CHAPTER 1 THE CINEMATIC
WRITING OF
HISTORY: AN OVERVIEW
Read the attached document first before answering the question
-Question: In the reading “The Cinematic Writing of History: An Overview,” Burgoyne specifies different subtypes of historical films. In your opinion, which type of historical film is better suited to depict the recent past (i.e. mid to late 20th century, and early 21st century)?
Notes
As Robert Sklar writes, “If the cinema was something new for spectators of the 1890s, seeing larger-than-life projections of still and moving images was not.” Exhibitions included magic lantern shows, dioramas, panoramas, and various forms of mechanically produced illusion. Some of the most successful and impressive of these projections were the Phantasmagoria and the Théâtre Optique.
See Robert Sklar, Film: An International History of the Medium (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2002): 16–24.
See Alison Griffiths, “‘Shivers Down Your Spine’: Panoramas and the Origins of the Cinematic Reenactment,” Screen 44(1) (2003): 1–37.
John Banvard, Descriptions of Banvard’s Geographical Painting of the Mississippi River (New York: L. H. Bigelow, 1862). Quoted and cited in Griffiths, “‘Shivers Down Your Spine’ ”: 11.
Griffiths, p. Griffiths, “‘Shivers Down Your Spine’”: 20.
“‘Ben-Hur’ Passes Over to the Movies,” January 7, 1923.
See James Castonguay, “The Spanish-American War in United States Media Culture,” http://chnm.gmu.edu/aq/.
Ibid.
Sklar, Film: 56.
Robert Rosenstone, History on Film/Film on History (Harlow, England and New York: Pearson Education, 2006): 13.
Richard Schickel, D. W. Griffith: An American Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984): 270.
Robert Eberwein, ed. The War Film (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005): 2–3.
Laurence Suid, Guts & Glory: Great American War Movies (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1978): 142.
Derek Elley, The Epic Film: Myth and History (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984): 6.
Ibid., 12, 13.
Quoted in Rosenstone, History on Film: 91.
Leo Lowenthal, “Biographies in Popular Magazines,” in 1942–43, ed. Paul Lazarsfeld and Frank Stanton (New York: Duel, Sloan & Pearce, 1944). Quoted in George Custen, Bio/Pics: How Hollywood Constructed Public History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992): 32.
Custen, Bio/Pics: 32–4.
See Mark E. Neely, Jr., “The Young Lincoln: Two Films,” in Mark C. Carnes, ed., Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies (New York: Henry Holt, 1995): 124–7.
David Bordwell, The Cinema of Eisenstein (New York: Routledge, 2005): 224.
John Sayles, “A Conversation with Eric Foner and John Sayles,” in Carnes, Past Imperfect: 13.
For a careful analysis of Collingwood’s philosophy of history, see Paul Ricoeur, “The Reality of the Historical Past,” (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 1984).
Martin Scorsese, “Manhattan Asylum,” interview with Ian Christie, Sight and Sound, January 2003.
Quoted in Daniel Stashower, The Beautiful Cigar Girl: Mary Rogers, Edgar Allan Poe, and the Invention of Murder (New York: Dutton, 2006): 14.
See Natalie Zemon Davis, Slaves on Screen: Film and Historical Vision (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press: 2000): 136.
See Sue Harper, Picturing the Past: The Rise and Fall of the British Costume Film (London: British Film Institute, 1994).
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