My eighth-grade teacher refused to believe I had read 12 books for extra credit in a semester or that works by Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, Charles Dickens, and Alexandre Dumas were among them. She didn’t know that I had long loved reading, especially stories set in the past of distant lands. In the tenth grade, I declared myself a writer, but only after earning a PhD in history did the hunger to write historical stories become a reality. Much later, I learned that historical films were another wonderful way of encountering history.
There is no better or more incisive scholar writing on American historical films today than Robert Burgoyne.
Making use of both social and film theory, his books, including this latest one, are elegantly written and sharply focused. Less interested in its historicity than in the way a film reflects the shifting values of our rapidly changing society, this book analyzes nine works made during this century, including important films such as Zero Dark Thirty, American Sniper, and The Hurt Locker.
Among many insights the work contains, the most important is that the changing nature of warfare exhibited in our recent “partial” conflicts has been a major factor in helping to reshape American notions of both war and those who defend us.
A look at how post-9/11 cinema captures the new face of war in the twenty-first century
While the war film has carved out a prominent space within the history of cinema, the twenty-first century has seen a significant shift in the characteristics that define it. Serving as a roadmap to the genre's contemporary modes of expression, The New American War Film explores how, in the wake of 9/11, both the nature of military conflict and the symbolic frameworks that surround it have been dramatically reshaped.
Featuring in-depth analyses of contemporary films like The Hurt Locker, Zero Dark Thirty, Eye in…
I love this book by the late and much-honored Professor of Early Modern European history for its clarity, concision, elegance of expression, and boldness of interpretation.
It focuses on five outstanding films about slavery beginning as early as the 73-71 BC revolt of soldiers against ancient Rome led by the famed gladiator Spartacus and ending with the United States, Cuba, and other Caribbean countries in the late 19th century.
The author even insists, in a chapter on the film made from Toni Morrison’s ghost story novel, Beloved, that it is possible that some written historical fiction can teach us much about the past as traditional scholarly works of history.
The written word and what the eye can see are brought together in this fascinating foray into the depiction of resistance to slavery through the modern medium of film. Davis, whose book The Return of Martin Guerre was written while she served as consultant to the French film of the same name, now tackles the large issue of how the moving picture industry has portrayed slaves in five major motion pictures spanning four generations. The potential of film to narrate the historical past in an effective and meaningful way, with insistence on loyalty to the evidence, is assessed in five…
When I first read this book, the only one on my list to deal exclusively with documentary film, I was knocked out by the brilliance of the author in locating, describing, and naming a new genre of historical film, which he calls the Microhistorical. The name is chosen as a parallel to a written genre with the same name that some historians have been writing in the last fifty years.
Such films are unique in both their sources and subject matter. Based almost exclusively on the lives of ordinary people or small forgotten incidents, the sources for such films rely largely on home movies; films never meant to be shown to the public. Remarkably, these microstudies contain important insights into the public’s beliefs about and reactions to the social conditions and movements of the past.
Traditional historical documentaries strive to project a sense of objectivity, producing a top-down view of history that focuses on public events and personalities. In recent decades, in line with historiographical trends advocating "history from below," a different type of historical documentary has emerged, focusing on tightly circumscribed subjects, personal archives, and first-person perspectives. Efren Cuevas categorizes these films as "microhistorical documentaries" and examines how they push cinema's capacity as a producer of historical knowledge in new directions.
Cuevas pinpoints the key features of these documentaries, identifying their parallels with written microhistory: a reduced scale of observation, a central role given…
I love this book for two special reasons: it was written by a scholar who doubles as a film director and thus understands both media from the inside and it is the first work to elaborate on the meaning of “historiophoty,” a word coined years ago by the famed historian, Hayden White, that means “the representation of history and our thought about it in visual images.”
In clear and compelling prose, Nelson undertakes the enormous task of consolidating several decades of scholarship in diverse fields (history, film, philosophy) to create five principles that allow you and I to think more clearly about the real contributions of historical films. Her work allows you to better understand the explicit and implicit meanings of historical films.
Making History Move: Five Principles of the Historical Film builds upon decades of scholarship investigating history in visual culture by proposing a methodology of five principles to analyze history in moving images in the digital age. It charts a path to understanding the form of history with the most significant impact on public perceptions of the past. The book develops insights across these fields, including philosophical considerations of film and history, to clarify the form and function of history in moving images. It addresses the implications of the historical film on public historical consciousness, presenting criteria to engage and assess…
Of the many books that focus on the historical films of an individual country or historical period, this is by far the most interesting and powerful. It deals with how the directors of the New German Cinema of the Seventies devised new visual and narrative strategies to come to terms with the shameful history of Hitler’s regime.
The book eschews the usual focus on guilt and atonement in favor of personal memory and a yearning for national identity. Focusing on a description of several important works–including Hitler: A Film from Germany, The Patriot, and The Marriage of Maria Braun–Kaes makes a strong case that such films both depicted and helped to promote a major shift in German attitudes toward their country’s past.
West German filmmakers have tried to repeatedly over the past half-century to come to terms with Germany's stigmatized history. How can Hitler and the Holocaust, how can the complicity and shame of the average German be narrated and visualized? How can Auschwitz be reconstructed? Anton Kaes argues that a major shift in German attitudes occurred in the mid-1970s-a shift best illustrated in films of the New German Cinema, which have focused less on guilt and atonement than on personal memory and yearning for national identity.
To support his claim, Kaes devotes a chapter to each of five complex and celebrated…
Do historical films teach us anything worth knowing? Are films like Twelve Years a Slave or Oppenheimer historically valuable? Could they be labeled works of “history?”
With detailed analyses of films from around the globe, my book, in its updated fourth edition, answers, yes, some films are indeed works of history able to shed light on issues of the past that elude the written word. My unusual trajectory to the visual media began after two of my books were turned into feature-length movies, one of them Warren Beatty’s Academy Award-winning epic, Reds. Later, I served as a historical consultant for several other American and European productions. In this book, I detail film's many fascinating actual and potential contributions to historical knowledge.
I come by my interest in history and the years before, during, and after the Second World War honestly. For one thing, both my father and my father-in-law served as pilots in the war, my father a P-38 pilot in North Africa and my father-in-law a B-17 bomber pilot in England. Their histories connect me with a period I think we can still almost reach with our fingertips and one that has had a momentous impact on our lives today. I have taken that interest and passion to discover and write true life stories of the war—focusing on the untold and unheard stories often of the “Average Joe.”
October 24, 1944, is not a day of national remembrance. Yet, more Americans serving in World War II perished on that day than on any other single day of the war.
The narrative of No Average Day proceeds hour by hour and incident by incident while focusing its attention on ordinary individuals—clerks, radio operators, cooks, sailors, machinist mates, riflemen, and pilots and their air crews. All were men who chose to serve their country and soon found themselves in a terrifying and otherworldly place.
No Average Day reveals the vastness of the war as it reaches past the beaches in…
October 24, 1944, is not a day of national remembrance. Yet, more Americans serving in World War II perished on that day than on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, or on June 6, 1944, when the Allies stormed the beaches of Normandy, or on any other single day of the war. In its telling of the events of October 24, No Average Day proceeds hour by hour and incident by incident. The book begins with Army Private First-Class Paul Miller's pre-dawn demise in the Sendai #6B Japanese prisoner of war camp. It concludes with the death…
