Revisioning History: Film and the Construction of a New Past

by Robert A. Rosenstone (Editor)

Overview

In Revisioning History thirteen historians from around the world look at the historical film on its own terms, not as it compares to written history but as a unique way of recounting the past. How does film construct a historical world? What are the rules, codes, and strategies by which it brings the past to life? What does that historical construction mean to us? In grappling with these questions, each contributor looks at an example of New History cinema. Different from Hollywood costume dramas or documentary films, these films are serious efforts to come to grips with the past; they have often grown out of nations engaged in an intense quest for historical connections, such as India, Cuba, Japan, and Germany.


The volume begins with an introduction by Robert Rosenstone. Part I, "Contesting History," comprises essays by Geoff Eley (on the film Distant Voices, Still Lives), Nicholas B. Dirks (The Home and the World), Thomas Kierstead and Deidre Lynch (Eijanaika), and Pierre Sorlin (Night of the Shooting Stars). Contributing to Part II, "Visioning History," are Michael S. Roth (Hiroshima Mon Amour), John Mraz (Memories of Underdevelopment), Min Soo Kang (The Moderns) and Clayton R. Koppes (Radio Bikini). Part III, "Revisioning History" contains essays by Denise J. Youngblood (Repentance), Rudy Koshar (Hitler: A Film from Germany), Rosenstone (Walker), Sumiko Higashi (Walker and Mississippi Burning), and Daniel Sipe (From the Pole to the Equator).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691025346
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	01/01/1995
Series:	Princeton Studies in Culture/Power/History , #5
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	264
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.25(h) x (d)

About the Author

Robert A. Rosenstone is Professor of History at the California Institute of Technology.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction	3
1	Distant Voices, Still Lives: The Family Is a Dangerous Place: Memory, Gender, and the Image of the working Class	17
2	The Home and the World: The Invention of Modernity in Colonial India	44
3	Eijanaika: Japanese Modernization and the Carnival of Time	64
4	The Night of the Shooting Stars: Fascism, Resistance, and the Liberation of Italy	77
5	Hiroshima Mon Amour: You Must Remember This	91
6	Memories of Underdevelopment: Bourgeois Consciousness/Revolutionary Context	102
7	The Moderns: Art, Forgery, and a Postmodern Narrative of Modernism	115
8	Radio Bikini: Making and Unmaking Nuclear Mythology	128
9	Repentance: Stalinist Terror and the Realism of Surrealism	139
10	Hitler: A Film from Germany: Cinema, History, and Structures of Feeling	155
11	From the Pole to the Equator: A Vision of a Worldless Past	174
12	Walker and Mississippi Burning: Postmodernism Versus Illusionist Narrative	188
13	Walker: The Dramatic Film as (Postmodern) History	202
Notes	215
List of Contributors	243
Film Credits	247
Index	249

Editorial Reviews

This excellent book of 13 articles explores how films construct an image of the past. . . . Revisioning History asks: what are the particular set of rules by which the past in represented on moving images? How does the present influence the representation of the past in films? Dealing with such topics as colonialism and Nazism, the films were made in the United States, Europe, Asia, and Latin America.

Virginia Quarterly Review

"This excellent book of 13 articles explores how films construct an image of the past. . . . Revisioning History asks: what are the particular set of rules by which the past in represented on moving images? How does the present influence the representation of the past in films? Dealing with such topics as colonialism and
Nazism, the films were made in the United States, Europe, Asia, and Latin America."—Virginia Quarterly Review

From the Publisher