Here are 100 books that Slaves on Screen fans have personally recommended if you like
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I am a film buff and history nerd who has brought her two passions together in the study of history on screen. So much of what we know is shaped by what we watch. It is crucial that we don’t dismiss historical TV shows and films as mere entertainment and instead work to understand how history is constructed and represented on screen. I have spent my postgraduate career exploring the screen’s unique capabilities for telling historical stories. I received my PhD from the University of Auckland and currently teach film studies at Media Design School, Aotearoa’s leading digital creativity tertiary provider.
Robert Rosenstone is thehistory 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 Gloryand 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 Pastremains my favourite.
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 questions, Robert Rosenstone offers a 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 venture into the investigation of a concern: how a visual medium, subject to the conventions of drama and fiction, might be used as…
I am a film buff and history nerd who has brought her two passions together in the study of history on screen. So much of what we know is shaped by what we watch. It is crucial that we don’t dismiss historical TV shows and films as mere entertainment and instead work to understand how history is constructed and represented on screen. I have spent my postgraduate career exploring the screen’s unique capabilities for telling historical stories. I received my PhD from the University of Auckland and currently teach film studies at Media Design School, Aotearoa’s leading digital creativity tertiary provider.
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.
Reading films, television dramas, reality shows, and virtual exhibits, among other popular texts, Engaging the Past examines the making and meaning of history for everyday viewers. Contemporary media can encourage complex interactions with the past that have far-reaching consequences for history and politics. Viewers experience these representations personally, cognitively, and bodily, but, as this book reveals, not just by identifying with the characters portrayed. Some of the works considered in this volume include the films Hotel Rwanda (2004), Good Night and Good Luck (2005), and Milk (2008); the television dramas Deadwood, Mad Men, and Rome; the reality shows Frontier House,…
I am a film buff and history nerd who has brought her two passions together in the study of history on screen. So much of what we know is shaped by what we watch. It is crucial that we don’t dismiss historical TV shows and films as mere entertainment and instead work to understand how history is constructed and represented on screen. I have spent my postgraduate career exploring the screen’s unique capabilities for telling historical stories. I received my PhD from the University of Auckland and currently teach film studies at Media Design School, Aotearoa’s leading digital creativity tertiary provider.
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.
Historical film studies is a burgeoning field, with a large and ever growing number of publications from across the globe. The History on Film Reader distils this mass of work, offering readers an introduction to just under thirty of the most critical and representative writings on the relationship between film and history. Films discussed include: Gladiator, Forrest Gump, Pan's Labyrinth, Titanic and Life is Beautiful.
Thematically structured, this Reader offers an overview of the varying ways scholars see film as contributing to our understanding of history, from their relationship with written histories, to their particular characteristics and their role in…
I am a film buff and history nerd who has brought her two passions together in the study of history on screen. So much of what we know is shaped by what we watch. It is crucial that we don’t dismiss historical TV shows and films as mere entertainment and instead work to understand how history is constructed and represented on screen. I have spent my postgraduate career exploring the screen’s unique capabilities for telling historical stories. I received my PhD from the University of Auckland and currently teach film studies at Media Design School, Aotearoa’s leading digital creativity tertiary provider.
Sets, props, and costumes are not only part of the historical film’s allure but play an important role in the construction of the historical narrative; to ignore this element of screen history is criminal. Sprengler’s book gives “visual pastness” the attention it deserves, delving into the form and function of costumes in Far From Heaven and the cars inSin City (to name just two examples). Sprengler approaches the topic through the lens of nostalgia, adding another layer to the examination of history on screen. As someone who is fascinated by 1950s history and the representation of the 1950s on screen, Sprengler’s focus on this decade is a bonus.
"In this fascinating in-depth study of the impact of nostalgia on contemporary American cinema, Christine Sprengler unpicks the history of the concept and explores its significance in theory and practice. She offers a lucid analysis of the development of nostalgia in American society and culture, navigating a path through the key debates and aligning herself with recent attempts to recuperate its critical potential. This journey opens up the myriad permutations of nostalgia across visual and material culture and their interface with cinema, with the 1950s emerging as a privileged moment. Four case studies (Sin City, Far From Heaven, The Aviator…
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…
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.
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…
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.
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…
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.
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…
I’m a historian, with a special interest in the 20th century. I’ve written about Freud’s Vienna, the aftermath of the First World War, strikes in the 1920s and 1930s in America’s cotton South, the plot to assassinate Hitler, and the notorious 1940s gangsters nicknamed “Murder, Inc.”. What intrigues me about the 20th century are the era’s underlying values and the shocking and violent collisions among them. In Casablanca’s Conscience, I use the great film as a lens with which to take another look at the tumultuous times just a generation ago.
Kracauer was a German film critic in the Weimar years. This classic text, first published in 1947, relates the crisis of German culture in the 1920s and 1930s–which climaxed in Hitler and Nazism–to famous Weimar films, like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and M. Kracauer’s effort to track Germany’s cultural zeitgeist in the movies. This relation is not without controversy.
His book remains a fine example of the struggle to see mass psychology in the movies and the movies in the context of mass psychology.
An essential work of the cinematic history of the Weimar Republic by a leading figure of film criticism
First published in 1947, From Caligari to Hitler remains an undisputed landmark study of the rich cinematic history of the Weimar Republic. Prominent film critic Siegfried Kracauer examines German society from 1921 to 1933, in light of such movies as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, M, Metropolis, and The Blue Angel. He explores the connections among film aesthetics, the prevailing psychological state of Germans in the Weimar era, and the evolving social and political reality of the time. Kracauer makes a startling…
I am teaching Theater studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Among my courses, “The World of Theater in the Reflection of Cinema" was a notable one. My favorite film was Children of Paradise. However, I was taken aback when a friend questioned the film's alleged anti-Semitic elements. I scrutinized the character of the Old-Clothes Man, Josué, noticing his stereotypical Jewish traits. As my research went further, I discovered the original 1942 script, where Josué played a more significant role as an overt Jewish traitor, ultimately slain by the film's hero, Deburau. This revelation prompted extensive research in Paris and Jerusalem, uncovering veiled Jewish portrayals in other French films made during the German occupation.
Cinema of Paradox is a captivating journey into the intricate world of French cinema during the challenging years of the Nazi occupation of France. This book offers a unique window into a period when the French film industry not only survived but flourished, producing enduring classics like Carne's Children of Paradise.
Evelyn Ehrlich's meticulous exploration guides us through the tapestry of French filmmaking from the outbreak of World War II in 1939 to the liberation of France in 1944. What sets this book apart is its comprehensive approach, delving into the political, cultural, and social context that shaped the cinematic landscape in occupied France. It also sheds light on the occupiers' perspective, revealing the surprising encouragement from the Nazis for the French to maintain their high cinematic standards for their own purposes.
Though the book doesn’t approach the problem of veiled representations of Jewish characters in French cinema, Cinema of…
From 1940 to 1944 the French cinema thrived both economically and artistically under the Nazi occupation. Despite the harsh and grim conditions of defeat, the French film industry produced many good films and a few enduring classics, including Carne's Children of Paradise, one of the most beloved of all French films. Cinema of Paradox reveals, for the first time in English, the difficult course of French filmmaking from the declaration of war in 1939 through four years of misery to France's liberation in 1944. Evelyn Ehrlich examines the conditions of filmmaking as they reflected the larger political, cultural, and social…
