This module is not currently running in 2024 to 2025.
This module studies the central concerns of film history and historiography. It focuses specifically on the theoretical, textual and contextual issues of films as they are played out in representations of selected historical events (as case studies). The ways in which other critics and historians have approached these representations and the concerns they raised forms a second focus of the module. Lastly, the course will enable students to analyse the narrative conventions and concerns which mark given films' representations of the past and present. Key issues to be analysed are; the documentary film as history and film as a document of history; the status of realist representation in the search for truth of historical events; the interrelation of historical memory and public history as they are explored through representations of historical events; the ethical responsibility of the filmmaker and film viewer in the construction of historical events.
Total Contact Hours: 50
Private Study Hours: 250
Total Study Hours: 300
Essay 1 (1000 words) – 20%
Essay 2 (4000 words) – 60%
Presentation – 20%
Burgoyne, Robert. (1997). Film Nation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press
De Groot, Jerome. (2009). Consuming History: Historians and Heritage in Contemporary Popular Culture. London: Routledge
Frey, Mattias. (2013). Postwall German Cinema: History, Film History, and Cinephilia. Oxford: Berghahn
Sobchack, Vivian, ed. (1996). The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television, and the Modern Event. London: Routledge
Stubbs, Jonathan. (2013). Historical Film: A Critical Introduction. London: Bloomsbury
See the library reading list for this module (Canterbury)
On successfully completing the module students will be able to:
- Examine the role of film in the representation of history;
- Consider the interface of fiction and non-fiction, narration and style in historical films;
- Contemplate the role of moving image media as historical evidence and in historical interpretation;
- Examine the different modes and labels for historical filmmaking;
- Understand how historical films function in society as cultural objects, engage with national narratives and traumas and create the possibility of empathy with both historical and contemporary human beings;
- Develop sophisticated verbal and written communication, including the communication of complex concepts about films to a variety of audiences in appropriate ways;
- Rigorously undertake research and writing on an aspect of history and film—on a level that befits scholarly MA standards.
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