History and Film: A Tale of Two Disciplines - Paperback

by Eleftheria Thanouli (Author)

History and Film: A Tale of Two Disciplines addresses the representation of history in cinema, a much-argued debate on the need to understand cinematic history in its own terms and develop a certain vocabulary for discussing historical films, their relation to public history, and their impact on public historical consciousness. Eleftheria Thanouli does this by changing the agenda altogether - combining a macro-level perspective with a micro-level one in order to argue that cinematic history is the dominant form of historiography in the 20th century, as it succeeded in remediating and repurposing the key formal, rhetorical, and ideological practices of 19th-century professional historiography. With case studies ranging from The Thin Red Line and Life is Beautiful, to The Fog of War and The Last Bolshevik, Thanouli bridges the gap between history and film studies and lays the foundations for a new visual historiography.

Author Biography

Eleftheria Thanouli is Assistant Professor in Film Theory at the Film Department at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Amsterdam in 2005. She is the author of Post-Classical Cinema: An International Poetics of Film Narration (2009).