History on Film/Film on History demonstrates how films can be analyzed as historical sources. It offers undergraduates an introduction to some of the first issues involved with studying historical films.
Rosenstone argues that to leave history films out of the discussion of the meaning of the past is to ignore a major factor in our understanding of past events. He examines what history films convey about the past and how they convey it, demonstrating the need to learn how to read and understand this new visual world.
This new edition places this 'classic' text in the context of work done elsewhere in the field over the ten years since this book first published, and help to renew the title for a new generation of undergraduates.
Contents
Preface to the series ix
Acknowledgements xi
Publisher’s acknowledgements xiii
Chapter 1: History on film 1
Chapter 2: To see the past 11
Chapter 3: Mainstream drama 32
Chapter 4: Innovative drama 50
Chapter 5: Documentary 70
Chapter 6: Telling lives 89
Chapter 7: Film maker/historian 111
Chapter 8: Engaging the discourse 134
Chapter 9: Film on history 154
Guide to key reading 165
Bibliography 172
Index 179
· A new introduction, outlining the impact this work has had on the topic of history and film as well as general developments in the field
· New, up-to-date ‘Guide to Key Reading’
· Detailed examinations of a variety of films – American, European, Mexican and Soviet – made in different political systems and climates
· A chapter focusing on Oliver Stone as a brilliant historian of the Vietnam era
· A chapter on recent Holocaust films, showing how a group of works, taken together, can provide a wide-ranging understanding of a single historical event.
· A new introduction places the work in the context of current critical debate
· Introduces the varieties, types, and traditions of historical films made in Hollywood, Europe, and the rest of the world
· Examines the responses of historians and other public critics (reviewers, teachers, politicians, historical actors) to the way particular historical events have been presented on the screen
· Discusses and explains the codes and conventions by which (some) filmmakers have created a meaningful historical discourse on the screen
· Provides practical guidance on how such methods can be applied to the analysis of other historical films
Professor Robert A. Rosenstone of the California Institute of Technology is a leading scholar in the growing field of history and film. To this topic he brings experience as both an honoured historian and a participant in several major film projects. His award winning biography of John Reed, Romantic Revolutionary (1975), was used as the basis of Warren Beatty's multiple Academy Award winner, Reds, on which Rosenstone served as historical consultant. He is author of several works of history, including Visions of the Past: The Challenge of Film to Our Idea of History (1995) Crusade of the Left: The Lincoln Battalion in the Spanish Civil War (1969) and Mirror in the Shrine: American Encounters with Japan (1988). He is editor of Revisioning History: Film and the Construction of a New Past (1995) and Experiments in Rethinking History (2004). He is the Founding Editor of Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice.