Category Archive for: ‘Issue 6 – AHR Forum’

Uploaded 16 April 1999   Robert Rosenstone’s essay raises at least two questions that should be of eminent concern to professional historians. The first is that of the relative adequacy of what we might call “historiophoty” (the representation of history and our thought about it in visual images and filmic discourse) to the criteria of truth and accuracy presumed to …

Uploaded 18 April 1999 First published American Historical Review 93, no.5 (December 1988): 1173-1185 For an academic historian to become involved in the world of motion pictures is at once an exhilarating and disturbing experience. Exhilarating for all the obvious reasons: the power of the visual media; the opportunity to emerge from the lonely depths of the library to join with other …

Uploaded 16 April 1999 When the American Historical Review published a special forum on film and history all those who had long contended that cinema was an important source for the study of the 20th century thought: “We have won. Now that they have been legitimated by AHA, the world’s leading association of historians, nobody will dare say that moving pictures are …

Uploaded 16 April 1999 |   As the centenary of the cinema has come and gone, and the Internet arrived on the scene, it is appropriate to ask what has been the impact of the visual and electronic media this past century? What kind of balance sheet of gain and loss can we draw? Of all the many pro’s and …

Uploaded 16 April 1999 History decomposes into images, not into narratives. – Walter Benjamin [W]hat proliferates in historical discourse are elements “below which nothing more can be done except display,” and through which saying reaches its limit, as near as possible to showing. – Michel de Certeau In Medias Res In his 1954 essay on “The Romans in films”, Roland …

Uploaded 16 April 1999 Two books published in 1997 testify to the epistemological upheaval taking place within the historical profession. In Deconstructing History , Alan Munslow argues that “Because today we doubt … empiricist notions of certainty, veracity and a socially and morally independent standpoint, there is no more history in the traditional realist sense, there are only possible narrative representations in, …

Uploaded 16 April 1999 The 1997 Italian film, Porzus (dir. Renzo Martinelli) has been advertised as portraying, “La faccia sporca della Resistenza.” [1] Why is the language of cleanliness and filth invoked to describe this film? What is the “clean” face of the Resistance as opposed to its “dirty” face? What precisely is the “dirt” that is being exposed, and what role …

Uploaded 16 April 1999 In this essay I would like to consider some of the ramifications of a widely accepted yet undertheorized idea: that the preeminence of the moving image in contemporary culture has reshaped our collective imaginary relation to history. This widely circulated observation has been the subject of much anguished commentary from the widest possible range of critics. …

Uploaded 16 April 1999 Films set in ancient Rome have often drawn the laughter, if not the outright contempt, of classicists. Why should classicists bother themselves with the inanities of such pompous, ephemeral farce when they have such rich, timeless materials to work with? And, if any book on such films by a classicist has first to confront the potential …

Uploaded 16 April 1999 Begin at the beginning. Which beginning? The 1988 AHR Forum. A historical mistake or an idea whose time had come. A breakthrough into a new field or the beginning of the end of history as we know it. Take your pick. Like all moments it was over determined. The coming together of too many lines of force, moments, …