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

Rosenstone, Robert A.

ISBN 10: 0674940989 / ISBN 13: 9780674940987

Published by Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1998

About this Item

viii / 271 pp clean sound paperback.

Seller Inventory # 045117

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Visions of the Past: The Challenge of Film to Our Idea of History (Relations)
• Publisher: Harvard University Press, Cambridge
• Publication Date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0674940989
• ISBN 13: 9780674940987
• Binding: Soft cover
• Edition: First Edition Thus
• Condition: Very Good
• Seller catalogs:
  • Film Cinema Television
  • History

About this title

Synopsis

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.

About the Author

Robert A. Rosenstone is Professor of History, California Institute of Technology, and author of Mirror in the Shrine: American Encounters with Meiji Japan and Romantic Revolutionary: A Biography of John Reed (both from Harvard)