by Robert A. Rosenstone (1995)
"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."--Book cover.
Kevin J. Harty
"Essays discuss American, British and European productions. Analyzed in detail are such films as The Vikings (1958), The Long Ships (1964), Alfred the Great (1969), Erik the Viking (1989) and Outlander (2008), and a pair of comic-strip adaptations, the live-action Prince Valiant (1997) and the animated Astérix and the Vikings (2006). Comprehensive filmography included"--Provided by publisher.
Edith Futscher
Die Filme Marguerite Duras? sind eigentümlich verstörend ? karg in der Bildsprache, mitunter beharrlich in der Artikulationsweise. Ihre ästhetischen Antworten auf soziale und politische Fragen des 20. Jahrhunderts sind heillos. ?Was restlos übrigbleibt? ist eine umfassende Werkmonografie, die dieser Verzahnung Rechnung trägt. In Kontakt mit Fragmenten von Maurice Blanchot wird in deskriptiven Analysen das dichte Geflecht an Filmen und literarischen Texten vorgestellt. Es wird hinsichtlich der Möglichkeiten diskutiert, mit Stille, Leere, Langsamkeit, mit dem Einsatz von Barrieren, Klüften oder Entfärbung von Dingen zu sprechen, die sich nicht zeigen oder zeigen lassen, die wir dennoch sehen können. Mit weitgehend neutralen Bildern, Bildern, die weder hervorstechen noch zuordenbar sein wollen, gelang es Duras, sowohl Übersehenes in den Blick zu rücken als auch extreme Erfahrung zu thematisieren.
Edward Branigan
Narrative is one of the ways we organise and understnad the world. It is found everywhere: not only in films and books, but also in everyday conversations and in the nonfictional discourses of journalists, historians, educators, psychologists, attorneys and many others. Edward Branigan presents a telling exploration of the basic concepts of narrative theory and its relation to film - and literary - analysis, bringing together theories from linguistics and cognitive science, and applying them to the screen. Individual analyses of classical narratives form the basis of a complex study of every aspect of filmic fiction exploring, for example, subjectivity in Lady in the Lake, multiplicity in Letter from and Unknown Woman, post-modernism and documentary in Sans Soleil.
Karl Kroeber
"Describing in detail precise differences between the psychological experience of reading a novel and watching a movie, Make Believe in Film and Fiction shows how movies' unique magnification of movements produces stories especially potent in exposing hypocrisy, the spread of criminality in contemporary society, and the relation of private experience to the natural environment. By contrasting novels with visual storytelling the book also displays how fiction facilitates sharing of subjective fantasies, frees the mind from limiting spatial and temporal preconceptions, and dramatizes the ethical significance of even trivial and commonplace behavior, while intensifying readers' awareness of how they think and feel."--Jacket.