History and Film: A Tale of Two Disciplines

by Eleftheria Thanouli

Overview

History and Film: A Tale of Two Disciplines addresses the representation of history in cinema, a much-argued debate on the need to understand cinematic history in its own terms and develop a certain vocabulary for discussing historical films, their relation to public history, and their impact on public historical consciousness. Eleftheria Thanouli does this by changing the agenda altogether - combining a macro-level perspective with a micro-level one in order to argue that cinematic history is the dominant form of historiography in the 20th century, as it succeeded in remediating and repurposing the key formal, rhetorical, and ideological practices of 19th-century professional historiography. With case studies ranging from The Thin Red Line and Life is Beautiful, to The Fog of War and The Last Bolshevik, Thanouli bridges the gap between history and film studies and lays the foundations for a new visual historiography.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501340789
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	10/18/2018
Pages:	296
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.69(d)

About the Author

Eleftheria Thanouli is Assistant Professor in Film Theory at the Film Department at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Amsterdam in 2005. She is the author of Post-Classical Cinema: An International Poetics of Film Narration (2009).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments viii

Preface ix

Introduction: History and Film in Parallel Orbits 1

Part I Historical and Theoretical Questions

1 The Archaeology of the Debate: Cinema and Literature as Analogies for History 23

2 Media Specificity and the Analogy of the Digital 43

3 The Theory and Practice of History 63

Part II History on Film: Narrating and Explaining the Past

4 The Poetics of History and the Poetics of the Historical Film 97

5 The Representation of History in the Fiction Film 111

6 The Representation of History in the Documentary 173

Conclusion: Filmic History in the Twentieth Century - a Successful Performance of Failure 229

Bibliography 253

Index 267

Editorial Reviews

A comprehensive and rigorous study, Thanouli's fine work enriches our understanding of the historical film as a powerful agent of contemporary thinking about the past. Bringing sophisticated readings of historiography and film theory together, Thanouli critically integrates the two disciplines in a way that will undergird future research. A major scholarly accomplishment.
Robert Burgoyne, author of Film Nation: Hollywood Looks at US History (revised edition, 2010)

Eleftheria Thanouli's new book reconceptualizes and reframes one of the most vexing questions in the history of film studies - that of the relationship between written and visual narratives. The scope of History and Film: A Tale of Two Disciplines extends and enriches the semantics of the field as established by André Bazin, Marc Ferro, Robert Rosenstone, and Hayden White. Yet it goes further by incorporating new problematics and fresh approaches which make it the most innovative contemporary contribution to the study of filmic history by addressing the representation of history in historical films, fiction film, and documentary and by exploring dimensions of historical emplotment in various written narratives. From the early Soviet experiments to contemporary imaginative narratives, Thanouli's book investigates thoroughly and conclusively the complex relations between narrative and visual forms and re-interprets their links and disjunctures. It will be the study for standard reference for many years to come.
Vrasidas Karalis, Sir Nicholas Laurantos Chair in Modern Greek Studies, University of Sydney, Australia

In my many years of work in this field, I can think of no other study that involves this level of intellectual sophistication in both theories of history and of the visual media, and certainly none which has grappled so successfully with the contentious issues surrounding the question of rendering the human past on screen.
Robert A Rosenstone, Professor Emeritus of History, California Institute of Technology, USA

From the Publisher