archive a history of modern subjectivity (Geoffrey Nowell-Smith). Moving through popular genres, documentaries, art cinema and avant-garde film practice, the course will explore the intricate relationship between film and history as it unfolds in the terrain of World Cinema.

Film, History and Memory, 2015

The essay offers a survey of the literature concerning the use of cinematic texts in historical research, from the publication of Kracauer's classic From Caligari to Hitler to the most recent contributions. It singles out the principal tendencies shown by the scholars who engaged in this particular field of research such as: the use of raw unedited footage as a record of historical events and personalities; the analysis of institutionally sponsored film in order to gain insight into the motives of sponsoring institutions like governments and political parties, the idea that feature films might be indicators of the moral values, prejudices, ideas, and political and social tensions running through a society at a given time. The essay also offers an account of the major theoretical contribution by authors like Marc Ferro, Pierre Sorlin, and John E. O'Connor. The paper's ultimate purpose is to take stock of the progress made by scholars in this well-established and yet, in many respects, still controversial research thread. 'We need to study film and see it in relation to the world that produces it. What is our hypothesis? That film, image or not of reality, document or fiction, true story or pure invention, is history.' M. Ferro, Cinema and History (Detroit: Wayne State University, 1988), p. 29. Historians basing their research principally on cinematic texts may, at times, feel unease with regard to the epistemological foundations of their research. This is due to a number or reasons. First of all, to study films, or principally films rather than written documents, means to go against a long and illustrious tradition of historiographical studies which has normally privileged written texts over visual evidence as primary sources for historical research. Secondly, within the range of visual sources, historians have for a long time been especially suspicious of cinematic texts. Finally, a universally accepted, coherent and comprehensive methodology for studying film as a source for historical analysis has not yet been formulated. This awareness accounts for the title of the essay: cinema and history have had a very long engagement, but a proper wedding has yet to be celebrated. It is worth noting that the longterm diffidence of historians towards film is not entirely unreasonable. The use of cinematic texts as historical sources presents difficult theoretical problems with respect to their

In the past three decades, due to the work of some distinguished historians, the discussion of film is being slowly integrated into Western historiography. However, while relatively few academic historians would deny today film’s ability to instigate awareness to and enrich the understanding of historical experiences, many fewer are willing – and able – to incorporate film analysis in their own research and teaching. This impasse is particularly apparent in the case of “historical films,” in which past events and experiences are reconstructed, invented and framed in varying degrees of sophistication. The convincing arguments that established film as a “legitimate” narrator of historical reality often fell short of explicating how film should be integrated into academic history discourse. This article reads Rosenstone and Parvulescu’s recent collection of essays A Companion to Historical Film as a demonstration of different approaches taken by contemporary historians in an attempt to meet this challenge. Within this context, it identifies four paradigms, each involves different premises about the nature of film’s realism, its role as an agent of social change, and its dialog with “conventional” (national, institutional, etc.) narration of the past. The analysis of these paradigms – and the ways they have been implemented by the contributors to A Companion to Historical Film – shows their potential contribution to the study of historical realities, as well as their weaknesses and limitations. Insightfully presenting and discussing these approaches, I argue, Rosenstone and Parvulescu’s volume is an important step forward in the ongoing endeavor to methodologically incorporate film analysis in the academic research of history.