Companion to the Historical Film

Robert A. Rosenstone is Professor Emeritus of History at the California Institute of Technology. His recent scholarship has focused on the overlapping topics of new narrative forms and history’s relationship to the visual media. He has published a dozen books, including Romantic Revolutionary: A Biography of John Reed (1975) , Mirror in the Shrine: American Encounters in Meiji Japan (1988), and King of Odessa: A Novel of Isaac Babel (2005).  His works on film include Visions of the Past: the Challenge of Film to Our Idea of History (1995), Revisioning History: Film and the Construction of a New Past (1995), and History on Film / Film on History (2006, 2nd edition 2012). He created the film section of the American Historical Review and has lectured around the world.Constantin Parvulescu is research fellow at the Institute for Culture and Society at the University of Navarra. He is the author of Orphans of the East: Postwar Eastern European Cinema and the Revolutionary Subject, Indiana University Press, 2015, and has published several articles on the relationship between cinema, history, and political and economic dicsourse.

"Overall, this work offers a serious and scholarly overview of several genres of historical film and would make a useful addition to academic collections in particular." (Reference Reviews, 1 June 2014)"Ultimately, this important collection will prove a useful and accessible resource for researchers and pedagogues both and deserves to be a fixture in the reading lists of students of history as well as film and cultural studies. It would certainly be useful to hear what historians have to say about these analyses and how those in that discipline are coping with the idea that dramatic recreations, fictions and documentaries might be treated seriously for the theses they present on the experience and understanding of the past." (Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 1 March 2014)"Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty." (Choice, 1 August 2013)

• Notes on Contributors viiiIntroduction 1Robert A. Rosenstone and Constantin ParvulescuPart 1 History and the Medium of Film1 Politics and the Historical Film: Hotel Rwanda and the Form of Engagement 11Alison Landsberg2 History as Palimpsest: Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (1975) 30Maria Pramaggiore3 Flagging up History: The Past as a DVD Bonus Feature 53Debra Ramsay4 The History Film as a Mode of Historical Thought 71Robert A. RosenstonePart 2 Filmmakers as Historians5 Julia’s Resistant History:Women’s Historical Films in Hollywood and the Legacy of Citizen Kane 91J. E. Smyth6 Mark Donskoi’s Gorky Trilogy and the Stalinist Biopic 110Denise J. Youngblood7 The Subjects of History: Italian Filmmakers as Historians 133Marcia Landy8 Andrzej Wajda as Historian 154Piotr WitekPart 3 Telling Lives: The Biopic9 Oliver Stone’s Nixon: The Rise and Fall of a Political Gangster 179Willem Hesling10 Authorial Histories: The Historical Film and the Literary Biopic 199Hila Shachar11 The Biopic in Hindi Cinema 219Rachel Dwyer12 The Lives and Times of the Biopic 233Dennis BinghamPart 4 Cinema and the Nation13 Gang Wars: Warner Brothers’ The Roaring Twenties Stars, News, and the New Deal 257Paula Rabinowitz14 State Terrorism on Film: Argentine Cinema during the First Years of Democracy (1983–1990) 283Mario Ranalletti15 Fossil Frontiers: American Petroleum History on Film 301Georgiana Banita16 Sounding the Depths of History: Opera and National Identity in Italian Film 328Roger HillmanPart 5 Wars and Revolutions17 Generational Memory and Affect in Letters from Iwo Jima 349Robert Burgoyne18 Post-Heroic Revolution: Depicting the 1989 Events in the Romanian Historical Film of the Twenty-First Century 365Constantin Parvulescu19 In Country: Narrating the Iraq War in Contemporary US Cinema 384Guy WestwellPart 6 Premodern Times20 Heart and Clock: Time and History in The Immortal Heart and Other Films about the Middle Ages 407Bettina Bildhauer21 The Anti-Samurai Film 425Thomas KeirsteadPart 7 Slavery and the Postcolonial World22 The Politics of Cine-Memory: Signifying Slavery in the History Film 445Michael T. Martin and David C. Wall23 The African Past on Screen: Moving beyond Dualism 468Vivian Bickford-Smith24 Colonial Legacies in Contemporary French Cinema: Jews and Muslims on Screen 490Catherine Portuges25 ‘‘What’s Love Got to Do with It?’’: Sympathy, Antipathy, and the Unsettling of Colonial American History in Film 513Louis Kirk McAuleyIndex 540