Visions of the Past: The Challenge of Film to Our Idea of History

by Robert A. Rosenstone

Overview

Can filmed history measure up to written history? What happens to history when it is recorded in images, rather than words? Can images convey ideas and information that lie beyond words? Taking on these timely questions, Robert Rosenstone pioneers a new direction in the relationship between history and film. Rosenstone moves beyond traditional approaches, which examine the history of film as art and industry, or view films as texts reflecting their specific cultural contexts. This essay collection makes a radical venture into the investigation of a new concern: how a visual medium, subject to the conventions of drama and fiction, might be used as a serious vehicle for thinking about our relationship with the past.

Rosenstone looks at history films in a way that forces us to reconceptualize what we mean by "history." He explores the innovative strategies of films made in Africa, Latin America, Germany, and other parts of the world. He journeys into the history of film in a wide range of cultures, and expertly traces the contours of the postmodern historical film. In essays on specific films, including Reds, JFK, and Sans Soleil, he considers such issues as the relationship between fact and film and the documentary as visionary truth.

Theorists have for some time been calling our attention to the epistemological and literary limitations of traditional history. The first sustained defense of film as a way of thinking historically, this book takes us beyond those limitations.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674266834
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	08/04/1998
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	288
File size:	316 KB

About the Author

Robert A. Rosenstone is Professor of History, California Institute of Technology.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Personal, Professional, and (a Little) Theoretical

PART 1: HISTORY IN IMAGES

1. History in Images / History in Words: Reflections on the Possibility of Really Putting History onto Film

2. The Historical Film: Looking at the Past in a Postliterate Age

PART 2: THE HISTORICAL FILM

3. Reds as History

4.The Good Fight: History, Memory, Documentary

5. JFK: Historical Fact / Historical Film

6.Walker: The Dramatic Film as (Postmodern) History

7.Sans Soleil: The Documentary as (Visionary) Truth

PART 3: THE FUTURE OF THE PAST

8. Re-visioning History: Contemporary Filmmakers and the Construction of the Past

9.Film and the Beginnings of Postmodern History

10. What You Think about When You Think about Writing a Book on History and Film

Notes

Sources

Acknowledgments

Index

Editorial Reviews

[A] fascinating analysis of the traditional and nontraditional historical film...This is solid scholarship written in a manner that makes it accessible for a wide range of readers.

Choice

If you're in search of a thoughtful overview of film and history as rival routes to the past, check out the essays collected in Visions of the Past...Rosenstone nicely reverses the assumption that history exists only on paper, approved and stamped by historians.

Chicago Tribune - Carlin Romano

In these essays, Rosenstone writes with the fervor of the convert...urging historians to admit that film can often do what books can't...Rosenstone is really rooting for modernist or post-modern cinema—the likes of Alex Cox, Chris Marker and Trinh T. Minh-ha—as the only adequate chroniclers of our fractured sense of the past.

Sight and Sound

If you're in search of a thoughtful overview of film and history as rival routes to the past, check out the essays collected in Visions of the Past...Rosenstone nicely reverses the assumption that history exists only on paper, approved and stamped by historians.
— Carlin Romano

Chicago Tribune