Awards

• Winner of Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2019
• Winner of Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2019 (UK)

Overview

A Choice Outstanding Academic Title 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.

Full Product Details

9781501340772

Table of Contents

Reviews

A comprehensive and rigorous study, Thanouli's fine work enriches our understanding of the historical film as a powerful agent of contemporary thinking about the past. Bringing sophisticated readings of historiography and film theory together, Thanouli critically integrates the two disciplines in a way that will undergird future research. A major scholarly accomplishment. * Robert Burgoyne, author of Film Nation: Hollywood Looks at US History (revised edition, 2010) *

A comprehensive and rigorous study, Thanouli's fine work enriches our understanding of the historical film as a powerful agent of contemporary thinking about the past. Bringing sophisticated readings of historiography and film theory together, Thanouli critically integrates the two disciplines in a way that will undergird future research. A major scholarly accomplishment. * Robert Burgoyne, author of Film Nation: Hollywood Looks at US History (revised edition, 2010) * In my many years of work in this field, I can think of no other study that involves this level of intellectual sophistication in both theories of history and of the visual media, and certainly none which has grappled so successfully with the contentious issues surrounding the question of rendering the human past on screen. * Robert A Rosenstone, Professor Emeritus of History, California Institute of Technology, USA *

Author Information

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).

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