26 books like Filming History from Below

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.

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.

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.

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. 

Robert Rosenstone is the history on film guru and a big reason why I chose to pursue this line of research. Reading his work as an undergraduate was incredibly refreshing: not only was his writing was clear and accessible, but the book showed me that there was a different way to approach history. Rosenstone presents the reader with persuasive arguments about the ability of film to do history. His discussion of the films Glory and Mississippi Burning as examples of true and false invention particularly sparked my interest. Although Rosenstone has written and edited many books on the subject, Visions of the Past remains my favourite. 

Hughes-Warrington has done an amazing job of creating a history on-film sampler that brings together must-read authors and articles on this subject. The book, published in 2009, introduces readers to the core debates and differing approaches that emerged in the first thirty years of history on film scholarship. The introduction by Hughes-Warrington effectively situates anyone new to the field, providing an engaging overview as well as context for the following chapters. The edited collection features key thinkers such as Robert Rosenstone, Natalie Zemon Davis, Hayden White, Robert Burgoyne, and Marcia Landy.

As indicated by the title, Landsberg’s book considers not just historical feature films, but alternative forms of screened history including TV serials, reality TV shows, and websites. Each chapter includes concise yet compelling case studies of texts such as Hotel Rwanda, Mad Men, and Frontier House. Unsurprisingly—given the focus of my own book—I was drawn to the section on dramatic TV shows and her discussion and definition of “historically conscious dramas.” Landsberg meticulously explains how audiences engage with the past through mass culture and, unlike many history on film scholars, pays considerable attention to the formal elements of filmmaking such as sound and editing.  

Schoenbaum’s massive compilation of documents from the life of William Shakespeare is the “go-to” book for anyone who wants the facts about the Bard. A large, folio-size edition, the book contains facsimiles of over 200 contemporary documents that record important moments and events in the life and career of Shakespeare. Arranged chronologically, Schoenbaum’s quite readable narrative explains the significance of each image and creates a living person from the documents that define Shakespeare, the man.

For anyone who asks the question, “Who Was Shakespeare,” Schoenbaum provides the answer. I love “just the facts.”

This is not a best-seller graphic novel, you don’t see this book on every bookstore shelf. I discovered it because of Nina Mickwitz’s Documentary Comics. I ordered it from the library network that we had at my grad school. My degeneration is a Jewel of a book in many senses, it is a sincere book, a dialogue that goes through many channels: the images drawn, the text typed, and the way the book was made. The shifting in the line makes you think about the process and the author not just as a character but as a person experiencing the world from certain conditions and telling you about that experience.

Virus Tropical is a Latin American Book, a Colombian book, an Argentinian Book, an Ecuadorian Book. Virus tropical talks about the nineties, if you are from Colombia you recognize the towns, the T-shirts, the music, the buses. So many peripheries mixed up and telling you about the coming of age of the main character. So many important things touched while touching on the most vapid-everyday things. The accents, the way the characters interact, I was able to identify with all of this while reading this graphic novel. Virus Tropical is a great book, I’m glad it was translated into English.