A Companion to the Historical Film

by Rosenstone, Robert A.; Parvulescu, Constantin

• ISBN13: 9781444337242
• ISBN10: 1444337246
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2013-02-04
• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell

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. 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

Author Biography

Robert A. Rosenstone is Professor 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 Senior Lecturer in European and Film Studies at West University of Timisoara, Romania. An emerging voice in the field of film and cultural studies, he has published extensively on issues of film and history and cinematic realism in journals such as Camera Obscura, Jump Cut, Central Europe, and Italian Studies.

Table of Contents

Notes on Contributors

Introduction
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
Alison Landsberg

2. History as Palimpsest: Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (1975)
Maria Pramaggiore

3. Flagging up History: The Past as a DVD Bonus Feature
Debra Ramsay

4. The History Film as a Mode of Historical Thought
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
J. E. Smyth

6. Mark Donskoi’s Gorky Trilogy and the Stalinist Biopic
Denise J. Youngblood

7. The Subjects of History: Italian Filmmakers as Historians
Marcia Landy

8. Andrzej Wajda as Historian
Piotr Witek

Part 3: Telling Lives: The Biopic

9. Oliver Stone’s Nixon: The Rise and Fall of a Political Gangster
Willem Hesling

10. Authorial Histories: The Historical Film and the Literary Biopic
Hila Shachar

11. The Biopic in Hindi Cinema
Rachel Dwyer

12. The Lives and Times of the Biopic
Dennis Bingham

Part 4: Cinema and the Nation

13. Gang Wars: Warner Brothers’ The Roaring Twenties Stars, News, and the New Deal
Paula Rabinowitz

14. State Terrorism on Film: Argentine Cinema during the First Years of Democracy (1983–1990)
Mario Ranalletti

15. Fossil Frontiers: American Petroleum History on Film
Georgiana Banita

16. Sounding the Depths of History: Opera and National Identity in Italian Film
Roger Hillman

Part 5: Wars and Revolutions

17. Generational Memory and Affect in Letters from Iwo Jima
Robert Burgoyne

18. Post-Heroic Revolution: Depicting the 1989 Events in the Romanian Historical Film of the Twenty-First Century
Constantin Parvulescu

19. In Country: Narrating the Iraq War in Contemporary US Cinema
Guy Westwell

Part 6: Premodern Times

20. Heart and Clock: Time and History in The Immortal Heart and Other Films about the Middle Ages
Bettina Bildhauer

21. The Anti-Samurai Film
Thomas Keirstead

Part 7: Slavery and the Postcolonial World

22. The Politics of Cine-Memory: Signifying Slavery in the History Film
Michael T. Martin and David C. Wall

23. The African Past on Screen: Moving beyond Dualism
Vivian Bickford-Smith

24. Colonial Legacies in Contemporary French Cinema: Jews and Muslims on Screen
Catherine Portuges

25. ‘‘What’s Love Got to Do with It?’’: Sympathy, Antipathy, and the Unsettling of Colonial American History in Film
Louis Kirk McAuley

Index