Introduction: Emotions, History, and Philosophy in Cinema
This Special Dossier for Screening the Past grew out of an event organised at the University of Western Australia and the Australian Research Council Centre for the History of Emotions…
Historical Moods in Film
Abstract: This essay explores the concept of historical mood as it is captured in narrative film, and considers its value for film studies and philosophy of film. Drawing on phenomenological…
She’s Already Waited Too Long: Affective Transtemporality in Ben Ferris’s Penelope
Abstract This essay investigates some ways in which affect is deployed in historical cinema to produce distinctive experiences of temporality. It argues that the experience of watching historical film is…
Feeling Medieval: Mood and Transhistorical Empathy in Justin Kurzel’s Macbeth
Abstract: Analysing the 2015 Justin Kurzel film Macbeth, this essay develops a critical frame from phenomenology and romantic hermeneutics to illuminate the affective experience of viewing films set in the…
Song, Dance, and the Politics of Fanaticism: Youssef Chahine’s Destiny
Abstract: Critics of Youssef Chahine's 1997 film Destiny assume that its message is that ideas will always trump censorship. Such responses, however, neglect to ask why Chahine chose to make…
The Emotional Historiography of Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Eclisse
Abstract: In Michelangelo Antonio’s L’Eclisse (1962), Cold War Rome is conceived of as a sequence of controlling frames from which the camera seeks liberation. In the opening sequence a reversed…
Moral Beauty in the Cinema of the Dardenne Brothers
Abstract: Moral beauty is at the heart of the Dardenne brothers’ cinema. Its revelation is a structuring principle of their cinema. The unsentimental production of moral beauty is among their…
Selbstdenken, Remembrance, and the Future of Civil Courage in Margarethe von Trotta’s Hannah Arendt (2012). On the Psychogenesis of the “Banality of Evil”
Abstract: The essay analyses Margarethe von Trotta’s 2012 biopic Hannah Arendt which focuses on Arendt’s attendance at the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961 as a reporter for the New…
Framing loss and figuring grief in Pawel Pawlikowski’s Ida
Abstract: This article concentrates on the formal and aesthetic aspects of Pawel Pawlikowski’s 2013 film Ida in the context of an increasingly visible interest in the history of Polish-Jewish relations…