Syllabus
1. Introduction: memory, history, cinema 2. Historians and historical films
Davis, N. Z. 2003. "Movie or Monograph? A Historian/Filmmaker’s Perspective." The Public historian 25(3):45. 3. Writing vs. showing (hi)story
White, Hayden. "Historiography and Historiophoty." The American Historical Review 93.5 (1988): 1193-1199. 4. Research, costume drama, experiment
Rosen, Philip. Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. (Selections) 5. Politics of historical films, nostalgia, trauma
Foucault, Michel. "Film and Popular Memory." In Foucault Live: Interviews, 1966-84, 89-106. New York: Semiotext(e), 1989. 6. Other uses: historiography and pedagogy
Marcus, Alan S. "" It is as it was": Feature film in the history classroom." The Social Studies 96.2 (2005): 61-67.
MIDTERM test 7. Useful inventions
Screening: Glory (Edward Zwick, 1989) 8. Historical character and memory
Screening: The Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966) 9. Reflexivity
Screening: Walker (Alex Cox, 1987) 10. Czechoslovak history: take one
Screening: Riders in the Sky (Jindřich Polák, 1968) 11. Czechoslovak history: take two
Screening: Dark Blue World (Jan Svěrák, 2001) 12. Final class: Review
Annotation
Scholars like Robert A. Rosenstone have pointed out that filmmakers often engage with the past much like academic historians do: they tell us stories about it. Feature films set in the past, i.e. the genre of historical films, may have fictional plots, yet they still render the past visually and their narratives provide frameworks for understanding it. In other words, with historical films, history is always a part of the story. In this course, we will examine the idea of cinema as a historiographic or memory medium in its own right. The course is structured so that in the first half of the semester the key notions addressing the cinema’s representational capacity for history are covered through theoretical readings. Students should learn how to use proper analytical vocabulary and identify core problems of historical films. In the second half of the semester, several of the notions will illustrate by examples of cinematic works. Critical spectatorship will be encouraged. Students are expected to apply the acquired theory to concrete issues of cinematic representation of the past.
In terms of skills, this course is focused not on filmmaking, but on developing academic expertise, such as scholarly reading comprehension, critical spectatorship and thinking, essay writing, and argumentation. However, on the substantive side, a student should learn about the issues of representation of the past by cinematic means. Although the course is not intended as training in practical filmmaking, it aspires to aid in facilitating the development of good filmmakers by fostering in-depth reflection on the possibilities of cinema as a storytelling medium. It will also stress the concomitant responsibility of filmmakers as historians - or historians as filmmakers.