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

By Robert A. Rosenstone

Book 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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0674940989
• ISBN13: 9780674940987
• Release Date: August 1998
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 0.77 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.5" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

A historian on film

Professor Rosenstone started writing on the subject of film when two of his own books were used as the basis for films, one a documentary, the other a hollywood feature. This book collects his essays, and in doing so shows his evolution from a historian writing/speaking about films in a somewhat negative light to one who realises the advantages and limitations of both media. This text showing one historian's changing opinion offers an excellect resource which helps us not only to understand the topic, but the histiography of it. Other books on this topic are often made up of single essays by historians who though maybe experts in their own field have not delt with the issue of the historical film as thoroughly as Prof. Rosenstone.