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Broad in scope, this interdisciplinary collection of original scholarship on historical film features essays that explore the many facets of this expanding field and provide a platform for promising avenues of research.
* Offers a unique collection of cutting edge research that questions the intention behind and influence of historical film
* Essays range in scope from inclusive broad-ranging subjects such as political contexts, to focused assessments of individual films and auteurs
* Prefaced with an introductory survey of the field by its two distinguished editors
* Features interdisciplinary contributions from scholars in the fields of History, Film Studies, Anthropology, and Cultural and Literary Studies
List of contents
Notes on Contributors viii Introduction 1
Robert A. Rosenstone and Constantin Parvulescu Part 1 History and the Medium of Film 1 Politics and the Historical Film: Hotel Rwanda and the Form of Engagement 11
Alison Landsberg 2 History as Palimpsest: Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon (1975) 30
Maria Pramaggiore 3 Flagging up History: The Past as a DVD Bonus Feature 53
Debra Ramsay 4 The History Film as a Mode of Historical Thought 71
Robert A. Rosenstone Part 2 Filmmakers as Historians 5 Julia's Resistant History:Women's Historical Films in Hollywood and the Legacy of Citizen Kane 91
J. E. Smyth 6 Mark Donskoi's Gorky Trilogy and the Stalinist Biopic 110
Denise J. Youngblood 7 The Subjects of History: Italian Filmmakers as Historians 133
Marcia Landy 8 AndrzejWajda as Historian 154
PiotrWitek Part 3 Telling Lives: The Biopic 9 Oliver Stone's Nixon: The Rise and Fall of a Political Gangster 179
Willem Hesling 10 Authorial Histories: The Historical Film and the Literary Biopic 199
Hila Shachar 11 The Biopic in Hindi Cinema 219
Rachel Dwyer 12 The Lives and Times of the Biopic 233
Dennis Bingham Part 4 Cinema and the Nation 13 GangWars:Warner Brothers' The Roaring Twenties Stars, News, and the New Deal 257
Paula Rabinowitz 14 State Terrorism on Film: Argentine Cinema during the First Years of Democracy (1983-1990) 283
Mario Ranalletti 15 Fossil Frontiers: American Petroleum History on Film 301
Georgiana Banita 16 Sounding the Depths of History: Opera and National Identity in Italian Film 328
Roger Hillman Part 5 Wars and Revolutions 17 Generational Memory and Affect in Letters from Iwo Jima 349
Robert Burgoyne 18 Post-Heroic Revolution: Depicting the 1989 Events in the Romanian Historical Film of the Twenty-First Century 365
Constantin Parvulescu 19 In Country: Narrating the IraqWar in Contemporary US Cinema 384
GuyWestwell Part 6 Premodern Times 20 Heart and Clock: Time and History in The Immortal Heart and Other Films about the Middle Ages 407
Bettina Bildhauer 21 The Anti-Samurai Film 425
Thomas Keirstead Part 7 Slavery and the PostcolonialWorld 22 The Politics of Cine-Memory: Signifying Slavery in the History Film 445
Michael T. Martin and David C.Wall 23 The African Past on Screen: Moving beyond Dualism 468
Vivian Bickford-Smith 24 Colonial Legacies in Contemporary French Cinema: Jews and Muslims on Screen 490
Catherine Portuges 25 "What's Love Got to Do with It?": Sympathy, Antipathy, and the Unsettling of Colonial American History in Film 513
Louis Kirk McAuley Index 540
About the author
Robert A. Rosenstone is Professor Emeritus of History at the California Institute of Technology. His recent scholarship has focused on the overlapping topics of new narrative forms and history's relationship to the visual media. He has published a dozen books, including
Romantic Revolutionary: A Biography of John Reed (1975) ,
Mirror in the Shrine: American Encounters in Meiji Japan (1988), and
King of Odessa: A Novel of Isaac Babel (2005). His works on film include
Visions of the Past: the Challenge of Film to Our Idea of History (1995),
Revisioning History: Film and the Construction of a New Past (1995), and
History on Film / Film on History (2006, 2nd edition 2012). He created the film section of the American Historical Review and has lectured around the world.
Constantin Parvulescu is research fellow at the Institute for Culture and Society at the University of Navarra. He is the author of
Orphans of the East: Postwar Eastern European Cinema and the Revolutionary Subject, Indiana University Press, 2015, and has published several articles on the relationship between cinema, history, and political and economic dicsourse.
Summary
Broad in scope, this interdisciplinary collection of original scholarship on historical film features essays that explore the many facets of this expanding field and provide a platform for promising avenues of research.
