Cinematic Histospheres

In this Open Access book, film scholar Rasmus Greiner develops a theoretical model for the concept of the histosphere to refer to the “sphere” of a cinematically modelled, physically experienceable historical world. His analysis of practices of modelling and perceiving, immersion and empathy, experience and remembering, appropriation and refiguration, combine approaches from film studies, such as Vivian Sobchack’s phenomenology of film experience, with historiographic theories, such as Frank R. Ankersmit’s concept of historical experience. Building on this analysis, Greiner examines the spatial and temporal organization of historical films and presents discussions of mood and atmosphere, body and memory, and genre and historical consciousness. The analysis is based around three historical films, spanning six decades, that depict 1950s Germany: Helmut Käutner’s Sky Without Stars (1955), Jutta Brückner’s Years of Hunger (1980), and Sven Bohse’s three-part TV series Ku’damm 56 (2016).

Making History Move: Five Principles of the Historical Film consolidates decades of scholarship investigating history in visual culture in the fields of film and media, cultural studies, and history. The book develops insights across these fields, including philosophical considerations of film and history, to clarify the form and function of history in moving images. It addresses the implications of the historical film on public historical consciousness in a systematic way, presenting criteria for engaging and assessing the truth status of depictions of the past. Its chapters offer a detailed methodology for analyzing history in moving images for the digital age, proposing five principles of analysis to organize past and future scholarship in this vital, interdisciplinary field of study. Including films such as The Birth of a Nation, Gone with the Wind, Lawrence of Arabia, and Saving Private Ryan the book sets the stage to examine the most influential form of history with the most significant impact on public perceptions of the past.

History on Film/Film on History has established itself as a classic treatise on the historical film and its role in bringing the past to life. In the fourth edition of this widely acclaimed text, Robert A. Rosenstone argues that to leave history films out of the discussion of the meaning of the past is to ignore a major means of understanding historical events. This book examines what history films convey about the past and how they convey it, demonstrating the need to learn how to read and understand this new visual world and integrating detailed analysis of films such as Schindler’s List, Glory, October, and Reds. Advocating for the dramatic feature as a legitimate way of doing history, this edition includes a new Preface and a new chapter that focuses on films produced in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, India, and East Asia. Examining the codes and conventions of how these films tell us about the past and providing guidance on how to effectively analyse films as historical interpretations, this book is an essential introduction to the field for students of history and film.

Music, Sound, and Documentary Film in the Global South, edited by Christopher L. Ballengee, represents an important step toward thinking about the production and analysis of the soundscapes of documentary film, all while exploring a range of social, cultural, technological, and theoretical questions relevant to current trends in Global South studies. Written by a diverse set of authors, including filmmakers, academics, and cultural critics, the ten essays in this book provide fresh evaluations of the place of music and sound in documentary films outside the European-American milieu. On the whole, the authors illuminate how the invention of documentary film was at first a product of the colonialist project. Yet over time, access to filmmaking technologies led to the creation of documentary films relevant for local communities and national identities. In this sense, documentary film in the Global South might be broadly defined as a mode of personally or politically mediated storytelling that, by one route or another, has become a useful and recognizable means of memorializing traumatic histories and critiquing everyday lived experience. As the essays in this volume attest, close readings of documentary soundscapes provide fresh perspectives on ways of hearing and ways of being heard in the Global South.

In this Open Access book, film scholar Rasmus Greiner develops a theoretical model for the concept of the histosphere to refer to the “sphere” of a cinematically modelled, physically experienceable historical world. His analysis of practices of modelling and perceiving, immersion and empathy, experience and remembering, appropriation and refiguration, combine approaches from film studies, such as Vivian Sobchack’s phenomenology of film experience, with historiographic theories, such as Frank R. Ankersmit’s concept of historical experience. Building on this analysis, Greiner examines the spatial and temporal organization of historical films and presents discussions of mood and atmosphere, body and memory, and genre and historical consciousness. The analysis is based around three historical films, spanning six decades, that depict 1950s Germany: Helmut Käutner’s Sky Without Stars (1955), Jutta Brückner’s Years of Hunger (1980), and Sven Bohse’s three-part TV series Ku’damm 56 (2016).

Music and sound shape the emotional content of audio-visual media and carry different meanings. This volume considers audio-visual material as a primary source for historiography. By analyzing how the same sounds are used in different media contexts at different times, the contributors intend to challenge the linear perspective of (music) history based on canonic authority. The book discusses AV-Documents (analysis in context), methodological questions (implications for research, education, and popularization of knowledge), archives of cultural memory (from the perspective of Cultural Studies) as well as digitalization and its consequences (organization of knowledge).

The television industry is changing, and with it, the small screen's potential to engage in debate and present valuable representations of American history. Founded in 1972, HBO has been at the forefront of these changes, leading the way for many network, cable, and streaming services into the "post-network" era. Despite this, most scholarship has been dedicated to analyzing historical feature films and documentary films, leaving TV and the long-form drama hungry for coverage. In History by HBO: Televising the American Past, Rebecca Weeks fills the gap in this area of media studies and defends the historiographic power of long-form dramas. By focusing on this change and its effects, History by HBO outlines how history is crafted on television and the diverse forms it can take. Weeks examines the capabilities of the long-form serial for engaging with historical stories, insisting that the shift away from the network model and toward narrowcasting has enabled challenging histories to thrive in home settings. As an examination of HBO's unique structure for producing quality historical dramas, Weeks provides four case studies of HBO series set during different periods of United States history: Band of Brothers (2001), Deadwood (2004–2007), Boardwalk Empire (2012–2014), and Treme (2010–2013). In each case, HBO's lack of advertiser influence, commitment to creative freedom, and generous budgets continue to draw and retain talent who want to tell historical stories. Balancing historical and film theories in her assessment of the roles of mise-en–scène, characterization, narrative complexity, and sound in the production of effective historical dramas, Weeks' evaluation acts as an ode to the most recent Golden Age of TV, as well as a critical look at the relationship between entertainment media and collective memory.

The Cold War was as much a battle of ideas as a series of military and diplomatic confrontations, and movies were a prime battleground for this cultural combat. As Tony Shaw and Denise Youngblood show, Hollywood sought to export American ideals in movies like Rambo, and the Soviet film industry fought back by showcasing Communist ideals in a positive light, primarily for their own citizens. The two camps traded cinematic blows for more than four decades. The first book-length comparative survey of cinema's vital role in disseminating Cold War ideologies, Shaw and Youngblood's study focuses on ten films—five American and five Soviet—that in both obvious and subtle ways provided a crucial outlet for the global "debate" between democratic and communist ideologies. For each nation, the authors outline industry leaders, structure, audiences, politics, and international reach and explore the varied relationships linking each film industry to its respective government. They then present five comparative case studies, each pairing an American with a Soviet film: Man on a Tightrope with The Meeting on the Elbe; Roman Holiday with Spring on Zarechnaya Street; Fail-Safe with Nine Days in One Year; Bananas with Officers; Rambo: First Blood Part II with Incident at Map Grid 36-80. Shaw breathes new life into familiar American films by Elia Kazan and Woody Allen, while Youngblood helps readers comprehend Soviet films most have never seen. Collectively, their commentaries track the Cold War in its entirety—from its formative phase through periods of thaw and self-doubt to the resurgence of mutual animosity during the Reagan years-and enable readers to identify competing core propaganda themes such as decadence versus morality, technology versus humanity, and freedom versus authority. As the authors show, such themes blurred notions regarding "propaganda" and "entertainment," terms that were often interchangeable and mutually reinforcing during the Cold War. Featuring engaging commentary and evocative images from the films discussed, Cinematic Cold War offers a shrewd analysis of how the silver screen functioned on both sides of the Iron Curtain. As such it should have great appeal for anyone interested in the Cold War or the cinematic arts.