Abstract
This book explores the relationship between film and history by considering how the medium of film shapes, reinforces or subverts our understanding of the past. We do this by widening our focus from ‘history’, the study of past events, to encompass ‘memory’, the processes by which meaning is attached to the past. This approach acknowledges that film’s impact lies less in its empirical qualities than in its powerful capacity to influence public consciousness, mould collective memory and retrieve suppressed or marginalised histories.
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Notes
Ofer Ashkenazi, ‘The Future of History as Film: Apropos the Publication of A Companion to Historical Film’, Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice 18 (2014), p. 291.
For an overview, see Maenie Hughes-Warrington (ed.), The History on Film Reader (London: Routledge, 2009);
Robert Rosenstone and Constantin Parvulescu (eds), A Companion to the Historical Film (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013).
James Chapman, Licence to Thrill: A Cultural History of the James Bond Films (London: I.B. Tauris, 2007 edn).
Robert Rosenstone, ‘Film Reviews’, American Historical Review 97 (1992), p. 1138. See, for example,
Guy Westwell, ‘Critical Approaches to the History Film — A Field in Search of a Methodology’, Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice 11 (2007), p. 585.
Marnie Hughes-Warrington, History Goes to the Movies (London: Routledge, 2007), p. 9.
Vivian Bickford-Smith, ‘Rosenstone on Film, Rosenstone on History: An African Perspective’, Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice 11 (2008), p. 533.
Robert Schneider, Perspectives on History, May 2006 (http://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history, date accessed 16 June 2014).
For one example, see Desmond Bell and Fearghal McGarry, ‘“One Cut Too Many?” History and Film: A Practice-based Case Study’, Journal of Media Practice, 14 (2013), pp. 5–23.
Hayden White, ‘Historiography and Historiophoty’, American Historical Review 93 (1988), pp. 1193–1199; Ashkenazi, ‘The Future of History’, p. 292.
James Chapman, Film and History (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. 87; Hughes-Warrington, History on Film, pp. 7–188.
Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. vii.
Robert Rosenstone (ed.), Revisioning History: Film and the Construction of a New Past (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 8.
Robert Burgoyne, ‘The Balcony of History’, Rethinking History. The Journal of Theory and Practice 11 (2007), pp. 552–553.
Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).
Jay Winter, ‘The Memory Boom in Contemporary Historical Studies’, Raritan 21 (2001), p. 52.
David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 41.
Marcia Landy, British Genres: Cinema and Society, 1930–1960 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), p. 53.
Paula Rabinowitz, ‘Wreckage upon Wreckage: History, Documentary, and the Ruins of Memory’, History and Theory 32.2 (1993), p. 134.
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© 2015 Jennie M. Carlsten and Fearghal McGarry
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Carlsten, J.M., McGarry, F. (2015). Introduction. In: Carlsten, J.M., McGarry, F. (eds) Film, History and Memory. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137468956_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137468956_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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