Film, History & Memory - Jennie M. Carlsten

Film, History and Memory
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Film, History and Memory
Edited by
Jennie M. Carlsten
and
Fearghal McGarry
Introduction, selection and editorial matter © Jennie M. Carlsten and
Fearghal McGarry 2015
Individual chapters © Contributors 2015
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2015 978-1-137-46894-9
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work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2015 by
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Film, history and memory / Jennie M. Carlsten, University of Ulster, UK;
Fearghal McGarry, Queen’s University, Belfast, UK, [editors].
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Historical films—History and criticism. 2. History in motion pictures.
3. Motion pictures and history. I. Carlsten, Jennie M., 1970– editor.
II. McGarry, Fearghal, editor.
PN1995.9.H5F58 2015
791.43'658—dc23 2014049965
Typeset by MPS Limited, Chennai, India.

For Des Bell, filmmaker
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Contents
List of Figures ix
Notes on Contributors x
Introduction 1
Jennie M. Carlsten and Fearghal McGarry
1 A Very Long Engagement: The Use of Cinematic Texts in
Historical Research 18
Gianluca Fantoni
2 Screening European Heritage: Negotiating Europe’s Past via
the ‘Heritage Film’ 32
Axel Bangert, Paul Cooke and Rob Stone
3 Confronting Silence and Memory in Contemporary Spain:
The Grandchildren’s Perspective 48
Natalia Sanjuán Bornay
4 The Enchantment and Disenchantment of the Archival
Image: Politics and Affect in Contemporary Portuguese
Cultural Memories 65
Alison Ribeiro de Menezes
5 Foundational Films: The Memorialization of Resistance in
Italy, France, Belarus and Yugoslavia 83
Mercedes Camino
6 Amnesty with a Movie Camera 101
Andrew J. Hennlich
7 History, Fiction and the Politics of Corporeality in
Pablo Larraín’s Dictatorship Trilogy 118
Nike Jung
8 Remember 1688? The Draughtsman’s Contract, the
‘Glorious Revolution’ and Public Memory 134
James Ward
9 Not Thinking Clearly: History and Emotion in the
Recent Irish Cinema 151
Jennie M. Carlsten
vii
viii Contents
10 Music and Montage: Punk, Speed and Histories of

the Troubles 169
Liz Greene
11 Reflections on What the Filmmaker Historian Does
(to History) 183
Robert A. Rosenstone
Index 198
List of Figures
3.1 Trauma and generational memory in Para que no me

olvides/Something to Remember Me By
(Patricia Ferreira, 2004) 55
3.2 ‘How the hell have you arrived here?’; Nadar/Swimming
(Carla Subirana, 2008) 61
6.1 Violence met with absurdity in Ubu Tells the Truth
(William Kentridge, 1997) 107
7.1 The disturbed subject in Tony Manero
(Pablo Larraín, 2008) 123
7.2 Embodied evidence in Post Mortem
7.3 Artificial authenticity in NO
ix
Notes on Contributors
Axel Bangert teaches German cinema studies at New York University

Berlin. His monograph, The Nazi Past in Contemporary German Film:
Screen Memories of Intimacy and Immersion, is scheduled to appear with
Camden House.
Natalia Sanjuán Bornay holds a BA in translation and interpreting

from Universidad de Alicante, Spain. She also received a Master of
Education from Flinders University, Australia, where she has taught
Spanish language and culture since 2006. Before moving to Australia,
Bornay worked as a freelance translator in Spain and Germany. She is
currently in the final stages of her PhD at Flinders University. Her thesis,
focusing on the work by contemporary Spanish women filmmakers,
explores issues of memory, gender and identity in fiction films and
documentaries, which reconstruct Spain’s troubled past. Her research
interests and publications include a variety of areas such as foreign
language acquisition, Spanish cinema, gender studies and cultural
memory.
Mercedes Camino is Professor of Cultural History at Lancaster

University. She has published five books and over 40 articles in jour-
nals and edited books. Her last book, Film, Memory and the Legacy of the
Spanish Civil War, was published in 2011, and her last article, on histori-
cal memory of Spanish football, has appeared in Memory Studies. She
directs Dynamics of Memory, a Lancaster University research centre on
memory studies, which was founded in 2008 and has been sponsored
by Humanities in the European Research Area (HERA) and the Arts
and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). She is currently working
on a book on film and memory of the Second World War in occupied
Europe, from which this article is taken.
Jennie M. Carlsten is Lecturer in the School of Media, Film and Journalism

at the University of Ulster, where she teaches a course on Irish film and tele-
vision. She received her doctorate in film studies at Queen’s University,
Belfast, where she subsequently worked as a postdoctoral researcher
with the School of History and Anthropology on the ‘Documentary
Film, Public History and Education in Northern Ireland’ project, funded
by the AHRC. Her PhD dissertation was titled ‘Stress Fractures: Loss and
x
Notes on Contributors xi
Emotion in the Recent Irish Cinema’. She has published on the topics
of Irish cinema and the representation of emotion in cinema.
Paul Cooke is Centenary Chair of World Cinemas at the University of

Leeds. He is the author of World Cinemas’ Dialogues with Hollywood. He
has also written widely on the legacy of both National Socialism and the
German Democratic Republic (GDR) in contemporary German culture,
with a particular emphasis on contemporary German film (Representing
East Germany: From Colonization to Nostalgia; with Marc Silberman,
Screening War: Perspectives on German Suffering; Contemporary German
Cinema; The Lives of Others and Contemporary German Film.)
Gianluca Fantoni is Lecturer in Italian at Nottingham Trent University.

He has previously worked at the University of Strathclyde where he
completed a PhD thesis concerning the cinematic propaganda of the
Italian Communist Party. His research interests revolve principally
around the history of the Italian Left, Italian post-war cinema and
cinematic propaganda. He has published in Modern Italy, in the Journal
of Contemporary History, as well as in a forthcoming edited volume
exploring Italian war films.
Liz Greene is Lecturer in Communications at Dublin City University.

She has previously worked at the University of Glasgow, Queen’s
University Belfast and York St John University, teaching both theory
and practice in film and television studies. Her research interests are
in sound, documentary, and Irish cinema and television. She has
worked in location sound in the Irish film and television industry
and recently completed the sound design and music for We Were There
(2014) a documentary on women’s experience of prison during the
Troubles in Northern Ireland. She has published chapters in edited
collections and articles in The Soundtrack, Music and the Moving Image,
The New Soundtrack and Printed Project. For more information visit,
www.lizgreenesound.com.
Andrew J. Hennlich is Assistant Professor of Art History at the Gwen

Frostic School of Art at Western Michigan University. Hennlich’s
current research projects include (un)Fixing the Eye: William Kentridge
and the Optics of Witness, a monographic study of the South African
artist and animator, and an exhibition that examines South Africa’s
post-apartheid political culture through the relationship between fash-
ion and politics, which is scheduled to open at the Richmond Centre
for Visual Arts in Kalamazoo, Michigan, in 2016. He has written more
widely on contemporary art and politics for journals including esse, Art
xii Notes on Contributors
& Language, Etc., Making Futures and Rubric, and he has also authored
a number of catalogue/exhibition essays for artists including Julia Rosa
Clark, Pierre Fouché and Dan Halter.
Nike Jung is a PhD student in the Department of Film and Television at

the University of Warwick, researching the relation of torture cases and
documentary evidence in contemporary US and Chilean fiction cinema.
Jung studied comparative literature, American studies and cinema stud-
ies in Berlin, Paris and New York. She has published her thesis, Narrating
Violence in Post-9/11 Cinema, as well as shorter essays. Some of her other
research interests include videographic film studies, media theory, food
politics, graphic novels and animation.
Fearghal McGarry is Reader in Irish History at Queen’s University

Belfast. Much of his research has focused on radical ideology and
revolutionary violence. He has written an account of the Irish in the
Spanish Civil War, as well as biographies of the socialist republican,
Frank Ryan, and Irish fascist, Eoin O’Duffy. More recently, he com-
pleted a history of the 1916 rebellion, The Rising, and edited Rebels,
a collection of first-hand testimony. He has led two AHRC-funded
projects exploring the relationship between film and history, and is
currently working with British Pathé to develop a film on the Irish
revolution.
Alison Ribeiro de Menezes is Professor of Hispanic Studies at the

University of Warwick. She has published widely on Spanish narrative,
including the books, Juan Goytisolo: The Author as Dissident (2005) and
A Companion to Carmen Martín Gaite (with Catherine O’Leary, 2008).
She has co-edited two volumes: War and Memory in Contemporary
Spain/Guerra y memoria en la España contemporánea (with Roberta
Quance and Ann Walsh, 2009) and Legacies of War and Dictatorship
in Contemporary Portugal and Spain (with Catherine O’Leary, 2011).
Her new monograph, Embodying Memory in Contemporary Spain, was
published in 2014.
Robert A. Rosenstone, Professor of History Emeritus at the California

Institute of Technology, has written works of history, biography, critic-
ism and fiction. His historical writings include Crusade of the Left: The
Lincoln Battalion in the Spanish Civil War (1969), Romantic Revolutionary:
A Biography of John Reed (1975) and Mirror in the Shrine (1988), while
his books on the media include Visions of the Past (1995) and History on
Film/Film on History (2006). He has edited two collections, Revisioning
History (1995) and A Blackwell Companion to Historical Film (2013).
Notes on Contributors xiii
His fiction includes a book of stories, The Man Who Swam into History
(2002), and two novels, King of Odessa (2003) and Red Star, Crescent Moon
(2010). Rosenstone has served on the editorial boards of the American
Historical Review and Reviews in American History, and is a founding
editor of Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice.
Rob Stone is Professor of Film Studies at the University of Birmingham

and Director of B-Film: The Birmingham Centre for Film Studies. He is
the author of Spanish Cinema (2001), The Wounded Throat: Flamenco in
the Works of Federico García Lorca and Carlos Saura (2004), Julio Medem
(2007), Walk, Don’t Run: The Cinema of Richard Linklater (2013) and the
co-author of Basque Cinema: A Cultural and Political History (2015). He
is also the co-editor of The Unsilvered Screen: Surrealism on Film (2007),
Screening Songs in Hispanic and Lusophone Cinema (2012), A Companion to
Luis Buñuel (2013) and Screening European Heritage (2015).
James Ward lectures in 18th-century literature at the University of

Ulster. He has published widely on this subject and on representations
and appropriations of the 18th century in modern fiction and film.
Introduction
Jennie M. Carlsten and Fearghal McGarry
This book explores the relationship between film and history by con-
sidering how the medium of film shapes, reinforces or subverts our
understanding of the past. We do this by widening our focus from ‘his-
tory’, the study of past events, to encompass ‘memory’, the processes
by which meaning is attached to the past. This approach acknowledges
that film’s impact lies less in its empirical qualities than in its powerful
capacity to influence public consciousness, mould collective memory
and retrieve suppressed or marginalised histories.
This collection contributes to the growing literature on the relation-
ship between film and history through the breadth of its approach, both
in disciplinary and geographical terms. Contributors are drawn not only
from the discipline of history, but film studies, film practice, art his-
tory, languages and literature, and cultural studies. Drawing on South
African, Chilean, Spanish, Portuguese, Irish, British, Italian, French and
other European cinema, we explore a wide variety of ways and contexts
in which film engages with history. The volume proceeds from broader
essays relating to questions of visual representation to more focused
case studies. The final essay by Robert Rosenstone, a pioneer of the
field, returns us to consideration of the creative and historiographical
implications of history on film.
Despite the burgeoning literature on the subject, studies of film
and history often begin similarly, by taking historians to task for their
failure to take historical films seriously, or by asserting the case for the
importance of film as a form of historiographical discourse. Although
the persistence of debates about the reliability of film alerts us to the
particular challenges posed by the medium, challenges that we address
in this introduction, this preoccupation with problems has resulted in
the re-treading of debates about authenticity and accuracy that are now
1
2 Jennie M. Carlsten and Fearghal McGarry
over four decades old. This collection moves beyond these debates by
starting from the assumption that historical films can embody histori-
cal thinking and, by so doing, contribute to understanding of the past.
Although we address theoretical debates about the historiographical
value of film, greater emphasis is placed on exploring how film shapes
the way the past is perceived, and how our understanding of this might
be enhanced by new approaches that draw on insights from a range of
scholarly disciplines.
History on film
It may be useful to begin by considering why history on film provokes

such concern, and how thinking about these concerns has developed
since the 1970s when scholars such as Marc Ferro and Pierre Sorlin
first sought to integrate film within mainstream historiography. It is
important to emphasize at the outset the wide variety of ways in which
film shapes our ideas about the past and about history: the narratives
we construct to give meaning to the past. Among the most important
of these are: the use of film to depict the past; film as a means of com-
menting on the discourse of history (for example, on historiographical
debates or the nature of historical knowledge); film as an agent of his-
tory (for example, through its propagandistic or ideological qualities);
and film as a source for studying the past.1 Although public controver-
sies about historical films usually relate to the first of these, each has
now generated a substantial body of literature.2 Although often inter-
related, the radically different nature of these functions has contributed
to confusion and disagreement about the medium’s historical value.
This helps to explain also why attempts to define what constitutes a
historical film (as anything other than a film set in the past relative to
the time of its production) have proven elusive. That a film might prove
valuable in thinking about the past in one context but not another calls
into question the possibility or necessity for such a definition. Carry
on … up the Khyber (Thomas, 1968) or From Russia with Love (Young, 1963),
for example, may not add greatly to our understanding of the British
Raj or Cold War espionage but they reveal much about gender, class
and sexual identities in post-war Britain.3 That the historical value of a
film may lie in its assumptions or reception rather than its narrative ele-
ments, moreover, further problematizes attempts to define the criteria
that lend historical significance to a film. Rosenstone’s influential sug-
gestion that the ‘history film’ is one which demonstrates ‘its willingness
to engage the discourse of history’, rather than being simply set in the
Introduction 3
past for entertainment purposes, inevitably calls for subjective value

judgements.4 Axel Bangert, Paul Cooke and Rob Stone’s essay on the
‘heritage film’ illustrates how even a genre often derided for its lack of
historiographical engagement may prove significant in constructing or
reflecting ideas about identity, nationhood and the ownership of his-
tory. The observation, by historian Marnie Hughes-Warrington, that a
film’s historical significance lies ‘in the eye of the viewer’ rather than
‘the film itself’ is a useful one, even if its practical consequence is little
different from saying that historical films (like historical sources) can-
not be delineated. Consequently, rather than seeking to define what
constitutes a valuable history film, it may be more useful to consider
(as Rosenstone does in this volume) what film does to history, and why
film – whether as a source for, representation of, or commentary on the
past – possesses value.
Popular and scholarly distrust of history on film is not merely a prod-
uct of concerns about representation, but also stems from the nature
of the medium itself: its accessibility, emotional power, unrivalled
reach and disturbing capacity to depict plausibly an imagined past.
Consequently, historians are often more discomfited by ‘realistic’ films,
which can draw on the indexical power of the medium to offer the audi-
ence a window into the past, rather than those which openly play fast
and loose with the facts, or those which seek to comment explicitly on
historical discourse. It is not difficult, for example, to see why 12 Years
a Slave (McQueen, 2013) – described by the Wall Street Journal as a film
‘certain to transcend the movie realm and become … a defining vision
of what slavery looked like, and felt like, in the US before the Civil
War’ – might prove more troubling than Django Unchained (Tarantino,
2012).5 Imagining – or inventing – the past through the artifice of film
can shape our understanding of it more profoundly than the rigorous
reconstruction of its archival fragments in scholarly texts.
Medium and form
Although film provides an important source of historical knowledge,

few believe it can represent the past with the accuracy, balance or
sophistication expected of written scholarship. The limitations of the
medium include the difficulty of conveying factual information; its
tendency to confine narratives within established genres; to attribute
causation to individual agency rather than broader historical forces;
to privilege emotion and drama; and to eschew multiple perspectives.6
These problems are compounded by the narrative techniques (the
inevitable departures from the historical record described by Rosenstone

as ‘condensation, alteration, combination and metaphor’) required to
depict history on screen.7 In response to the criticism that the medium’s
commercial and storytelling requirements preclude a complex depic-
tion of the past, advocates of the history film point out that these
restrictions are inherent to the form. Criticism of the narrative strate-
gies that make possible dramatic representation of the past constitutes
a limited approach to film’s potential, one that fails to address how film
does engage with and shape understanding of the past, for good or ill.
It follows from this that understanding how film represents the past
requires moving beyond analysis of its narrative elements to considera-
tion of its techniques and form. As Vivian Bickford-Smith has argued,
historians:
need to have some knowledge of the history of film, its changing

technology, aesthetic concerns and how these are expressed in its
multi-media language of sound, colour, camera work, editing, acting
styles and mise en scene. It is through this language that history films
use metaphor, argument, and drama to speak their truths about the
past.8
A practical example of this proposition is provided in this volume by

Nike Jung’s analysis of NO (21012) which demonstrates how film stock,
editing, montage, music, aesthetics, narrative temporality and the sub-
version of genre expectations combine to provide a commentary on ‘our
fragmented, contingent knowledge of history’.9 Similarly, Liz Greene’s
essay demonstrates the narrative uses to which music and montage can
be put. A similar point applies to the way in which film operates discur-
sively on the emotional level. Jennie M. Carlsten’s essay considers how
specific film techniques encourage the audience’s emotional engage-
ment. While film is often routinely criticised for its nostalgic depictions
of the past, James Ward – along with several other contributors to this
volume – demonstrates how nostalgia can be used ‘to confront received
versions of heritage and historical memory’.10 Andrew Hennlich, in his
discussion of William Kentridge and his allegorical works, points to the
way Kentridge’s films foreground the camera and the mechanics of tell-
ing in order to critique ideas of forgiveness and reconciliation within
the historical narratives of South Africa.
Although calls for historians to consider how cinema’s visual lan-
guage shapes the meaning of the cinematic text date back over four
decades (as Gianluca Fantoni’s essay demonstrates), the reluctance
Introduction 5
of many to do so was exemplified by the American Historical Review’s

2006 decision to end its policy of reviewing individual films due to its
reviewers’ lack of expertise and interest in the medium. As the editor,
Robert A. Schneider, noted: ‘When historians review films, they usually
write about what they know about – accuracy, verisimilitude and peda-
gogical usefulness. These are not inconsiderable as commentary, but it
is a far cry from what we expect from them in a book review.’11 This
highlights the continuing need for approaches that will allow film to be
assessed alongside written historical accounts rather than simply com-
pared to them.12 As scholars such as John E. O’Connor, Robert Brent
Toplin, Hayden White, Marc Ferro, Richard White and Natalie Zemon
Davis have concluded, the historiographical value of film should be
determined by different standards to those applied to written history.
As Rosenstone suggests in this volume:
rather than assuming that the world on film should somehow adhere
to the standards of written history, why not see if it has created its
own standards over the last century, techniques for turning the past
into history which are appropriate to the possibilities and practices
of the medium, including those of drama, which is the standard way
in which film tells its stories, past or present.13
More contentious than the idea that history on film might be consid-
ered a distinctive form of historiographical discourse with its own ‘rules
of engagement’ are some of the potential corollaries of this: that film
should be seen not merely as a distinct but also as an equally valuable
form of historical discourse; and that value judgements on the basis of
the ‘factual reliability’ of historical films are, as Willem Hesling puts
it, ‘old fashioned’. Rather, Hesling suggests, historical films should be
judged according to whether they lend ‘some sort of meaning’ to the
past: to ask whether a film such as Nixon (1995) is ‘real’ history suggests
furthermore ‘that concepts like “historical truth” and “historical know-
ledge” are epistemologically unproblematic and that outside traditional
academic historiography there exists no meaningful way of approach-
ing the past’.14 Significantly, advocacy of the history film has often been
combined with a rejection of the positivistic ‘truth claims’ attributed to
historians. For example, the literary critic Hayden White, who coined
the influential term ‘historiophoty’ to describe the ‘representation of
history and our thought about it in visual images and filmic discourse’,
suggested that ‘film merely presents a different type of selective and
creative use of facts’ than that practised by historians.15
Although not calculated to appeal to historians – who are generally

more attuned than most to the epistemological problems of their trade,
and increasingly open to a wide range of imaginative ways of approach-
ing the past – the most persuasive aspect of such arguments is the idea
that historians share more in common with filmmakers than they care
to concede. In choosing a subject to represent, deciding how to concep-
tualise it, identifying source materials to illustrate it, and foregrounding
key themes to signify its historical significance to a contemporary audi-
ence, the historian follows similar methodologies to the filmmaker.16
History, as Hughes-Warrington observes:
is not solely about events; it is also about the relationships between

those events, the order in which they are presented and the selection
of emphases. Historians and historical filmmakers are thus stylists,
whether or not they like or even recognise it: they shape their works
according to conventional story forms or forms of ‘emplotment’.17
Piotr Witek has drawn attention to similar methodological commonalities:
The selection of source documents, the ways by which historians

interpret, juxtapose, and compare them, the ways of represent-
ing them, and the ways of creating a historical narrative are, from
a technical point of view, not unlike what filmmakers describe as
selection, editing, camera movement and perspective, close-ups,
foreground, background, lighting, music, acting, and so on.18
Although most historians would recognise these parallels, the tendency

of influential advocates of the history film to deprecate written history as
a means of asserting the historiographical value of film, and to posit an
equivalence between both forms of discourse, has done little to challenge
the popular and academic assumptions that marginalise historical films
within scholarly history.19 Consequently, advocates of the value of histori-
cal films often focus more on their potential to reflect on the nature of his-
tory, and to comment on historical discourse, rather than the medium’s
ability to depict historical events, an idea explored in the next section.
Despite the scepticism of many scholars towards the medium, some
historians – as Rosenstone reflects in the conclusion of this volume –
have been drawn to engage with history on film as a result of their
experience of practical engagement with the film industry. For example,
Zemon Davis’ influential text, The Return of Martin Guerre, was a product
of her ‘adventure with a different way of telling about the past’ while
Introduction 7
serving as a historical consultant on Daniel Vigne’s eponymous 1982

movie.20 As she explains:
Writing for actors rather than readers raised new questions about the
motivations of people in the sixteenth century – about, say, whether
they cared as much about truth as about property … I felt I had
my own historical laboratory, generating not proofs, but historical
possibilities. At the same time, the film was departing from the his-
torical record … Where was there room in this beautiful and com-
pelling cinematographic recreation of a village for the uncertainties,
the ‘perhapses’, the ‘may-have-beens’, to which the historian has
recourse when the evidence is inadequate or perplexing? … The film
thus posed the problem of invention to the historian as surely as it
was posed to the wife of Martin Guerre.
Rosenstone has similarly observed how the attempt to represent the

past in a different medium can bring with it new perspectives that may
lead to their own insights:
To change the medium of history from the page to the screen, to add
images, sound, colour, movement and drama, is to alter the way we
read, see, perceive and think about the past … The history film not
only challenges traditional history, but helps return us to … a sense
that we can never really know the past, but can only continually play
with, reconfigure, and try to make meaning out of the traces it has
left behind.21
In short, preoccupation with the problems of history on film can

obscure its potential to invite new ways of thinking about the past and
how we frame our narratives about that past. Although discomfiting
for some practitioners of a discipline that emerged from a nineteenth-
century scientific empirical tradition, the parallels between history on
screen and on the page suggest that the history film – because, as much
as despite of, its limitations – offers rich historiographical potential,
particularly as many of the criticisms levelled at history on film apply
in different ways to written history.
Film and historiography
That many people derive much of their information about the past from
films does not necessarily imply credulity on their part about what they
see on the screen. On the contrary, surveys indicate that ‘viewers have
more sense of historical films as representations than other history media
such as museums or books.’22 Audiences are thus more likely to challenge
history on film – to question its evidential basis, its bias, ideological influ-
ences, or narrative strategies – because it is so clearly a construct. Film’s
accessibility – the economy and clarity with which arguments about
the significance of the past are expressed – also encourages audiences to
engage with its interpretations in a way that (except for those with his-
torical training and extensive knowledge of the subject matter) the schol-
arly monograph does not permit. In other words, it is precisely because
of the liberties film takes with the past that it conveys to the public more
successfully the central principle of historiography: that history is a
process of interpretation, reflecting a dialogue between past and present.
Advocates of the historiographical potential of film identify its abil-
ity ‘to contest history, to interrogate either the meta-narratives that
structure historical knowledge, or smaller historical truths, received
wisdoms, conventional images’ as potentially its most meaningful
contribution to historical understanding.23 For Rosenstone, it is film’s
ability to engage on a historiographical level, with ‘the facts, the issues,
and the arguments raised in other historical works’, which grants film
its historical significance.24 However, the fact that scholars often cite the
same examples – art-house films such as Alex Cox’s Walker (1987), Alain
Resnais’s Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959), Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s Hitler:
A Film from Germany (1977) and Ousmane Sembène’s Ceddo (1977) –
suggests that most historical films tend not to demonstrate such a
sophisticated engagement with history. Such films, James Chapman
notes, are ‘the work of directors with a highly self-conscious style who
use historical signifiers and motifs in a symbolic rather than a literal
way’. Through the deliberate use of anachronism, the rejection of linear
narratives and other experimental techniques, they provide ‘an alterna-
tive to the verisimilitude of the classical narrative film, which typically
represents the past according to accepted representational codes’.25
In this respect, both film scholars and historians share a distrust of
the mass-market films which adopt the classical Hollywood principle of
invisibility, striving to conceal the artifice or apparatus of filmmaking. In
contrast, by presenting history as ‘a representation that can and ought to
be questioned’ rather than ‘a polished and complete story’,26 films – such
as Peter Greenaway’s The Draughtman’s Contract (1982), carefully analysed
in this collection by James Ward – that seek to comment on the nature of
history rather than depict it realistically tend to offer a richer engagement
with the past. Such works challenge the idea that film has the capacity
Introduction 9
only to shed light on historical thought at the time of its production,

demanding a more generous view of the medium’s possibilities.
The other aspect of the historical film to elicit extensive debate in
terms of its historiographical potential is its use of re-enactment, arguably
the genre’s defining characteristic. Scholars of history and film suggest
that the process of recreating history, of imagining the past from the per-
spective of the present, is central to its historiographical value, although
there is disagreement as to how and why this is. Re-enactment, Robert
Burgoyne has argued, facilitates ‘the act of imaginative re-creation that
allows the spectator to imagine they are “witnessing again” the events
of the past’. The ‘somatic intensity’ of film provides not a direct window
onto ‘how things were’, but rather a vivid and immersive guide into an
unfamiliar past: ‘The filmmaker and the spectator alike project them-
selves into a past world in order to reimagine it, to perform it, and to
rethink it.’27 Alison Landsberg has similarly argued that film enables indi-
viduals to assimilate as personal experience historical events in which
they did not participate. However, she differs from Burgoyne in attribut-
ing this, not to the process of re-enactment, but to the ability of film to
create empathy for the historical experiences of others, to fashion a ‘pros-
thetic memory’ that informs a collective narrative of the past.28 As the
next section suggests, this ability to shape memory – to create a shared
understanding of the past – is central to film’s historical significance.
Film and memory
Memory is a fundamental mechanism of social identity. Jay Winter

goes so far as to describe memory as ‘the central organizing concept of
historical study, a position once occupied by the notions of class, race,
and gender.’29 David Lowenthal writes that ‘the awareness of “I was” is
a necessary component of “I am”’; this is true not only of individuals,
but of communities.30 Like individuals, groups (nation-states as well as
internal ethnic or political units) employ memory to sustain established
identities. Social memory, the communal sense of continuity with the
past, creates solidarity and cohesion by fashioning shared narratives of
suffering and experience. This is central to a discussion of cinema given
the medium’s role in confirming, shaping or contesting these historical
narratives. Film can legitimize the codified narratives told about his-
tory, or it can subvert these by providing a range of competing images,
symbols and discourses. In this latter mode, film can create, transmit
and maintain counter-memory, a set of narratives that challenge the
transmission of exclusionary or oppressive history.
In this context, film provides a particularly useful tool for the his-
torian, again because of its unreliability: films do not represent reality
but an interpretation of reality, and they very often reflect a hidden or
not-so-hidden propagandistic dimension, whether intentional or unin-
tentional. As Marcia Landy notes, historical film is a genre that most
often speaks to an audience about ‘specific events drawn from national
histories’, dramatizing or questioning myths of ‘national identity, mon-
archy, empire, personal heroism, and consensus’.31 Cooke, Stone and
Bangert’s essay on the heritage cinemas of modern Europe stresses the
ways in which film has been used to negotiate problematic national
identities. In looking at the economic and political factors behind
trends in heritage filmmaking in the UK, the Basque Country, Denmark
and Germany, the authors point to the multiplicity of forces and factors
that shape audiences’ collective memory of the past.
The popular history of nations emerges from a collective understand-
ing of the past, both what is remembered in the historical record and
what is forgotten. Film, whether fiction, documentary or actuality, is a
site for the collective remembering or forgetting of past events. Memory
is not only unreliable and highly mediated, it is unstable, and in this
instability lies the potential for the making of new histories. Among
the essays in this collection this is perhaps most clearly demonstrated
by Mercedes Camino’s comparative survey of the ideological uses of
representations of anti-fascist resistance throughout Europe. Her argu-
ment that films, such as those produced in Tito’s Yugoslavia, are both
historical documents and sites of memory suggests that – regardless of
their limitations as historical representation – their analysis requires
careful attention to the context of both production and reception.
Natalia Sanjuán Bornay’s essay on the representation of generational
memory in Spanish film similarly demonstrates how film can provide
an effective vehicle for tracing the construction of memory, and the
extent to which such memories are shaped by ever-changing ideologi-
cal and political contexts. These approaches indicate how scholars of
cinema and history, as Chapman has noted, treat cinema increasingly
as a mediation rather than a reflection of history. Chapman cites the
‘commercial and ideological imperatives of the film industry’ and of film
form: memory is as much a part of this mediation as those other factors.32
Many of the essays in this collection are particularly concerned with
this dimension of the medium: how film can play a role in constructing
mythical narratives, as well as questioning such popular narratives and
official histories by challenging ossified or even unethical narratives of a
nation or society’s historical past. In doing so, these essays incidentally
provide a way of tracing the protean nature of collective memory. This
Introduction 11
historicization of memory provides one of the most valuable ways by

which historians can navigate divergences between popular, official and
collective histories and more scholarly understanding of the past. As the
essays by Jung and Alison Ribeiro de Menezes here demonstrate, such
‘memory work’ can play an important role in societies where histories
have been repressed or obliterated. De Menezes describes the emergence
of a ‘transnational economy of memory’, pointing to the importance of
understanding film representations of history over a variety of national
contexts. Similarly, the transnational nature of film production and
consumption underlines the need to shift towards comparative and
transnational studies of film and memory.
The future of the past on screen
This volume originated from an interdisciplinary collaboration between

a historian and a documentary film team around the making of a
docu-drama film on the life of Irish republican Frank Ryan (1902–44).33
Historian (Fearghal McGarry) and filmmaker (Desmond Bell) collabo-
rated, in a research project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research
Council (AHRC), to produce and exhibit a feature-length film based on
McGarry’s biography of the controversial Irish Republican Army (IRA)
leader, International Brigade volunteer and alleged wartime collabora-
tor. The project extended beyond the usual co-operation in the process of
filming by facilitating screenings and workshops to involve the public in
debates about the contentious issues raised by the film. A website allowed
historian and filmmaker to develop a range of interpretive resources, and
to make explicit the challenges in translating a complex and potentially
divisive historical story from page to screen. With the participation of
Jennie M. Carlsten, a subsequent AHRC-funded project explored these
challenges on a broader scale, bringing together scholars from a wide
variety of disciplines to consider approaches to film and history within
different national contexts. Resulting from the film collaboration, con-
ferences and these essays, certain themes emerged as being central to
the larger project of advancing the study of history on film. Without
attempting to prescribe a methodology for such study, we offer the
following seven principles which might guide researchers in this arena.
1. A recognition that filmmaking and film-viewing are collaborative

processes.
This may involve collaboration not just between filmmakers, writers,
historians, crew and cast but also between producers, subjects, activists
and consumers. Collaboration takes place between these parties, all of
whom may have divergent understandings of the past and its present-
day significance. Ideally, the subjects of films, where they participate in
the production, are treated not as objects of study, or even exemplars,
but as participants in the making of new histories.34
2. A broadening of the notion of ‘sources’.

Recent decades have seen a shift away from reliance on archival and
other written records to the use of oral testimony, visual material and
other non-traditional sources. This approach also finds new value in
‘old’ material, reconsidering even the most ‘trivial’ traces as evidence:
advertisements, comedies, animations and home movies, for instance,
have a new currency within the study of the past. This reflects a change
in how we judge both the sources from which film draws its stories
and evidence, and the role of films as, themselves, sites of historical
evidence.
This changing conception of the archive goes hand-in-hand with the
development of new technologies for creating, accessing and dissemi-
nating traditional and non-traditional source material. As Jung writes
in her essay here, the medium of film ‘encourages reflections on how
our access to historical knowledge is configured by technology, on the
capacity of the medium to record “objectively” and convey historical
truth.’35 New technologies invariably impact on older media but the
internet is changing the way historians use and think about film to
a much greater extent than cinema and television, eroding the domi-
nance of an essentially nineteenth-century narrative model of historical
writing. Meanwhile, digitisation is transforming the potential of film
to create history; to take one example, the recent uploading of British
Pathé’s entire collection of 85,000 films to YouTube has made these
works accessible to a wide audience of citizens and scholars alike.
Consequently, film needs to be considered within a wider field of
visual material. As Guy Westwell observes: ‘With photography as a pre-
cursor, television stealing the march in the post-war period, and now
the Web augmenting visual culture, it is not at all clear that film is para-
mount in establishing a visual sense of the past … film is only one of
any number of visual discourses that work in concert to shape historical
consciousness.’36
3. A broadening of the notion of ‘historical stories’.

Among historians and film scholars, attention has shifted from
notions of historical accuracy and objectivity, increasingly recognised
as problematic concepts, to consideration of historical inclusivity and
polyvocality. Whose histories are being told in the films we study?
Introduction 13
Keeping in mind Paula Rabinowitz’s claim that ‘testimony is always a

partial truth’, scholars and filmmakers alike are charged with present-
ing a broader sampling of such testimonies.37 This has most often
meant adding the voices of the dispossessed or the victimised to the
historical record. More controversially, it means adding the voices of
the oppressors and the victimisers. We also see (as in this volume’s
essays by Bornay, Greene, Jung, Carlsten and Ribeiro de Menezes) new
attention to the voices of those who were not first-hand participants
or witnesses but who, through prosthetic memory or nostalgia, have
acquired a profound interest in the shaping of the past for present-day
consumption.
Of course, we must include here the voice of the filmmaker: the degree
to which the presence of the filmmaker is apparent in the work, and how
that impacts on notions of historical subjectivity or the reliability of the
history presented.
4. Consideration of formal reflexivity and transparency about any

given film’s relationship to history.
As noted above, the films which are most problematic for historians are
often those which most closely follow the classical Hollywood model
of filmmaking. As film historian Ian Christie observes: ‘Films which are
most realistic are the most illusory’; the false transparency offered by
such films makes them particularly vulnerable to accusations of histori-
cal inaccuracy and bias, not to mention ideologically-driven distortion
of the past.38 The analysis of any individual film and its relationship
to historical representation depends upon considerations of form and,
essentially, how that form might affect the spectatorial experience. The
category of ‘historical films’ encompasses not just those produced in the
mode of historical realism, but also more subjective and even fantastical
constructions of the past: film and history scholarship must similarly
expand to allow space for a range of works, from the most illusory to
those that deliberately seek to expose their own construction.
5. Attention to the sensory and the cognitive.

This requires accepting, rather than resisting, the notion that viewers’
emotional responses to a work are both significant and worthy of schol-
arly attention. Our historical understanding is not something which
exists independently of artistry, imagination, emotion and individual
experience, but is shaped by these. Landy notes that ‘Cinema offers
both a sensory and a cerebral alternative to thinking about the uses of
the past.’39 Attempts to understand history on film – on its own terms –
requires exploration of the affective, the corporeal and the emotional.
6. Attention to the specificity of place.

Westwell highlights a problem in Rosenstone’s tendency to celebrate
films that deconstruct the dominant methods of writing and filming
history: ‘thinking about the history film in this way necessarily requires
a decontextualization of the film from its context of production and
reception’, effacing the extent to which ‘national film industries, and
cultural contexts … give shape to these films.’40 Indeed, it is through
focused examination of the local and national contexts that new
insights often emerge. The nation continues to represent a central
analytical framework, both in film studies generally and in the particu-
lar consideration of the historical film. At the same time, and as the
essays included here attest, there is a clear move in film scholarship (as
within mainstream historiography) towards regional and transnational
frameworks, a tendency illustrated by, for example, Andrew Higson and
Richard Maltby’s ‘Film Europe’ and ‘Film America’.41 Film production and
reception are now transnational activities, and this must be reflected in
academic approaches to film and historical understanding.
A comparative reading is valuable in this context: the highly specific
circumstances of a film’s production, exhibition and reception can
occur simultaneously with transnational factors; finding the com-
monalities between films from widely different national contexts –
often again through an examination of the aesthetic, the cognitive and
the processes of memory formation – reaps fresh insights.
7. Attention to reception and audience.

Some scholars, as we have seen, argue that a film’s historical significance
can be established by conjoining analysis of its plot with examination
of its filmic techniques. While this approach clearly adds much to our
understanding of individual films and their relationship to history, we
must also be conscious of the role the viewer plays in shaping histori-
cal understanding. Audiences are not only active spectators, capable of
responding to the films in varied and sometimes surprising ways, but
they are also social subjects. Audience reception is influenced not only
by narrative content and formal choices, but by the material and social
conditions under which they view the film.
Approaching history on film increasingly means looking beyond the
film text itself to the paratextual material which surrounds it: film post-
ers, trailers and print advertisements; merchandising tie-ins; DVD extras
and commentaries; multimedia, consumer-produced content; and tie-
ins on other media platforms (such as video games). The relationship of
viewers to history on film is an interactive one, in which individuals are
Introduction 15
not only consumers, but prosumers, creating their own material in the
form of online commentary, exchanges on message boards and forums,
the remixing of films on YouTube, viewer response films, and so on.
This suggests that the public dialogue which occurs around histori-
cal films is equally, if not more, central to the historical understanding
and transmission of narratives. Rosenstone’s view that what makes a
film historical ‘is its willingness to engage the discourse of history’ is
countered by the idea that it is filmmakers and viewers – rather than
films – who engage history.42 Films themselves are no longer the sole
focus of attention; studies of audiences – including the social activity
of cinema-going and the relationship between films and viewers – are
increasingly repositioning the analysis of films within the broader fields
of economic, social and cultural history. Scholars of film and history
should avoid replicating a traditional fault-line within film studies,
where a dearth of quantifiable audience study has frustrated attempts
to draw firm conclusions. The most productive approaches to historical
films may be those that recognize the extent to which their historical
significance is located outside the cinema.
Notes
1. Ofer Ashkenazi, ‘The Future of History as Film: Apropos the Publication of
A Companion to Historical Film’, Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and
Practice 18 (2014), p. 291.
2. For an overview, see Marnie Hughes-Warrington (ed.), The History on Film Reader
(London: Routledge, 2009); Robert Rosenstone and Constantin Parvulescu
(eds), A Companion to the Historical Film (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013).
3. James Chapman, Licence to Thrill: A Cultural History of the James Bond Films
(London: I.B. Tauris, 2007 edn).
4. Robert Rosenstone, ‘Film Reviews’, American Historical Review 97 (1992),
p. 1138. See, for example, Guy Westwell, ‘Critical Approaches to the History
Film – A Field in Search of a Methodology’, Rethinking History: The Journal of
Theory and Practice 11 (2007), p. 585.
5. Wall Street Journal, 17 October 2013.
6. Marnie Hughes-Warrington, History Goes to the Movies (London: Routledge,
2007), p. 9.
7. Robert Rosenstone, ‘Reflections on What the Filmmaker Historian Does (to
History)’, in this volume, Chapter 11, p. 250.
8. Vivian Bickford-Smith, ‘Rosenstone on Film, Rosenstone on History: An
African Perspective’, Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice 11
(2008), p. 533.
9. Nike Jung, ‘History, Fiction, and the Politics of Corporeality in Pablo
Larraín’s Dictatorship Trilogy’, in this volume, Chapter 7, p. 147.
10. James Ward, ‘Remember 1688? The Draughtsman’s Contract, the “Glorious
Revolution” and Public Memory’, in this volume, Chapter 8, p. 177.
11. Robert Schneider, Perspectives on History, May 2006 (http://www.historians.

org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history, date accessed 16 June
2014).
12. For one example, see Desmond Bell and Fearghal McGarry, ‘“One Cut Too
Many?” History and Film: A Practice-based Case Study’, Journal of Media
Practice, 14 (2013), pp. 5–23.
13. Rosenstone, ‘Reflections on What the Filmmaker Historian Does (to
History)’, p. 245.
14. Willem Hesling, ‘Oliver Stone’s Nixon: The Rise and Fall of a Political
Gangster’, in Rosenstone and Parvulescu, Companion to the Historical Film,
p. 192.
15. Hayden White, ‘Historiography and Historiophoty’, American Historical
Review 93 (1988), pp. 1193–1199; Ashkenazi, ‘The Future of History’, p. 292.
16. Piotr Witek, ‘Andrzej Wajda as Historian’ in Rosenstone et al., Companion to
Historical Film (Princeton: Princeton University Press), p. 155.
17. Hughes-Warrington, History Goes to the Movies, p. 9.
18. Witek, ‘Andrzej Wajda’ in Rosenstone et al., Companion to Historical Film,
p. 155.
19. James Chapman, Film and History (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. 87;
Hughes-Warrington, History on Film, pp. 7–188.
20. Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1997), p. vii.
21. Rosenstone, History on Film, p. 186.
23. Robert Rosenstone (ed.), Revisioning History: Film and the Construction of a
New Past (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 8.
24. Rosenstone, ‘Film Reviews’, p. 1138.
25. Chapman, Film and History, p. 86.
27. Robert Burgoyne, ‘The Balcony of History’, Rethinking History. The Journal of
Theory and Practice 11 (2007), pp. 552–553.
28. Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American
Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2004).
29. Jay Winter, ‘The Memory Boom in Contemporary Historical Studies’, Raritan
21 (2001), p. 52.
30. David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1985), p. 41.
31. Marcia Landy, British Genres: Cinema and Society, 1930–1960 (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1991), p. 53.
33. For further details, see Desmond Bell and Fearghal McGarry, ‘Truth at
24 Frames a Second? A Working Dialogue between a Film-maker and a
Historical Consultant about the Making of The Enigma of Frank Ryan’,
Rethinking History. The Journal of Theory and Practice 18 (2014); see also http://
www.qub.ac.uk/sites/frankryan/ (date accessed 1 August 2014).
34. For one innovative example, see the Prisons Memory Archive (http://
prisonsmemoryarchive.com, date accessed 1 August 2014).
35. Jung, ‘History, Fiction, and the Politics’, p. 152.
Introduction 17
36. Westwell, ‘Critical Approaches’, p. 578.

37. Paula Rabinowitz, ‘Wreckage upon Wreckage: History, Documentary, and the
Ruins of Memory’, History and Theory 32.2 (1993), p. 134.
38. Ulster Museum talk, 30 April 2014 (http://www.qub.ac.uk/sites/frankryan/
InterpretativeResources/CriticalIssues/, date accessed 1 August 2014).
39. Marcia Landy, ‘The Subjects of History. Italian Filmmakers as Historians’ in
Rosenstone and Parvulescu, Companion to the Historical Film, p. 151.
40. Westwell, ‘Critical Approaches’, p. 587. See also Chapman on the new
film history (http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/629, date accessed
1 August 2014).
42. Rosenstone, ‘Film Reviews’, p. 1138.
1
A Very Long Engagement:
The Use of Cinematic Texts
in Historical Research
Gianluca Fantoni
We need to study film and see it in relation to the

world that produces it. What is our hypothesis? That
film, image or not of reality, document or fiction, true
story or pure invention, is history.
Marc Ferro1
Historians who base their research principally on cinematic texts may,

at times, feel uneasy with regard to the epistemological foundations of
their research. This is due to a number of reasons. Firstly, to study films,
or principally films rather than written documents, means to go against
a long and illustrious tradition of historiographical studies which nor-
mally privileges written texts over visual evidence as primary sources
for historical research. Secondly, within the range of visual sources,
historians have for a long time been especially suspicious of cinematic
texts. Finally, a universally accepted, coherent and comprehensive
methodology for studying film as a source for historical analysis has not
yet been formulated. Such awareness accounts for the title of this essay:
cinema and history have had a very long engagement, but a proper
wedding has yet to be celebrated. It is worth noting that the long-term
diffidence of historians towards film is not entirely unreasonable. The
use of cinematic texts as historical sources presents difficult theoretical
problems with respect to their selection, use and methods of analysis.
In the mid-1970s, historian Paul Smith, while advocating the use of
films in historical research, provided a succinct summary of the issues
troubling professional historians:
[film] can quite easily be faked, or put together in such a way as

to distort reality, give a tendentious picture, and practise upon the
18
Use of Cinematic Texts in Historical Research 19
emotions of the spectator. Moreover, it is often a relatively trivial and

superficial record, capturing only the external appearance of its sub-
jects and offering few insights into the processes and relationships,
causes and motives which are the historian’s concern.2
The concerns identified by Smith remain relevant and should not be

overlooked. However, a corpus of methods, findings and suggestions
concerning the use of cinematic texts in historical research has been
developing over the years, especially since the mid-1970s. Together
they provide – if not a methodology – a reasonably reliable theoretical
base. By sketching the history of the relationship between historians
and film, this essay takes stock of the methodological progress histo-
rians have made in analysing cinematic texts as a source for historical
research. In particular, it focuses on the literature that has developed
as a result of historians’ interest in cinematic propaganda. This essay
outlines how well-established scholars have addressed a range of ques-
tions concerning the nature of cinema, and the relationships between
cinema and society and cinema and audience. Key questions include:
are historians justified in using cinematic texts in their research? What
is the social role of cinema? Does cinematic propaganda work? How?
And to what extent? With a closer look, everything boils down to a
single, fundamental question: do films influence people, or, rather, do
they mirror people’s ideas?3
The issue of the relationship between cinema and history is as old as
cinema itself. As early as 1898, the Polish cameraman and employee of
the Lumière Company, Bolesław Matuszewski, argued for the establish-
ment of a ‘Cinematographic Museum or Depository’ where footage
documenting historical events could be stored on behalf of scholars
and students of the future.4 The use of the filmic image as historical
documentation was a fairly intuitive idea. If history’s most sacred duty
was to avoid that ‘what has come to be from man in time might become
faded’, to quote Herodotus of Halicarnassus, what could be better than a
tiny band of celluloid which constituted, in the words of Matuszewski,
‘not only a proof of history but a fragment of history itself’? It can be
seen that Matuszewski had an essentially positivist attitude towards
cinema: film was much more that a mirror of reality to him, it was
reality itself.
Matuszewski’s call for the large-scale storage of footage for research
purposes fell on deaf ears. Film archives were not established before the
1930s, and, for many years, historians did not give any serious thought
to the use of film as a historical source. Even when the Annales School
20 Gianluca Fantoni
legitimized the use of a wider range of evidence in historical research,

scholars generally remained suspicious of film. A certain intellectual
snobbery towards the cinema medium, which was for many years
regarded as nothing more than a form of entertainment for the lower
classes, certainly played a part in this respect.
If there is a moment that can be considered a watershed for the study
of cinema and history, it is the publication of From Caligari to Hitler:
A Psychological History of the German Film by German historian Siegfried
Kracauer, first published in 1947.5 Clearly influenced by the work of
Sigmund Freud, Kracauer came to believe that cinema represented a sort
of psychoanalytic revelation of the collective unconscious. His study was
aimed at accounting for the mass acceptance of Nazism in the Germany
of 1930s by investigating the ‘hidden mental processes’ and ‘mass
desires’ of the German people as they emerged from the films produced
in the years of the Weimar Republic.
The chapter devoted to Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920)
is perhaps the best known of Kracauer’s psychoanalysis-inspired investi-
gations.6 Kracauer sensed that, in order to understand the historical rele-
vance of the film completely, it was necessary to go beyond what appears
on the screen, and investigate the film’s production process. It was
precisely this investigation which provided Kracauer with the principal
evidence informing his psychoanalytic reading. Kracauer learnt that the
film’s original script, by two Austrian authors, exposed the perversion of
power and the intrinsic violence of government institutions: the protago-
nist of the film eventually finds out that the despicable Caligari (who has
enslaved the somnambulist Cesare and forces him to commit murder) is
the director of a public lunatic asylum. In order to make the film more
acceptable to the mainstream audience, however, German-born director
Wiene imposed a fundamental change on the plot by encapsulating it
in a new narrative frame: the entire story is just the fantastic account
of a mentally ill patient secluded in the lunatic asylum.7 According to
Kracauer, by turning a subversive plot into a reassuring and conform-
ist film, Wiene had demonstrated a more heightened awareness of the
‘German soul’ than the two Austrian screenplay writers. In fact, according
to Kracauer, Germans trusted authority above all else. Kracauer concluded
that, when faced with the seemingly unavoidable alternative of tyranny
and chaos, as had happened in the early 1930s, German people would
invariably choose tyranny, as for them order was, in any case, preferable
to anarchy. This is why they had eventually chosen Adolf Hitler.
To infer the ‘collective disposition and tendencies’, the ‘inner urges’,
or ‘the intrinsic concerns of the collective mind’ from the production
of a national film industry appears, nowadays, quite an adventur-

ous approach to film studies.8 Nonetheless, Kracauer’s book remains
fascinating in that it reminds us that film, fiction or factual, does not
appeal exclusively to the viewer’s rationality. In order to be appealing
and successful, films have to satisfy the audience’s existing desires and
psychological needs.
Kracauer also added to his book a final chapter dealing with Nazi
cinematography, in which he claimed that all of the films produced in
Germany during the Nazi regime – newsreels, documentaries, or appar-
ently escapist feature films – were to be regarded as propaganda films.9
There was, at the time, a growing awareness among scholars in this
respect. Many historians realized that, when it came to cinematic texts,
one could hardly speak of objectivity, given that every film, feature film
or documentary conveyed an author’s point of view.10 This certainly
did not help overcome historians’ scepticism over the use of film in
historical research. As a consequence, studies on film and history did
not flourish in the following years.11
Historical documentaries and newsreels formed the focus of a confer-
ence held at the University College of London (UCL) in 1968 under
the title Film and Historians.12 This conference focussed on the use of
films for didactic purposes. Significantly, scholars debated whether ‘raw
material’ – that is, unedited footage – was the best visual source for
the teaching of history, being the only type of cinematic text (almost)
free from manipulation. This approach shows how historians generally
contemplated only a narrow use of the cinematic text. Based on a sort
of ‘criterion of truth’, the historian dealing with filmic documents had
to perform, primarily, a philological operation aimed at detecting every
kind of manipulation. Only the remaining true information could thus
be safely deployed.13
The UCL conference stimulated British scholars to investigate the
potential uses of cinema in historical research. In 1976, Historian and
Film, edited by Paul Smith, took stock of the progress made in this
field. In the introduction, Smith advocated ‘the full integration of film
into the range of resources at the historian’s disposal’.14 Historian and
film-studies lecturer William Hughes adopted a structuralist approach.
He claimed that cinema constituted a visual language structured by
specific elements which fundamentally shaped the cinematic text’s
meaning. These elements were the result of how both shooting and
editing techniques were handled by the filmmaker. Therefore, a proper
interpretation of visual content depended upon a knowledge of film-
making: ‘Just as they must often learn a foreign language in order to
22 Gianluca Fantoni
utilize essential written documents, historians must know how focus,

camera placement, framing, lens selection, lighting, film emulsion,
editing technique, and other factors combine to determine the form,
content and meaning of a given length of film.’15
Hughes also listed a number of possible uses of cinematic texts in
historical research. For example, unedited footage could be employed
as a partial record of events and personalities. Films produced and
distributed on a regular basis (such as newsreels) might be useful for
audience research purposes. Sponsored films could provide insights into
the motives of sponsoring institutions like governments and political
parties (showing what they wanted and did not want people to see).
Finally, feature films could be taken as an indicator of the moral values,
prejudices, ideas, and political and social tensions running through a
society at a given time.16
Of all the potential applications of film to historical study suggested
by Hughes, it was especially the last one that seemed to arouse the inter-
est of scholars in the mid-1970s. According to Michael Wood, author of
America in the Movies, ‘all movies mirror reality in some way or other’,
and Hollywood films mirrored myths and concerns of the American
people.17 Daniel J. Leab, in From Sambo to Superspade, analysed the rac-
ism of American society through American cinema.18 He asked whether
movies influence an audience or whether they mirror its ideas, and
seemed to consider both alternatives possible. The cinema industry. to
same extent, pandered to society’s prejudices, while Hollywood also
played a major part in shaping the American Dream.19 His conclusions
with respect to the relationship between cinema and society were quite
original:
Movies are entertainment, but they are also symbols, and behind
every shadow on the big screen is a struggle to impose definitions
upon what is and what should be. The power of any single movie
to influence a viewer permanently is limited, although repetition
obviously has its effect. Constant repetition that emphasizes certain
stereotypes […] is overpowering.20
The works of both Wood and Leab are examples of what could be
called the subjective approach to film, an approach which was directly
derived from Kracauer. In the 1970s, a few film theorists, sensing that
this approach lacked objectivity, attempted to create new interpreta-
tive tools, principally borrowing models from linguistics. This was the
golden age of film semiotics, founded by French film theorist Christian
Metz.21 Although film semioticians may have developed a more objec-

tive method, their work was inaccessible and utterly unsuitable as far as
dissemination outside the academic environment was concerned. For a
few years it appeared that the advent of semiology applied to cinema
would lead to a definitive rupture of the nascent relationship between
cinema and historians. The latter were in fact understandably alienated
by the esoteric terminology employed by film semioticians.22
Fortunately, a major methodological breakthrough, which would
restore historians’ confidence in their justification to study cinematic
texts, was about to come from France. This was the work of Marc Ferro,
who published a collection of essays called Cinéma et Histoire in 1977.23
Ferro’s book officially granted cinematic texts a place among the eviden-
tial sources admitted to the courtroom of historical research.24 In fact,
the French historian provided a decisive impetus to the overcoming of
the residual distrust of historians towards the reliability of films. Ferro
demonstrated how cinematic texts offer a useful tool for the historian
precisely because they are unreliable: they do not represent reality
but an interpretation of reality, and they very often reflect a hidden
or not-so-hidden propagandistic dimension, whether intentional or
unintentional. As such, films tell us a great deal more about the people
who produced them than the events they portray. In this respect, Ferro
argues that films provide historians with ‘a counter-analysis of soci-
ety’; that is, the possibility of unearthing hidden aspects of society.25
According to Ferro, the historian must therefore look for everything
that can be spotted beyond the intentions of the authors of the cine-
matic text. In this sense, a film – rather than showing – reveals. Ferro
also made several suggestions concerning the methodology to be used
in the analysis of film, including, famously, the recommendation to
study both ‘the visible and the non-visible’ or, in other words, ‘the rela-
tions between a film and what is extra-filmic’.26 This encompassed the
production background, as well as the material circumstances in which
the cinematic text was produced and distributed, including screenplays,
production documents and film reviews published in newspapers.27
Following Ferro’s Cinéma et Histoire, publications on cinema and his-
tory blossomed. Anthony Aldgate and Jeffrey Richards, for example,
authored two books investigating British society via the analysis of
feature films.28 These British scholars adopted the idea of the two-way
connection between cinema and society previously proposed by Leab.
They claimed: ‘Broadly speaking, the cinema operates in two ways –
to reflect and highlight popular attitudes, ideas and preoccupations,
and to generate and inculcate views and opinions deemed desirable
24 Gianluca Fantoni
by film-makers’.29 Richards would take an important further step with

respect to the idea of cinema as a mirror to society in a later book, Films
and British National Identity: From Dickens to Dad’s Army, which inves-
tigated the relationship between British national cinema and British
identity.30 He claimed that feature films do not simply mirror society,
they reflect an empowered and very often prescient image of it and, as
such, they legitimize a new state of things which are about to come.
His conclusions about the function played by British ‘free cinema’ are
rather intriguing in this regard: by championing the repudiation of
Victorian self-restriction, free cinema films of the 1960s prepared the
ground for the advent, a decade later, of Thatcherism – in its essence,
a political philosophy promoting the elevation of individual desires
above the good of society.31
By the time Richards published his book, film had become one of
the most popular sources for scholars in the flourishing field of cultural
studies. The use of cinematic texts in cultural studies seems to reflect
the idea that films, as human artefacts, disclose something about soci-
ety as they reveal the complicated relationship between reality and its
social representation. This assumption is arguably rooted in the Marxist
theory of literature, which postulates that cultural production cannot be
treated in isolation but must be interpreted ‘within a larger framework
of social reality’.32 It could be argued that, as a result, modern scholars
of cultural studies often regard the epistemological legitimacy of the use
of cinematic texts as a given, and they are not especially attentive to
methodological questions. There are, however, many exceptions to this
rule.33 As far as historians are concerned, a more recent attempt to draft
a coherent and comprehensive methodology for the use of cinematic
texts in historical research came from the US in the early 1990s, when
John E. O’Connor edited Image as Artifact: The Historical Analysis of Film
and Television.34
O’Connor suggested that there should be two stages in the histori-
cal analysis of what he defined as a ‘moving image document’. In the
first stage, the historian should gather as much information as possible
with respect to content, production and reception of the moving
image document, as he would do with any other document. In the
second stage, the historian should undertake an enquiry according
to four frameworks: the moving image as a representation of history;
the moving image as evidence for a social and cultural history of the
period in which it has been produced; the moving image as evidence
for historical facts; and the moving image as part of the history of the
film industry and arts. Quite apart from this scheme, which is perhaps
too rigid to be profitably adopted, O’Connor’s work contains several

useful conclusions and suggestions. One of these concerns the idea
that content analysis requires repeated viewing of the cinematic text
under examination. Another is that every cinematic text represents a
valuable source of historical information as far as customs and habits of
the past are concerned, including the way people used to dress or style
their hair, the houses in which they lived and the way they spoke.35 It
could be said that in such an ethnographical approach, as proposed by
O’Connor, the cinematic text retrieves the historical function originally
envisioned by Matuszewski.
Another aspect of film and history, which rose to prominence within
the historical discipline in the late 1980s and early 1990s, concerned the
relationship between history and the cinematic rendering of historical
events. However, this need not detain us here, as it is analysed in the
final essay of this collection by Robert Rosenstone, one of the most
pioneering and important scholars in the field of historical films.
Along with historical films, another class of cinematic texts that
has aroused the interest of historians is cinematic propaganda. Studies
concerning cinema and propaganda began to appear at the beginning
of the 1970s, probably because the emergence of political and militant
filmmaking in various countries in the late 1960s had awakened his-
torians’ interest in this particular use of the cinematographic medium.
Authors have focussed particularly on the cinematic propaganda text
itself and, having learned the lesson of Ferro, have interrogated propa-
ganda films for the values and political perspectives conveyed through
the voice-over commentary – for instance in the case of newsreels – or
have conducted extensive research aimed at detecting censorship and
repression by the authorities responsible for the production of the
propaganda film. A book which exemplifies this approach perfectly is
Anthony Aldgate’s Cinema and History, published in 1979.36
Since the pioneering work on politics and film by Swedish authors
Leif Furhammar and Folke Isaksson (1968), however, historians have
also questioned whether the historical significance of propaganda films
should be judged by finding a reliable way to assess their influence on
a contemporary audience.37 Although this endeavour proved challeng-
ing, it was not meaningless. Not only has the question of the audience’s
reception been subsequently addressed by sociologists and media schol-
ars, who eventually established a field of research known as audience
studies,38 it has also had some important reverberations as far as the
methodology of studying films from an historical perspective is con-
cerned. Most notable in this respect is Pierre Sorlin’s call to appreciate
26 Gianluca Fantoni
and valorize the specificity of the filmic fact (fait filmique), namely the
invitation made to historians to not merely utilize cinematic material as
written text, but to investigate the effect of what Sorlin calls effet cinéma
(cinema impact) on viewers.39 It is worth stressing, however, that a his-
torian analysing archival cinematic texts cannot have the same visual
experience as early spectators when viewing the cinematic text at the
time in which it was produced. Clearly, as modern viewers, we have a
different perception of film due to the evolution of cinematographic
techniques, narrative styles and taste which have taken place since
then. This inevitably affects the analysis, for example making a cine-
matic text appear obsolete and clichéd, whereas contemporary viewers
may have had no such impression.40
There is much more to be said about the relationship between cin-
ematic texts and viewers. Every film – and possibly a propaganda film
does it to a greater extent – conveys its message through a series of artis-
tic, cinematographic, cultural and political codes that its target audience
is capable of understanding due to a cultural and political background
common to both the authors of the film and its audience. Therefore,
the historian must be conscious of the cultural references and symbols
shared by a given group of people constituting the presumed audience
of the cinematic text(s) under analysis. This has become, over time,
increasingly accepted by scholars of film studies and by historians.41
Perhaps the greatest challenge with propaganda films, as Aldgate and
Richards have observed, is to distinguish deliberate propaganda from
‘“unwitting testimony”, the hidden assumption and attitudes, rather
than the conscious, and often biased, message’.42
As this essay demonstrates, there has long been a symbiotic if proble-
matic relationship between historians and film. I shall now conclude
by returning to the questions raised at the outset of this essay, begin-
ning with the justification for the use of cinematic texts in historical
research. Doubts about film’s accuracy and reliability, which have both
preoccupied and frustrated historians for decades, manifest themselves
in every type of document normally utilized by historians, at least
to some extent. Such doubts do not, therefore, justify the exclusion
of cinematic texts from the range of sources analysed in historical
research. Furthermore, the corpus of texts devoted to the use of film for
research purposes has reached a respectable consistency, and tradition
matters in history.
Of the various approaches pioneered by historians, perhaps the most
convincing is Ferro’s suggestion that the cinematic text be utilized pri-
marily to gather information and insights about the life and times of
those who produced it. This consideration prompts a fundamental ques-

tion: how should we characterize the connection between cinema and
society? Although nothing conclusive can be said on this matter, that
cinema mirrors society in some form is such an intuitive and powerful
idea that one cannot help but give it some credence. After all, cinema
does not exist per se, in a separate sphere. Cinema, rather, is like a piece
of blotting paper, absorbing ideas, cultural influences and controversies
emanating from the world in which it was produced. In Dudley Andrew’s
words: ‘Culture can be said to surround each film like an atmosphere
comprised of numerous layers and spheres, as numerous as we want.’43
In some cases, one of these spheres may consist of the reflections of a
society, or a section of it, on past events. In this case we can speak of
historical films (or perhaps more accurately ‘history films’, as suggested
by Robert Rosenstone in his essay, as ‘historical films’ could also refer
to any important film made in the past). These provide the audience
with a powerful and vivid experience of history by putting ‘flesh and
blood on the past’, as argued by Rosenstone.44 History films are perhaps
a branch of historiography, as Pierre Sorlin suggests, as films based
upon historical events help to shape what he calls a country’s ‘historical
capital’, that is the historical heritage of a country.45
As far as cinematic propaganda is concerned, Nicholas Reeves has
argued that the assumption that cinema is a powerful medium of propa-
ganda, with the ability to affect viewers radically and produce profound
transformations in the attitudes and ideology of the population, is not
borne out by recent research.46 Propaganda films are, however, valuable
documents for the insights they provide into the motives of the spon-
soring institutions and for what they reveal as far as the ideological and
cultural traits of an epoch and/or a social group are concerned.
Today, finding and viewing films has never been so simple and easy.
Films can be downloaded legally from a variety of specialized websites at
accessible prices. Thousands of old movies, documentaries and original
newsreels are available on YouTube and other video-sharing platforms,
as well as on online video archives. In future, it is likely that virtually
every cinematic text ever produced will be accessible with the click of a
mouse. Increased accessibility will encourage more and more historians
to regard cinematic evidence as both primary and secondary sources.
Although a universally accepted, coherent and comprehensive method-
ology for studying film as a source of historical analysis will probably
never emerge, an eclectic and interdisciplinary approach merging his-
tory, cultural studies, film studies, gender studies, anthropology and so
forth, will enable the historian to analyse with greater sophistication
28 Gianluca Fantoni
every type of cinematic text. After all, the effective and rigorous use of
archival evidence ultimately depends upon the ability and the profes-
sionalism of its researchers. This consideration of the epistemological
foundation of the use of film in historical research is intended as a step
in this direction.
Notes
1. Marc Ferro, Cinema and History (Detroit: Wayne State University, 1988), p. 29.
2. Paul Smith (ed.), The Historian and Film (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1976), p. 5.
3. Issues related to the specular/non-specular relationship between text and
reality are also dealt with by literary theorists, see for example P. Macherey’s
classic, Pour une théorie de la production littéraire (Paris: Maspero, 1966).
4. The article, ‘Une nouvelle source de l’histoire: création d’un dépôt de cinématog-
raphie historique’, published in Le Figaro on 25 March 1898, has been trans-
lated subsequently by Julia Bloch Frey, see B. Matuszewski, ‘A New Source
of History: the Creation of a Depository for Historical Cinematography’,
Cultures 2 (1) (1974), pp. 219–222 (http://www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/
classics/clasjul/mat.html, date accessed 7 March 2014). On Matuszewski, see
Anthony Aldgate, Cinema and History. British Newsreels and the Spanish Civil War
(London: Scolar Press, 1979), pp. 2–3.
5. Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler. A Psychological History of the German
Film (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974, c. 1947).
6. Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, pp. 61–76.
7. Kracauer based his interpretation on an unpublished typescript by Hans
Janowitz, co-writer of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. An analysis of Janowits’
account of the making of Caligari, and a critique of Kracauer’s reading of
the film can be found in D. Robinson, Das Gabinet des Dr. Caligari (London:
British Film Institute, 1997), pp. 1–24.
8. Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, pp. 6, 7 and 86 respectively.
9. Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, p. 275. The chapter on Nazi cinema tog-
raphy was a reprint of the pamphlet titled Propaganda and the Nazi war
film, issued, in 1942, by the Museum of Modern Art Film Library of New
York. Nazi cinematography has since been investigated thoroughly. See, for
example, D. S. Hull, Film in the Third Reich: A Study of the German Cinema,
1933–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), R. Taylor, Film
Propaganda, Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany (London: Tauris, 1998), and D.
Welch, Propaganda and the German Cinema (1933–1945) (London and New York:
Tauris, 2001).
10. Kracauer elaborated on this in a later work, see Kracauer, Theory of Film:
The Redemption of Physical Reality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971,
c1960), pp. 160–163. On objectivity in documentary filmmaking, Eric
Barnouw has claimed that:
The documentarist, like any communicator in any medium, makes
endless choices. He selects topics, people, vistas, angles, lenses, juxtaposi-
tions, sounds, words. Each selection is an expression of his point of view,
whether he is aware of it or not. […] Even behind the first step, selection
of a topic, there is a motive.
E. Barnouw, Documentary, a History of the Non-fiction Film (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1974), pp. 287–288.
11. Kracauer’s book, however, inspired a line of research based on what could be
defined as ‘the psychological paradigm’. See, for example, M. Wolfenstein
and Nathan Leites, Movies: A Psychological Study (New York: Free Press, 1950).
A critique of the psychological paradigm is in Robert Sklar, ‘Moving Image
Media in Culture and Society: Paradigms for Historical Interpretation’, in
J. E. O’Connor (ed.), Image as Artifact: The Historical Analysis of Film and
Television (Malabar, Florida: Krieger, 1990), pp. 121–123.
12. British University Council, Film and the Historian (BUFC, 1968).
13. On this point, see Aldgate, Cinema and History, pp. 5–11; Peppino Ortoleva,
‘Testimone infallibile, macchina dei sogni. Il film e il pubblico televisivo
come fonte storica’, in Gianfranco Miro Gori (ed.), La Storia al cinema.
Ricostruzione del passato/interpetazione del presente (Città di Castello: Bulzoni,
1994), pp. 299–332.
14. Smith (ed.), The Historian and Film, p. 3.
15. W. Hughes, ‘The Evaluation of Film as Evidence’, in Smith (ed.), The Historian
and Film, p. 51.
16. Hughes, ‘Film as Evidence’, pp. 49–79.
17. Michael Wood, America in the Movies (London: Secker and Warburg, 1975),
p. 16. Although brilliant in some of its analysis, Wood’s book seems quite
contradictory as far as methodology is concerned. While claiming that fea-
ture films mirror society, he also says that films, at least Hollywood movies,
belong to an independent, self-created, self-perpetuating universe, an artis-
tic tradition upon which both their narrative structure and significance
ultimately depend; see Wood, America in the Movies, p. 8.
18. Daniel J. Leab, From Sambo to Superspade: The Black Experience in Motion
Pictures (London: Secker and Warburg, 1975). Interesting investigations
on feature films as a reflection of collective mentality can be also found
in Peter C. Rollins (ed.), Hollywood as Historian. American Film in a Cultural
Context (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1983). On the same
line of research, but more concerned with the political background of the
films, and not devoted exclusively to America, are the essays contained in
K. R. M. Short (ed.), Feature Films as History (London: Croom Helm, 1981).
19. Leab, From Sambo to Superspade, pp. 117 and 2 respectively.
20. Leab, From Sambo to Superspade, p. 263.
21. See Christian Metz, Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema (New York and
London: Oxford University Press, 1974), and Christian Metz, Language and
Cinema (The Hague: Mouton, 1974).
22. On this point see Anthony Aldgate and Jeffrey Richards, Best of British.
Cinema and Society 1930–1970 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983), p. 6.
23. Ferro, Cinema and History.
24. A discussion on the theoretical contribution by Marc Ferro to the studies
concerning film and history can be found in William Guynn, Writing History
in Film (New York and London: Routledge, 2006), pp. 7–9.
25. Ferro, Cinema and History, p. 23.
26. Both quotations are from Ferro, Cinema and History, p. 30.
30 Gianluca Fantoni
27. On the relevance of film reviews for historical research, Pierre Sorlin exhibits
a rather dismissive attitude in his book, Italian National Cinema: ‘I have read
a large number of weeklies, specialized and not, in preparing this book. They
have told me a lot about the names of famous people, the way of comment-
ing upon films, the vocabulary in vogue, but, obviously, little about specta-
tors’ deeper feelings’. See Pierre Sorlin, Italian National Cinema, 1896–1996
(New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 167.
28. Aldgate and Richards, Best of British and Anthony Aldgate and Jeffrey
Richards, Britain Can Take It: the British Cinema in the Second World War
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986).
29. Aldgate and Richards, Best of British, p. 1.
30. Jeffrey Richards, Films and British National Identity: From Dickens to Dad’s
Army (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997).
31. Richards, Films and British National Identity, p. 23.
32. See David Forgacs, ‘Marxist Literary Theory’, in Ann Jefferson and David
Robey (eds), Modern Literary Theory. A Comparative Introduction (London:
Batsford, 1986, 2nd edition), p. 167.
33. I shall mention just one example, David Forgacs’s compelling analysis of
Roberto Rossellini’s 1938 masterwork, Rome, Open City, published by the
British Film Institute in 2000. The author is fully aware of many of the meth-
odological questions discussed in this article, including the necessity to go
‘beyond the visual’ by interrogating production documents and investigat-
ing material circumstances within which the film was conceived, produced
and distributed.
34. J. E. O’Connor, Image as Artifact: The Historical Analysis of Film and Television
(Malabar, FL: Krieger, 1990).
35. On this point, see also Pierre Sorlin, The Film in History. Restaging the Past
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980), pp. 24–25.
36. Aldgate, Cinema and History.
37. L. Furhammar and Folke Isaksson, Politics and Film (New York: Praeger,
1971), translated by Kersti French, p. 243.
38. In the early 1980s, Stuart Hall pioneered this area, proposing his Encoding/
Decoding model. See Stuart Hall, ‘Encoding/Decoding’ in Stuart Hall, Dorothy
Hobson, Andrew Lowe, and Paul Willis (eds), Culture, Media, Language:
Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972–1979 (London: Hutchinson, 1980),
pp. 128–138. Hall’s work revealed that the effects of mediated communica-
tion were not as direct as expected, and that different groups decoded the
same message in different ways. For Hall, the central point was that a text
could be understood in different ways, ranging from a dominant reading of
it, in line with the intended meaning, or an oppositional one, which might
add new meaning to the message. This meant that the audience had some
degree of agency. If applied to our analysis, it also suggests that the potential
impact of a propagandistic text, for example the effect of propagandistic
cinema, cannot simply be assumed. However, alongside recognition of
the complexity resulting from the audience agency, Hall also insisted on
the idea of the media as a tool to set the political agenda. By reinforcing
a dominant understanding of a text, for example by highlighting certain
issues instead of others, the media exercises political influence on society as
a whole. Subsequent research in audience studies went back to highlighting
the power that media had in shaping attitudes according to a dominant

ideology (the Glasgow Media Group). Nevertheless, the idea of a variety of
effects, or different degrees of effects of the mediated text, within the same
society at the same historical time, has remained a principal assumption of
this research area until today.
39. See, in particular, the conclusions of Pierre Sorlin, Sociologie du cinéma.
Ouverture pour l’histoire de demain (Paris: Aubier, 1977), pp. 290–297.
40. Ideological and cultural factors can also play a part in the audience’s percep-
tion of the artistic and political value of a film. An example can help to clar-
ify this point. From the perspective of a modern viewer, it is rather surprising
that a film like the Soviet biopic Kljatva (The Vow, 1946) – a piece of pure
Stalinist cinematic propaganda – could have been considered an effective
propaganda tool by the Soviet authorities, as its content is so explicitly prop-
agandistic that its effect would appear, to a modern viewer, counterproduc-
tive. However, this was not the case in 1946 Russia, as noted by the director
of Kljatva himself, Mikhail Chiaureli, during a press conference following the
presentation of his film at the Venice Film Festival. Answering a provocative
question by an Italian journalist about the presence of propaganda in Soviet
feature films, Chiaureli claimed that although every film should be consid-
ered propagandistic – as every film, regardless of its nationality, endorsed an
ideological vision of reality – the viewer whose ideology matched the one of
the film would not perceive it as such. See Umberto Barbaro, ‘Il regista sovie-
tico Ciaureli parla ai critici del Festival’, l’Unità (Milan, Italy), 4 September
1946. On The Vow, see J. Leyda, Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film
(London: Allen & Unwin, 1960), pp. 392–394. For complete cast and crew,
see Leyda, Kino, pp. 452–453.
41. On this point see, for example, Bill Nichols, Introduction to Documentary
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), pp. 35–41.
42. Aldgate and Richards, Best of British, pp. 1–2. The expression ‘unwitting
testimony’ is attributed to Arthur Marwick.
43. Dudley Andrew, ‘Film and History’, in John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson
(eds), Film Studies: Critical Approaches (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2000), p. 183.
44. Robert A. Rosenstone, History on Film/Film on History (New York: Routledge,
2013), p. 133.
45. Sorlin, The Film in History, p. 118.
46. Nicholas Reeves, The Power of Film Propaganda: Myth of Reality? (London:
Cassell, 1999).
2
Screening European Heritage:
Negotiating Europe’s Past via the
‘Heritage Film’
Axel Bangert, Paul Cooke and Rob Stone
In European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood, Thomas Elsaesser

observes that ‘European cinema distinguishes itself from Hollywood
and Asian cinemas by dwelling so insistently on the (recent) past.’1 Even
if one takes the briefest of looks at the most celebrated European films
internationally, Elsaesser would appear to have a point. From Das Leben
der Anderen (The Lives of Others, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck,
2006) to The King’s Speech (Tom Hooper, 2010), historical dramas play
a key role within national film cultures across the continent, acting
as international ‘shop windows’ that can help support not only the
domestic film industry but also the wider heritage and tourist sectors by
attracting international visitors to the country. At the same time, such
films can generate major debates at home on the role of the past in
contemporary national identity construction and the problematic sedi-
mentation of cinematic representations of history in collective memory.
What forms has this enduring engagement with the continent’s history
taken across different European film cultures? How and why do histori-
cal dramas reach the large and small screens across Europe, and what is
their role in the promotion of European heritage, however this might
be defined? These are the questions that are the focus of this chapter,
which results from an AHRC Care for the Future project run by the
Centre for World Cinemas at the University of Leeds and B-Film: The
Birmingham Centre for Film Studies.
As a starting point for the project’s reflection upon the particular
place that historical dramas hold in European film cultures, we returned
to the ‘heritage film’ debates of the 1990s, which emerged in the UK in
response to a wave of costume dramas that began a decade earlier, when
films such as Chariots of Fire (Hugh Hudson, 1981) and A Room With A
View ( James Ivory, 1985) were increasingly analysed as a new genre that
32
Screening European Heritage 33
was characterised by slow-moving, episodic narratives organised around

props and settings as much as they were around narrative and charac-
ters. These films were often read as part of a national project of nostalgic
remembrance celebrating British heritage culture just as the country was
undergoing the seismic social shifts of the Thatcher years. In his defini-
tive discussion of this trend, Andrew Higson explored the manner in
which heritage films present the past as a ‘visually spectacular pastiche,
inviting a nostalgic gaze that resists the ironies and social critiques so
often suggested narratively by these films.’2 In so doing, Higson identi-
fied a key tension at the heart of this cycle of filmmaking which, on the
one hand, offered the potential for alternative, and particularly Queer,
readings of history through their plots, while on the other helping to
generate tourist traffic through their presentation of an essentially con-
servative (with both a large and small ‘c’) image of Englishness, readily
consumable by international audiences.
Claire Monk, another key voice in the early debate, has underlined
the political context of Higson’s work, stressing how politicised the cri-
tique of the heritage film was from the beginning. ‘This critique grew
out of the wider, very combative, cultural-political climate that we had
in Britain in the 1980s’, much of which, she suggests, was predicated
on an analysis of the implied spectator within the film texts themselves.
In order to probe what she saw as the assumptions that flow from this,
Monk focussed on the empirical reception of heritage films by different
audience segments. In so doing, she found
that there is one section of the audience that was more conservative
than anyone like Andrew Higson […] ever dreamt. But there is also
a left-wing or liberal, generally younger, degree-educated and quite
cinephilic audience that enjoys these films but feels self-conscious
guilt about it because of their awareness of the debate.3
The initial discussion of the nature and status of British historical drama
in the 1980s, provoked by the likes of Higson and Monk, in turn fed into
a broader debate on the state of the British film industry and the nature
of British ‘national’ film culture. Over the last two decades, Higson’s
original definition of the term ‘heritage’, along with the parameters of
the debates it engendered, has been repeatedly challenged, redefined and
stretched almost to breaking point. Moreover, it is increasingly noted by
academics such as Rosalind Galt, Lutz Koepnick, Ginette Vincendeau and
others that such films were not, and are not, unique to British cinema.4
Clearly film studies has largely moved on from the original debate that
34 Axel Bangert et al.
Higson initiated, much of which ultimately became somewhat seman-

tic. However, its core concern, namely what we mean by ‘heritage’ and
how might this be communicated, instrumentalized or challenged by
cinema, remains a key concern.
If we stick closely to Higson’s original aesthetic definition of the con-
cept and the debate it generated, but accept that heritage cinema is an
international phenomenon, it can be seen that such films are produced
and consumed within very different and distinct social and political
contexts, all of which inflect the specific concept of heritage they seek
to communicate. A country house draped in a swastika, such as we see
in the German film Napola (Before the Fall, Dennis Gansel, 2004) imme-
diately creates a very different affective relationship with the spectator
to a shot of a similar building in a British heritage drama like Maurice
( James Ivory, 1987), though the two films, on the face of it, would
appear to have much in common. The disparate modes of engagement
with the past we see across European heritage films (e.g. Zemsta/The
Revenge, Andrzej Wajda, Poland, 2002; Obaba, Montxo Armendáriz,
Spain, 2005; En kongelig affære/A Royal Affair, Nikolaj Arcel, Denmark,
2012; Tähtitaivas talon yllä/Stars Above, Saara Cantell, Finland, 2012)
explore a very wide array of historical moments. Yet what unites them
is the fact that they are invariably inflected by the preoccupations of
the present, evoking conflicting emotions among those who make and
consume such films, emotions driven variously by nostalgia, mourning,
or more nationalist, even jingoistic strategies. Here we might mention
the more recent work of Belén Vidal, who includes in her study several
productions about non-British heritages, including The Girl with a Pearl
Earring (Peter Webber, UK, Luxembourg, 2003) and Joyeux Noël (Merry
Christmas, Christian Carion, France, Germany, UK, Belgium, Romania,
Norway 2005). By drawing on a broad selection of films, with notable
differences in terms of their production, representation and reception,
Vidal presents the heritage film not as a rigid category but as
a hybrid genre with porous borders, a genre that is becoming less

consensual and more political through its own staunch preference
for emotional histories, and also more adventurous in its continu-
ous incorporation of a popular historical iconography informed not
only by literature or painting, but also by fashion, popular music and
television.5
This wider definition, when placed alongside the original debate, offers
a particularly productive starting point for our discussion of the shape
of contemporary European heritage film, and its circulation and con-

sumption across and beyond the continent. How can the notion of
heritage film, with its roots in the specific situation of 1980s Britain,
be used heuristically to explore other national and transnational cin-
emas across Europe? What does ‘heritage’ mean in this context? What
can ‘European’ heritage signify beyond the kinds of platitudinous
statements of international cooperation one might expect from the
European Union or Council of Europe and which might be seen to
reach its cinematic nadir in the much maligned ‘Europudding’, a form
of filmmaking that is the product of pan-European compromise, and
which itself has a particular penchant for overblown historical dramas
(Enemy at the Gates, Jean-Jacques Annaud, 2001; Joyeux Noël, Henri 4,
Jo Baier, 2010)? How do the imperatives of national heritage culture
interact with, enhance or resist those of the transnational? Indeed, what
counts as heritage in this regard? In the rest of this chapter, we sketch
out three case-studies that suggest the various ways in which heritage
cinema is produced and consumed in the Basque Country, Denmark
and Germany. In so doing we focus, in particular, on the tensions
between regional, national and transnational forms of heritage film.
What can tentatively be grouped under the umbrella of European herit-
age film arises at the intersection between these levels. While the forms
of heritage and the kinds of heritage films to be found in the Basque
Country, Denmark and Germany differ markedly, they all illustrate the
enduring importance of heritage on the economic, social and cultural
levels, and the key role film can play in its communication.
The Basque country: the region as allegory of the nation
Like British cinema, Basque cinema also saw a notable increase in films
about history and heritage in the 1980s. After the establishment of the
Autonomous Basque Community in 1978, which was composed of the
three provinces of Álava, Biscay and Gipuzkoa, its domestic administra-
tion sought to promote Basque identity and culture through cinema
both at home and abroad. In 1982, the decision was taken to subsidise
films that were shot in the Basque country with a significant degree
of Basque participation (including 75 percent of cast and crew) but
allowed for non-Basque stars in the hope of reaching a wider audiences.
The aims of this measure were, firstly, to build a Basque film industry
by training and attracting film professionals and, secondly, to produce
heritage films that portrayed Basque history in a way that informed
and entertained domestic audiences and that were attractive to foreign
festivals, distributors and critics. These films were to be shot in Castilian

to ensure widespread Spanish distribution, but with the proviso – or
standard operating procedure (SOP) – to those with more radical ideas of
Basque cinema, that a single copy would subsequently be made available
to be dubbed into the Basque language of Euskara.
The political nature of Basque heritage film is rooted in the struggle
for recognition and independence of the Basque nation. Once the sup-
pression of Basque nationalism under the dictator, General Francisco
Franco, had come to an end in the mid-1970s, there was a strong urge
to reclaim Basque nationhood, including its sense of history. However,
this urge was realised only in part with the creation of the Autonomous
Basque Community, for it comprises only three of the territories tra-
ditionally associated with the Basque Country, excluding Navarre on
Spanish soil as well as the three provinces in the Pays Basque across the
Pyrenees in France. And while the Spanish constitution of 1978 gave
the Autonomous Basque Community the status of a nationality, the ref-
erendum by which it was achieved was rejected by many Basques who
objected to its wording and the fact that the region remained embedded
within the Spanish state. The Autonomous Basque Community nonethe-
less became the location from which the medium of film was exploited
to reimagine the history, heritage and even territory that encompasses
the seven provinces of the Euskal Herria, the land of the Basques.
The relation between the local, the national and the international thus
proved to be critical for Basque film at this time. Resorting to archetypical
landscapes and traditional ethnographic details, Basque cinema sought
to evoke the heritage of a nation greater than the Autonomous Basque
Community where it was produced, drawing on history and legend from
Navarre to portray a people more independent than the political reali-
ties of the present allowed. Here, in fact, lies a fundamental difference to
the British heritage film of the 1980s. Instead of suggesting a historically
larger but politically unattained nation, the British productions limited
their portrayal of national heritage to a version of ‘Englishness’. Indeed,
even this description would appear too broad, since these films focussed
predominantly on an image of Britain experienced by the bourgeois elite
of the Home Counties and the City of London. While the Basque films,
by portraying expeditions and invasions, tried to expand the viewers’
perception of space in both the historical and the cultural sense, the
British films staged their performances of the bourgeois heritage canon
within the safe confines of the country house.
The three films that set out to reclaim the ancient and modern Basque
past that had been deleted or rewritten by the dictatorship were La
conquista de Albania (The Conquest of Albania, Alfonso Ungría, 1983),

Akelarre (Witches’ Sabbath, Pedro Olea, 1983) and Fuego eterno (Eternal
Fire, José Ángel Rebolledo, 1985). In so doing, these films provided a
political commentary in metaphorical or allegorical fashion on contem-
porary issues. This is another important difference to the British produc-
tions of the 1980s. While some scholars have described British heritage
film as political in terms of its queer gaze, prompting the audience to
see the past from a minority perspective, or as having been prompted by
the specific political context of the 1980s, there is little evidence of direct
commentary on present-day political affairs in the cycle of filmmaking.
Moreover, the British films’ focus on the middle and upper classes stands
in sharp contrast to the appeal to the nation as a broad collective in past
and present which characterises the approach of Basque heritage cinema
of the same period.
A brief look at Akelarre illustrates how Basque heritage film of the
1980s functioned as a political commentary. The film, based on an
auto-da-fé (ritual of public penance) of 1595, details the testimonies of
witchcraft recorded in the valley of Araiz in Navarre. Aiming to provide
an allegory for the contemporary Basque struggle for independence,
Akelarre portrays a conflict between, on the one hand, an ancient, matri-
archal culture with its own language and customs, and, on the other, the
patriarchal, oppressive and invasive culture of non-Basque Christianity.
Demonised and tortured, the Basques resist, band together and rise up
to overthrow their oppressors. Reordering the past from a radical and
heroic perspective, the film subverts anti-Basque nationalist history,
providing a historical justification for present-day conflict. In particular,
Akelarre dramatizes the witch-hunts that terrified the Navarrese town of
Zugarramurdi in the 17th century in order to reflect events at the time
of the film’s making. An inquisitor arrives to arrest and torture villagers
accused of witchcraft; however, these accusations are intended to quell
growing claims for independence and suppress incipient militancy. The
narrative of Akelarre therefore folds up like a concertina in order to pre-
sent its audience with several points of contact or obvious comparison
between recent and mythic Basque history and it acts in defence of
Basque heritage by showing how traditional Basque identity is threat-
ened by Spanish forces of oppression and persecution. Significantly, this
filmic intervention in the struggle for independence was released at a
time when evidence of the torture of members of the ETA (Euskadi Ta
Askatasuna, the Basque Homeland and Liberty movement) by Spanish
security forces, which is represented by that inflicted on Basque rebels
by Spanish inquisitors in the film, had provoked debate and protest.6
The specific concerns of such films may go some way towards explain-
ing why the Basque version of heritage cinema did not reach as wide
an international audience as the British cycle. Akelarre, La conquista de
albania and Fuego eterno played at various international film festivals, but
their reception centred on their country of origin, where their value was
often contested by Basque audiences who may have resented the appar-
ent need to falsify or exaggerate a history that they felt had no need for
inauthenticity. None of the three were commercial successes and their
status in relation to Basque cinema is generally derided, if not ignored.
Nevertheless, where Akelarre offers a blatant attempt at nation-building,
La conquista de Albania and Fuego eterno are surprisingly subversive,
offering disruptive narratives and unreliable narrators where inviolable
myths of Basque history might be expected.7
In sum, the Basque case illustrates some of the benefits of seeking a
wider definition of heritage film. For instance, the 1980s Basque herit-
age films serve as reminders of the fact that heritage, in its etymologi-
cal root, is about ownership, not only of territory but also of history.8
Heritage films play a key role in defining the ownership of history,
assigning it to a certain group or opening it up to transnational identi-
fication and consumption, as in the British case. The question of own-
ership is particularly critical for heritage films that address traumatic
histories, such as the Spanish Civil War, the Second World War or events
marked by political terrorism. Representing a strong strand within con-
temporary European cinema, such films shape the ownership of history,
not least by assigning the roles of perpetrators and victims. Some stage
heroic re-appropriations of history, as we saw with regard to Akelarre,
others present a form of ‘dark heritage’ – a term we shall discuss later in
this chapter – marked by moral grey zones and dangers of complicity, as
several examples from the Danish and German contexts show.
Denmark: national icons of the resistance,

progress and success
In the Danish context, cinema also plays a prominent part in shaping

and maintaining the nation’s sense of history and heritage, in many
cases through films portraying positive aspects of Danish history.
Occasionally, the country produces heritage films that travel beyond
Denmark and become international successes, most recently the cos-
tume drama En kongelig affære (A Royal Affair, Nikolaj Arcel, 2012).
However, on the whole, Denmark is characterized by heritage films
that seek to reach a large proportion of the country’s – comparatively
small – domestic audience. Claus Ladegaard, Head of Development and

Production at the Danish Film Institute, suggests that Denmark has
seen a veritable boom in historical films over the past five years. Partly
caused by an extremely tight market situation, in which films about
Danish history are more likely to be successful, this trend has reaffirmed
the formative role of heritage films in national culture.
One of the main concerns of Danish historical dramas is the Nazi
occupation and how Danes reacted to it. As Ladegaard explains,
if you look at what could be labelled historical films, at least half of

them would be about the way Danes acted during that time. There is
a theme, and it is about our role during the war. These films are about
being a small country, maybe not being as heroic as we thought we
were, and continuously rewriting the history of Danish resistance
and collaboration during the war.9
This also means that, to a significant degree, the portrayal of national

history in Danish film is set against the violent and dark background
of the Second World War as a European history. The ways in which
this history is portrayed through local agents, national icons and, on a
transnational scale, in comparison or response to foreign productions,
illustrate the main features of Danish heritage films set during the Nazi
occupation.
A recent example of this engagement with the Nazi occupation in
Danish cinema is Flammen & Citronen (Flame & Citron, Ole Christian
Madsen, 2008), a film which tells the story of two iconic figures of the
Danish resistance, Bent Faurschou-Hviid (Thure Lindhardt) and Jørgen
Haagen Schmith (Mads Mikkelsen) who become increasingly enmeshed
in a morally compromising web of conspiracies. The film was a success
with Danish audiences but also gained distribution through a range
of European art-house cinemas. Its public resonance was partly due to
the fact the film complicated the widespread image of heroic resistance
against the Nazis. As Lagedaard observes, ‘in popular culture, this was
more or less the first film that put some question marks behind the
official history of Denmark during the war.’
Flame & Citron was an intervention in debates about hegemonic
Danish memory culture, but the film also needs to be seen in the context
of European films about the legacy of Nazism. From this point of view,
it forms part of a group of productions that explore the darker side of
what is commonly celebrated as the positive heritage of resistance. Other
examples from this group would be Un héros très discret (A Self-Made
Hero, Jacques Audiard, 1996), which unravels the legend of the French
resistance via liberal use of irony, and the Dutch production, Zwartboek
(Black Book, Paul Verhoeven, 2006), which undermines the heroism and
sacrifice that often characterise filmic portrayals of the Dutch resist-
ance. Instead, the film shows a resistance infiltrated by corruption and
betrayal, similar to the way in which Flame & Citron uses the gangster
movie as its generic model. And, likewise, Black Book was targeted not
only at a domestic but also at a European and indeed international
audience. A Danish film such as Flame & Citron thus renegotiated the
national heritage of resistance in a way that interacted with larger trends
in memory culture and film production.
Flame & Citron stands in sharp contrast to films about the Nazi occupa-
tion that present the Danish resistance in a heroic light, such as the more
recent Hvidsten gruppen (This Life, 2012). The latter film was a return to
traditional forms of telling the story of the Nazi occupation, using actual
locations in the Danish province and emphasising the selfless acts of
ordinary citizens. As Ladegaard explains, ‘This Life was the pure history
of our heroic Danes in the countryside fighting the Germans. It did
amazingly at the box office and had 50 percent more admissions than
Flame & Citron.’ While the film was screened subsequently at European
film festivals, such as Karlovy Vary, its approach to history made it, in
Ladegaard’s words, ‘a very Danish film’, clearly targeted at a domestic
audience. In the Danish film industry, putting the heritage of resistance
against the Nazis on screen continues to be a recipe for success.
However, Danish cinema also draws on more recent periods of
national history in order to attract domestic audiences. Despite their
significantly higher production costs, heritage films are sought after by
producers because of their ability to create income in a market domi-
nated by blockbuster franchises. Going beyond the Second World War,
such films in Denmark frequently feature positive figures representing
progress or success, often in the form of biopics. Current examples
include Spies & Glistrup (Sex, Drugs and Taxation, 2013) about Simon Spies
and Mogens Glistrup, two key figures in the modernisation of post-war
Denmark, and Tarok (Catching the Dream, 2013) about one of the most
celebrated Danish race horses of the 1970s. These productions show how
heritage film in contemporary Europe has by no means lost its function
of providing edifying tales about the nation’s shared past.
Finally, the Danish context also illustrates the importance of televi-
sion for heritage film in contemporary Europe. At the time of writing,
the country’s two public service broadcasters are producing histori-
cal drama series, which Ladegaard describes as their ‘most prestigious
projects’. He adds that ‘they use enormous amounts of money on

this, and about half the population will watch these shows.’ Within
a European context, this represents an extraordinary degree of audi-
ence penetration. The influence of television can in fact be seen across
Europe’s film industries. Cases in point include the epic mini-series
Gernika bajo las bombas (Guernica under the Bombs, Luis Marías, 2012)
produced by Euskal Telebista (Basque Language Television) – which
presented the bombing of the Basque town by the Luftwaffe during the
Second World War as a melodramatic tapestry of tragic lives that exalted
the martyrdom of the Basque Country – and the well-known dramatic
adaptations of Rosamunde Pilcher novels by Germany’s second public
channel, ZDF. Appropriating the British heritage tradition for German
audiences, the latter productions have led to an increase in German
tourism to their settings in Cornwall.10 And, of course, British television
is famous for its heritage productions such as Downton Abbey (2010–),
Call the Midwife (2012–) and Mr Selfridge (2013–). These productions
are not limited to a national network of domestic viewers, but are also
sold to countries such as the United States where, despite the tenuous
connections to the heritage displayed, they remain highly appealing.
Germany: transnational memories of war and migration
The enormous importance of the Nazi dictatorship and the Second

World War suggests an obvious parallel between Danish and the German
heritage film. Yet, a closer look reveals decisive differences, not only in
terms of the ways in which this legacy is approached, but also in terms
of the national-versus-transnational reach of the films in question.
Moreover, in engaging with the history of a country which, albeit belat-
edly, is acknowledging its status as an immigrant society, German film
has also begun to engage with the heritage of its minorities.
Films about the Third Reich are among Germany’s most high-profile
and successful historical productions. In contrast to the large number
of Danish films cited above, a good proportion of these films is able to
reach both domestic and international audiences. As in the case of an
international success like Der Untergang (Downfall, Oliver Hirschbiegel,
2004), it has even been argued that films about the Nazi past have delib-
erately been designed for the export market.11 While this might under-
state the importance of the domestic market, it is true that German
films about the Nazi past often receive international attention, from
Stalingrad (1993) to Sophie Scholl – Die letzten Tage (Sophie Scholl: The
Final Days, Marc Rothemund, 2005).
Yet German film can only draw on a few identificatory figures such
as Sophie Scholl in order to construct a positive legacy out of the Nazi
past. In this regard, the German situation is markedly different from the
Danish one with its heroes of the resistance, and also in a broader sense
from the British tradition with its celebration of the country’s pre-war
history and culture. German productions about the Third Reich con-
front a legacy that, instead of being cherished and preserved, needs to
be worked through and overcome. This discrepancy prompts us to con-
sider the concept of heritage from yet another point of view, asking to
what extent it has to be positively connoted, and if German films about
the Nazi past can be considered under the heading of heritage at all.12
In discussing these questions, commentators frequently refer to the
concept of ‘dark heritage’. This term refers to legacies of violence and
crime, often state-sponsored and large-scale, which are universally con-
demned yet have a powerful influence on society and culture. Matthew
Boswell, for example, suggests that there are significant parallels between
what we commonly understand as heritage in the positive sense and
dark heritages such as the Nazi past. ‘Although dark heritage is dif-
ficult and traumatic, it is still connected to exactly the same ideas and
processes, often in a positive way: things like community-building and
the construction of group identities.’13 As an example, Boswell cites Der
Untergang, arguing that the film’s positive representation of national
identity is based on a shared experience of suffering:
It is a film that represents Germans as victims. It does not really

attempt to deal with them as perpetrators of terrible crimes – apart
from Hitler who is virtually the sole perpetrator, the sole source of
evil. Der Untergang is about communities being restored and positive,
harmonious group identities arising out of a dark chapter of the past.
While the history portrayed is problematic, the film’s genre and func-
tion are comparable to those of the heritage film. However, the con-
struction of a positive legacy out of the Nazi past may come at a price:
‘Heritage film is a genre that can be applied to darker subjects as well as
lighter ones. The question, of course, is whether this then becomes less
about the art of memory and more about the art of forgetting.’14 The
heritage of Germany also comprises the German Democratic Republic
(GDR), and in particular the legacy of the East German secret police,
the Stasi, the role of which is portrayed in Das Leben der Anderen.15 As
the winner of an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, the
production underscores the transnational appeal of German films about
the country’s troubled past. In fact, since Nirgendwo in Afrika (Nowhere in

Africa, Caroline Link, 2001), almost every Oscar-nominated or -winning
German film was set in either Nazi- or Communist-Germany.16
Finally, it might be noted that the transnational character of heritage
film from Germany is also underscored by the increasing representation
of Germany as a multicultural space. Daniela Berghahn, for example,
describes how the filmic portrayal of diasporic and migrant communi-
ties began with what she terms ‘postmemory documentaries’ such as
Yüksel Yavuz’s Mein Vater, der Gastarbeiter (My Father, the Guestworker,
1994) or Seyhan Derin’s Ich bin Tochter meiner Mutter (I Am My Mother’s
Daughter, 1996). In these niche productions for small audiences, the
filmmakers trace their parent’s experiences and memories of migration.
The same is true of Basque films, such as Amaren ideia (Mum’s Idea,
Maider Olega, 2010), in which three elders return to their homeland
after 70 years of exile occasioned by the Civil War, and Zuretzako (For
You, Javi Zubizarreta, 2011), which is the first American-made film in
Euskara, telling the story of the filmmaker’s grandfather and his life as
a shepherd in the US. Both films expose painful, necessary negotiations
between people, times and places, while bringing a largely forgotten
social heritage to the screen. In a sense, such films extend the notion
of territory by enlarging the idea of heritage, enabling Basque cinema
to transcend national limitations to become internationally located
instead. Nevertheless, in terms of their perspective and style, these inti-
mate films and subjective documentaries can hardly be compared to
heritage films in the narrow sense.17
Early attempts to portray the experience of migration through what
might be described as a heritage aesthetic include Solino (Fatih Akın,
2002) and Almanya – Willkommen in Deutschland (Almanya – Welcome
to Germany, Yasemin Şamdereli, 2011). Berghahn sees the significance
of these and other films from across Europe in their attempt ‘to claim a
space for the collective memory of immigrants, which has been elided
in the official memory of the host nations’. Their aim is ‘to incorporate
diasporic memory in the collective memory of France, Germany, Britain
or wherever else these immigrants have settled permanently, raised
their children and grandchildren and, in most cases, become citizens’.
Like the earlier postmemory documentaries, these films seek to broaden
common definitions of heritage by highlighting the contribution which
migrants have made to the development of these countries.
Yet, one might wonder to what degree the often difficult experience of
migration lends itself to the heritage aesthetic. According to Berghahn,
films like Solino and Almanya confront this problem by downplaying the
‘hardship, poverty and marginalization’ that often characterize immi-

grant lives. They manage to do so by:
looking at the world through the eyes of children and adolescents

or, better still, memories of childhood. That is why those films about
diasporic memory that approximate the generic conventions of herit-
age cinema are often coming-of-age stories […]. In the eyes of a child,
even a shanty town does not have to look drab and dismal, but is
transformed into a place charged with positive emotional values – the
excitement of adventure, the warm feeling of friendship and so forth.18
For instance, telling the story of an Italian family which moves from
Solino, a fictional village in southern Italy, to Duisburg in the German
industrial Ruhr, Solino has a retro and indeed heritage look. In Berghahn’s
words:
The scenes set in Solino are every bit as beautiful as those set in
Tuscany in James Ivory’s A Room with a View. Whitewashed houses,
lush green fields, kids playing in the haystacks, the streets paved
with white marble that glistens in the bright sunlight and, at night,
reflects the gold light of the old-fashioned street-lamps. The visual
splendour and charm of the small Italian town, especially the open-
air cinema, immediately recalls Giuseppe Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso
(1988), an undisputed heritage film.
But the grey city of Duisburg also forms part of this look, above all
through décor, costumes, consumerist objects and popular culture
which recall the 1970s. In this manner, the film allows mainstream
audiences to connect to the migrants’ experience, creating a shared
memory of the times.19 Solino is thus an example of how the heritage
film continues to evolve and has the potential of including new histo-
ries in the process.20 That said, it might also be noted that while such
films highlight the transnational constellation of German society, these
films have not been as successful in achieving international distribu-
tion. It remains the decidedly ‘national’ history of, in particular, the
Nazi past which remains the best way for German filmmakers to find
an audience beyond national borders.
Heritage film and the heritage industry
Among the member states of the European Union (EU), there is no

agreement on what exactly the heritage of Europe is. As Ib Bondebjerg
explains, politicians have instead settled on the appealing, if vague, for-

mula of ‘unity in diversity’. Moreover, EU-wide support for film produc-
tion is still very underdeveloped, offering only a limited contribution
through the MEDIA and Eurimages funds. According to Bondebjerg, a
large part of what drives heritage film across Europe is co-production,
not only between production companies from different nations but also
between public service broadcasters.21 However, more often than not,
concerted efforts to co-produce European heritage films have resulted
in critical and commercial failures, the so-called ‘Europuddings’, which
lack a clear sense of identity and address.
Despite this relative lack of political definition and initiative, heritage
film remains an important part of European film culture, exercising a
variety of functions, as this study has shown. It can be a tool for portray-
ing certain locations or regions as allegorical for a larger culture or nation
that is politically unrealised, as in Basque cinema. Or, as the Danish case
illustrates, heritage cinema can be used to celebrate national icons, from
heroes of the resistance against the Nazi occupation to post-war figures
of progress and success. Finally, a strongly transnational dimension is
apparent in the German context, from films about the Second World
War – which invariably also have to negotiate pan-European memory
of the event – to the growing cultural influence of labour migrants and
their descendants. Heritage film in contemporary Europe is thus much
more than the perpetuation of a recognizable period style based on
established cultural classics, as evidenced in British cinema of the 1980s.
Instead, it is a mode of film production that actively defines what counts
as heritage, and to whom it belongs. This can have strong political
implications, impacting on, for example, attitudes to the Basque nation-
alist struggle for independence, or the claims for recognition raised by
migrant and diasporic filmmakers in Germany.
The prominence of heritage films in contemporary European cinema
results from economic as well as cultural factors. As a genre, they are
capable of galvanising domestic audiences and, in some cases, provid-
ing the best opportunity for a national film culture to succeed inter-
nationally. Of course, their economic impact cannot be measured by
box-office figures alone, but also by how they foster heritage tourism,
locally and regionally. Moreover, and as has been discussed in this chap-
ter, heritage films are powerful media for negotiating a sense of history.
Despite all accusations of their explicit or implicit reactionary nature,
they retain a strong potential for inciting debate and dissent. European
heritage film is certainly more diverse than it is unified, but it is impos-
sible to deny its persistence and impact across European film cultures.
Returning to our introductory comments, in an interesting phrasing,
Elsaesser speaks of films that ‘dwell on’ the past, a description which
seems particularly true of films that engage with traumatic histories.
However, as we have seen, while European film seems more fixated on
the past than many other film cultures, heritage cinema is always also a
way of engaging the present, as such films provide a means for regions,
nations and transnational communities (however speculative) to build
on their continual renegotiation of history.
Notes
1. Thomas Elsaesser, European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood (Amsterdam:
Amsterdam University Press, 2005), p. 23.
2. Andrew Higson, ‘Re-Presenting the National Past: Nostalgia and Pastiche in
the Heritage Film’, in Lester Friedman (ed.), Fires Were Started: British Cinema
and Thatcherism (London: University College London Press, 1993), p. 109.
3. ‘From Political Critique to Online Fandom: Claire Monk on British Heritage
Film, its Origins and Afterlife’, Screening European Heritage, 25 July
2013 (http://arts.leeds.ac.uk/screeningeuropeanheritage, date accessed
1 September 2013). See also Claire Monk, Heritage Film Audiences: Period Film
and Contemporary Audiences in the UK (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 2011) and ‘Heritage Film Audiences 2.0: Period Film Audiences and
Online Film Cultures’, in Participations: Journal of Audience & Reception Studies
8 (2011), pp. 431–477.
4. See, for example, Rosalind Galt, ‘Italy’s Landscapes of Loss: Historical
Mourning and the Dialectical Image in Cinema Paradiso, Mediterraneo and Il
Postino’, Screen 43 (2002), pp. 158–173; Lutz Koepnick has shown how the
display of heritage in films set during the Third Reich focuses on examples of
the so-called German-Jewish symbiosis. See his ‘Reframing the Past: Heritage
Cinema and the Holocaust in the 1990s’, New German Critique 87 (2002),
pp. 47–82; Ginette Vincendeau, ‘Exhibiting Heritage Films in the Digital
Age: Interview with Vincent Paul-Boncour’, The Network, 7 September 2012
(http://www.europa-cinemas.org, date accessed 15 March 2013); Paul Cooke,
Contemporary German Cinema (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012),
pp. 88–99.
5. Belén Vidal, Heritage Film: Nation Genre Representation (London: Wallflower,
2012), p. 4.
6. A comprehensive discussion of Basque heritage film will be offered by Rob
Stone and María Pilar Rodríguez in Basque Cinema: A Political and Cultural
History (New York and London: I.B. Tauris, forthcoming 2015).
7. For further discussion of this subversive trend in European heritage cinema
see Paul Cooke and Rob Stone, ‘Crystalising the Past: Slow Heritage Cinema’,
in Nuno Barradas Jorge and Tiago de Luca (eds), Slow Cinema (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming 2015).
8. See Stuart Hall, ‘Whose Heritage? Unsettling “the Heritage”, Re-imagining
the Post Nation’, in Rasheed Araeen, Sean Cubitt and Ziauddin Sardar (eds),
The Third Text Reader on Art, Culture and Theory (London: Continuum, 2002),
pp. 72–84.
9. ‘Denmark’s Recent Wave of Historical Films: An Interview with Claus

Ladegaard, Head of Production and Development at the Danish Film
Institute’, Screening European Heritage (25 September 2013, http://arts.leeds.
ac.uk/screeningeuropeanheritage, date accessed 15 October 2013).
10. Eckart Voigts, ‘Heritage and Literature on Screen: Heimat and Heritage’ in
Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan (eds), Cambridge Companion to Liter-
ature on Screen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 123–137.
11. Paul Cooke, ‘Oliver Hirschbiegel’s Der Untergang (2004): An Image of German
Wartime Suffering Too Far?’, German Monitor 67 (2007), pp. 247–261.
12. Cooke, Contemporary German Cinema, pp. 88–99. With regard to the 1990s,
Lutz Koepnick has shown how the display of heritage in films set during the
Third Reich focuses on examples of the so-called German-Jewish symbio-
sis. See his ‘Reframing the Past: Heritage Cinema and the Holocaust in the
1990s’, New German Critique 87 (2002), pp. 47–82.
13. ‘Dark Heritage, Identity and Community: In Conversation with Matthew
Boswell’, Screening European Heritage, 14 June 2013 (http://arts.leeds.ac.uk/
screeningeuropeanheritage, date accessed 15 September 2013). Visitor interest
in sites of dark history is explored in John Lennon and Malcolm Foley, Dark
Tourism: The Attraction of Death and Disaster (London: Continuum, 2000).
With regard to Germany’s dark heritage, see in particular Sharon Macdonald,
Negotiating the Nazi Past in Germany and Beyond (London: Routledge, 2009).
14. ‘Dark Heritage, Identity and Community’.
15. Jaimey Fisher, ‘German Historical Film as Production Trend: European
Heritage Cinema and Melodrama in The Lives of Others’, in Jaimey Fisher and
Brad Prager (eds), The Collapse of the Conventional: German Film and its Politics
at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century (Detroit: Wayne State University Press,
2010), pp. 186–215.
16. See Ib Bondebjerg, ‘Coming to Terms With the Past: Post-1989 Strategies in
German Film Culture’, Studies in Eastern European Cinema 1 (2010), pp. 29–42.
17. ‘Diasporic Communities and Heritage Film: An Email Exchange with Daniela
Berghahn’, Screening European Heritage, 31 May 2013 (http://arts.leeds.
ac.uk/screeningeuropeanheritage, date accessed 1 September 2013).
18. ‘Diasporic Communities and Heritage Film’.
19. A comprehensive account of this trend in European film is given by Daniela
Berghahn in Far-Flung Families in Film: The Diasporic Family in Contemporary
European Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013).
20. With regard to France’s post-colonial heritage and its role in French film, see
Dayna Oscherwitz, Past Forward: French Cinema and the Post-Colonial Heritage
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2010).
21. ‘Heritage Film and Cultural Policy: An Interview with Professor Ib
Bondebjerg’, Screening European Heritage, 8 March 2013 (http://arts.leeds.
ac.uk/screeningeuropeanheritage, date accessed 15 September 2013).
3
Confronting Silence and
Memory in Contemporary Spain:
The Grandchildren’s Perspective
Natalia Sanjuán Bornay
The choice that we have is not between remembering

and forgetting; because forgetting can’t be done by an
act of the will, it is not something we can choose to do.
The choice is between different ways of remembering.
Tzvetan Todorov1
The relationship between memory and history in contemporary Spain

remains controversial. In spite of the current obsession with memory,
materialized both in cultural production and in media debates over
whether to acknowledge or forget the past, the lack of a political con-
sensus on the issue points towards a ‘memory crisis’.2 Seventy-five years
after the end of the Spanish Civil War, and nearly 40 years after Franco’s
death, Spain has not fully resolved the fratricidal conflict that started in
1936, or successfully dealt with its violent traumatic past. Throughout
most of the 20th century, the conflict has been remembered – or dis-
remembered – in a very different manner in each historical period,
depending on the political needs of the time. This, in turn, has influ-
enced the collective memory and the construction of a national iden-
tity based on a division between the ‘victors’ (Nationalists) and the
‘defeated’ (Republicans) created by Francoist discourse. After Franco’s
death, the promulgation of the 1977 Amnesty Law and the symbolic
‘pact of oblivion’ negotiated in the transition period postponed the
settling of scores for war and post-war crimes, prolonging an indefinite
silence for the ‘defeated’. However, democracy – with its consequent
freedom of speech – gave rise to a fruitful cultural production that
problematized Spain’s relationship with its past, initiating a remarkable
transformation of its collective national memory. This was given legisla-
tive effect, however, only in 2007 with the so-called ‘Law of Historical
48
Silence and Memory in Contemporary Spain 49
Memory’. Despite constituting an important step in addressing the

country’s conflicted past, and providing additional financial support
to the victims, the law has been criticized for privatizing memory and
failing to provide an official apology to the victims of Francoist crimes.3
The enduring impact of the Civil War on Spanish society and politics
is evidenced by the differing reactions and interpretations of three
generations of Spaniards. In post-Franco Spain, the memory of the Civil
War and the consequent repressive dictatorship has been treated as a
collective traumatic experience.4 Several scholars have emphasized how
the analysis of different generational memories is crucial in obtaining
a diversity of perspectives on a conflicted past that can contribute to
the creation of a more representative and inclusive collective memory.
Paloma Aguilar, for instance, notes that the ‘generational effect’ is
strongly related to the study of collective memory because it is useful to
trace the development of a country’s collective memory as new genera-
tions come to power.5 Julio Aróstegui observes that the evolution of the
generational memory of the conflict has not always coincided with the
new interpretations provided by historiography.6 Insisting on the plura-
lity and dynamic nature of memory, Aróstegui emphasizes its unstable
and protean qualities.7 Consequently, public manifestations of memory
are heterogeneous, fragmented and often contested. In some cases, as is
exemplified by the protagonists in the films analyzed in this essay, an
incompatibility arises between individual memories and the collective
memory of the war. In this sense, it is important to examine the differ-
ences between ‘autobiographical memory’ and ‘transmitted or inherited
memory’. Over time, as Aguilar suggests, those who lived through the
war had the opportunity to compare and complement their personal
experience of this event with that of other individuals, as well as the
official historical narrative and that provided by novels and films. This
generation had – and still has – the opportunity to learn from history.
Aróstegui terms the memory of this generation – the only one based
on personal experience – the memory of identification or confrontation,
according to which side they supported.8
In contrast, those who do not have a direct experience of the war
possess a memory transmitted by multiple sources, one that cannot be
contrasted with personal recollections of the event. The first version of
the war learnt by this generation is the one conveyed at home, as Jesús
Izquierdo and Pablo Sánchez observe: ‘it is not the war that happened in
1936, it is the war that our families explained to us.’9 Yet, such were the
psychological repercussions of the Civil War that the generations who
did not experience the conflict were also deeply affected.10 The war had a
50 Natalia Sanjuán Bornay
two-fold negative impact on their lives as they experienced – and trans-

mitted – the inherited trauma of the war, as well as their own trauma
of the post-war era. As a result, Aguilar concludes, the post-war genera-
tion did not draw the same conclusions about the conflict as those who
actually fought in it.11
The silence of this second generation, Jo Labanyi suggests, is more
difficult to examine due to the lack of testimonial documentation.12
Santos Julià, nevertheless, has claimed that the children of both victors
and defeated rebelled against their parents by rejecting the memory
imposed by the victors as a fraud.13 A major challenge faced by this
generation, he argues, was the impossibility of replacing the victors’
memory with an alternative collective memory, since the defeated
parents, shattered and traumatized, were not permitted to transmit
their own stories. Consequently, the war’s children considered this
chapter of history closed; although it had affected their parents, they
sought to forget in order to move on or to pursue new paths to democ-
racy. For this reason, Aróstegui classifies the memory of the second gen-
eration as the memory of reconciliation, indicating a desire to overcome
collective trauma.14 However, the transition did not promote a genuine
reconciliation as it did not embrace the memory of the defeated, provo-
king in turn a reaction in the following generation, which demanded a
revisionist memory.
At the turn of the last century, a new social dimension of memory
emerged, leading to what Aróstegui has termed the memory of repara-
tion or restitution.15 Within the last two decades, the descendants of the
executed, mainly the grandchildren, have assumed the responsibility of
confronting the violent past experienced by their relatives. They sought
to recover the experiences – and, in many cases, the burial sites – of rela-
tives whose fate had been overlooked for decades. From these organisa-
tions demanding the recuperation of historical memory has emerged a
movement to find and exhume the mass graves of the victims of the
war and of Francoism. Scholars have emphasised the significance of
the third generation’s demands for the investigation of the Francoist
repression, highlighting its impact on debates about Spain’s past and
its memory. Labanyi, for example, observes that this generation has
re-established the process of generational transmission of memory
disrupted during the dictatorship and the following 25 years of democ-
racy.16 According to Julià, the generations born or raised in the era of
democracy, who lack personal experiences and memory of the war or
Franco’s dictatorship, confront the past with a different gaze.17 They are
more interested in finding out why their grandparents, on both sides,
were so ‘bloodthirsty’, why so many indiscriminate killings of civilians

took place, and why society after the war was so repressive. As a result,
their concerns are oriented more towards the consequences than the
causes of the conflict and repression. The greater detachment of the
grandchildren’s generation from Spain’s violent past might allow them
to provide a more objective and critical assessment of these events, and
to translate their predecessors’ political trauma into more conciliatory
cultural representations.
Representing generational memories on screen
In parallel with these demands for the re-examination of the past, a new
trend of films has emerged to represent the third generation’s concerns
from a more reflective and enquiring perspective. Unencumbered by
Francoist repression, the war’s grandchildren have taken on the respon-
sibility of representing the family stories of the silenced, narratives that
remain essential to the construction of identity. Focusing on female-
authored films, this essay explores how two contemporary filmmakers
portray the differing approaches to memory characterized by the three
generations. On the one hand, the melodrama, Para que no me olvides/
Something to Remember Me By (Patricia Ferreira, 2004), portrays the influ-
ential pull of Spain’s traumatic past on the lives of three generations
of Spaniards. On the other hand, the documentary, Nadar/Swimming
(Carla Subirana, 2008), depicts the inquisitive attitude of a grandchild
pursuing the silenced story of her executed grandfather.18
Both directors articulated their preoccupation with the reconstruc-
tion of Spain’s collective memory, evident in their film narratives, in
the interviews that I conducted with them.19 Although Ferreira has not
declared a personal connection with the film’s storyline, she acknowl-
edges her responsibility as an artist to ‘to stand up against a situation
that I consider totally unfair’.20 Subirana, in contrast, demonstrates a
very personal standpoint in recounting her family story within the con-
text of Spain’s divided past: ‘In order to place ourselves in the present we
need to know what happened in the past. It is necessary as a country to
heal, to close wounds, but I have the feeling that in this country the Civil
War is still an open wound, isn’t it?’21 My essay argues that both direc-
tors’ representations of the past can be seen as interventions aimed at
constructing a memory of reparation and which propose effective means
of reconciliation in order to heal contemporary Spain’s open wound.
The directors’ divergent choices in terms of genre facilitate their origi-
nal ways of confronting a troubled past. Ferreira has chosen melodrama
for her project. Isolina Ballesteros points out the advantages of using this
genre to represent the complexities of memory, arguing that ‘Ferreira’s
melodramatic mode provides a means through which individual mem-
ory can become official history, as well as a potential therapeutic model
for dealing with the trauma that generates collective empathy and
affective identification.’22 The story centres on a tri-generational family
drama that addresses the hardship of losing a loved one. Early in the
film, David (Roger Coma), a young architecture student, dies in a bike
accident shortly after moving in with his girlfriend Clara (Marta Etura)
against the will of her mother Irene (Emma Vilarasau). This tragedy has
a huge impact on both women, as well as on David’s grandfather, Mateo
(Fernando Fernán Gómez). With one another’s help, the three bereaved
characters develop strategies to deal with David’s death, a process sym-
bolizing the divergent generational attitudes to the memory of Spain’s
traumatic past. Under the guise of a domestic family drama, the plot
enables Ferreira to develop an allegorical reading of the memory of the
defeated.
In the case of Subirana, her experimental film project portrays her own
journey of discovery about her grandfather’s execution in Barcelona in
1940. Straddling documentary and fiction-film, this young filmmaker’s
directorial debut reveals the challenges of tracing the experiences of war
survivors so many years later. Except for the details of his death and his
name, Joan Arroniz, Subirana lacks any other substantive information
about her grandfather when she begins her quest. Her grandmother,
Leonor, who had never previously talked about him, has now become
unable to do so due to Alzheimer’s disease. Subirana decides to under-
take and document her own investigation through archival research and
interviews with family members, historians and war survivors. Towards
the conclusion, the focus of the film switches to her relationship with
her mother, Ana, who, after Leonor’s death, is also diagnosed with
Alzheimer’s disease. As Laia Quilez points out, Nadar recuperates the
past from a post-memorialist perspective, allowing Subirana to present a
gaze that is dissociated from traumatic memories and, therefore, capable
of combining autobiographical with politically critical elements.23
Both films capture the curiosity, as well as the imperative, that has
driven the efforts of the war’s grandchildren to re-examine the past in
order to better understand their own identity and place within Spain’s
broader collective memory. They highlight the obstacles faced by their
respective protagonists in trying to fill gaps in the official historical
memory, but also in personal and family memories. Each film explores
the role of the transgenerational transmission of memory in the
construction of national and personal identity. By contrasting these two

family portraits, this essay seeks to foreground the perspective of the
grandchildren in endeavouring to restore their repressed family histo-
ries. Both directors, it is argued here, represent the past in metaphorical
ways in order to provoke a wider reconsideration of its impact.
Reconciling trauma and memory in Para que no me olvides
After briefly introducing the three family members, apparently living

together harmoniously, David’s sudden death is presented as a trauma-
tic experience, one which functions as a metaphor for the Civil War.
The differing responses of each character to this tragic event – that is,
conscious reminiscing by Mateo, obsessive remembering by Clara and
deliberate forgetting by Irene – provides an analogy for 20th-century
Spain’s politics of memory. In particular, the complex reactions of the
two female protagonists become the focus of the narrative. In order
to move on, Irene endeavours to forget her son by getting rid of any
photograph or object that triggers the slightest recollection of him,
aiming at oblivion. Irene’s character represents the memory of the chil-
dren’s generation, born and raised in Franco’s regime. Much as in Julià’s
characterization of this generation, Irene is depicted as rejecting her
father’s memory as she generally fails to pay attention to his war and
childhood stories, and is sarcastic about aspects of that harsh historical
period. Her attempts to blank out the death of her son mirror the silenc-
ing process instigated during the post-Franco transition era. Irene’s
efforts to erase the memory of David conflict with Mateo’s attitude
to death, for which she reproaches him: ‘I am not like you. I need to
forget to continue with my life. If David is gone, I want it to be forever.’
But just as the attempt to neglect Spain’s traumatic past at a collective
level was unsuccessful, Irene’s determination to ‘disremember’ her son
fails to resolve her feelings of loss, or her guilt for having argued with
him prior to his death. Irene exemplifies Todorov’s argument about the
impossibility of forgetting through an act of will. However, through the
character of Clara – who tries to commit suicide – the film also warns
that obsessive remembering does not resolve trauma.24 Clara’s plight,
representing how excessive remembrance can reopen old wounds, can
be seen as a critical commentary on the contemporary surfeit of repeti-
tive memory which appears neither to disclose new information about
the past, nor aim at reconciliation.
The character of Mateo, a first-hand witness to the war and the dicta-
torship, is seen to represent a more effective middle way between the
extremes of remembrance and oblivion. After losing his parents and

other relatives in the war, Mateo has chosen to keep alive their memory
by imagining conversations with them. It might be noted that the
approach taken by Ferreira in this representation of the first generation’s
memory is unusual. Mateo’s reaction to remembering the past differs
strongly from the prevailing attitude of his peers who – largely through
necessity of circumstances – opted for silence. Ferreira’s creative – even
idiosyncratic – approaches to commemorating the past emphasize the
important role of memory in learning to live with trauma. Throughout
the film Mateo helps both women to understand the importance of
dignifying the memory of loved ones and accepting their deaths.
Having experienced her son’s tragic death, Irene finds herself able to
empathize with her father’s lifelong suffering, finally understanding
his motives for constantly remembering his own family. The ensuing
reconciliation between father and daughter is the film’s most poignant
and – at the same time – critical scene. It not only depicts a reconcilia-
tion between two generations which differ in their methods of dealing
with the trauma of the past, it provides Ferreira’s critique of Spain’s
politics of memory. Mateo’s explicit political vindication of the need
for a collective memory of the defeated is seen to justify his strategy of
keeping alive the memory of the dead: ‘I knew that I had to remember
everything until they return the honor to all the nameless dead that
that merciless regime swept away.’ This vindication also emphasizes
the discordance – observed by Aróstegui – between individual memo-
ries and the collective memory which, Aguilar suggests, can impede
political stability if sufficiently extreme.25 Cruz similarly observes how
Mateo’s misfortune stems from the discordance between his own per-
sonal memory and the official memory of Spanish society.26 Ferreira’s
film culminates with Mateo’s frustrated outburst, which sees him
lament the absence of an official apology to the victims of the war and
the dictatorship, the decline of the last remaining eyewitnesses, and the
ignorance of the younger generations:
But as days go by I realize that they will never ask for our forgiveness,
that they will never put up the names of the dead in some prominent
place for all to see, as they did over 60 years ago with the names of those
who died for God and Spain. Young people should know. (Figure 3.1)
Through the characters of Clara and David, Ferreira addresses the

relevance of the past to the younger generations. While David reveals
a strong interest in Spanish history, particularly his grandfather’s war
stories, Clara attributes her lack of historical knowledge to the fact that
Figure 3.1 Trauma and generational memory in Para que no me olvides/Something

to Remember Me By (Patricia Ferreira, 2004)
Source: Image courtesy of Tornasal Films.
the war was not spoken of at home, suggesting also that she did not
learn about the conflict at school. Following David’s death, Mateo finds
among his papers several notebooks which David had begun secretly to
transcribe when he realized that his aging grandfather’s memory was
starting to fail. The transmission of Mateo’s oral recollections into a
material object serves the purpose of preserving his memory for future
generations. David’s writings become the vehicle for Mateo’s memory,
which also allows for its incorporation into the broader collective
memory of the Civil War. Ironically, after David’s death, these roles are
reversed. Mateo transcribes his grandchild’s story to give to Clara, who
needs to know more about her boyfriend, an act which serves also to
preserve David’s memory.
Towards the end of the film, both women become involved in an
investigation initiated secretly by David into the potential historical
significance of an old building destined for demolition. Although David
does not directly research the war, the parallel between his motives and
the revisionist movement’s efforts to examine Spain’s recent past is clear.
David, therefore, embodies the minority – mainly the grandchildren of
the defeated – who have assumed the responsibility of reconstruct-

ing their country’s historical memory. The property, it transpires, is
Mateo’s childhood home, which he was forced to leave due to the war
when he was 15. David had hoped to show his grandfather the place
that he continued to remember nostalgically at the end of his life.
Described by Igor Barrenetxea as a ‘posthumous homage from a grand-
child to a grandfather’,27 this gesture provides Mateo with a memory of
reparation, a symbolic reconciliation acknowledging that Mateo’s long
remembrance has not been in vain. This discovery brings the three
protagonists closer together and their mutual support becomes crucial
in enduring David’s absence and preserving his memory. Overcoming
the trauma of the Civil War, the film suggests, requires both time and
collective effort.
The film’s ending conveys the importance of generational memory
for identity formation, illustrating Labanyi’s argument that the genera-
tional transmission of memory is dependent on a belief in some kind
of collective identity.28 When Mateo is taken by Irene and Clara to visit
his childhood house, he finds one of his old books, Treasure Island,29
inscribed with a dedication from his father: ‘From your father, for you
to pass on to your children and they to your grandchildren.’ Mateo’s
father passed on the value of literature to his children, which Mateo
bequeathed to David. However, the generational transmission of famil-
ial beliefs and memory in this film appears both to skip a generation,
and to occur within gendered parameters: from grandfather to grand-
son. As a result, the male protagonists are not only represented as the
bearers of knowledge about the past, but also as its transmitters (both
writing each other’s memoirs). Jaqueline Cruz’s feminist reading of the
film highlights the exclusivist role of male agency in this respect.30
According to Cruz, the male characters adhere to the sexist tradition
in cinema denounced by Laura Mulvey in which the male protagonist
plays the active role that allows the story to progress. The film’s
emphasis on male agency results in a dual discriminatory effect as its
narrative revolves around the male characters’ actions (David’s death,
David’s investigation, Mateo’s war stories), while also perpetuating the
stereotype that men are responsible for making – and writing – history.
Nevertheless, it should be noted that the story is successfully resolved
by the two female characters, who locate Mateo’s house, providing him
with an ‘“architectural space of memory”, from which the recovery of
familial and collective trauma can be initiated’.31 In addition, the ste-
reotypical enmity between girlfriend and boyfriend’s mother gives way
to a friendship that enables the resolution of the story with a credible

happy ending.
Nadar: politicizing personal portrayals of silence

and amnesia
The relationship between silence, remembrance and oblivion in Nadar

reflects the complexities of Subirana’s attempt both to retrieve and to
represent a combination of individual, family and historical memories.
The director’s autobiographical approach to memory, which combines
the personal with the political, transcends that of the individual,
portraying the experience of several generations to explore the trou-
bled past. The progressive loss of her grandmother’s memory, just as
Subirana is seeking to challenge Spain’s collective amnesia through her
quest for the phantasmagorical figure of her grandfather, constitutes
a powerful metaphor. As Ryan Prout observes: ‘Subirana’s act of de-
personalizing the illness and of reading it across a social history is in
itself a political gesture’.32
Nadar not only depicts how the struggle against time impedes the
collection of first-hand testimony about the Civil War and the early
post-war era, it also portrays the inability of victims to articulate their
traumatic memories. The scarcity of information conveyed by family
members, the refusal of other war survivors to testify and the dearth
of information in official records provide the central challenges to sur-
mount both in Subirana’s research and in the making of her film. The
outcome is an eight-year project in which the director’s present and past
converge. Initially conceived as a fiction film, the script was modified
from its original idea, in particular by the incorporation of subsequent
events in her life (including the illnesses affecting Leonor and Ana, and
the birth of her first son). A key figure in Subirana’s journey is cineaste
Joaquim Jordà, who acts as her mentor, advising on the script in various
conversations which have been included in the film.
Contrary to Subirana’s expectations, a copy of the summary trial
reveals that Joan Arroniz, whose war-time activities form the subject of
considerable mystery, was found guilty of three armed robberies. Later
she discovers that, following the Civil War, he was part of a band of anti-
Franco leftists who, it is believed, used the proceeds of their robberies to
help the needy. Arroniz’s criminal past is recreated in film-noir-like fic-
tion scenes, in which Subirana fantasizes romantic scenarios involving
her grandparents. Half-way through the film, Subirana learns that her
grandparents never married, although they had intended to do so. To her

surprise, Subirana comes across documents revealing that Arroniz’s wife –
who was not her grandmother – claimed a widow’s pension for herself
and her child. Perceiving that she forms part of Arroniz’s clandestine
family, Subirana’s investigation takes on a new dimension. As her
mentor Jordà insists, she needs to find this family in order to complete
her own family history. However, after extensive archival research and
numerous interviews, Subirana realizes that it is too late to compensate
for her grandfather’s absence. The director’s personal approach results
in an innovative film, which intersperses domestic videos of her mother
and grandmother, fictional black-and-white sequences and stylized
images of herself reflected in a swimming-pool. Posing new questions
rather than resolving longstanding concerns, Nadar allows the viewers
to contemplate the importance of knowledge of the past and their own
family background.
The approaches to memory taken by the protagonists in this film
are determined both by the female gender of these three generations
and their respective historical contexts. The film reveals how aspects of
female identity impart a particularity to the experiences of ‘forgetting’
that, in other works, are assumed to be the same for men as for women.
It also portrays how the traumatic experience of the war, and the silence
imposed during the dictatorship, affected the first two generations of
women, and prompted, in turn, confusion and frustration for the third
generation raised during the democracy. The question of transgen-
erational transmission, therefore, is shown to be more problematic
in Nadar than in Para que no me olvides, since the intergenerational
dialogue about the past that takes place between Mateo and David is
impossible between Leonor and Subirana. Certainly, Leonor’s personal
circumstances, together with her gendered experiences during a particu-
larly repressive period for women, play a crucial role in her decision not
to transmit her story to future generations.
Leonor’s strategy of silence was presumably motivated by several fac-
tors, including her generational experience of the trauma of the war, as
well as the gendered experience of unwed motherhood in a conservative
era.33 However, the principal reason for Leonor’s silence was probably
her partner’s left-wing inclinations, as Jordà observes in one scene: ‘It
was better being a single mother than the widow of an executed man.’
As Luisa Passerini argues: ‘Certain forms of oblivion point to a lack of
identity or to an effort to cover up some of its components.’34 In the early
post-war years, a connection to anyone executed by Franco’s regime
was cause for stigmatization, imprisonment or even execution. In order
to protect herself and her child, Leonor did not reveal the identity of
Ana’s father, until Subirana’s present-day curiosity leads her to break
her silence. As Labanyi has noted, due to the length of the dictatorship,
silence was a survival strategy that endured over several generations.35
Consequently, Subirana is unable to obtain any information about
Arroniz from her grandmother because she has been silent for too long,
and from her mother because she never possessed such knowledge.
The secondary characters among the first generation in Nadar offer
broader insights into war survivors’ memories. The reluctance of both
Leonor’s younger sister, Herminia, and the historian, Abel Paz, to discuss
issues from the past attests to the culture of silence and censorship
imposed by the dictatorship. After Leonor dies, only Herminia – the sole
survivor of four siblings – is in a position to provide more details about
the family history. For Subirana, discovering this silenced part of her
family history has become a pressing need, essential for reconstructing
her own identity. As Todorov has noted: ‘If we learn something about
the past that forces us to reinterpret the image that we had of ourselves
and of our own circle, we have to modify not just an isolated aspect
of our selves, but our very identity.’36 Herminia, however, repeatedly
refuses to speak about the past, claiming that Leonor would not have
wished it, a comment that prompts the director to respond in the
voice-over: ‘I hope that she understands that her sister’s story is also my
story.’37 Although a certain detachment from our predecessors is neces-
sary to understand who we are, as Vita Fortunati and Elena Lamberti
point out, a certain continuity is also required.38 Herminia’s negative
attitude to Subirana’s project indicates the continuing fear of disclosing
a family secret that has been suppressed for decades.
Similarly, Abel Paz, a former anarchist combatant in the Civil War
and the author of numerous works on anarchist history, also refuses
to answer Subirana’s questions about political ideology. In order to
complete her research, Subirana considers it essential to speak to some-
one who can explain Arroniz’s outlook. Although Paz’s appearance
in the film does not contribute much to Subirana’s investigation, his
testimony illustrates the desencanto (disappointment) of old left-wing
militants with the political system and with the position of the working
class in Spain. Through this testimony, Fran Benavente suggests, Nadar
claims the legacy of Joaquín Jordà’s militant cinema, as ‘the resistance
by historian Abel Paz seems to be the “real” trace of a rupture against
any attempt to devise a line of continuity or constitute a conscious leg-
acy of a certain memory of activism.’39 Paz’s lack of straight answers, his
annoyed facial expressions, his continuous silences and his aggressive
tone reveal his discontent with the country’s socio-political develop-

ment and extended conformism. He concludes the interview with a
sceptical comment that denotes a strong feeling of frustration: ‘I don’t
know anything at all, do you understand? Because everything I know
it’s like as if I didn’t know.’
By filming Nadar, Subirana materializes her own memories of her
grandmother, depicted in the domestic videos and, at a later stage, of
her own mother as well. Ana’s role in the documentary is not prominent
until she is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. From this moment, the
progression of her illness is incorporated in the film. Replicating her
mother’s behavior, Ana has also not spoken about Subirana’s own father
as she was not able to replace the absence of her own father with any
other memory (as Julià claims is often the case for the second genera-
tion). This silence, spanning two generations, can only be disrupted by
Subirana. In their visit to the cemetery, Subirana is able to reconcile her
mother’s memory of her own father’s ghost by providing her not only
with a physical memorial, but a heroic one. Ana looks very impressed
when she sees her father’s name engraved on the war memorial, as
Subirana observes with irony on the voice-over: ‘That same day she
decided that her father was a hero. A stone column forgotten at a cem-
etery was enough for her.’ Ana’s lack of inherited memory has been
replaced by the memory of restitution.
The generational transmission of the past has been inverted: from
daughter to mother. The process is also transgressive as it subverts the
stereotype of history as a form of knowledge passed from men to other
men. In the absence of reparation at a national level, the generation of
grandchildren seeks to acknowledge their predecessors’ past through
individual homages, as David does by transcribing his grandfather’s
memories and locating his childhood home. Subirana’s homage to her
family memory is corroborated in her documentary by means of a meta-
cinematic device. The final scene shows Subirana watching one of the
fictional scenes of her own documentary at a cinema, as the director
dedicates the film to her mother in the voice-over’s final comment.
As both the research project and film have progressed, Arroniz has
become increasingly distant from Subirana’s family. Throughout the
film he is represented as a shadow, the ghost that he always was for
Leonor and Ana, playfully embodied in a faceless film-noir gangster
inspired by Jean Paul Belmondo’s character in Breathless ( Jean-Luc
Godard, 1960).40 Near the conclusion, Subirana’s visit to Arroniz’s sister
finally puts a face to the ghost when she receives an old black-and-white
photograph. Subirana subsequently explains how, looking at this
photograph, she felt as if two separate historical moments had been

brought into alignment to confront a ghost.41 In the film, the photo-
graph (as is illustrated below) is observed within a storage box, as
Subirana’s voice-over exclaims: ‘I have the feeling that he looks at me
and tells me: how the hell have you arrived here?’ (Figure 3.2)
As the documentary reveals, Subirana’s project has been transformed
into a journey of self-discovery, reinforcing and validating her identity as
a member of a family of single mothers. In addition, the impossibility of
the transgenerational transmission of a part of her family story has made
her aware of the importance of recording her mother’s and grandmother’s
past in order to pass it on to her own son.
Rather than offering answers about post-war Spain, Nadar poses many
questions, which are often voiced as Subirana is swimming, as the title
symbolically suggests. In general, the film depicts places associated
with water as reflective spaces for the director, but this provides also an
invitation for viewers to reflect on their own past, and to contemplate
their own story. Subirana recounts the response of a 95-year-old man
who, after fighting on the Nationalist side, went into exile in Mexico.42
He admitted to her, with tears in his eyes, that her film had moved him,
causing him to reflect on his own years of silence when he suppressed his
memories by concealing his own war stories from his children. His expe-
rience suggests that Subirana’s film has the capacity not only to promote
constructive debate about the past, but reconciliation on both sides.
Figure 3.2 ‘How the hell have you arrived here?’; Nadar/Swimming (Carla
Subirana, 2008)
Source: Image courtesy of Carla Subirana.
Conclusion
This essay has presented an analysis of two films that problematize

the fragility of memory, while emphasizing its protean nature across
generations. Todorov’s observations concerning the different ways of
remembering the past, and the impossibility of conscious forgetting,
are reflected in the diverse representations of attitudes towards memory
in both films. As the number of war survivors diminishes, and their
recollections become less accurate, the memory of the first generation is
beginning to fade. In Para que no me olvides, this is suggested by Mateo’s
slight loss of memory in several scenes, whereas in Nadar the impact of
Alzheimer’s disease on the lives of Leonor and Ana assumes a central
role. With aging, the ability to remember and transmit the past becomes
no longer a matter of conscious choice, as in the case of Mateo and
Leonor. Consequently, both films emphasize how a more complete and
inclusive collective memory depends on the collection, preservation
and dissemination of a wide range of first-hand testimonies.
The most original contribution made by both family portraits lies in
their avoidance of a traumatic or nostalgic representation of the past
by means of an intergenerational perspective that attempts to reconcile
divergent generational memories. Both films eschew the victimization
of their characters, aiming to vindicate the silenced memories of their
predecessors at an individual as well as a collective level. Para que no me
olvides focuses on Mateo’s war and childhood experiences, stressing his
determination to sustain the memory of his relatives until an official
apology can be won. Mateo’s memory of confrontation emphasizes how
individual memories diverge from the official memory. Through the
character of Irene, the film suggests that addressing the past remains
necessary both in order to live in the present and to fashion a future.
In this way, the film refutes the notion that a peaceful future is incom-
patible with remembrance of the violence of the past which underpins
the transition era’s pact of oblivion.
Nadar’s narration of a silenced family story over three generations
of women stresses the positive – but also precarious – aspects of being
raised in a fatherless family. Instead of becoming the story of an execu-
ted left-wing anti-Franco fighter, the documentary’s focus shifts to the
resilience of strong and independent women who were forced by his-
torical circumstances to remain silent. The film not only explores the
beautiful relationship between the director, her mother and her grand-
mother, but also depicts gatherings with single mothers and divorced
women. The consequent normalization and celebration of these repre-
sentations of alternative family structures that challenge the Francoist
patriarchal model of family becomes Subirana’s major contribution to

the nation’s collective memory.
Notes
1. Tzvetan Todorov, Hope and Memory: Lessons from the Twentieth Century
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), p. 311.
2. José F. Colmeiro, Memoria histórica e identidad cultural. De la postguerra a la
modernidad (Barcelona: Anthropos Editorial, 2005), p. 13.
3. For details of this law, see http://www.boe.es, date accessed 14 April 2014.
4. Julio Aróstegui, ‘Traumas colectivos y memorias generacionales’ in Julio
Aróstegui and François Godicheau (eds), Guerra Civil: mito y memoria
(Madrid: Marcial Pons Historia, 2006), p. 58.
5. Paloma Aguilar, Memoria y olvido de la guerra civil (Madrid: Alianza, 1996),
pp. 27–29.
6. Aróstegui, ‘Traumas colectivos’, p. 63.
7. Ibid., p. 59.
8. Ibid., p. 81.
9. Jesús Izquierdo Martín and Pablo Sánchez León, La guerra que nos han
contado. 1936 y nosotros (Madrid: Alianza, 2006), p. 304. My translation.
10. Aguilar, Memoria y olvido, p. 30.
11. Ibid., p. 31
12. Jo Labanyi, ‘The Languages of Silence: Historical Memory, Generational
Transmission and Witnessing in Contemporary Spain’, Journal of Romance
Studies 9 (2009), p. 25.
13. Santos Julià, ‘Bajo el imperio de la memoria’, Revista de Occidente 302–303
(2006), p. 13.
14. Aróstegui, Traumas colectivos, p. 82.
15. Ibid., p. 89.
16. Labanyi, ‘The Languages’, p. 25.
17. Santos Julià, ‘Echar al olvido: Memoria y amnistía de la transición’, Claves de
Razón Práctica 129 (2003), p. 23.
18. Other documentary-makers have also taken a personal or autobiographical
approach to portray the memory of surviving eyewitnesses, including
Mujeres en pie de guerra (Susana Koska, 2004), Bucarest, la memoria perdida
(Albert Solé, 2008) and Death In El Valle (C. M. Hardt, 2005).
19. In 2012, I interviewed both directors as part of my PhD project during
a research field trip funded by Flinders University (all translations in
quotations that follow are my own).
20. Natalia Sanjuán Bornay, Interview with Patricia Ferreira, 25 July 2012.
21. Natalia Sanjuán Bornay, Interview with Carla Subirana, 21 June 2012.
22. Isolina Ballesteros, ‘Feminine Spaces of Memory: Mourning and Melodrama
in Para que no me olvides (2005) by Patricia Ferreira’, in Parvati Nair and Julián
Daniel Gutiérrez-Albilla (eds), Hispanic and Lusophone Women Filmmakers:
Theory, Practice and Difference, (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
2013), p. 43.
23. Laia Quílez Esteve, ‘Memorias protésicas: Posmemoria y cine documental
en la España contemporánea’, Historia y Comunicación Social 18 (2013),
p. 388.
24. Jaqueline Cruz, ‘Para que no olvidemos: La propuesta de recuperación de la

memoria histórica de Patricia Ferreira’, Letras Hispanas 3 (2006), p 36.
25. Aguilar, Memoria y olvido, p. 26.
26. Cruz, ‘Para que no olvidemos’, p. 34.
27. Igor Barrenetxea Marañón, ‘¡Nada de olvidar! El cine y la memoria histórica’,
Quaderns de cine 3 (2008), p. 11.
29. This book also appears in the film, La lengua de las mariposas ( José Luis
Cuerda, 1999). Like Mateo’s father, Don Gregorio (also played by Fernándo
Fernán Gómez) uses Treasure Island to introduce his pupil, Moncho, to
reading fiction. As Moncho finishes this adventure novel, featuring a
coming-of-age story parallel to his own, the Spanish Civil War starts, and his
teacher is arrested by the Nationalists.
30. Cruz, ‘Para que no olvidemos’, p. 37.
31. Ballesteros, ‘Feminine Spaces’, p. 47.
32. Ryan Prout, ‘Critical Condition: Alzheimer’s and Identity in Carla Subirana’s
Nadar (2008)’, Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies 18 (2012), p. 250.
33. The social marginalisation and stigmatisation of unmarried mothers during
the Franco era was explored by Ferreira in her subsequent documentary
Señora de (2009).
34. Luisa Passerini, ‘Memories Between Silence and Oblivion’, in Katharine
Hodgkin and Susannah Radstone (eds), Memory, History, Nation: Contested
Pasts (New Brunswick NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2006), p. 245.
36. Todorov, Hope and Memory, p. 165.
37. The emphasis is mine.
38. Vita Fortunati and Elena Lamberti, ‘Cultural Memory: A European
Perspective’ in Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning (eds), Media and Cultural
Memory: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook (Berlin and New York:
Walter de Gruyter, 2008), p. 127.
39. Fran Benavente, ‘Formas de resistencia en el documental español contem-
poráneo: en busca de los gestos radicales perdidos’, Hispanic Review 80
(2012), p. 615. My translation.
40. Sanjuán Bornay, Subirana interview, 21 June 2012.
41. Ibid.
42. Ibid.
4
The Enchantment and
Disenchantment of the
Archival Image: Politics and
Affect in Contemporary
Portuguese Cultural Memories
Alison Ribeiro de Menezes
In recent years, memory studies have begun focussing on embodied

memories rather than on places and sites of memory. This has occurred
at the same time as an ‘affective turn’ in cultural theory, in which the
body is understood, not in terms of constructionism, but in terms of
‘intensities’ that represent non-cognitive disruptions and discontinui-
ties in conscious experience.1 Memory’s bodies, especially in contexts
such as those of ‘the disappeared’, are frequently objects rather than
subjects: initially the objects of torture and suffering, they become,
through remembrance, the objects of others’ gazes (and at times oth-
ers’ politicized manipulations) at the same time as they elicit affective
and emotional responses from those who view them. They are also fre-
quently the objects of transnational gazes, as memory’s images now cir-
culate globally, evoking both national- and cultural-specific traumas as
well as becoming instrumentally linked to other, parallel or comparable,
but not identical, traumas. The global valency of the term, ‘the disap-
peared’, which originated with Southern Cone Latin American dictator-
ships, illustrates the point. The phrase now generally evokes notions of
illegal detention and forced disappearance, as well as the emotive situa-
tion of relatives and family members left dealing with the aftermath of
irrecuperable and possibly legally unproveable loss, which is frequently
crystalized in mug shots or identity photos of those missing.
Brian Massumi has stressed the primacy of affect in image recep-
tion,2 and Mark Hansen has explored the means by which visual, and
digital media in particular, may open up vistas on the normally imper-
ceptible ‘in-betweens’ of different emotional states; those micro-stages
65
66 Alison Ribeiro de Menezes
or moments of transition between one emotion and another that

may constitute an overabundance of affectivity.3 Nevertheless, classic
theorists of affect, such as Massumi or Nigel Thrift,4 regard it as pre-
cognitive and pre-ideological, rendering the political little more than
a consequence of visceral, pre-subjective forces rather than intentions,
meanings or reasons. This poses a conundrum for memory studies, most
particularly with regard to discussions of civic memory campaigns and
committed artistic memory work, both of which may draw upon emo-
tive images and solicit affective responses in order to achieve specific
political ends. If the political is no longer so much personal as uninten-
tional, and significantly influenced by pre-cognitive forces, and if affect
is triggered independently of objects in the world,5 this begs a series of
questions for those cultural approximations to the past that employ an
ethical frame. We might, then, ask: in what ways might the political and
the affective be entwined, and can creative artists explore and expose
this in a self-reflexive manner?
The affective turn has been viewed as a desire to re-enchant
‘fleshed’ experience,6 to step closer to the lived, and so re-connect with
dimensions of experience elided in the linguistic and discursive turn of
post-structuralism, while avoiding the dangers of biological essentialism.
I do not intend, with this focus on lost bodies, to evoke a melancholy
essentialism or irretrievable authentic presence, but instead, by drawing
on Sara Ahmed’s approach to the circulation of feelings, to explore ways
in which affect might indeed be imbricated in political agency. I am
interested in Ahmed’s focus on an ‘affective economy’,7 in which ‘affect
does not reside positively in the sign or commodity, but is produced as
an effect of its circulation’.8 This, I argue, is the means by which the
affective becomes imbued with the political, accumulating value as it
circulates and resonates. An object, Ahmed argues, is not inherently
fearsome, but its proximity may press upon the subject, threatening,
creating a response of fear. The more a sign circulates the more affective
it becomes, through processes of metonymic proximity and metaphoric
displacement, which draw upon hidden histories of affective encounter.
This concealed historicity creates a ‘stickiness’ to the sign which may
adhere, creating a ‘blockage’ that ‘stops the word moving or acquir-
ing new value’.9 In discussing hate crimes, for instance, Ahmed writes
that they work ‘as a form of violence against groups through violence
against the bodies of individuals. Violence against others may be one
way in which the other’s identity is fixed or sealed; the other is forced to
embody a particular identity by and for the perpetrator of the crime’.10
Although of a radically different nature, remembrance runs the risk of
Enchantment and Disenchantment of the Archival Image 67
a similar objectification of victims, fixing or sacralizing their bodies to

become ‘the body of the victim […] as testimony’.11 Ahmed’s concern
for the ‘mediation’ of affect is crucial here.12 As Gibbs notes of televi-
sion (although she might also observe the same of almost any mediated
image), ‘as affect migrates from body to body through the intermediary
of television, it carries ideas along with it’, acquiring ‘affective reso-
nance’.13 Images of trauma’s aftermath frequently display an impulse to
re-connect with a lost past, specifically lost lives and lost relationships.
The affective turn as a desire for re-enchantment, then, goes to the
heart of embodied memory, which I understand here in two senses:
firstly, as a focus on bodies and individuals, whether living, suffering
or deceased; and secondly, as a process of remembrance that stresses,
utilizes and plays upon embodied practices and affective resonances.
In this regard, I build on Jill Bennett’s focus on art that is ‘transactive’
rather than ‘communicative’, that is to say, art that sets out to examine
‘how affect is produced within and through a work, and how it might
be experienced by an audience coming to the work’.14 This represents
a shift from a focus on the art of trauma, understood as the deposit
of primary experience, to art’s engagement with trauma, taken to be
a form of conceptual engagement that examines not the affinity of
empathy but ‘feeling for another that entails an encounter with some-
thing irreducible and different, often inaccessible’.15 I do not, however,
draw on Bennett’s perspective only in the context of trauma, but more
broadly to examine the politics of affect. Art, in this approach, is not
representation but encounter, arguably offering a means to avoid the
flattening of historical and cultural specificity in the appearance of glo-
balized memory cultures, where transnational connections may efface
the specificity of experience. It is thus in the dynamic between the
artwork and the spectator that an affective and a critical function may
emerge, pointing precisely to that imbrication of affect and politics that
I am seeking to uncover.
Nevertheless, I wish to draw a distinction, as Bennett also does, between
this position and Geoffrey Hartman’s argument that trauma works create
a form of ‘secondary trauma’, since I am here stressing not primary expe-
rience, but an affective response to the experience of an aesthetic object
that simultaneously – and, one might argue, paradoxically – arouses a
sense of critical inquiry. These are works, in Bennett’s words, that are ‘out-
side representation [but] not inside trauma’.16 In exploring this, I discuss
three contemporary documentary films that rethink approaches to dic-
tatorship and revolution in Portugal using the visual language of affect.
They deploy images that become moments of intensity, crystalizing a
series of historical memories and unfinished legacies and, at the same

time, interrogating processes of spectatorship and reaction that create a
self-reflexive encounter with and through affect.
Re-encountering the ‘revolution within the revolution’:

José Filipe Costa’s Linha Vermelha
Portugal and her neighbour Spain were, according to Samuel Huntingdon’s

formula, the first cases in the so-called third-wave of democratisations in
the late 20th century;17 40 years on, both nations are engaged in pub-
lic and intellectual debates concerning the nature and legacies of their
transitions to democracy.18 In Portugal, interest has arisen regarding an
overwhelmingly nostalgic discourse of memory in the metropolis regard-
ing the African wars of the 1960s and early 1970s,19 and more recently a
‘historians’ debate’ on the question of whether or not the Salazar regime
should – or indeed, must – be labelled ‘fascist’. Nevertheless, Portugal’s
unmastered national past is less contentious than the memory debates
that have surfaced in Spain since approximately the turn of the mil-
lennium. António Costa Pinto has described in several articles how the
manner of the Portuguese Revolution of 1974, and the ensuing purges
of certain components of state bureaucracy, brought about a successful –
if tumultuous – closure to the Salazar-Caetano dictatorship.20 Via the
rupture of 25 April, Portugal dealt with the potentially traumatic legacy
of dictatorship in quite a different manner to Spain, where reconciliation
and consensus drove a transition to democracy that entailed a pragmatic
sidelining of issues to do with the crimes of the Civil War and Franco
Regime.21 Having opened Polícia Internacional e de Defesa do Estado (PIDE)
files and made them accessible to their subjects under strict conditions,
Portugal does not face the level of accusation of archival silencing that
has been levied at Francoist and post-Francoist Spain.
Nevertheless, Portugal’s mastering of her recent past is not uncon-
tentious; the nation has still to confront an unabashedly nostalgic
remembrance of the colonial wars, and there has, since the 1970s,
existed a radical left discourse that interprets the Revolution as incom-
plete, resulting from the defeat of the radicalism of the verão quente of
1975 by the structures and forces of capitalism and liberal democracy.
In this sense, to borrow Nancy Gina Bermeo’s phrase from her study of
land occupations during the Processo Revolucionário Em Curso (PREC),
‘the revolution within the revolution’ is seen by sectors of the left as
having been betrayed.22 Bermeo argues that the land occupations were
not politically orchestrated, but largely a result of local actions arising
from a lack of confidence that the organized political groupings of

the Revolutionary period would defend the interests of the rural poor.
This included the Portuguese Communist Party, which supported the
occupations once they were underway but had not specifically initiated
them. Bermeo cites, as illustration, the case of Torre Bela, a property
near Santaném that belonged to the Duke of Lafões, and her descrip-
tion provides an excellent context for my analysis of documentary
treatments of the event. Bermeo writes:
The occupation was led by an elected leader named Wilson. Wilson
had been chosen by a village assembly to go to the Ministry of Labor
in Lisbon and petition for some sort of relief for the chronic unemploy-
ment in the area. He travelled between Lisbon and his village for over
a month meeting with government officials in various ministries, but
returned with no concrete offers of assistance. He became discouraged
and, reading of successful land seizures elsewhere, decided to propose
an occupation to the residents of his own village. He called a meeting
and suggested a land seizure ‘without vandalism and without politi-
cal parties’. Only a third of the individuals present voted to go ahead
with the plan. Needing more support, he went to Marcussa, a poorer
village three kilometres away, which actually adjoined the property he
proposed to occupy. His idea was accepted with unanimity. The next
day, approximately 100 local residents, the vast majority of whom were
unemployed farmworkers, gathered nervously at the border of the prop-
erty and walked four kilometres to the main house. The owner of the
property was far from the scene. The local armed forces, the Institute for
Agrarian Reform and the political parties of the area were not informed
of the occupation before it took place.23
There are a number of key points to note in this description of events,
not least the frustration of the land occupiers, the example of seizures
elsewhere, the lack of political involvement at the start and the concern
to avoid vandalism. The Torre Bela occupation was filmed by a German
documentary filmmaker, Thomas Harlan, and first screened as Torre Bela
in 1977. Harlan’s documentary has since become the basis of a filmic
reworking in José Filipe Costa’s documentary, Linha Vermelha, on which
I focus here.
In re-reading Harlan’s work in 2011, 37 years after the events and 34
after Torre Bela’s first screening, Costa initiates a historical dialogue in
which the original footage becomes the subject of memory work. Now
reaching the end of his life, Harlan’s ageing suggests a generational
shift in memories of the Revolution, symbolized in Costa’s jump cuts
between the sights and sounds of a hospital and the image of a vase of
dying roses, which evokes European socialism and arguably, in the post-
2008 context, discussions over its complicity in, and failure to respond
adequately to, the early 21st-century crisis of capitalism. Harlan’s
recording of the physical occupation of the land and its manual culti-
vation is re-enacted in Costa’s own manipulations of the earlier direc-
tor’s print. The celluloid body of Torre Bela becomes a rather complex
memory icon that, rather than standing indexically for the original
events, approximates to them and, in the process, flaunts the activity of
remembrance. Thus the apparent enchantment of recovery and histori-
cal proximity ends up stressing the process of image recycling, creating
for the contemporary viewer a new encounter with those past events.
This dialogue of past and present, and its stress on memory’s temporal
horizons, highlights what Ahmed terms the ‘stickiness’ of words and
images that may adhere or crystalize into particular constellations at
certain historical moments. Costa’s quest to understand Harlan’s moti-
vation in recording the land occupation of Torre Bela, as well as his
approach to the filming, becomes a search to understand the meaning
of the ‘revolution within the revolution’ in the context of the early
20th century.
With his layering of visual discourses, Costa moves away from an
approach to documentary that privileges representationalism – what Bill
Nichols has called the genre’s ‘discourse of sobriety’ – and towards Stella
Bruzzi’s emphasis on performativity.24 The result is a focus on shifts in
the history of signification,25 in which the past is presented as an injury
or site of collective pain, re-encountered affectively by the spectator in
the present. The pain, in this context, is already political. The injury to
the body politic that the Salazar dictatorship inflicted is reflected in the
pain of Harlan’s original subjects, a pain felt and expressed collectively,
although not unambiguously. In examining closely the question of
Harlan’s role in potentially engineering dramatic moments – such as
his key protagonist Wilson’s over-emotional and melodramatic demand
for food, or the collective’s invasion of the landowner’s house – Costa
subverts the supposedly indexical nature of documentary. The viewer
re-encounters events through the manipulation of the original footage,
the addition of interviews with Roberto Perpignani, Harlan’s original
editor, and a narrative voice-over that contextualizes the re-reading for
the contemporary era. As a result, the very body, or skin,26 of Harlan’s
film is injured by Costa’s memory work. Two sequences are particularly
important in this regard: two travelling shots of a wall at the property,
which add a visual architecture to Costa’s film, and the episode of the
occupation of the house, which becomes central to the drama.
Linha Vermelha, like Torre Bela before it, places considerable stress
on landscape. Switching between contemporary vistas of the alpine
hospital, where Harlan lies dying, and Harlan’s own images of the rural
Ribatejo, where the estate of Torre Bela is located, Costa establishes a
series of linkages that are predicated not simply upon the importance of
the land for the workers, but upon the symbol of the land as a diagnos-
tic tool for Portuguese socio-economic affairs. The land thus comes to
stand not only for the ‘revolution with the revolution’, but also for the
process of its cinematic recording. The twilight of Harlan’s life implic-
itly suggests the twilight of revolutionary utopianism. Thus, Harlan’s
panorama shots of Torre Bela, accompanied by the urgent voices of the
workers, full of emotive power as they plan their occupation,27 become
in Costa’s reworking voices that are doomed to failure; they echo over
a landscape that the early 20th-century viewer knows is not collectiv-
ized, leaving the spectator with a wrenching sense of failure. The ‘linha
vermelha’, or red line, of Costa’s title is implicitly evoked by the wall sur-
rounding the property, which Costa includes in two separate travelling
shots.28 The wall becomes a symbol of the occupation, via its indication
of the socio-economic division that the revolution aims to overcome.
Harlan is heard in Costa’s film reflecting on the relationship between the
events he films and his own documentary practice, which he describes
as a ‘ligne rouge’, that is, a methodological hypothesis in which those
who make the film and those who are its subjects seek self-consciously
to understand the process upon which they are engaged. This, Harlan
declares, is an apprenticeship of revolution. For Costa, who flaunts
these images of the estate’s boundary wall, Harlan’s red line becomes an
emotive and affective symbol of exclusion, a literal and metaphorical
cause of social pain. But it is also a self-reflexive trope, opening a discus-
sion on the constructedness and performativity of Harlan’s documen-
tary practice that is then continued in Costa’s exploration of the filming
of the workers’ entry into the landowner’s residence.
The occupation of the house is the sequence in Harlan’s film that has
caused the most discussion, perhaps because of its affective qualities.
A seizing of power through the occupation of space, the invasion of the
house has been criticized as theatrical and manipulated. Yet both Costa
and Perpignani interpret it in a more complex manner, arguing that it
is not a matter of deliberate staging. Rather, the presence of the camera
turned reality into a performance. In this view, there is no ‘authentic’
reality underlying or betrayed by the documentary recording, since the
original events became shaped by the fact of their filming. As Costa puts
it, ‘the making of the film was part of the actual writing of the event’.29
The Revolution thus becomes a spectacle that, in echo of Bennett, is re-

encountered in the present. Costa’s film dissects the body of Harlan’s to
reveal the complicity between the workers’ agency and Harlan’s filming;
the presence of the camera leads the workers towards theatrical gestures,
shaping their encounter with the landowner’s possessions just as the
celluloid shapes the spectator’s encounter with the events.
Likewise, Costa’s dramatically lit shots of an objet trouvé, in the form
of a smoothing iron re-discovered long after the occupation, turns the
viewer’s attention towards the question of the meaning of historical
objects, now presented as museum-like relics of a forgotten history.
Possessing the aura of a Benjaminian work of art, but also the arbi-
trariness of Duchamp’s ready mades, the iron symbolizes the ambigu-
ous relationship between art and reality, the event and its celluloid
crystalize those images. In this sense, just like the symbolic wall divid-
ing social classes as well as reality from its aesthetic representation,
the iron evokes the paradoxical meanings of the ‘red line’ that Harlan
and Costa posit as an explanation of their documentary aesthetic. For
Costa, the linha vermelha stands for the line that the workers cross
in occupying the land, as well as for the blurred boundary between
events and their recording. But it also stands for the overlap between
politics and affect, the exploration of which leads the spectator not
simply to view or consume Harlan’s film four decades after the events,
as if it were some outmoded or historical object. Instead, Costa’s work
crystalizes Harlan’s images into a new visual and auditory experience,
investing the events with renewed significance. The danger of this
belated investment in affective memory, despite Costa’s emphasis on
performative documentary, is that it casts the re-encounter with the
past as a re-encounter with the sublime, a nostalgic re-enchantment
of lost possibilities via a re-encounter with the archival image, an issue
to which I return in my conclusion. First, however, I discuss two per-
formative documentaries that create an affective encounter with the
repression apparatus of the Salazar-Caetano Regime, namely Susana de
Sousa Dias’s Natureza Morta and 48.
Re-encountering repression: Susana de Sousa Dias’s

Natureza Morta and 48
Given the proximity of its 40th anniversary, it is not surprising that

the Carnation Revolution of 1974 has come under recent scrutiny in
Portuguese cultural contexts. Likewise, the Salazar-Caetano dictatorship
has attracted attention, leading to something of a ‘historians’ debate’ in
the summer of 2012.30 Whether or not this skirmish over the state of
Portuguese historiography proved productive, it would seem to signal
a shift in historiographic generations as younger voices establish them-
selves in divergent ways. Certainly, the debate crystalized fracture lines
and differing views of the recent past in contemporary Portugal, with
critiques that certain historians were engaged in an airbrushing of the
evils of the dictatorship. The bitter academic verão quente (hot summer)
of 2012 is but a part of a larger move to revisit the period of the Estado
Novo, or New State, in recent Portuguese academic and cultural pro-
duction. Questions of political repression, imprisonment, deaths and
torture have formed part of this revisionism,31 no doubt because they
permit some evaluation of the repressive severity of the dictatorship,
but also presumably as part of the rise of a ‘politics of regret’ in western
culture.32 Against this backdrop, Sousa Dias’s experimental documenta-
ries, which bring together question of the dictatorship’s repression but
also its pursuit of a brutal colonial war, can be interpreted as aesthetic
stagings of memory work.
Natureza Morta recycles film footage from the period of the dictator-
ship in a manner reminiscent of the work of Italian directors, Yervant
Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi, particularly their From the Pole to the
Equator (1987). This use of ‘found footage’,33 along with the recovered
identity photos from the PIDE archive, works, as does Costa’s recycling
of Harlan’s reels, to place the viewer in a new relationship with old
images. But Sousa Dias deforms these earlier cinematic images with
close ups, fade in and fade out, and a radically slowed temporal frame.
Her approach recalls Walter Benjamin’s notion of ‘unconscious optics’
outlined in his famous essay, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction’. Benjamin’s concern there was for the ways in which
technology could deepen perception by ‘focusing on hidden details of
familiar objects’. He argued that film, more so than photography, expands
the previous limits of natural perception via the close-up, which expands
space, and slow motion techniques, which extend movement to reveal
‘entirely new structural formations of the subject. […] an unconsciously
penetrated space is substituted for a space consciously explored by
man’.34 Benjamin thus exposes the extent to which film can ‘disturb
and disrupt conscious acts of looking’,35 and so examine hidden or
previously invisible aspects of reality. In her work on memory and the
visual image, Marianne Hirsch takes this further, deploying unconscious
optics to expose gaps and silences in the optics of the familial gaze.
For her, ‘looking occurs in the interface between the imaginary and
the symbolic. It is mediated by complex cultural, historical and social
screens.’36 Similarly for Sousa Dias, the exposure of Benjamin’s uncon-

scious optics, via both the close-up and the use of slow motion – what
Hansen terms ‘video time’37 – on a body of still and moving images from
the period of the Salazar dictatorship permits an examination of gaps
and silences in its legacy in contemporary Portuguese political and civic
discourse. These images thus flaunt precisely the aspect that Benjamin
feared would disappear with technological reproduction, namely the
illusory nature of the depth and realism that the photographic image
creates. If Benjamin viewed the proximity of such images to the ‘real’
as having fascistic implications, Sousa Dias turns his thinking against
totalitarianism in her visual scrutiny of the Salazar Regime’s narrative
of Portuguese identity.
Natureza Morta is entirely devoid of dialogue and consists of a series
of black-and-white manipulated images with soundtrack, although this
does not mean that the work lacks a narrative frame. The film opens with
a few short lines of textual summary of 20th-century Portuguese history,
stressing the advent of the military dictatorship in 1926 and its end with
the Carnation Revolution of 1974. Sousa Dias’s montage appears disrup-
tive and non-linear, but she does retain a broadly chronological develop-
ment via sequences showing key pillars of support for the Regime – the
military, the Church, and, less importantly, social movements such as
Mocidade Portuguesa. The importance of the empire, reflected in scenes
depicting native parades, as well as more home-grown demonstrations
of farming activity and religiosity, such as pilgrimages to Fátima, reaf-
firms the Estado Novo’s values as conservative, imperial and Catholic.
There is little questioning of this somewhat stereotypical depiction of
the Regime; the Mocidade Portuguesa, for instance, had much less impor-
tance and impact than Sousa Dias’s film would suggest. Nevertheless, the
director disrupts the Regime’s narrative of Portuguese identity through
the treatment of images of the colonial wars and the splicing of PIDE
archival photographs into the montages. The opening sequence depict-
ing a bomb exploding in slow motion creates an affective encounter in
which the viewer is drawn into the experience of an explosion at the
same time as the grainy quality and surface disfigurements of the film
highlights the fragility of the celluloid body, wounded just like the colo-
nial war dead. This transformation of the filmic body into an index of
the violence of the dictatorship and its pursuit of a bloody colonial war
is extended in a sequence in which fatally injured and disfigured bodies
are displayed alongside images of a child’s pram and a sewing machine.
Themes of war and domesticity together here raise questions about
unwarranted atrocities, but Sousa Dias’s slowing of the footage has the
effect also of bring to the viewer’s attention the surface of the film print,
so that the gashes on the bodies are echoed in the disfigurements of the
reproduced images. The wound of the war has been compounded, this
sequence suggests, by the injustice of historical forgetting.
Sousa Dias stresses a performative dimension to her documentary
that self-referentially disturbs conventional views of the Salazar period
as safely consigned to history. Rather like the explosion with which
she starts her film, Sousa Dias blows a hole in interpretations of the
Revolution as a moment of historical rupture that successfully ended
the dictatorship, blocking off the past from the present. Her use of
mug shots from the PIDE reinforces this point. These images indicate
the political exercise of power via repression in Salazarist Portugal.
Benjamin remarks in his essay: ‘It is no accident that the portrait was
the focal point of early photography. The cult of remembrance of loved
ones, absent or dead, offers a last refuge for the cult value of the picture.
For the last time the aura emanates from the early photographs in the
fleeting expression of a human face.’38 But these are different remem-
bered victims, functioning subversively to underline silences and gaps
in Portuguese public memory. Indeed, underlining the Freudian origins
of Benjamin’s notion of ‘unconscious optics’, Sousa Dias’s police mug
shots might be taken to suggest the return of individual histories that
together constitute a repressed counter-narrative of Salazarist Portugal.
In Sousa Dias’s second documentary, 48, the viewer is affectively
drawn into the experiences of some of the political prisoners of the 48
years of the Salazar-Caetano dictatorship. This film, which does not
include archival footage but focuses on recycling the PIDE mug shots of
Natureza Morta, works largely through a testimonial mode. Nevertheless,
it complicates any sense of direct unmediated testimony, instead estab-
lishing an affective encounter for the viewer through a temporal mis-
match between those PIDE images and the accompanying voices of the
individuals who recall in the present their experiences of detention and
torture at the hands of the political police. There is also a mismatch
in terms of the stillness of the original photos – static recordings of
visual identity at a moment in time – and Sousa Dias’s re-photography,
which, using digital manipulations to video, animates the images with
lighting effects as well as fade in and fade out. This is a development
from the more straightforward use of PIDE photos in Natureza Morta,
resulting from Sousa Dias’s perception that a viewer’s gaze tends not to
linger long on a still image, whereas a sense of movement engages the
spectator, creating an affective link with the person depicted and a con-
sequent concern to understand the experiences they narrate.39 Sound
enhances this identification, establishing an encounter in which the

viewer does not simply view, but is drawn towards sharing the experi-
ences of the speaking subject. However, this is a sharing akin to Kaja
Silverman’s notion of heteropathic identification, in which there is an
affective perception of connection, and yet also an awareness of sepa-
ration from the torture victim.40 It is not, then, the same as a belated
usurpation of the place of the suffering subject.
The narrative dimension of 48 is largely displaced by an affective
encounter in which static mug shots are digitally animated, not simply
to reveal their status as archival object, but in order to re-embody a
power play between the PIDE and their prisoners.41 The use of mug shots
is particularly important for the imbrication of politics in this affective
encounter. Normative, familiar, politically codified markers of identity,
mug shots are intended to capture an objective likeness of an individual,
freezing an identity outside the contours of time and space. Thus, they
symbolize the loss of freedom, agency and control over one’s body that
imprisonment and torture entail. In Sousa Dias’s film, the animation of
these images re-creates a space of resistance aimed at permitting the spec-
tator to experience the power relations between jailers, who control the
circumstance in which prisoners are detained and their photo likenesses
taken, and the prisoners, whose only control over their fate is an expres-
sion of disdain or defiance at the moment of being photographed.42 This
reinvests still images with what Hansen has called the ‘micro-stages of
affect’, demonstrating how new media can open up an ‘embodied yet
intentional apprehension’ of emotive states.43 Focusing on facial expres-
sions, and accompanying these with a narrative crescendo as the battle
of wills between political prisoners and the PIDE is explained, Sousa Dias
draws on the materiality of images – the skin of the film, as Marks puts
it – to emphasize the physicality of torture. We view the evidence of cor-
poral suffering not via direct injuries, but through the disdainful gazes
and dishevelled appearances of those who have undergone the torture
of sleep deprivation. But the Regime’s desire to control the prisoners’
bodies is subverted in Sousa Dias’s documentary. Via re-photography,
the mug shots undergo subtle changes in illumination, which creates
around the cheekbones of many of the faces a luminosity that seems at
times almost to melt the surface of the photograph. In one photo, the
viewer can see the edge of the print and a shoulder from the following
print, drawing attention to the serial quality of these archival objects and
the manner in which they, during the 48 long years of the dictatorship,
stand for a collective socio-political pain.
The corporality of the images, their re-embodiment reflected in

minute movements added to the still image, thus becomes a means to
endow the prisoners with political agency at the same time as it lets the
viewer encounter the previously hidden experience of arrest – previously
hidden because the encounter between prisoner and PIDE was not a
public one, and because, for Sousa Dias, the Regime’s history of politi-
cal repression has become a victim of civic amnesia in contemporary
Portugal. Via its standard recognition as a normative, legal marker of
identity, the mug shot is inherently political; re-photographing it thus
creates an ‘transactive art’, to recall Bennett, in which the political and
the affective inevitably intersect. Yet the political interpretation of these
images, as opposed to their inherently political origins, ultimately
remains ambiguous, as is confirmed by the inclusion of one particular
photograph of a female detainee smiling. This is a facial expression that
the individual concerned would come to regret, since it cannot easily
be read as gesture of political opposition. Disrupting the flow of vacant,
disdainful or resistive expressions, this photo subverts 48’s insistence
on a single political narrative, wounding it and opening up an inquiry
into expected responses to repression versus habitual responses to being
photographed.
In another instance, the surface of a photo has been damaged, the
wound to the image clearly standing metonymically for the pain
inflicted by the Regime on the Portuguese body politic. Yet what really
punctuates Sousa Dias’s visual grammar of repression is the constant
presence of a metal stand against which the heads press. Alien and intru-
sive, it becomes endowed – at least for this viewer – with the features of
a ‘fearsome object’ that threatens pain, in Ahmed’s understanding of the
term. Pain, she argues, is best understood as a pressing upon the body;
a wound is thus ‘a trace of where the surface of another entity (however
imaginary) has impressed upon the body’.44 As Teresa Brennan argues,
affect is transmitted through entrainment, ‘the process by which human
affective responses are linked and repeated’, resulting in an ‘unlocking
[of] the affective constellations of repressed images […] enmeshed in
fantasy and memory, as well as projective judgement’.45 The affective
encounter generated by viewing this alien metal object repeatedly in
contact with political prisoners is to bring the spectator closer to the
‘fleshed’ experience of detention and abuse, simultaneously enchanting
the archival images with a sense of authenticity, and yet disenchanting
the viewer as to the inclusiveness and justness of Portugal’s contempo-
rary memory of dictatorship.
Conclusion: whither Portuguese memory work?
Approaching the past through an affective and transactive aesthetic

raises the question of whether or not this transforms the past into a site
of the sublime. As Robert Rosenstone notes in his discussion of history
in the documentary genre, this is an encounter ‘where the past is expe-
rienced in flashes but never explained’.46 In presenting the Portuguese
landscape as a diagnostic for socio-economic relations and lost possi-
bilities, Costa could be accused of making an appeal to the sublime; in
surrounding her ‘found footage’ and PIDE identity photos with the aura
of archival objects that transmit pain and injury, Sousa Dias gestures in
the same direction.
The ending of Natureza Morta, with its image of a carnation, the

symbol of the 1974 Revolution, disappearing through the door
lock of a prison – simultaneously suggesting a successful unlocking
of freedom through democracy, and yet also a melancholy loss of
Revolutionary utopianism – certainly presents the moment of 25
April 1974 through the lens of the sublime. Yet, Costa and Sousa
Dias both present their viewers with cinema art that is, in the end,
transactive. The affective encounter is aimed at creating the possibil-
ity of being heard and seen; of establishing a space for a politics of
listening.47 This is not an assimilation of the other’s experience, but
is akin to Silverman’s notion of heteropathic identification through
the re-cycling of images and the concomitant build-up of affect. In
presenting wounded bodies and wounded films, each director seeks
to allow affects to flow out to the spectator, who filters the visual
images through their own embodied nature at the same time as he
or she apprehends the political dimensions that do not simply attach
to these images in the moment of the affective encounter, but which
were already imbricated in them in the moment of their very coming
into being.
This is a practice that is evident in documentaries that engage in

memory work in other contexts,48 and I wish to conclude with some
thoughts on the transnational dimensions of the works discussed here.
The Portuguese Revolution of 1974 became symbolic of utopian hopes
realized on the European continent, especially in the wake of the 1973
coup d’état in Chile and the neoliberal ousting of Salvador Allende’s
government by Augusto Pinochet. Robert Kramer’s Scenes from the Class
Struggle in Portugal (1977) exemplifies this perspective in a film that,
like Harlan’s, aimed to document the revolution as it happened. Sousa

Dias’s incorporation of mug shots in Natureza Morta and 48 taps into a
more contemporary memory discourse, predicated upon identity photos,
that evokes both the Holocaust and the Latin American ‘disappeared’.
While discussing Natureza Morta at a recent conference, one Germanist
in my audience was surprised to discover that the individuals repre-
sented had not died or disappeared at the hands of the Portuguese
Regime.49 We have become accustomed to photos of this type as mark-
ers of a (frequently mass) loss of life, yet this is not the case with Sousa
Dias’s subjects. As Ahmed has argued, the circulation of certain types
of images triggers an affective economy and so a series of assumptions
that ‘stick’ to particular genres and modes of viewing and remembering.
The addition of testimonial narratives to the images in 48 simultane-
ously evokes and deconstructs this transnational economy of memory,
making it a work of considerable relevance beyond Portuguese cultural
studies. As memory becomes increasingly global, the need to under-
stand what such ‘travelling memories’ might mean in terms of the
addition of international perspectives and the erasure of local specifici-
ties becomes all the more pressing.50 This is important not just within,
but also beyond the field of Holocaust studies, where the global reach
of remembrance has tended to be analysed. Sousa Dias’s work raises the
issue of our affective encounters with memory’s ‘sticky images’ at the
same time as it refuses to endorse the normative suggestions that may
lie behind these. As Astrid Erll has recently pointed out, memory stud-
ies, the subject of varying conceptual formulations in and across diverse
cultures and languages, has come to mean different things to different
scholars. Portuguese memory studies are in many ways in their infancy,
yet the documentary practice studied here suggests that they already
insert themselves into and bring new perspectives upon urgent global
memory debates.
Notes
1. Mike Featherstone, ‘Body, Image and Affect in Consumer Culture’, Body &
Society, 16/1 (2010), p. 209.
2. Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham,
NC.: Duke University Press, 2002), p. 66.
3. Mark Hansen, ‘The Time of Affect, Or Bearing Witness to Life’, Critical Inquiry
30/3 (2004).
4. Nigel Thrift, Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect (London:
Routledge, 2008).
5. Ruth Leys, ‘The Turn to Affect: A Critique’, Critical Inquiry 37/3 (2011),
pp. 434–472 (437).
6. Constantina Papoulias and Felicity Callard, ‘Biology’s Gift: Interrogating the

Turn to Affect’, Body & Society 16/1 (2010), p. 39.
7. Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press 2004), p. 60.
8. Ahmed, The Cultural, p. 45.
9. Ibid., p. 92.
10. Ibid., p. 55.
11. Ibid., pp. 57–58.
12. Ibid., p. 28.
13. Anna Gibbs, ‘Contagious Feelings: Pauline Hanson and the Epidemiology
of Affect’, Australian Humanities Review, December 2001 (http://www.
australianhumanitiesreview.org, date accessed 1 March 2014).
14. Jill Bennett, Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art (Stanford:
Standford University Press, 2005), p. 7.
15. Bennett, Empathic Vision, p. 10.
16. Ibid., p. 35.
17. Samuel Huntingdon, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth
Century (Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993).
18. Kathryn Sikkink’s recent study, The Justice Cascade: How Human Rights
Prosecutions Are Changing World Politics (New York: Norton, 2011) builds on
Huntingdon, but also demonstrates the step-change in restorative justice
and international human-rights frameworks since the end of the Cold War,
rather than in the mid-1970s.
19. See, for instance, Paulo de Medeiros, ‘War Pics: Photographic Representations
of the Colonial War’, Luso-Brazilian Review 39 (2002), pp. 91–106.
20. António Costa Pinto, ‘Settling Accounts with the Past in a Troubled
Transition to Democracy’, in Alexandra Barahona de Brito, Carmen González
Enríquez and Paloma Aguilar (eds), The Politics of Memory: Transitional Justice
in Democratizing Societies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 65–91;
‘Political Purges and State Crisis in Portugal’s Transition to Democracy,
1975–1976’, Journal of Contemporary History 43 (2008), pp. 305–332; ‘The
Legacy of the Authoritarian Past in Portugal’s Democratisation, 1974–1976’,
Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 9 (2008), pp. 265–291.
21. Paloma Aguilar, Memory and Amnesia: The Role of the Spanish Civil War in the
Transition to Democracy, translated by Mark Oakley (Oxford: Bergahan, 2002).
22. Nancy Gina Bermeo, The Revolution Within the Revolution: Workers’ Control
in Rural Portugal (Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press, 1986).
Bermeo’s study obviously does not address contemporary interpretations
of these events, but concludes that ‘the advance of capitalist development
has suggested to some that the era of peasant revolts is drawing to an end’
(p. 222).
23. Bermeo, The Revolution Within the Revolution, p. 81.
24. Bill Nichols, Introduction to Documentary (Bloomington, IN.: Indiana University
Press, 2001), p. 39; Stella Bruzzi, New Documentary, 2nd edition (London:
Routledge, 2006), p. 1.
25. Belinda Smaill, The Documentary: Politics, Emotion, Culture (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2010), p. 6.
26. Laura U. Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the
Senses (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000).
27. José Filipe Costa, ‘When Cinema Forgets the Event’, Third Text 25/1 (2011),
p. 108.
28. José Filipe Costa, Linha Vermelha (2011), minutes 6 and 45 respectively.
29. Costa, ‘When Cinema Forgets the Event’, p. 113.
30. Filipe Ribeiro de Meneses, ‘Slander, Ideological Differences, or Academic
Debate? The Verão Quente of 2012 and the State of Portuguese Historiography’,
E-Journal of Portuguese History 10/1 (2012) (http://www.brown.edu/Departments/
Portuguese_Brazilian_Studies/, date accessed 1 March 2014).
31. See, for example, Irene Flunser de Pimentel, A História da PIDE (Lisbon:
Temas e Debates, 2007); Joáo Madeira (ed.), with Luís Farinha and Irene
Flunser de Pimentel, prologue by Fernando Rosas, Víctimas de Salazar: Estado
Novo e Violência Política (Lisbon: A Esfera dos Livros, 2007).
32. Jeffrey Olick, The Politics of Regret: On Collective Memory and Historical
Responsibility (New York: Routledge, 2007). The exploration of comparative
hierarchies of repression and suffering is, of course, a highly problematic
approach to the past.
33. Robert Lumley, ‘Amnesia and Remembering: Dal polo all’equatore, A Film by
Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi’, Italian Studies 64/1 (2009), p. 135.
34. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’,
in Illuminations, translated by Harry Zohn, (ed). and introduction by Hannah
Arendt (London: Fontana, 1973), pp. 238–239.
35. Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 118.
36. Hirsch, Family Frames, p. 119.
37. Hansen, ‘The Time of Affect’, p. 591.
38. Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art’, p. 228.
39. Scott MacDonald, ‘Susana de Sousa Dias’, Film Quarterly 66/2 (2012), p. 32.
40. Kaja Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible World (New York: Routledge,
1996), p. 89.
41. This recalls Marianne Hirsh’s notion of post-memory as a creative invest-
ment in the past. Hirsch draws on Silverman’s argument concerning ‘het-
eropathic identification’, notably in the essay, ‘Projected Memory: Holocaust
Photographs in Personal and Public Fantasy’, in Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe,
and Leo Spitzer (eds), Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present (Hanover,
NH: Dartmouth College Press, 1998), pp. 3–23.
42. As Emília Tavares puts it, Sousa Dias ‘Turns a Visual Discourse on Repression
into an Affirmation of the Principles of Freedom and Human Rights’; see
‘The Imprisoned Images’, Seismopolite (30 September 2012) (http://www.
seismopolite.com, date accessed 1 March 2014).
43. Hansen, ‘The Time of Affect’, p. 587.
44. Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, pp. 24–25 and 27 respectively.
45. Teresa Brennan, The Transmission of Affect (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 2004), pp. 52 and 113 respectively.
46. Robert A. Rosenstone, History on Film/Film on History, 2nd edition (Harlow:
Pearson, 2012), p. 96.
47. Bennett, Empathic Vision, p. 105.
48. See, for instance, Elizabeth Ramírez Soto’s study, ‘(Un)veiling Bodies: A Tra-
jectory of Post-dictatorship Chilean Documentary’, unpublished doctoral dis-
sertation, University of Warwick, 2014.
49. Alison Ribeiro de Menezes, ‘Memories in Contention: The 1970s in the Iberian
Peninsula’, invitation paper’, University of Bristol colloquium ‘Remembering
the 1970s’, 6 March 2015.
50. Astrid Erll, ‘Travelling Memory’ Parallax, 17/4 (2011), pp. 4–18; see also
Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the
Age of Decolonization (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009).
5
Foundational Films:
The Memorialization of
Resistance in Italy, France,
Belarus and Yugoslavia
Mercedes Camino
Film, according to Robert Rosenstone, has become the ‘chief medium

for carrying the stories our culture tells itself’.1 This affirmation has
special relevance for the first half of the 20th century, given the popu-
larity of historical films in this era, and the emergence of cinema as the
most popular form of mass entertainment throughout urban Western
Europe. In spite of their popularity, or perhaps because of it, the use of
films as historical sources remains contested, and we are accustomed to
debates that pit cinematic adaptations against the events on which they
are based. Normally, in these contests, the popular media is deemed
unsuitable, limited or simplistic, even when allowing for format and
time constraints. In addition, two schools of thought treat films dif-
ferently. While film history tends to assess the documentary evidence
related to a film’s production and reception, film scholars seek to eluci-
date its cinematic ‘language’, reading closely its photographic construc-
tion and technical details. This essay merges both approaches to study
a doubly partisan subject: civilian resistance to fascism in the Second
World War.
From the earliest cinematic productions, such as D. W. Griffith’s Birth
of a Nation (1915), historians have been divided about cinema’s poten-
tial to represent historical events. For some, the distortion, simplifica-
tion and romanticism inherent in screening the past renders cinema an
unsuitable medium for historical enquiry. Others vindicate the value
of film as a point of access to the past, while censoring productions
that privilege sentimentality and discourage analysis. Leaving aside
such contestable quality criteria, films can be assessed both by their
production, that is to say, their context, as well as by their content:
what they show (or do not show), and how they go about this. I adopt
83
84 Mercedes Camino
here a systematic approach that looks at the history that films purport
to represent, and contextualizes these productions within the time of
their release. This, I suggest, yields insights that complement informa-
tion from other sources, including traditional historical documents.
Also, and perhaps more importantly, it recognises how films – on a par
with memoirs, oral sources and photography – illuminate the history of
ideas, emotions and attitudes.
My approach analyses films within the parameters of Memory
Studies, providing a connection between the fact-based evidence that
underpins historical research and the uses to which the past is put at
particular times. This is nowhere better represented than in relation to
the Second World War, a conflict that has been tirelessly screened in
fiction films and documentaries, and continues to be invoked regularly
in the political arena. From the myriad productions about the war, my
selection deals with films that showcase resistance in order to foster a
particular view of the war and its participants. These films fulfil several
functions, including paying homage to ordinary ‘heroes’ or victims,
providing atonement strategies to cope with a conflictive past, stimu-
lating debate or promoting social cohesion. To clarify these functions,
I focus on films from four European countries – France, Italy, Belarus
and Yugoslavia – with very different experiences of the war and of its
memorialization. Variances notwithstanding, the productions studied
here demonstrate the political uses of film in a conflict that remains
a cornerstone of the socio-political composition of contemporary
Europe.
My analysis departs from the hypothesis that the obvious political
differences between communist and non-communist Europe would
be the main determinant of the memorialization of collaboration and
resistance. As will be seen below, the pattern that emerges is rather more
complex. Like Italy and France, post-communist countries such as the
former Yugoslavia and Belarus reveal a shifting paradigm that is not
simply the outcome of political allegiance or censorship. In these cases,
religious beliefs, ethnicity and class influence the shifting approaches
towards collaboration and resistance during the war and its aftermath.
More recently, these have been inflected by the political, social and
economic aspirations of these countries, which might entail acknowled-
ging past and present human rights abuses, especially, but not limited
to, those committed by Nazi Germany. In many cases, national memo-
rialization of the war has been modified to incorporate the singularity
of the Holocaust, deployed both in legitimate and spurious ways to gain
international recognition.
Foundational Films: The Memorialization of Resistance 85
Cinematic productions about the Second World War provide a privi-

leged space from which to assess the political uses of memory. In fact,
film is probably the most important tool for the popular understand-
ing of the conflict in most European countries, including Yugoslavia,
France, Belarus and Italy. From the productions of the 1940s, films about
the war mark effectively the way countries, communities or regions see
themselves (or wish to be seen by others). Whether constructing a justi-
fication for the war or promoting reconciliation and social consensus,
depictions of the war have played a salient role in shaping political
narratives, providing ways to validate, memorialize or simply come to
terms with the past.
Italy
Besides representing history, some films can be said to create it by

putting forward a particular interpretation of the past. A paradigmatic
example of this is Roberto Rossellini’s ground-breaking version of ordi-
nary Italians resisting German occupation in Rome Open City (1946).
Rossellini’s film not only disregards how Italy formed part of the Axis
alliance prior to the Armistice of Cassibile (3 September 1943), it effecti-
vely erases the country’s north-south division that followed. In fact, the
upsurge in resistance during that time, and the fight between partisans
and those supporting Mussolini’s Salò Republic, the republichini, can be
understood partly in terms of a civil war, as Claudio Pavone suggests.2
Instead, Rossellini constructed a narrative that erased two decades of
compliance with fascist rule and provided an antidote to the disunion
and reprisals that ensued. The film clearly stands out as an effort to
redeem Italians, rendering them all victims. It also represents Italians
as capable of sorting out the country’s future themselves, avoiding the
possibility of Allied occupation after the war or the armed conflict that
engulfed neighbouring countries, including Greece.
The position of Italy as a country that was, at different times (and
even simultaneously), occupier and occupied, collaborator and resister,
defeated and victorious, is clearly unique in some regards. These divis-
ions had the potential to make the Second World War’s legacy conten-
tious, particularly as Italian fascism had enjoyed the active support
of much of the population, and was passively accepted by a sizeable
majority which had done little to counter or contest the oppression of
the Italian left during the 1920s.3 Mussolini’s regime had also provided
the ‘foundational fascism’ on which German Nazism and other fascisms
were modelled. Indeed, the effectiveness of Mussolini’s brutal repression
86 Mercedes Camino
of his enemies cannot have been far from Adolf Hitler’s mind when he
set about crushing opposition parties in the 1930s.
Italy emerged from this context as the first country to bring to the
fore the cinematic mystification of the resistance that would prevail
after the war. No production encapsulates the wish to unite people
better than Rossellini’s Rome, whose reception and enduring legacy
exemplifies the predominant memorialization of the war. Set in 1944,
the film depicts Italy’s capital after the evacuation of Mussolini in 1943,
as the Allies advanced from the south, following the invasion of the
mainland from Sicily. In Rossellini’s microcosmic representation of the
country, anti-fascist Catholics, communists, socialists and liberals are
united in opposing the status quo, actively or passively. These disparate
‘resisters’ are embodied by the working-class single mother, Pina (Anna
Magnani); her communist fiancé, Francesco (Francesco Grandjacquet);
his comrade, Giorgio Manfredi (Marcello Pagliero); and the partisan
priest, Don Pietro Pellegrini (Aldo Fabrizi). Even the boys support the
resistance, and are depicted at the film’s conclusion walking towards
their city, exemplifying the country’s future.
In the Italian case, the country’s alignment in the Cold War contrib-
uted to a tacit silence about its war crimes. This convenient oblivion
also arose from the need to create a sense of collective purpose in the
war’s immediate aftermath, as well as the trepidation caused by the
strength and sense of legitimacy that communists accrued for their
active role fighting fascism. In this context, Rossellini’s perspective on
the putative unity of communists and Catholics during the war was,
therefore, not simply prescient or wistful. It also meant that, as a genre,
the neo-realism that he and others pioneered has become intricately
associated with ordinary civilians and anti-fascism. In other words,
Rossellini’s film remains a tangible monument to the mystification of
Italiani, brava gente, fighting together the alien oppressor.4
France
The ambiguous position of Italy, and the silence regarding its past, was
echoed in France up to the 1980s, when historical debates, often stimu-
lated by films and documentaries, took centre stage. France has seen a
plethora of cinematic interventions that have played a crucial role in
the way the country sees itself, which can be traced back to the con-
troversial depiction of a French policeman supervising a concentration
camp in Alain Resnais seminal Night and Fog (1955). This has entailed
a shifting view of France’s own role from that of a country of ‘resist-

ers’ to a country of ‘collaborators’, overwhelmed by guilt and various
degrees in between.
The public reaction inspired by Resnais’ documentary was dwarfed
by the reception of Marcel Ophuls’ The Sorrow and the Pity (1981). This
four-hour documentary was commissioned by French public television
in 1969 but was only screened in 1981 on account of its controversial
representation of the widespread support for Vichy France in Clermont-
Ferrand. This area is shown as the heartland of Marshal Petain and,
especially, of the head of Vichy’s Government, Pierre Laval, whose
relatives are interviewed in the film.5 For different reasons, Claudio
Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985), a landmark in Holocaust Studies, gave way to
equally-heated debates, this time due to its criticism of ‘bystanders’, and
the way its interviews were conducted. These controversies about resist-
ance and collaboration were not restricted to documentaries, as attested
by Louis Malle’s disturbing Lacombe Lucien (1979), which portrays how
Frenchmen staffed the Milice française (French Militia), the paramilitary
force which acted ruthlessly on behalf of the Nazis and the nationalist
French right. Malle’s protagonist, a nonchalant teenager who would
as easily join the partisans as the Milice, sits comfortably while those
known to him are tortured. Not a ‘perpetrator’ in the strict sense of the
term, Lucian (Pierre Blaise) brings to mind Hannah Arendt’s assessment
of Adolf Eichmann in terms of the ‘banality of evil’.
The national trauma ensuing from France’s swift defeat in 1940,
and the division of collaborators and resisters, was partly soothed at
the war’s end by the elaboration of a unifying Gaullist narrative. This
represented the country as having struggled together to defeat the
foreign invader, crucially liberating Paris and the country’s main cities.
This ‘myth’, which proved useful in rebuilding the country and avoid-
ing prolonged Allied occupation, had the consent of the US and the
UK. However, it ignored not only the role played by the Allies in the
country’s liberation, but also the active collaboration or wait-and-see
attitude of many towards the incarceration, deportation or execution
of communist resisters and Jews. The latter culminated in the infa-
mous rounding up of French Jews at the Velodrome d’Hiver, part of
Operation Spring Breeze (Opération Vent printanier) in June 1942, which
was undertaken by French policemen and members of Jacques Doriot’s
Fascist Party (PPF). French attendismo, therefore, buttressed the segment
of the population that collaborated for ideological, economic or practi-
cal reasons. Under the slogan ‘Better Hitler than Blum’, this section of
88 Mercedes Camino
opinion favoured the ‘French’ government of Marshal Petain over the

Popular Front that, led by the French Jew Leon Blum, had been elected
in 1936.
Eventually, however, and especially from the 1980s, France became
a country haunted by its collaborationist past, now referred to, using
Henri Rousso’s terms, as the Vichy Syndrome.6 The different ways in
which French society came to terms with its complex past are repre-
sented in Jean-Jacques Audiard’s Un hero tres discret/A Self-Made Hero
(1996), a playful denunciation of the construction of the Gaullist myth
of a country united in resistance. In Audiard’s film, Albert Dehousse
(Mathieu Kassovitz), a young man who is largely unaware of what goes
on around him during the war, decides to reinvent himself as a resister.
Dehousse learns facts and names and literally puts himself in the picture
with other resisters, obviously assisted by those who had boosted their
own credentials at the war’s end. Providing a clear metaphor for the
country itself, Dehousse rehearses his own past, forging a history that
is clearly invented. As Chris Darke remarks, ‘Audiard knits all manner
of fake witnesses – sociologists, Resistance veterans, historians –
to attest to the relative truth or falsehood of Dehousse’s career. But
it’s also a troubling parable of the still-unresolved French guilt about
its wartime and immediate post-war record, a guilt that came into
sharp focus around the time of former president Francois Mitterrand’s
death.’7
The release of Audiard’s film coincided with the controversies
surrounding the trial of Maurice Papon (1995–1998). Papon was con-
victed in 1998, even though his infamous collaboration in the round-
ing up and deportation of 1,690 Bordeaux Jews had been known since
1981.8 In his defence, Papon, who had been awarded the Legion of
Honour by President Charles de Gaulle in 1961, argued that his ‘col-
laboration’ had been a form of ‘resistance’, designed to avoid reprisals
by appeasing the Germans. As with Papon’s self-fashioning as a ‘resist-
ance hero’, France recast its own past after 1945, rebuilding its sense
of legitimacy as the heir of an anti-fascist resistance which, in reality,
had been confined to a minority that had been ignored, marginalized
or overtly opposed.9 Papon’s treatment contrasted with that of Klaus
Barbie whose trial took place in 1987 following his extradition from
Bolivia. Barbie, known as ‘The Butcher of Lyon’, tortured and mur-
dered approximately 14,000 people, including not only women and
children, but also the resistance hero, Jean Moulin. De Gaulle’s envoy,
Moulin had worked tirelessly for over two years uniting resistance
groups throughout the country with great success.10 Unlike that of
Papon, however, Barbie’s indictment did not call into question French
complicity in assisting the Nazis.
The controversies and debates of the 1980s and 1990s also focused
on the attitude of the president at the time, Francois Mitterrand, who
supported Vichy at the beginning of the war but became a resister
thereafter.11 Necessitating silence about local perpetrators, the French
post-war attitude rendered it impossible to seek reparations. In fact,
for around three decades, the state did not assist with the provision of
information about lost friends or relatives. This can be attributed partly
to negligence but also to the fact that, in Paul Webster’s words, ‘the
pain of discovering the truth was unbearable’.12 In other words, decades
after the events, some still perceived the social cleavages of the war as a
threat. Curiously, it was the conservative President Jacques Chirac, who
issued a public apology to the country’s Jews on behalf of the Republic
on 16 July 1995.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, France confronted its postwar
silence, with films such as Ophuls’ documentary and Audiard’s drama
challenging the previous production of war memories. This facilitated
the admission of the country’s failures, and a shift from the general
perception of France as a ‘country of resisters’ to that of ‘a country
of collaborators’. Nevertheless, the lack of consensus about the war’s
legacy did not prove so divisive, with France’s self-image emerging from
these debates as a country built both on ‘collaboration’ and ‘resistance’,
with various regions and individuals situated at different points of the
spectrum. Arguably, these representations have deepened our historical
understanding of the motives for people’s attitudes towards ‘resistance’
or ‘collaboration’, wherever that choice was possible.
Yugoslavia
If films and documentaries have encouraged public debate about the

protean memorialization of the war in France, the same phenomenon
is not obviously apparent in cinematic productions about the Second
World War in the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. By and
large, the films produced there were designed to promote the unity of
the entity that emerged at the end of the First World War as the Kingdom
of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, and which was dismantled in a series of
brutal wars in the 1990s. The idea of a nation forged through a suppos-
edly united fight against an external enemy was harnessed by a cinematic
genre, Partizanski (Partisan) films, closely associated with the leader
overseeing that country’s unity: Josip Broz (1892–1980), better known
90 Mercedes Camino
as Tito.13 As shown in Mila Turajlic’s documentary, Cinema Komunisto

(2012), Tito promoted and financed the lavish film industry that flour-
ished during the 1960s and 1970s, personally endorsing or intervening
in the production of films. Within this industry, Partisan films stood
out, both in terms of quantity and prominence. Tito also sponsored
the creation of a large production company, Avala Film, located in the
country’s capital, Belgrade. This cinematic ‘city’, now derelict, flour-
ished during the 1960s and 1970s when it became the site of numerous
major productions, hosting international stars such as Elizabeth Taylor
and Richard Burton. The latter’s visit resulted from an offer, endorsed
by Tito, for Burton to portray the Marshal in one of the most famous
Partisan films, Stipe Delic’s Battle of Sujetska (1974), also known as The
Fifth Offensive.
In comparative terms, Tito’s Partisan Army was unusual on many
counts, not least because of the manner in which it won support from
the Allies, who had initially endorsed the royalist Serb militia (the
Chetniks), led by Draza Mihailovic, who were subsequently accused
of collaboration.14 As Michael R. Foot notes, when ‘Mihailovic sent
a message about setting Chetnik bands on the hills, it made a sensa-
tion. Mihailovic was hailed, by the BBC, in the English, American and
Russian press, as the first of those resistance heroes and heroines who
were to be staple journalists’ fodder for so long’.15 In late 1942, how-
ever, the Allies switched allegiance to the Partisans on account of either
the Chetniks’ ineffectiveness or their collaboration with the occupying
forces. Mihailovic was nonetheless portrayed in a romantic light in
Louis King’s film Chetniks! The Fighting Guerrillas (1943). However, the
time lapse from the incubation to the release of a film portraying ‘heroic
Chetniks’ meant that the film was a flop that, to borrow an expression
from Jeffrey Richards, we have ‘forgotten to remember’.
Most Partisan films are ‘foundational narratives’ that present
Manichaean depictions of the struggle against the Chetniks and the
Axis forces, normally represented by evil Nazis and the occasional
Italian fascist.16 The films depict how Tito’s successful resistance
achieved the ‘liberation’ of the country, largely by its own means and
at an immense cost in human lives and material losses. In 1944, when
the Red Army arrived in Belgrade, they were welcomed by partisans
who had already expelled the Germans and Italians from most of the
country. The films that represent this ‘victory’ cast civilians from the
country’s different ethnicities, including a good number of women.17
For a few decades, this struggle was used to cultivate a sense of unity
among the diverse ethnicities of the country, and in support of Tito’s
‘non-aligned’ stance after Yugoslavia’s split from Stalinist USSR in

1948, when it was thrown out of the Communist Information Bureau
(Cominform).
Partisan films emerged as a genre 20 years after the conflict, follow-
ing Veljko Bulajić’s inauguration of the genre with Kozara (1962). Like
Kozara, most Partisan films were seen and celebrated by large segments
of the Yugoslav population both in the cinema and, subsequently,
on television. In retrospect, given the break-up of the country in the
1990s, it can be seen how the nationalistic pride depicted in these
films belongs firmly to a specific historical era when Yugoslavia existed
as a ‘non-aligned’ communist country beyond the Stalinist sphere
of influence. These films represent a kind of ‘history as homage’, to
borrow Rosenstone’s expression.18 A clear example is Žika Mitrović’s
Užicˇka republika/The Republic of Užice (1974), which recreates the
beginning of the movement and the first-ever liberation by partisans
of a Nazi-occupied town. In reality, in November 1942 the Serbian
town of Užice was the site of the headquarters of the provisional gov-
ernment of Tito’s partisans, AVNOJ, a Serbo-Croatian acronym for the
Anti-Fascist Council for the Liberation of Yugoslavia. This council, as
well as other local forms of government organized by the Partisans,
operated in areas not occupied by the Germans, who often forced
them to move.
Before Operation Barbarossa, the Communist Party of Yugoslavia had
set up its Military Committee, out of which the National Liberation
Army would emerge, calling upon demobilized soldiers to hide weapons
in April 1941. Three months later, on July 4, they issued a call for
armed resistance, an appeal that was emulated across Bosnia, Croatia,
Serbia, Herzegovina and Slovenia as hundreds of other cities and towns
declared themselves ‘liberated’ republics following the example of
Užice, the Partisan Republic represented in Mitrović’s film.
Tito’s uprising is unsubtly depicted in Mitrović’s film when partisans
discuss with locals their options for a future that was already 30 years in
the making when Užič ka republika was released. When they wonder what
would happen after a hypothetical German defeat, a partisan emphasizes
that they ‘won’t put up with oppression’, urging them to resist and warn-
ing that a German triumph would entail utter destruction. Curiously, he
backs his assertion not with evidence of what was happening on the
Eastern Front but with reference to Spain: ‘I know the Germans. I was
in Spain.’ This reference to the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) links the
anti-fascism of the 1930s with the resistance to Nazism during the 1940s.
It also invokes Tito, who had worked for the Comintern in Paris during
92 Mercedes Camino
the Spanish conflict, recruiting volunteers from different countries

before dispatching them to Spain. It was there that Tito established links
with Yugoslav communists whom he called upon to create Partisan units
across the country soon after its occupation.
Two of the most popular Partisan films recreate the celebrated
battles of Neretva and Sutjeska. The first, Veljko Bulajić’s Battle of
Neretva (1969), was one of the most expensive motion pictures made
in Yugoslavia. Its budget, personally approved by Tito, is estimated to
have been between $4.5 million and $12 million. Whether attracted by
large salaries, or sympathy for Yugoslavia’s position as a friendly com-
munist outpost independent of the Soviet-controlled Warsaw Pact, its
stars included the internationally renowned actors Sergei Bondarchuk,
Yul Brynner, Franco Nero and Orson Welles. Exemplifying Tito’s belief
in the power of film to cultivate national pride and popular support
for his regime, the filming of Battle of Neretva took over 16 months and
used a combined battalion of 10,000 soldiers as extras. In addition, four
villages and a fortress were especially constructed and destroyed, as
were many Soviet-made T-34 tanks disguised as German Tiger I tanks.
Today, the site is as famous for the film as for the battle itself, with Tito’s
phrase, ‘Not without the wounded’, duly inscribed there for visitors
to photograph themselves. His words, it is worth remembering, were
true, for ‘experience, in the first offensive, showed them that wounded
who were left behind were massacred; thereafter, wounded preferred to
be killed by their own side, or carried away by it.’19 In this ‘humane’
battle, as is celebrated in the film, many of the wounded were success-
fully rescued.
The greatest engagement of the war, the Battle of Sutjeska, is show-
cased in another Partisan film directed by Delic. The battle took place
in 1943 in Nazi-occupied Bosnia-Herzegovina where Tito’s partisans
fought in spite of being outnumbered six-to-one. Using guerrilla tactics,
the Partisans had managed to take the Durmitor area of northern
Montenegro when the Axis, seeking to suppress the movement,
deployed nearly 130,000 troops to encircle them. The Partisans’ escape
from encirclement on the plains of Sujetska, in southeast Bosnia, cost
them many lives, and Tito (played by a poised Richard Burton) was
wounded in the battle, which could have changed the course of the war.
Although suffering heavy losses, the Partisans halted the offensive, and
the film emphasises both the scale of the battle and the personal cost
paid by many, personified by a character who loses his two sons and
only daughter in the fight.
With Partisan roles played by men and women from the different
Yugoslav nations, these films offer a clear example of the cinematic
simplification of a multi-layered conflict. The resulting ‘myth’ of harmo-
nization provided sustenance for a regime built on entrenched antago-
nisms, which began to unravel after Tito’s death. As Marko Attila Hoare
remarks:
The Titoist regime in Yugoslavia encouraged the belief that all

Yugoslavs participated in an equal manner and to an equal degree
in the Partisan movement and that they did so on a homogenous,
all Yugoslav, basis … The Partisan movement was a genuinely
multinational movement but the roles played in it by the vari-
ous Yugoslav nationalities were not equivalent … Serbs in Croatia
might fight as Partisans to halt the persecution by the Ustashas;
Croats in Dalmatia to resist the Italian annexation of their home-
land; Muslims out of fear of the Chetniks; townsmen out of left-
ist sympathies; and peasants according to traditional patterns of
rebelliousness.20
The swift and bloody breakup of Yugoslavia has given way to diff-
erent claims on this national past, including a nostalgia for the
shared illusions of social reconstruction in the war’s aftermath. This
‘Yugonostalgia’ informs Turajlic’s portrayal of the country’s love affair
with cinema, a reflection of its ruler’s obsession. Turajlic’s documen-
tary offers a selection of interviews with directors, actors and, perhaps
more significantly, Tito’s dutiful cameraman, Leka Konstantinovic.
In charge of Tito’s private cinema, Konstantinovic selected a different
film to screen each evening for Tito and his wife, Jovanka Budisavljević
Broz, who had been Lieutenant General of the Partisan Army during
the war. Konstantinovic’s yearning defines Turajlic’s approach from
the film’s beginning, when the camera follows his footsteps into Tito’s
Mausoleum in Belgrade. As he walks to lay a wreath on the Marshal’s
tomb, the camera zooms in to show us the elderly Konstantinovic in
close up, with tears welling up in his eyes as he utters the following
words: ‘Comrade President Tito. I was your projectionist for 32 years
and I am grateful for every one of them.’
Cinema Komunisto’s long takes of Konstantinovic’s wistful expres-
sions or of the ruins of the derelict film city, Avala, contrast with
scenes that depict the euphoria of the war’s immediate aftermath.
At that time, a sense of collective identity appeared to obliterate
94 Mercedes Camino
divisions, including ethnic and religious cleavages. Curiously, this

ethos informs the legacy of the Partisan movement, which remains
important today for the nations that emerged from the former coun-
try, albeit for different reasons. As Hoare suggests, the legacy of the
Partisan struggle offers a potential foundation on which mutual
understanding can be built:
The Partisan movement forms part of the national heritage of both

Serbs and Croats, as well as of Muslims and other former Yugoslav
peoples. It represents at the same time a shared tradition of multi-
national co-operation that may one day help to re-establish friendly
relations between the former Yugoslav states.21
Belarus
Nostalgia is also a concern of the last country to be explored in this

essay, Belarus, where the brutality of the front remains staggering to
behold. Belarus is probably the area of Europe which saw the highest
proportion of civilians, including most of the country’s Jews, murdered,
with an estimated 20 to 30 percent of the overall population and the
majority of its Jewish citizens obliterated, mostly shot or burned to
death in town halls, synagogues or barns.22 Belarus also contributed
to the Soviet partisan efforts, providing numerous recruits, including
many Jews. Alongside Poland, with which Belarus shared a shifting
border, Belarus lay within the Jewish Pale of Settlement, where the
genocidal extremes of Nazi Germany reached their peak after Operation
Barbarossa.
The predominant Belarusian approach to the past offers a unique
example of continuity from the Soviet era, with the singularity of the
Jewish plight subsumed within the national narrative. As in Soviet
times, Belarus’ foundational narrative is grounded on a monolithic ver-
sion of a Great Patriotic War in which all people became heroic resisters.
This is what Alexandra Goujon terms the ‘neo-Soviet’ version of the
past, still prevalent under the dictatorship of Alexander Lukashenko
whose strict censorship extends to interpretations of the war.23 Belarus’
unusual reverence for its communist past places it at odds with most
countries from the former Eastern Bloc, which have seen a revival of
nationalist memories, addressing or even vindicating the fact that the
Germans were seen by many as potential ‘liberators’. This is especially
the case in Ukraine and in the Baltic States, although Belarusians also
‘volunteered’ to join the police force that fought their own countrymen.
By contrast with its neighbours, and even after the country’s independ-
ence in 1991, the focus of memorialization of the war in Belarus is not
so much on the country as victim, but of a community built on active
resistance against a murderous occupier. This perspective can be seen
in the 21st century monument ‘Partisan Belarus’, inaugurated in 2005,
and is both highlighted and contested in a film screened 20 earlier, Elem
Klimov’s Come and See (1985).
Shot while Belarus was still part of the Soviet Union, Klimov’s film
offers a sophisticated view of the harrowing cruelty of the Eastern
front, witnessed from the point of view of a child who loses his family
and, eventually, his sense of reality. The film adheres to the Soviet line
of integrating the murder of Jews with that of the rest of the popula-
tion during the German approach to the East (the Generalplan Ost
that saw the occupation transformed into a war of annihilation or
Vernichtungskrieg). However, instead of simply endorsing the predo-
minant narrative of heroic resistance, Klimov stresses the absence of
options for a population whose choice might be to join the resistance
or be killed otherwise. The film also depicts local militiamen who have
joined the Germans and follow their orders, and are the subject of
contempt towards the end of the film.
The ‘wait and see’ option available for countries on the Western
front was simply not viable for most Belarusians and, especially, for all
Belarusian Jews. Although alluded to in Klimov’s film, the peculiarity of
the genocide of Belarusian Jews is submerged within the wider war of
extermination, much as it is in Belarus’ official memorial sites. In fact,
the main memorial site of the Nazi extermination policy is the vast
memorial complex of Khatyn, which spreads over 50 hectares. Located
about 50 kilometres from Minsk, Khatyn was a village whose entire 149
inhabitants, including 75 children, were burnt alive on 22 March 1943.
It was chosen as representative of the hundreds of villages razed to
the ground by the Nazis, perhaps due to its resonance with Katyn, the
similarly named site of the Soviet massacre of Polish officers. Research
has shown that Khatyn was destroyed by the 118th police battalion,
formed in Kiev in 1942 and headed by Sturmbannfuhrer (SS Major) Erich
Kerner. This battalion comprised mostly Ukrainian Soviet prisoners of
war, deserters and criminals.
Needless to say, Belarus’ emphasis on heroic resistance is not a fabrica-
tion, and its active resistance included many of the country’s Jews. Of
the scattered Jewish survivors, around 10 percent of the pre-war popula-
tion, many joined the Partisans as part of pro-Soviet, ethnic-based or
Zionist units, initially on account of their ideology and, subsequently,
96 Mercedes Camino
as the only alternative open to them. As interest in Jewish resistance

has grown, evidence to contest the claim that Jews were led to their
slaughter without a fight has been mobilized, and Belarus offers a few
remarkable examples to supplement the Uprising of Warsaw’s Ghetto in
1943. One of these is the survival of 1,236 Jews in the Naliboki Forest,
in north-western Belarus, as part of a communal-cum-resister group
known, after its leader, as the Bielski Partisans.24 The struggle of Tuvia
Bielski, accompanied by his brothers – Arsael, Aron and Alexander
(known as ‘Zus’) – has been fictionalised by Edward Zwick’s film,
Defiance (2008), starring Daniel Craig as Tuvia. By and large, Defiance
presents the Bielskis as heroes who set up an idealised, kibbutz-like
camp in a densely forested area.
As often happens with the memory of the Holocaust, the film’s release
became a catalyst for debates on account of its perceived anti-Polish
bias. Released in Poland as Opor (Resistance), Defiance was either booed
or removed from cinemas, partly because Poles attribute to the Bielskis
a massacre of 128 Poles in Naliboki in 1943. The most vocal attack on
the film was voiced by the conservative newspaper Rzecpospolita, which
has, in turn, been accused of anti-Semitism. The newspaper claimed
that: ‘The Jewish groups were not squeamish when it came to procur-
ing food. They turned to pillaging, murder and rape.’ Rzecpospolita also
criticised Zwick for ‘[placing] on a pedestal a man [Tuvia Bielski] who
was bandit and hero rolled into one’.25 Another Polish newspaper, the
liberal Gazeta Wyborcza, also disapproved of the representation of the
Bielski brothers, while acknowledging that they were not involved in
the Naliboki massacre. Nonetheless, reporters Piotr Głuchowski and
Marcin Kowalski, who conducted their own investigation, suggested
Tuvia Bielski was ‘probably a smuggler’, adding that ‘Tuvia personally
fought against neither the Germans nor the Poles, but his people attac-
ked Home Army units. The Bielski partisans participated, for instance,
in the treacherous disarmament of Polish partisans by the Soviets on 1
December 1943.’26
A similar debate arose in Belarus after the screening of Andrei
Kudinenko’s Okkupatsiia Mysteries (2003), a low-budget film depict-
ing Belarusian collaborators and others who acted as police for the
Germans. Although Kudinenko’s production was initially praised, it
was eventually banned on the grounds that ‘The film does not cor-
respond to the real truth; it can insult the sensitivities of war veterans
and negatively influence the education of the young generation.’27 This
lack of consensus about the past in post-Soviet Belarus is, therefore, not
a consequence of the ‘grey zones’ between resistance and collaboration
but arises from the film’s challenge to a nationalist project built on the
notion of collective heroism. In Belarus, the official memory of the war
serves to legitimize contemporary political struggles.
Conclusion
As with Kudinenko’s production, films that depict resistance or collabo-

ration have provided – and continue to provide – a platform for debates
about the past. In fact, productions dealing with resistance to Nazism
offer a unique perspective from which to assess European post-war
reconstruction. In France, cinematic productions have often spurred the
confronting and debating of the past. In the case of post-communist
countries, such as Yugoslavia, the picture is complicated by the demise
of the Soviet Bloc, as well as by the break-up of its republics. Italy, both
a perpetrator and a victim, provides an example of the way cinema was
deployed to unify the country in the war’s immediate aftermath, and
the endurance of that narrative. In Yugoslavia, Partisan memories, and
the films that represented or mystified them, contributed to the relative
inter-ethnic concord during the four decades that Tito ruled. However,
the disintegration of Yugoslavia illustrates the limitations of this type of
social compact. Lastly, the memorialization of the conflict in Belarus –
which remains essential to that state’s political identity – offers a
window into processes that have been contested largely or revised
elsewhere in Eastern Europe.
Taken together, the films considered here challenge the imposition
of any Manichaean division on what was a multi-sided conflict. They
demonstrate how its memorialization has been shaped by the politics
of the Cold War and the post-communist era, rendering it impossible to
disentangle memory from history. These resistance films have contribu-
ted actively to shaping the social frameworks of collective memory, as
delineated by Maurice Halbwachs. As Halbwachs notes, although indivi-
duals have the ability to remember, they do so through parameters that
are socially delimited: ‘While the collective memory endures and draws
strength from its base in a coherent body of people, it is individuals as
group members who remember … Every collective memory … requires
the support of a group delimited in space and time.’28
Through their impact on the collective memory of the war, films
have proved critical to the imagining or inventing of post-war societies.
Resistance films highlight the role played by memories of the war in
the foundational narratives upon which various European countries,
regions or entities – to borrow Benedict Anderson’s term – imagine
98 Mercedes Camino
themselves.29 From this perspective, the inability to face up to a conten-

tious past signals the uneasy foundations on which that country’s sense
of ‘imagined community’ rests.
The importance of cinema in the creation or representation of his-
tory goes beyond notions of accuracy or objectivity. In relation to
resistance films, the way the past is perceived to have taken place is
often as important – if not more – than the actual history of the period.
Films made in and about the 1940s offer paradigmatic examples of
the power of cinema not only to (mis)represent historical events, but
to contribute effectively to their ‘creation’. Filmmakers can generate
original versions of history, some of which go on to become canonical.
In this regard, cinema has had the salutary effect of bringing to life
the experiences of individuals, marshalling empathy in order to con-
struct a version of the past. In sum, resistance films have shaped the
historical capital on which communal consensus was built in the war’s
aftermath, becoming foundational narratives that remain contested in
the 21st century.
Cinematic representations of resistance have constructed a popular
history that highlights the roles of ordinary citizens, often fostering a
basis for co-existence. A society’s shared past, and the films that embody
that past, have provided – and continue to provide – a contingent sense
of unity following a war that magnified social divisions. These films are,
at once, historical documents and monuments: that is to say, sites of
memory. As such, they offer an emotional outlet, representing (or imag-
ining) people’s ‘finest hours’, and dignifying the anonymous deaths
that the war left behind.
Notes
1. See Robert Rosenstone, History on Film, Film on History (London: Pearson,
2006), p. 3.
2. On this, see Claudio Pavone, A Civil War: A History of The Italian Resistance
(London and New York: Verso, 2013) and Gustavo Corni, ‘Italy’, in Bob
Moore (ed.), Resistance in Western Europe (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2000),
pp. 157–187.
3. Tom Behan, The Italian Resistance: Fascists, Guerrillas and the Allies (London:
Pluto, 2009).
4. See Claudio Fogu, ‘Italiani Brava Gente: The Legacy of Fascist Historical
Culture on Italian Politics of Memory’ in Richard Ned Lebow, Wulf Kansteiner
and Claudio Fogu (eds), The Politics of Memory in Postwar Europe (Durham and
London: Duke University Press, 2006), pp. 147–176.
5. The film remains controversial. See John Sweets’ Choices in Vichy France: The
French Under Nazi Occupation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).
6. Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University

Press, 1991).
7. Chris Darke, ‘Monsieur Memory’, Sight & Sound 7 (1997), p. 24.
8. A French satirical newspaper, Le Canard enchaîné, published documents
signed by Papon that showed his responsibility in the deportations.
9. See Robert Gildea, ‘Resistance, Reprisals and Community in Occupied
France’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 13 (2003), pp. 163–185.
10. See Rod Kedward, In Search of the Maquis: Rural Resistance in Southern France
1942–1944 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), Matthew Cobb, The Resistance:
The French Fight Against the Nazis (London: Simon and Schuster, 2009) and
Rousso, Vichy Syndrome.
11. Mitterrand admitted to pressuring his Minister of Justice to postpone the
trials of French war criminals (his long-time friend, Bousquet, Leguay and
Papon) to avoid ‘reopening old wounds’. ‘My duty,’ he explained, ‘is to work
for the reconciliation of the French people, after so many years of discord.’
(The Tablet, 24 September 1994.)
12. As Paul Webster notes: ‘It was not until thirty years after the deportations
that most survivors found out when and where their relatives had died.’
Pétain’s Crime (London: MacMillan, 1990), p. 8.
13. This study has benefitted from Jurica Pavicic’s knowledge of Partisan films,
and I wish to thank him for letting me have a copy of his manuscript, ‘Titoist
Cathedrals: Rise and Fall of the Partisan Film’, before its publication.
14. After the Italian invasion, Tito and Mihailovic attempted to establish some
common ground, meeting in September and October of 1941, but split
definitively on 1 November 1941.
15. M. R. D. Foot, Resistance: An Analysis of European Resistance to Nazism
1940–1945 (London: Methuen, 1976), p. 192.
16. The supposed collaboration of Chetniks with Germans has been questioned
by, for example, Simon Trew, Britain, Mihailovic and the Chetniks, 1941–42
(London: Macmillan, 1998).
17. More than one hundred thousand women were members of Tito’s National
Liberation Army.
18. Rosenstone is referring ‘to a certain kind of commitment and to a tradition
of activism, one in which the filmmakers clearly situate themselves’. Visions
of the Past: The Challenge of Film to Our Idea of History (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 111.
19. Foot, Resistance, p. 193.
20. Marko Attila Hoare, ‘Whose is the Partisan Movement?: Serbs, Croats and
the Legacy of a Shared Resistance’, The Journal of Slavic Military Studies 15
(2002), pp. 24–25
21. Hoare, ‘Partisan Movement’, p. 40.
22. According to Tim Snyder: ‘Half the population of Belarus had either been
killed or moved’ by the end of the war. Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and
Stalin (London: Vintage, 2011), pp. 250–251.
23. As Alexandra Goujon observes: ‘With few exceptions, the Soviet era empha-
sized the heroics of the resistance to fascism rather than the actual crimes
and abominations committed by the Nazis.’ ‘Memorial Narratives of WWII
Partisans and Genocide in Belarus’, East European Politics and Societies 24
(2012), p. 7. Lukashenko has ruled Belarus from 1994.
100 Mercedes Camino
24. The film is based on Nechama Tec’s book, Defiance: The Bielski Partisans
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). Tec is a Holocaust scholar who
managed to escape from Poland by posing as a Catholic. Tuvia Bielski, who
migrated to the US, became a taxi driver and died in 1987, before the book
and the film were released.
25. Kate Connolly, ‘Jewish Resistance Film Sparks Polish Anger’, The Guardian,
5 March 2009 (http://www.theguardian.com, date accessed 7 April 2014).
26. Piotr Głuchowski and Marcin Kowalski, ‘The True Story of the Bielski
Brothers’, Gazeta Wyborcza 6 January 2009 (http://wyborcza.pl, date accessed
7 April 2014).
27. Jan Maksymiuk, ‘Belarus Film About Partisans Goes Against Official Grain’,
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 13 July 2005 (http://www.rferl.org, date
accessed 7 April 2014).
28. Halbwachs, On Collective Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1992), p. 22.
29. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991).
6
Amnesty with a Movie Camera
Andrew J. Hennlich
Our eye sees very poorly and very little – and so men
conceived of the microscope in order to see invisible
phenomena; and they discovered the telescope in order
to see and explore distant, unknown worlds. The movie
camera was invented in order to penetrate deeper into
the visible world, to explore and record visual phenom-
ena, so that we do not forget what happens and what
the future must take into account.
–Dziga Vertov1
Witness often structures discourses of law, memory and history. As a

process of looking, witness binds the relationship between vision and
truth in testimony, and also in the narration of history. The camera has
similar evidentiary roles and provides valuable source material for the
historian’s work. The Soviet filmmaker, Dziga Vertov, links the camera’s
function to the discovery of truth. Moreover, Vertov’s statement in the
epigraph on cinema’s potential posits that the medium remakes the
present through a consideration of its place in the future. Its function
becomes narrative and political. Yet we know that the potential for
error in the courtroom, like the process of ‘editing’, demonstrates that
the histories these two discourses construct are sites of narrativity that
run counter to the pure objectivity they frequently purport to have.
Subsequently the relationship between truth and witness does not
appear as stable as often presented.
The South African artist and animator William Kentridge continu-
ally explores the destabilization of vision’s objective status in his work.
This investigation, frequently manifested through the use of optical
tools such as stereoscopes or camera obscurae, considers how the work
101
102 Andrew J. Hennlich
of memory naturalizes a model of history. These works investigate

memory and history in South Africa by addressing narratives of class
identification, colonialism, industrialism and the legacies of apartheid.
Kentridge’s work considers how an ‘objective’ narrative of history often
obfuscates or minimizes other memories lost in the process of narrating
an event such as apartheid. Instead, Kentridge embraces the contin-
gency of the optical devices he uses, enlivened by the sense-making
potential they make explicit, but also through their ability to consider
memory as expressed by voices that may be elided by the formation of
official narratives.
Kentridge’s 1997 film, Ubu Tells the Truth (referred to here as Ubu),
addresses the relations of memory, history and narrative through a jux-
taposition of Vertov’s famed kino-eye (a truth telling eye) movie camera
and absurdist playwright Alfred Jarry’s corpulent and brutal King Ubu.
Jarry’s Ubu Roi was developed from parodies of his physics teacher, and
its absurdist tone became a strong inspiration for many 20th century
avant-gardes including Dadaism, surrealism and situationism as well as
Jarry’s own development of pataphysics (roughly defined as a science of
imaginary solutions).2 The kino-eye camera and Ubu become the cen-
tral characters of Kentridge’s most concerted investigation into South
Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commissions (TRC). The TRC, put
into action through the 1995 Promotion of Unity and Reconciliation
Act, occupied a central role in the transitional politics of post-apartheid
South Africa.3 The TRC served several important political functions: it
historicized human rights violations under apartheid, allowed victims
to tell the stories of violations they suffered, took steps to repair the
‘human and civil dignity of victims’ (including using the hearings as
a forum to enable families to recover the bodies of victims), and, most
controversially, offered amnesty for individuals who committed ‘gross
violations of human rights’ in exchange for a full disclosure of their
crimes.4 Through the hearings, nightly radio and weekly television
broadcasts and a final report delivered to the president, the TRC con-
structed an archive of apartheid history. Kentridge’s reflections on these
events in Ubu, through the confrontation between the kino-eye camera
and Ubu, consider the relations between truth, witness and forgive-
ness in the TRC’s juridical structures. Kentridge constructs a narrative
of apartheid history through the language of animation and absurdist
theatre that strongly contrasts with the juridical language of the court-
room. The investigation of these themes, considered in this chapter
through Kentridge’s Ubu and a later film, Stereoscope (1999), reveal an
ironic structure in the TRC’s juridical approach. The TRC’s goals of
Amnesty with a Movie Camera 103
truth and amnesty form an incongruous pairing that often negate one
another’s aims. Throughout Ubu Kentridge demonstrates that despite
the camera’s function as a documentarian apparatus, it often obfuscates
the thing it intends to document. By reading the structure of the TRC
as ironic, Ubu questions the uneasy relationship between forgetting and
forgiveness woven into the TRC’s role of granting amnesty.
Irony, Mark Sanders argues in his reading of the TRC, becomes a rhe-
torical figure that expresses understanding in both law and literature;
its tropological structure, enmeshed in the functions of law, can thus
be read through literary studies.5 Engaging irony as the central narra-
tive topos of Ubu, this chapter reads Kentridge’s film as an investigation
of the TRC’s historical discourses. Ubu provides a framework for inter-
preting history while offering up its own narrative of apartheid. Ubu,
through the ironic pairing of the kino-eye camera and Ubu, constructs
counter-narratives of apartheid history that speak to the lacunae within
the TRC’s approach. The pairing of the TRC and the animation of Ubu
is telling: Kentridge describes the hearings as ‘Ur-theatre’, merging with
the theatrical world of Jarry’s Ubu plays.6
William Kentridge (b. 1955) is one of South Africa’s best known art-
ists. He has shown at many major international arts exhibitions includ-
ing Documenta, Havana, Johannesburg and Venice and was the subject
of a retrospective organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern
Art and the Norton Museum of Art in 2009. As a child, Kentridge was
exposed to the politics of apartheid quite abruptly; both of his parents
were lawyers active in anti-apartheid struggles; he describes within the
home ‘an incandescent rage’ over the injustices of the South African
government.7 Specifically, his mother ran a public interest law firm in
Johannesburg and his father represented Nelson Mandela and later the
family of Black Consciousness leader, Steve Biko, at inquests into his
death.8 Kentridge, rebelling against what he terms ‘the family business’
of law, works in a multitude of media: theatre, drawing, printmak-
ing, animation, performance, opera, puppetry, tapestries, earthworks
and sculpture.9 His most recognizable body of work is 10 Drawings for
Projection, animations drawn with charcoal on a metre-by-metre sheet
of paper that are made by photographing the drawing, erasing it and
redrawing the next frame of the scene. The laborious repetition of this
process builds a palimpsest upon the paper’s surface preserving ghostly
traces of the image’s history.
The questions of guilt, responsibility and memory evoked in 10
Drawings for Projection address personal and individual perspectives on
apartheid and their persistence in the present. Similarly, Ubu addresses
the relationship between history and its present, but does so by consid-
ering the public memories revealed in the TRC. Ubu inverts 10 Drawings
for Projection’s format; the animations are drawn with white chalk on
black paper. Along with animations, Kentridge uses shadow puppets
formed from torn pieces of paper, and newsreel footage representing
unrest during apartheid, including the Sharpeville Massacre and the
State of Emergency.10 A varying soundtrack of traditional African music,
electronic synthesizers and pianos that call to mind ragtime are used
alongside sound clips of speeches, giving the film’s audio track a similar
multi-media composition to the video.
Kentridge produced Ubu, re-editing film footage for a play, Ubu and
the Truth Commission, made in collaboration with playwright Jill Taylor
and the Johannesburg-based Handspring Puppet Company. In the re-
edited version of Ubu, Kentridge emphasizes the interactions between
Ubu and Vertov’s kino-eye camera. While it might seem that truth and
parody perform separate tasks in Kentridge’s depiction of the TRC – the
camera as witness and Ubu as parody – the TRC evinces that the most
absurd scenes of violence often become the most grievously real. The
juxtaposition between these two figures opens apartheid narratives,
structured through juridical truth to create new forms of historical
expression.
Ubu Goes to South Africa
The TRC’s main goals were to allow victims of ‘gross human rights
violations’11 to come forward and tell their stories alongside those of
perpetrators who received amnesty for a full confession of their crimes.
Through this testimony, the TRC achieved two secondary goals: ‘to
compile as complete a picture as possible’ of apartheid, and to build a
transition to a newly democratized nation figured through ‘reconcilia-
tion’.12 The TRC, acting as a proxy for victims and perpetrators by grant-
ing amnesty through the politics of forgiveness, was heavily informed
by the Christian rhetoric of TRC chair Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s
invocation of Ubuntu, highlighting the centrality of community and
restorative justice. While the communal restorative nature of Ubuntu
distinguishes the TRC from the trial’s juridical punitive function, the
Commission’s procedures were still structured through testimony, foren-
sic definitions of truth and the cross-examination of witnesses.13 While
other forms of truth were addressed in the TRC’s report – including
social, healing and narrative – the Commission is clear that its approach
was framed predominantly through ‘factual and objective information
and evidence’.14 Thus, a legal framework persists in the drive for truth
and forgiveness in the Commission’s hearing rooms.
By reading the TRC’s legal strictures, the links between forgiveness
and forgetting in the hearings will become clearer. Tutu explicitly
links the two concepts in the TRC’s outlook by expanding upon the
Commission’s function: ‘We should be deeply humbled by what we’ve
heard, but we’ve got to finish quickly and really turn our backs on this
awful past and say: “Life is for living.”’15 However, it is this exchange
between forgiveness and the amnesty to come that leads Kentridge to
his criticisms of the Commission, evoking the structure of irony:
A full confession can bring amnesty and immunity from prosecution

or civil procedures for the crimes committed. Therein lies the central
irony of the Commission. As people give more and more evidence
of the things they have done they get closer and closer to amnesty
and it gets more and more intolerable that these people should be
given amnesty.16
When Kentridge, Taylor and Handspring began their work on Ubu and
the Truth Commission, they interrogated the TRC by placing Ubu in a
‘domain where actions do have consequences’.17 Thus, the question
not only of confronting the truth, but of its relationship to amnesty as
a form of forgetting are central to the memory work performed in Ubu.
Kentridge’s Ubu begins with the rotund and bumbling King Ubu,
marked by a spiral on his belly, pacing back and forth gazing up at a
blinking eye. Ubu pokes the eye with a stick, grounding the film’s start
in a moment of violence. He proceeds to shed his garments, morphing
into a camera atop a tripod (making reference to Vertov’s camera). The
camera and Ubu become wed, a link Kentridge invites by revealing the
fact that during apartheid police officers had filmed themselves com-
mitting murders.18 These tapes would be shown as evidence during the
TRC. Thus, the violence represented in Ubu’s actions during the film is
recorded through the camera’s documentarian role. The camera in Ubu,
reaching up with the legs of the tripod, takes the iris of the wounded
eye. It places it atop its body, turning it into a flash. The reference to
Vertov becomes more explicit; this scene mimics the stop motion dance
sequence of the camera at the end of Vertov’s Man With a Movie Camera.
As Ubu and the camera navigate the space of the film, the events they
witness/perform reference several infamous moments of testimony. The
first of these scenes begins with the image of a pig’s head, wearing head-
phones, that explodes in a mushroom cloud. The cloud’s dissipation
leaves the image of the pig’s head as disfigured. The exploding pig’s
head – depicted like a comedic explosion in a Looney Toons short –
references the trial of Vlakplaas commander Eugene De Kock. Vlakplaas,
a farm outside of Pretoria, housed a paramilitary police squad used to
assassinate anti-apartheid activists (or to convert them to informers).
Specifically, the scene in Ubu depicts an event where De Kock, Vlakplaas’
second commander, wanted to prevent the previous commander Dirk
Coetzee from revealing the squad’s activities. To silence Coetzee, De
Kock sent him a package containing an explosive device housed in a
Walkman. Unwilling to pay the import duty, Coetzee refused the pack-
age, which was sent to a return address marked for ANC lawyer Bheki
Mlangeni. Mlangeni received the package, finding the Walkman with a
cassette marked ‘Evidence, Hit Squad’. He played it, triggering the fatal
explosion. De Kock’s colleagues testified that members of the unit had
first tested the explosive device on a pig’s head before sending the pack-
age to Coetzee.19 Kentridge bases the film sequence on photographs of
this operation.20 The photographs do not reveal a form of truth; they
only provide evidence of the intention to conceal a crime, suggesting
an ironic narrative. While showing an image of violence, it documents
an erasure of the individual that the bomb was intended for. Yet its
intended work of erasure is evocative enough that the film invites the
viewer to imagine the scene, writing through the work of fiction and
animation.21
Ubu reaches a frenetic pace as Ubu and a white dog (a reference to
Jarry’s second Ubu play), hunched over a table, construct clandestine
plans that resonate with Vlakplaas’ mission. Ubu and the dog wrap a
package, which creates further reference to De Cock’s plot. The package
flies over a landscape and images of a skull and severed limbs crudely
drawn atop collages comprised of Johannesburg-like street maps. It
finally lands in the dirt next to a woman and child crafted from black
torn paper. The package explodes. The explosion opens the film to
scenes of violence taken from appropriated film footage, including
Sharpeville and the State of Emergency, interspersed with shadow
puppets at political rallies.
The use of silhouetted puppets is repeated in the film. In the follow-
ing scene, slowed considerably from the frenetic pace of the previous
sequence, the silhouette of a man alone in a room is visible. He is hung
by his ankles from the electrical cord of a lamp, and plunged into a
basin, referencing the torture undertaken in interrogation during apart-
heid. The small room is revealed to be one in a looming monolith of a
building. The room exists like a cel in animation, as they are connected
via a pan that follows wires running between the rooms. Within these
rooms, the viewer sees several images of clandestine violence, including
dogs emerging from suitcases and perched atop tripods snarling and
attacking people, acts of torture and a silhouetted figure falling from
the building.22 The scene closes by panning out to the large building
(bearing resemblance to John Vorster Square, a detention centre used
by police for interrogation and torture during apartheid), whose soli-
tary solidity emphasizes the overwhelming sense of bureaucracy within
apartheid violence (Figure 6.1).
Ubu’s final scene gives a chilling vision of violence met with absurdity.
A man walks out to meet the camera on its tripod, which again makes
explicit the reference to the stop-motion scene in Vertov’s film. The
man faces the camera; extending its lens, the camera becomes a can-
non and shoots the man. As the body falls, the camera places a bomb
beneath him; it explodes, detonating the body (Fig. 1). This scene rep-
resents a moment in Dirk Coetzee’s testimony during his application for
Figure 6.1 Violence met with absurdity in Ubu Tells the Truth (William Kentridge,
1997)
Source: Image, collection of the artist, courtesy of the Marian Goodman Gallery, New York,
and Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg.
amnesty. Coetzee testified that the process of detonating bodies was a

common practice by Vlakplaas forces. It provided the benefit of quickly
getting rid of a body, destroying it, and eliminating the potential for a
funeral to become a political rally.23 The camera repeats the detonations
in Ubu until the pieces became so finite that they form the stars in the
sky. As the camera pulls back to the stars, they form a constellation of a
spiral in the sky, giving one last visual reference to Ubu.
Kino-eye witness
When Kentridge animates TRC testimony in Ubu, he reveals these

moments through inversion. As the final scene demonstrates, the
camera only witnesses the destruction of the body; its work frequently
captures the impossibility of representation in Ubu. The camera docu-
ments absence rather than the event. In Ubu, as in the TRC, the camera
performs an act of witnessing even when it films absence. Cameras film
the TRC hearings just as Kentridge uses a Bolex to document his work in
the studio; this documentary function performed by the camera empha-
sizes the narrative functions made present by Vertov’s kino-eye camera.
Kentridge explicitly references Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera
in Ubu. The most obvious of these scenes is the ending sequence of
Ubu, which evokes the stop-motion dance performed by the tripod
and camera at the end of Vertov’s film. In Man with a Movie Camera,
the tripod moves about, lowering itself, enabling the camera to take a
perch atop the tripod. The use of silhouetted forms becomes a second
reference point. Ubu and Kentridge’s related project, Shadow Procession
(which also engages with the figure of Ubu), uses the silhouette to
reference scenes from Man with a Movie Camera in which Vertov’s
brother, cameraman Michael Kaufmann, scurries up a series of starkly
contrasted girders. Finally, the thematic work done in Ubu reminds us
of the camera, capable of moving through the city to capture a newly
emergent social reality. The work of the camera in Vertov’s film, as in
Ubu, is not merely a transparent witness, it actively engages with the
material it considers.
Kentridge’s formal references bind his camera to Vertov’s kino-eye,
which uses the camera as an apparatus to observe social reality as a
filmic mode of history-writing. As the eye is frequently drawn as part of
the camera’s apparatus in Ubu, its relationship to witness as a mode of
historical narrative becomes clear. Likewise, Vertov frames the kino-eye
as a mode of narrative. Vertov developed the principles of the kino-
eye camera while working for the Moscow Kinoedelia (‘Film Week’)
beginning in 1918.24 The central foundation in Vertov’s process is mon-

tage as a form of narrative; the film scholar Annette Michelson argues
that Vertov’s filmmaking is a reflexive force; subjective yet critical.25 The
use of montage through the kino-eye, Vertov believes, makes the invis-
ible visible again.26 Vertov’s editing uses the camera in a process akin to
Walter Benjamin’s reading of the camera in his famed ‘The Work of Art
in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility’. It becomes a device that
cuts open society, using montage to expose social realities that may not
be readily apparent in the viewer’s life.27 Vertov’s kino-eye – through
editing, cutting and montage – develops a grammar that constructs a
narrative of the Soviet Union; its model of history runs counter to the
absoluteness of forensic truth. As his statement in the epigraph reminds
us, history is always in a process of becoming.28 The camera captures
invisibility by revealing those things that cannot be seen immediately;
its process of documentation worked through montage brings forth a
new historical image.
While the camera is a documentarian tool in Ubu, it also becomes
an ironic device, juxtaposing its truth-telling role with the force of
violence. The camera’s use of force opens the film, as Ubu pokes the
eye, taking it and repurposing it as a camera flash. The eye’s role does
not perform the work of the camera, as in Man With a Movie Camera,
but rather works as a flash. The eye/camera pairing gets upset: the eye
still holds the potential to illuminate the scene, but it can also blind
the subject. Throughout Ubu, this blinding occurs as flashes are emit-
ted during the cuts between newsreel footage and the eye being pulled
open. The flash exemplifies how the camera obfuscates truth just as
much as revealing it.
If the role of the camera aligns with the task of witness, its blinding
reveals the obfuscations within the TRC’s work. In a director’s note for
Ubu and the Truth Commission, Kentridge expresses concern over the
struggle between documentation and erasure at the end of apartheid.
He describes this as a battle between the Photostat machine and paper
shredder: ‘Just as soon as the documentation of a series of government
activities entered the TRC archives, another set of documents would
be destroyed.’29 The tension between documentation and its erasure,
expressed in the rush to document and/or conceal history, reaches its
apotheosis in the closing sequence of Ubu, where Vertov’s optimism
turns to tragedy. The destruction of the body revealed in Coetzee’s testi-
mony documents its irrecoverability. By narrating the historical event,
the film points to the gaps within the TRC’s structure, the things that
its transparent and juridical functions cannot express.
Ubu and the figure of irony
The camera, while constructing gaps within the TRC’s narrative, also
reveals new forms of truth. The ability to metamorphose and move
through the social space of the film allows the camera to see often-hidden
sights: the clandestine functions of the government under apartheid.
This is particularly clear in the vignettes witnessed in the monolithic
building towards the end of Ubu. The camera reveals scenes of snarling
dogs (making reference to Jarry’s plays and the image of the Alsatian as
police dog), which conspire with Ubu to draw up plans and construct a
bomb, and finally scenes of torture in the building. The longest of these
scenes shows a victim bound by his ankles from the power cord of a
lamp that illuminates the room (contributing to its irony, shedding light
on the thing it attempts to hide); the detained man is suspended over a
basin, suggesting interrogation tactics such as waterboarding.
The camera’s Vertovian mode of capturing social reality often reveals
both unseen events and events so incredible they seem absurd. At the
same time, the deeply contradictory role of the camera in Ubu is at work
in Ubu himself. Ubu seems the figure most closely aligned with the
paper shredder, and the camera with the Photostat machine. However
the lampooning and violent comedies of Ubu use the language of the
absurd to construct new historical narratives of apartheid.
Kentridge’s work turns repeatedly towards the absurd to consider the
political realities of his investigations. In a lecture/performance entitled
‘Learning From the Absurd’, he describes its functions thus:
The interest in the absurd … has to do with two different possibilities …

one is that it gives us a sense of other logics, of other possibilities of
how the way the world is organized; what happens is that the world
becomes so naturalized to us that it takes an act of will, it takes an
act of determination to understand that there are possible other
logics … The absurd is pointing to the contingency of the way we
think we understand the world … And the second part is that it shows
us the physical and mental act that we do in trying to construct a
sense of the world as it arrives to us, the way in which we assume
that it is all naturalized and that the world has simply arrived at us,
but every now and then there is a way in which we understand, no
the world is arriving at us as a chaotic set of impulses and we do this
huge work; it’s both kind of mental and rational and psychic the
whole time to keep all the different pieces in place and believe in the
coherence of how they operate.30
Through the absurd as a narrative trope, Kentridge argues, one becomes

reflexively aware of the stories we are told, and of the rationalization
of histories. Ubu’s absurdity critiques the political functions of the TRC,
where justice is too easily subordinated to the demand to forgive. It
recognizes the contingent way in which the narratives of apartheid are
framed through the Commission’s work. It opens the history of apart-
heid to questions about the pairing of truth and forgiveness, of who gets
to testify and who is left out of the TRC’s narratives. In each instance
it clarifies the political stakes of the TRC’s seemingly objective ‘picture’
of apartheid abuses.
The narratological structure of the absurd, as Hayden White argues
about any work of history writing, is an inescapable fact of that
work. However, rather than the rush to move away from narrative
structures – as the historian or the forensic, juridical forms of truth
might advocate – White’s work points to the value of these ‘tropologi-
cal’ moves in considering the ideologies of history. White insists that
historical writing is in its form literary, but does so not to denigrate
history; instead White’s work reminds us of the ‘models of interpretive
thought’ that literature and history both engender.31 White continues:
‘All stories are fictions. Which means, of course, that they can be true
only in a metaphorical sense and in the sense which a figure of speech
can be true.’32 History writing must be read through its figuration and
use of language. Reading the TRC through irony and the absurd invites
a consideration of the juridical functions of amnesty and of what is
elided from the framework the commission sets for itself. An analysis
of the lacunae within the TRC’s testimonies reveals the framework of
forgetting that Tutu sets out for it. To read history as a literary genre also
allows figurative constructions such as Kentridge’s work to open new
models of perceiving these historical events.
Ubu as a figure deployed in both Jarry’s work and Kentridge’s exists
as a political and historical language. Jarry’s Ubu plays make reference
to the will to power, state violence, revolution and slavery; Ubu’s rep-
resentation becomes potent as a figure through which to read poli-
tics. Notably, the French Trotskyist writer David Rousset used Ubu to
describe the conditions of his internment at Buchenwald.33 Rousset
refers to Buchenwald as having ‘a monstrous humour, a tragic buffoon-
ery’.34 This description of Buchenwald renders a condition ‘that every-
thing is possible’. Rousset continues: ‘Ubu and Kafka lost their original
literary association and became component parts of the world we live
in.’35 Rousset’s deployment of Ubu highlights the limitless potential
of political violence after the Holocaust. This condition of ‘everything
is possible’ also bears consideration as a mode of experience in South

Africa’s apartheid history, as sites such as Vlakplaas or Kentridge’s loom-
ing monolith in Ubu set a similar limitless potential for violence. The
formal register of animation in Ubu reinforces this dimension of limitless
possibility: a camera transforms into a cat, radio, cannon and helicopter,
enabling the camera to move effortlessly through South Africa.
Ubu’s presence in Rousset’s reading of Buchenwald, or in Kentridge’s
film, deploys the absurd to think about history. In Ubu, the main charac-
ter’s behaviour exposes many covert police actions to the viewer of the
film. At the same time it holds the potential for transformative politics,
working in the same way that the TRC does (or Vertov’s camera). As
Rousset writes, the discovery of Ubu’s humour ‘enabled many to sur-
vive’.36 Perhaps more so than the camera, Ubu exposes the viewer to lost
apartheid histories. Ubu shows these histories, yet offers no conclusion.
Jarry’s play also does not end with a clear or meaningful conclusion. Ubu
Cuckolded, the second Ubu play in Jarry’s series, concludes as a crocodile
runs across the stage demanding a resolution – yet the play simply con-
cludes on this moment of aggression. Kentridge appropriates the croco-
dile in Ubu and the Truth Commission, using it as a figure of erasure. Taylor
and Kentridge use the crocodile to swallow reams of evidence; it stands in
for the paper shredder. The crocodile points to the impossibility of struc-
turing a complete narrative; it reveals the narrative gaps and impossibili-
ties of seeing destroyed evidence the TRC attempts to uncover. In a similar
fashion, the absence of a conclusion in Ubu suggests the impossibility
of the closure the TRC aims to achieve. Like the erasure traces function-
ing as an afterimage in Kentridge’s 10 Drawings for Projection, the scars of
apartheid persist as ghosts on the present. These memories, just like the
economic and social antimonies they engendered, cannot simply fade to
the past in a condition of a ‘new’ South Africa.37 In Ubu, the impossibility
of pure reparation is figured through the torn fissures of the silhouette
puppets in the film, reassembled only from their contingent parts, which
leaves the fault lines of destruction still visible.
Ubu and the kino-eye camera are an ironic tandem, mutually sup-
porting each other by writing a counter history to the TRC, but also
simultaneously highlighting the flaws of the other. As much as the
camera destroys the event itself, Ubu’s absurd behaviour documents the
secretive moments of violence during apartheid. By pairing the two in
ironic tension, Kentridge constructs a narrative of the TRC that captures
statements uttered there while not reducing the event to simple report-
age; it considers the commission’s ability to achieve the goals it desires.
Yet this is not just simply a question of constructing historical narra-
tive. The narrative and its absences critique the very ethical structures
the TRC engages. Specifically the link between testimony and the
demand for forgiveness is complicated by the reliance on the juridical
structure of amnesty. The pairing of amnesty and forgiveness suggests
a forgetting that renders the terrain of memory contentious within
the TRC’s structure. This returns us to Tutu’s insistence that the role of
forgiveness emphasizes the need to forget and move forward. The legal
function of amnesty specifically defines it as an act of forgetting. The
Oxford Dictionary of Law defines amnesty as ‘an act erasing from legal
memory some aspect of criminal conduct by an offender. It is most
frequently granted to groups of people in respect of political offences
and is wider than a pardon, which merely relieves an offender of pun-
ishment’.38 Amnesty literally removes the offence from history, erasing
it from legal archives. Erasure, as Kentridge’s working process of draw-
ing and erasing, physically and metaphorically, suggests, is impossible
to achieve in a pure form. No mater how much one tries, traces of the
past remain upon the surface. Ubu critiques the possibility of forget-
ting as a mode of progress and by extension examines the problems of
amnesty as a political solution. Kentridge’s notes for Ubu and the Truth
Commission reveal an opposition to the process of amnesty. Through an
examination of Kentridge’s Stereoscope it becomes clear that this is linked
to the questions of memory and forgiveness Kentridge explores in Ubu.
Conclusion: on forgiveness
The thorny connections between amnesty, forgiveness and forgetting

are central to an understanding of Kentridge’s response to the TRC.
These considerations emerge in part from Kentridge’s attendance at
philosopher Jacques Derrida’s 1998 lecture tour of South Africa. In these
lectures, Derrida addressed the topics of forgiveness and the role of the
archive in memory. After attending Derrida’s address at the University
of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, Kentridge considers the relationship
of forgiveness and poisoning:
There are two things about that give/forgive which comes in the film,
the one was the film House of Games; in which there is a psychoana-
lyst who keeps telling her patient who has in fact just shot someone
in the airport, just remember forgive yourself as the key thing. The
other was a visit to Johannesburg by Derrida who came and gave a
lecture at that time which I could not understand, but he said that
the word give has an interesting etymology that the word give comes
from the Germanic root gif and knowing from Afrikaans, I don’t know
from German, but from Afrikaans the word gif means poison … there
is a poison in the giving. And that acts of giving are acts of aggression
and that the idea of forgiveness becomes very complicated.39
Kentridge’s reference to give/forgive alludes to a scene from his film

Stereoscope, which uses the metaphor of the eponymous visual device
to explore metaphors of public and private, past and present, industry
and apartheid. The stereoscope creates a three-dimensional effect by
separating the eyes in the process of perception; the observer looks at
two similar but slightly different images.40 To reconcile the disparity
between the two images, the brain superimposes one atop the other,
merging them into one, producing the illusion of three-dimensionality.
Kentridge uses the stereoscope as a metaphor to show the divided
worlds between the industrialist Soho Eckstein’s empire and his private
guilt. This culminates in a scene at the end of the film where Kentridge
specifically invokes Derrida’s reading of forgiveness (itself closely allied
to the TRC). Kentridge draws with smoky black charcoal and rich blue
pastel; the word ‘give’ emerges, it is joined by ‘for’, making ‘forgive’.
The ‘for’ recedes, leaving ‘give’ and remerges to again form ‘forgive’, in
a process that enjoins giving with forgiveness.
The act of giving forgiveness, closely related to the gift invoked in giv-
ing, figures heavily here. The word gift, as Kentridge points out, derives
from the German gif, which translates as ‘poison’ in Afrikaans (as it does
in German). A relationship between giving and poisoning emerges, evok-
ing the tensions between forgiveness and forgetting in Ubu. As Kentridge
argues, the gift of forgiveness and its ally forgetting do not provide the
reparative function Tutu seeks. In a similar way, Derrida rejects the idea
that forgiveness could emerge from the TRC. In On Forgiveness, Derrida
argues that the act of forgiveness is rooted in the unconditional, distinctly
separating it from the work of amnesty.41 Derrida writes: ‘In order to have
its own meaning, [it] must have no “meaning”, finality, even no intelli-
gibility. It is a madness of the impossible.’42 Forgiveness can only forgive
the unforgivable, and for Derrida forgiveness must strive to be ‘without
power: unconditional but without sovereignty [emphasis Derrida’s].’43 Derrida
insists forgiveness must remain in the realm of the personal, separating it
from amnesty, which exists as a juridical notion.44 Instead, the TRC links
amnesty with forgiveness, introducing a sense of forgetting.45
Kentridge, reflecting on Stereoscope, seems to concur with Derrida’s
interpretation:
somebody said that the interesting thing about forgiveness is it’s only
possible when it no longer matters, that it no longer counts, up to that
point its not possible when it still has a huge weight you can’t forgive
and once you can forgive it means there is nothing to forgive.46
Stereoscope breaks up forgiveness into three units: ‘give’, ‘for’ and ‘for-
give’. Reading these three units in an interrelation, the questions of
who forgives, for whom the act of forgiveness is meant, and what that
forgiveness costs, are raised in Stereoscope, in turn questioning the limits
of forgiveness in the TRC. ‘For’ and ‘give’ alliteratively resonate with
‘forgetting’, invoking the gift of amnesty; reading forgetting in a similar
operation, it is important to ask who it is for and what one gets from
the act. The German philosopher Harald Weinrich argues that forget-
ting works in the move between ‘for’ and ‘get’, it becomes an attempt to
move away from, or to get rid of something; much like Tutu’s belief that
forgetting the past will allow one to move towards the future.47 In the
TRC, forgiveness does the work of forgetting. Like the binaristic pair-
ing of the stereoscope demanding one image be placed above another,
so too does the TRC place one historical narrative over other voices
perhaps not aligned with its politics of amnesty. The archive, a crucial
component of the TRC’s work, makes this clear. The archive as memory
is intensely linked to forgetting, as Derrida writes: ‘There is a perverse …
desire for forgetting in the archive itself.’48 The archive’s memory work
functions like forgiveness once it is put in place: there is no demand
for the work of memory any longer once the archive exists. Thus, the
archive further entangles forgiveness and forgetting.
The archive brings us back to the presence of witness, testimony
and memory documented by the camera and commission in the TRC.
What Ubu narrates, in response to this forgetting, are the lacunae, the
irreparable gaps in memory, and the work of witness revealed in the TRC.
The camera and Ubu visualize the impossibility of seeing in the TRC;
its absurd testimony highlights the gaps within its narrative, but also
suggests the impossible tasks of forgiving suggested by Derrida and
Kentridge. Instead, Kentridge’s absurdity demands that one think dif-
ferently; it constructs new modes of sense-making. To think through
the absurd conceptualizes apartheid history outside the juridical links
to the demand for forgiveness. Vertov’s kino-eye camera opens up the
demand to conceptualize history through a contingent and embodied
schema. Subsequently, Ubu’s narrative of apartheid writes a history of
South Africa’s past while critiquing the TRC, but in doing so allows us in
Vertov’s words: ‘to not forget what happens, and what the future must
take into account’, thus narrating memories of apartheid not only for
the ghosts of the past, but for the future to come as well.
Acknowledgement
This work was supported by funds from the Faculty Research and Creative
Activities Award, Western Michigan University.
Notes
1. Dziga Vertov, Annette Michelson (ed.), Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 67.
2. See Andrew Hugill, ‘Pataphysics: A Useless Guide’ (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 2012).
3. Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act 34, 1995 (http://www.justice.
gov.za, date accessed 14 April 2014).
4. Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act 34.
5. Mark Sanders, Ambiguities of Witnessing: Law and Literature in the Time of a
Truth Commission (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), pp. 13, 23.
6. Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Dan Cameron, J. M. Coetzee, and William
Kentridge, William Kentridge (London: Phaidon, 1999), p. 132.
7. William Kentridge quoted in William Kentridge: Anything is Possible, DVD,
directed by Charles Atlas (Boston, MA: PBS, 2010).
8. Calvin Tomkins, ‘Lines of Resistance’, The New Yorker, 18 January 2010.
9. Mark Rosenthal, Mark Rosenthal (ed.) ‘William Kentridge: A Portrait of the
Artist’, William Kentridge: Five Themes (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2009), p. 36.
10. These scenes include protests in Durban’s Cato Manor, the University of the
Witswatersrand, the 1985 State of Emergency and the 1976 Soweto uprising.
11. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa, Truth and Reconciliation
Commission of South Africa Report, vol. I (Cape Town: Truth and Reconciliation
Commission, 1998), p. 24.
12. TRC, Truth and Reconciliation Report, p. 24.
13. For a detailed analysis of the social and legal meanings of Ubuntu, see:
Sanders, Ambiguities of Witnessing.
14. TRC, Truth And Reconciliation Report, pp. 111–114.
15. Desmond Tutu quoted in Antjie Krog, Country of My Skull: Guilt, Sorrow and
the Limits of Forgiveness in the New South Africa (New York: Three Rivers Press,
1998), p. 42.
16. Kentridge, ‘The Crocodile’s Mouth’, director’s note to Ubu and the Truth
Commission (Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 1998), p. viii.
17. Taylor, Ubu and the Truth Commission, p. iv.
18. Christov-Bakargiev, Cameron, Coetzee, Kentridge, William Kentridge, p. 33.
19. Bill Keller, ‘A Glimpse of Apartheid’s Dying Sting,’ New York Times, 20 February
1995 (http://www.nytimes.com, date accessed 2 August 2014).
20. Christov-Bakargiev, Cameron, Coetzee, Kentridge, William Kentridge, p. 35.
21. Angela Breidbach and William Kentridge, William Kentridge: Thinking Aloud
(Köln: Walther König, 2006), pp. 93–94.
22. The image of the falling man evokes a reference to the police informing the
family of activist Ahmed Timol that he had fallen from a 10th storey win-
dow at John Voster Square Police station in Johannesburg when in fact he
had been beaten to death. See: http://www.justice.gov.za for the TRC inquest
into his death (last accessed 5 August 2014).
23. Krog, Country of My Skull, pp. 271–272.
24. Annette Michelson, Kino-Eye, p. xxiii.
25. Michelson, Kino-Eye, p. xix.
26. Vertov, Kino-Eye, p. 41.
27. Walter Benjamin, Edmund Jephcott, Harry Zohn (trans.), Howard Eiland
and Michael Jennings (eds), ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological
Reproducibility’, Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, 1935–1938, vol. 3 (Cam-
bridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2002), pp. 101–133.
28. Vertov, Kino-Eye, p. 88.
29. Kentridge, ‘The Crocodile’s Mouth’, p. viii.
30. William Kentridge, Learning From the Absurd, Podcast video lecture, University
of California at Berkeley, 15 March 2009 (http://townsendcenter.berkeley.
edu, date accessed 2 August 2014).
31. Hayden White, Figural Realism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1999), p. 6.
32. White, Figural Realism, p. 29.
33. David Rousset, Yvonne Moyse and Roger Senhouse (trans.), A Word Apart
(London: Seeker and Warburg, 1951), pp. 2, 64.
34. Rousset, A World Apart, p. 2.
35. Rousset, A World Apart, pp. 109–111. For a detailed application of Rousset to
cinema see Griselda Pollock and Max Silverman, Griselda Pollock and Max
Silverman (eds), ‘Concentrationary Cinema,’ in Concentrationary Cinema:
Aesthetics as Political Resistance in Alain Resnais’ Night and Fog (New York and
Oxford: Berghan, 2011).
36. Rousset, A World Apart, p. 111.
37. For a reading of the ideologies of newness in post-apartheid South Africa see:
Grant Farred, ‘The Not-Yet Counterpartisan: A New Politics of Oppositionality’,
South Atlantic Quarterly 103 (2004), pp. 589–605.
38. Oxford Dictionary of Law, sixth ed., s.v. ‘amnesty.’
39. William Kentridge, Larry Rinder, Mark Rosenthal and Kaja Silverman, Learning
from the Absurd: Panel Discussion, Podcast video, Round table discussion at the
University of California at Berkeley, 16 March 2009 (http://townsendcenter.
berkeley.edu, accessed 2 August 2014).
40. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993),
p. 120.
41. Jacques Derrida, Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes (trans.), On Cosmopolitanism
and Forgiveness (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 39–42.
42. Derrida, On Forgiveness, p. 45.
43. Derrida, On Forgiveness, pp. 33, 59.
44. Derrida, On Forgiveness, pp. 43–44.
45. Derrida, On Forgiveness, pp. 41–42.
46. Kentridge, Rinder, Rosenthal and Silverman, ‘Learning From the Absurd:
Panel Discussion’.
47. Harald Weinrich, Steven Rendall (trans.), Lehte: The Art and Critique of Forgetting
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), pp. 1–2.
48. Jacques Derrida, Carolyn Hamilton, et. al. (eds), ‘Archive Fever: A Seminar
by Jacques Derrida, University of Witwatersrand,’ Refiguring the Archive
(Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002), p. 80.
7
History, Fiction and the Politics
of Corporeality in Pablo Larraín’s
Dictatorship Trilogy
Nike Jung
The historical film – defined here as a fiction film based on historical

events – commits a sacrilege according to conventional wisdom: it trans-
gresses the boundaries between documenting history as a verifiable truth,
expressed in and confirmed by the use of archive, and fictionalizing this
history into a fantasy, considered subjective and therefore somewhat
unreliable. Within academia, this notion of a strict line of separation
between history and fiction has, of course, been thoroughly debunked.
Maybe Raul Hilberg’s rhetorical question puts it best: If we cannot
write poetry any more after Auschwitz, why should writing history be
possible?1
Nevertheless, my first move in this essay will be to re-establish –
conditionally and contextually – the division between documentary
and fiction, in order to make the case for an additional potential of
and in fiction. Chilean director Pablo Larraín’s trilogy on the Pinochet
dictatorship – Tony Manero (2008), Post Mortem (2010) and especially NO
(2012) – offers a persuasive example of a fiction that perforates narrative
and visual confinements and repetitions, and provides a forum for differ-
ent ways to imagine and talk about the histories in history.
My second argument rests on textual analysis of the films, revolving
on the axis of corporeality.2 Various bodies – the prodiegetic bodies, the
bodies of the spectator, the body of the medium film itself3 – connect
Larraín’s films’ potent aesthetics with its political agenda.
Embattled memories
As the critical response to Larraín’s films reflects several core issues

regarding the history/fiction divide, I would like to use this criticism
as a starting point.4 Critics of NO, for example, object to its use of a
118
History, Fiction and the Politics of Corporeality 119
‘classical Hollywood cinema’ paradigm, one which allegedly suggests

that the campaign was designed – and won – by a single heroic indi-
vidual.5 In leaving out the many forces that united in the NO campaign,
the argument goes, the film oversimplifies and even distorts the fact
that the campaign was the ‘first collective work of art of Chilean cin-
ema’.6 The critics’ issues with NO centre around its emphasis, focus and
judgement: what is being rejected is the idea that the triumph of NO
was primarily or only a result of this kind of ‘brave new world’ ad cam-
paign. The film is accused of misrepresenting by failing to convey the
whole story – a routine problem for historical movies: Of course, we can-
not ever tell history comprehensively and exhaustively, or show history
how it ‘really’ was, regardless of whether we choose a visual or written
format. Rather, different questions emerge. What should be remembered
and how? What demands can and should be made of fiction?
The social fibre of Chile has been profoundly shaped by its contested
history. As the transitional politics that followed the return to democracy
sought to neutralize contradictory versions of the past, seeking consen-
sus and reconciliation, remembering on both sides of the political-social
spectrum has often been conducted along well-trodden and antagonistic
narrative memory lanes, each lined with its Manichean version of the
past.7 Historical myths and questionable forms of revisionism often per-
sist despite historical evidence.8 As re-conciliation implies and relies on
the premise of a previous unity, its potential (and art’s capacity to sup-
port the implementation) must be questioned – some positions might
not be reconcilable. If indeed ‘memory is the meaning that we attach
to experience’,9 it does not surprise that collective memory and the
judgement of historical experience continue to be negotiated in fero-
cious form, at times. The debates upon NO’s release surely demonstrated
the fragile nature of consensus in Chile and the continuing obstacles to
communication between opposed political camps.
While questions of historical accuracy and the exploration of (collec-
tive) memory have provided the main frameworks for academic discus-
sions of Chilean cinema, this essay will address these themes through
consideration of the effects of aesthetic and formal treatment of subject
matter.
Documentary and fiction
Rather than setting up an absolute or fundamental ontological differ-

ence between documentary and fiction, the distinction between these
categories creates certain expectations in the audience. Imbued with
120 Nike Jung
the aura of the real, documentary footage invokes what Sobchack calls
the ‘viewer’s documentary consciousness […] a particular mode of
embodied and ethical spectatorship’.10 Chilean documentaries on top-
ics related to the dictatorship often have an ambitious agenda to find
justice or truth, to set the historical record straight. Building on archival
footage and images, these documentaries can and do rely on testimony,
as well as on the cultural code that finds ontological force and eviden-
tiary power in the image.11 Even though the notion of the (analogue)
image as ontologically indexical is being re-examined in light of the
digital turn, for the time being we can assume that audiences continue
to share these assumptions.
After an initial peak in the early 1990s, the recent past all but disap-
peared from Chilean fiction films, while the topic continued to thrive
in the documentary format.12 The reasons offered for this schism range
from false consciousness and cultural training (reflected in thematic
preferences for comedies and Hollywood fare) to contrasting levels of
economic risk; a missing or nascent infrastructure of distribution and
production; lack of state support and self-censorship due to a perceived
or real lack of an audience,13 as well as the need to add to an archive
that was intentionally or accidentally destroyed.14
Recognizing the power of the visual, the junta at different points in time
either prohibited images completely, in classic anti-pictorial fashion, or
used them for spectacular social deceit.15 In the resistance, visual media
played an important role as well. Family members of the disappeared
pinned photographs of the regime’s victims to their chests at demonstra-
tions, using the images as evidence of the existence of the disappeared
and to resist the attempted erasure of their lives.16 Video – U-matic, VHS-
C, Hi-8, Super VHS and Betacam – was central for the development of an
alternative ‘imaginary’ of Chilean society and, later, as part of the audio-
visual battle of the 1980s, as well as the NO campaign.17 Visual media
thus played an important role in shaping historical discourses of Chile,
both as a tool of deception by the regime and as a weapon of resistance.
This leads to my assertion that the perception of visual media’s properties
is coded in culturally and historically specific ways, despite the identical
material-technical basis. Pre-existing expectations towards the capacity
of the image and, derived from that, attitudes towards documentary and
fiction might be more culturally determined than is often acknowledged.
These are, of course, propositions, not absolute ontological statements.
Of central interest here is the interplay of format – both the cultural
codes associated with documentary and fiction, and with the medium
of film itself – and content, and how this shapes the negotiation of
historical events and embattled memories. Moreover, fiction films that

focus (also) on entertaining consumers appeal to a larger and/or differ-
ent range of spectators. By providing a different means of expression,
fictionalizations can play an important part in the process of under-
standing historical experience by offering a different and potent way of
accessing the past in emotional and sensual terms. If, in order ‘to under-
stand and combat material inequalities, it is necessary to comprehend
imagined inequalities [in representation]’,18 the same might be true to
understand the ways in which collective memory and version(s) of the
past are experienced and challenged. In the following section, I there-
fore wish to look closer at these imagined parts and to trace how the
movement from evidential documentation to imaginative negotiation
of history takes shape in Larraín’s films.
Imagining history
In Larraín’s trilogy, the ‘imagined’ in history is expressed by emphasis-

ing what is visibly missing, yet alluded to; things that are expected
but remain unsubstantiated. Prominent absences permeate the films,
expressed both on a formal and narrative level. Central actions take
place in offscreen space, transmitted via offscreen sound and contrasted
with pregnant silences, or they are cut out by ellipses. Obscure mise-en-
scène and the perceptually limited gaze of the protagonists constantly
obstruct clear vision. These aesthetics of the ‘negative space’ point to
our fragmented, contingent knowledge of history and to the gaps in
knowledge filled with imagination.
Secondly, the concept of corporeality forms a useful framework for
interpretation. Various types of bodies emerge as a privileged site for
the concentration and condensation of meaning. For each film, I will
demonstrate how meaning is created by the body-as-metaphor, and how
the political drive of the films is tied up with aesthetic devices clustered
around the body.
Tony Manero: the psychopathic subject
Tony Manero’s protagonist Raúl Perralta (Alfredo Castro) wants to win a

popular look-alike contest to be ‘the Chilean Tony Manero’. This epony-
mous quest can be read as an allegory about the nation striving, at that
historical moment, to emulate the glittery appearance of another.
Rather than just creating a ‘colourful’ background, life under the dic-
tatorship forms the spinal column of the film. A stoic camera captures
122 Nike Jung
apparently quotidian scenes of persecution and police brutality, and

Raúl murders with utter impunity and sometimes little motivation,
exhibiting a complete lack of personal or amorous ethics (for instance,
attempting to sleep with the daughter of his lover). His behaviour
mirrors the conduct of the authoritarian regime: random, cruel and
without ideological or ethical pretensions.19 In an insane world, the
psychopathic Raúl is presented as the logical culmination of the system.
He embodies a rational response under the circumstances; the necessity
to develop selective schizophrenia in order to become habituated to
constant fear.20
The conditions of life under the dictatorship provide the breeding
ground for disturbed subjects. In the recent Chilean docufiction, Pena de
Muerte (Tevo Díaz, 2012), which investigates a series of murders in Viña,
in the municipality of Valparaíso, in the early 1980s, a neuropsycholo-
gist explains that the psychopathic behaviour demonstrated by the
serial killers did in fact mirror the conduct of the authorities. The sense
of inviolability experienced by the real murderers in Pena, who did not
even bother to cover their traces, and the fictional killer Raúl in Tony
Manero, points to the issue of real, off-screen impunity.
Carlos Flores defined Chile’s ‘mania of the copy’ as a sociocultural tic;
this is certainly not an exclusively Chilean obsession, but it lends itself
easily to the interpretation of Raúl rejecting his national identity.21 In
one scene, Raúl’s lover tells him he is Chilean and he responds: ‘No, not
me, not any more.’ (‘Yo nopo … yo, no más’.) Paradoxically, his attitude
can also be read as affirmation of his identity, following the neoliberal
parroting project instigated by the dictatorship. Yet Raúl’s desire to be
free to choose his identity is completely self-centred, and this absence
of any larger social or political inclination or socially inclusive vision
has been considered as precisely what makes his character ‘political’
(Figure 7.1).22
Raúl escapes from his life and identity into a dream world offered by
and initially fomented in the cinema. This appears as a rather rational
response to a society in which public space and social bonds have been
dissolved. What Judith Butler identified as the fundamental sameness
between human beings, the precariousness of all human life, is negated
by a dictatorship. Butler argues that we are all bound to and dependent
on each other, precisely through our vulnerable, irrevocably material
bodies. The dictatorial state obfuscates this fact, installing a mercantile
calculation in the social body in which whatever benefits another is
taken from one’s self.23 In Tony Manero, the body functions as a symbol
of this erosion of social trust and annihilation of the public sphere. The
Figure 7.1 The disturbed subject in Tony Manero (Pablo Larraín, 2008)
Source: Image courtesy of Pablo Larraín and Fábula
camera focuses almost entirely on Raúl; his face and body fill the frame
in a claustrophobic way, conveying the lack of a community as well as
suggesting his diminished range of perception.
Raúl’s obsession also resonates with Butler’s notion on the relation-
ship between grief and unacknowledged lives. Butler argues that a life
must first be perceived as living in order to be worth grieving over. In
Tony Manero, the old lady killed by Raúl will not be grieved for. Raúl
does not grieve for the members of his dancing troupe – taken by the
secret police, the DINA, while he hides – who will be imprisoned, hurt
or killed. Most likely, if Raúl died, no-one would grieve for him and he
would be one more erased existence. From this perspective, his desire to
be someone whose existence is acknowledged, and consequently to be
grievable, can again be considered utterly logical.
Resurrection in Post Mortem
Post Mortem continues this engagement with the erasure of existence

through the trope of disappearance. In the film, a small functionary
at a morgue (Alfredo Castro, again) attempts without much success to
pursue ‘love in the time of a coup d’état’. Both the corpse of President
Salvador Allende and the bodies of those killed in the first months after
the coup appear in the film, manifesting the ghostly figures that pos-
sess and haunt the country with their traumatic absence. For those who
124 Nike Jung
knew the disappeared, as Alfredo Jocelyn-Holt points out, there is of

course nothing more visible, vocal and loud than their absence.24 And
for the collective social imagination, the figure of the ghost, notoriously
body-less, hovering between visible and invisible,25 can be read as a
‘social figure’ with a ‘political status and function’.26 Instead of reani-
mating the dead president, Post Mortem resurrects Allende as a corpse,
re-incarnating the traumatic loss of this singular publicly visible body.
The film’s characters watch and touch, as surrogates for the Chilean
public, who, like the biblical Thomas, had long been in a position of
incredulity. Doubt is transferred not to the death (or resurrection) of
the president but to the cause of his death, long contested in Chilean
society (Figure 7.2).27
The coup itself is encoded in sonic and temporal form – by asynchro-
nous sounds of sirens, low-flying jets, barking dogs and objects being
destroyed while the image shows the protagonist showering (the bom-
bardment took place in the early morning) – and through visual evi-
dence of its aftermath: the morgue is inundated with corpses. Unknown
and unnamed, these bodies pile up and fill the screen. Their sheer quan-
tity is embodied evidence and mute accusation, testifying to the vio-
lence committed. As has been theorized with regards to various forms of
state violence, such as imprisonment or torture, the bodies upon which
these transgressions are inflicted are made to signify abstract values.28
The (authoritarian) state substantiates its claim to power by using the
bodies of its subjects to remake a national identity – by wounding,
killing or disappearing those deemed dangerous or expendable, and
thereby paralyzing the general population through fear. In this context
of a violated social body, imaginarily having, visually possessing the
Figure 7.2 Embodied evidence in Post Mortem (Pablo Larraín, 2010)

Source: Image courtesy of Pablo Larraín and Fábula.
missing bodies, results in a powerful gesture. The ‘resurrected’ bodies in

Post Mortem create a kind of restorative corporeality for these missing
bodies, a cinematic habeas corpus.
NO’s many bodies
In NO, new scenes are shot with U-matic cameras from the 1980s and
meshed with footage of the actual advertisements from the 1988 NO
campaign for the plebiscite that succeeded in ousting General Augusto
Pinochet. The film faithfully reproduces mannerisms of the era’s style
and flaunts the shortcomings of the medium, such as overexposure or
narrow depth of field. Diegetic time is thus encoded not only by the use
of archive material, production design, soundtrack and mise en scène,
but is expanded to the medium itself. All three films of the trilogy have
been shot with such vintage cameras, lenses and film stock but, in NO,
this use of the medium is most proficient (Figure 7.3).
Throughout the film, there is a sort of Freudian fort-da game around
the notions of real/not real. For instance, Larraín invited prominent indi-
viduals who participated in the original historical events to re-perform
Figure 7.3 Artificial authenticity in NO (Pablo Larraín, 2012)

Source: Image courtesy of Pablo Larraín and Fábula.
126 Nike Jung
their roles.29 Rather than having vintage stock and cameras work as
an unquestioned tool for the authentication of the narrative, archive
footage is juxtaposed with the re-enacted genesis of this material. This
combination of real old film stock with real archive material effectively
sutures two kinds of ‘documentary’. The result is an authenticity which
has an artificiality that is acknowledged, both evoking and deconstruct-
ing the concept of the real. The ‘double realness’ alerts the viewer to
culturally inherited claims to (transparent) truth of footage material
generally. While the re-enacted footage is perceptually realistic and the
use of vintage media in the fictionalized parts allows for a softened
suture between archive and fictional re-enactment, the star presence of
Gael García Bernal as the protagonist ensures that the audience never
confuses the footage with the re-enacted parts, even if unfamiliar with
Chilean history. Additionally, Bernal’s body, belonging to a well-known
actor, always points to its material existence outside of the film, as do
the bodies of historical protagonists.
The enmeshing of old and new footage foregrounds the materiality of
the film’s own celluloid ‘body’. As opposed to the logic of immediacy,
which ‘dictates that the medium itself should disappear’,30 the medium
in NO is showcased, as a material body. And precisely this hypermediacy
makes us ‘aware of the artificiality of the original’.31 Determinedly pre-
sent, the medium encourages reflections on how our access to historical
knowledge is configured by technology, on the capacity of the medium
‘objectively’ to record and convey historical truth. NO plays on this
authenticating representational tradition and ontological power of
historical footage – not to delegitimize it, but to make a point on the
genesis of at least some of the grievances of contemporary Chile in the
dictatorship and transition period.
This continuity between past and present is expressed with the mon-
tage of old and new footage, through repetitions and leitmotifs, such as
a toy train going in circles, and in the narrative construction. Here, con-
versations spill over from one scene to the next, sentences break off and
ideas are picked up again in a different spatio-temporal setting. In this
way, the film insinuates a different notion of time, as circular, elliptical
or flattened.32 On the level of the medium itself, the aesthetic tension
between surface and depth in video also expresses this central question
of the film in a cunning way: what has really changed?
Furthermore, the montage couples such issues of temporality with an
affective and psychological dimension. Dislocated temporal and spatial
relations leave the viewer in a limbo and demand an active reading
position. As they do not match expectations codified according to genre
or continuity editing, the ellipses function as the space into which the
audience may insert what they imagine to transpire between the scenes,
which can only loosely be based on the available visual and narrative
information. In this way, ‘what is being seen is in excess of what is being
shown’,33 allowing for a different, psychological experience of time.
In NO, form (medium) expresses and also looks like content (message),
as a central theme of the film relates to advertising’s surface power. The
world of sales speaks to the particular way in which the transition to
democracy was negotiated in Chile.34 Born of various agreements with,
and concessions made to, the military government, the transition left
in place many of the dictatorship’s institutions. This is where the film
offers its deeply political message, creating a clever metaphor for the
Chile to come, where ‘the official discourse is publicity’.35 René uses
the same tagline – ‘What you will now see is deeply embedded in the
contemporary social context of Chile … Today Chile thinks of its
future’36 – on three different occasions: to sell a soft drink; to present
the NO campaign to members of the medley of parties who will form
the coalition government of the transition; and again at the end of the
film for his next commercial. Each time the pitch works, selling soda
as well as democracy, and its vague grandeur also serves as a caption,
introduction or advertisement for the film NO itself: the ‘contempo-
rary social context of Chile’ can refer both to the diegetic time, or to
the time of viewing for the film’s audience. Commercials – like fiction
cinema and nostalgia – appeal to the audience on a visceral level. The
metaphor of the commercial is therefore also a self-referential allusion
to the appeal of its own format. While we may deplore the increasing
‘McDonaldización’37 of our world, the appeal of commercials, as of com-
mercial fiction cinema, should not be understood simply or solely as a
product of manipulation or conditioning. The disdain for these genres
smacks of prejudice and elitism.
Yet do the adverts featured in NO reflect an empty style, deplete of
substance, as some commentators suggest?38 Why is the promise that
‘happiness is coming’ (‘la alegría ya viene’) inevitably cast as superficial
and insubstantial; frivolous individualism bordering on decadence and
egotism – if not for the enduring privilege of intellect over emotion,
the puritan ideal and concept of work and ideas as that which hurts,
and the separation of public and private spheres? ‘Happiness’ may
sound like a pursuit of gringos, but it has very real political implica-
tions. Arguably, the substance of happiness encompasses freedom from
oppression, fear and arbitrary state violence, as well as the security,
leisure time and financial means to participate in one’s community,
128 Nike Jung
culturally and socially. The NO campaign itself was shaped by a method

that privileged the process, the search for an experimental and playful
style and by the idea that content may also be present on the surface.
At least some of the creators of the historical campaign therefore con-
cluded that ‘it’s not what you say, but the way you say it’, echoing a
tenet of marketing.39
Clearly, NO is not the feel-good film that some critics perceive; while
they may sneer at its vintage effects, these do more than confine the past,
safely, to a nostalgic time capsule. Often devalued, nostalgia, if employed
self-reflectively, can bring the spectator closer to history, instead of
educating with histories that impose ‘narrative order on chaotic real-
ity’.40 Nostalgia derives power from its emotional appeal; its capacity to
produce a strong affective response.41 I would add that nostalgic desire
also indicates a capacity to imagine an alternative world, or at least an
insistence on the possibility of such a different space or time. This insist-
ence implies a (potentially political) rejection or non-acceptance of the
status quo.42 The capacity of fiction to appeal on an emotional level
is essential to incite the recognition and empathic viewing necessary
for the kind of memory work that produces the necessary distinction
‘between past and present’ and the recognition ‘that another’s loss is
not my own’.43 This emotional connection might then result in the
kind of compassionate empathy that is able to distinguish between self
and other.
The embodied audience
Why emphasize the fact that fiction appeals to its audience in emo-
tional terms? What is the socio-political relevance of this, and where is
history’s place in all this?
A 2013 survey by the Center for Studies of Contemporary Reality
(CERC) revealed that 55 percent of Chileans regarded the 17 years of the
dictatorship as either bad or very bad, while nine percent said they were
good or very good. More than a third of those polled either had no opin-
ion or regarded the dictatorship years as a mixture of good and bad.44
How should this undecided third be understood? Walescka Pino-Ojeda
argues that a combination of judicial oblivion and individual logic has
led to ‘a questionable and convenient dissociation between “them”, the
“victims”, and “us”, those who were not directly affected by the climate of
fear’.45 For the victims of violations, justice must be total and complete,
and there cannot be ‘honourable’ negotiation; the relativism of per-
sonal or subjective truth is not an option. Yet for those who were not as
affected personally, such absolute positions might not fit. Larraín’s films
invent this personality for the Chilean screen: the bystander, the ‘neu-
tral witness’, ‘those who are just there, who look from the outside, who
maintain themselves neutral, indifferent’.46 The political blankness of
these figures can be related to the personal memories of many Chileans
who do not appear in the official narrative.47
The strength of the films lies precisely in their novel incorporation
of this perspective of a non-affiliated wavering third, certainly shared
by many, but rarely depicted in Chilean film. These characters can also
be related to a younger generation searching for a tenable position with
regard to the ideological struggles of the 1970s.
In all three films, the protagonists are initially passive and situated at
a certain uncomprehending distance from the unfolding events. Their
observing position mirrors the placement of the cinematic spectator.
For the most part confined to the visual ranges of the protagonists,
the audience can only watch, and only receives, a partial story. The
necessity to decipher the cinematic text positions the spectator – any
spectator – alongside Chileans who are trying to make sense of their
history. No bird’s eye offers a ‘monumental’ vision, a totality of history,
advancing with determined linearity. Instead, as history intrudes into
the protagonists’ lives, they witness tangentially, fragmentarily. These
small stories do not tell ‘History, with capital letters, but that other
history, the small and personal one’.48 Eventually the protagonists are
forced to take a stance – suggesting to the audience that maintaining
passivity is never neutral and ultimately impossible.
Yet in Larraín’s films, it is not primarily through vision that we come
closer to understanding. Dislocated temporal and spatial relations
leave the viewer in a limbo, while the emotional-affective and sensual
dimension of the films aim to depict mental states that escape direct
representation.49 We never see clearly in these films. Vision is power, of
course, and blocked vision – in a context where we desire (and fear) to
see – can be experienced as uncomfortable, disorienting, uncanny or
threatening. In Tony Manero and Post Mortem, filmic structures (gloomy
lighting, subdued acting, threatening offscreen sound, obscure mise-
en-scène, half-mute characters, the appeals made by the medium itself)
provide an ‘invitation to feel’, to experience emotional states that can
be aligned to historical experience.50
To conclude, the materiality and corporeality of the medium, style
and surface express the central concerns of Larrain’s films. The history
of photography and video in Chile demonstrates how the material
intersects with the mode of attention invoked, where the older medium
130 Nike Jung
encourages a sensual visuality and evokes particular histories. This use

might help either to access body memories – for a Chilean audience of
a certain age or generation – or to allow for a different way of relating
to history.
Notes
1. Raul Hilberg, ‘I Was Not There’, B. Lang (ed.), Writing and the Holocaust
(New York: Holmes & Meier, 1998), p. 25.
2. See Karl Schoonover, Brutal Vision: The Neorealist Body in Postwar Italian
Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012).
3. See Vivian Sobchack (ed.), The Address of the Eye: a Phenomenology of Film
Experience (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992); Laura Marks, The
Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Durham and
London: Duke University Press, 2000).
4. Much ado continues to be made about Larraín’s parents’ political views and
many critics detect an unconscious right-wing point of view in his films.
5. Eminent critics include scholars such as Manuel Antonio Garretón, ‘No
según M. A. Garretón’, Emol, 2012 (http://www.emol.com, accessed 18 April
2014); and Raquel Olea, ‘NO… la perversión de la verdad’, Radio Tierra, 2012
(http://www.radiotierra.cl, accessed 13 August 2012).
6. In the original: ‘la primera obra colectiva del cine chileno’. All translations
from Spanish to English are mine. S. Caiozzi, quoted in A. Cavallo, P. Douzet,
and C. Rodríguez, Huerfanos y perdidos: El cine chileno de la transición, 1990–1999
(Santiago: Grupo Grijalbo Mondadori, 1999), p. 270.
7. See G. W. Mitnick, ‘Chile: La persistencia de las memorias antagónicas’,
Política y cultura 31 (Spring 2009), pp. 211–234 and N. Richard, Cultural
Residues: Chile in Transition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2004); V. V. O. de Zarate, ‘Terrorism and Political Violence during the Pinochet
Years: Chile, 1973–1989’, Radical History Review 85 (2003), p. 182.
8. The Chilean right continues to justify the coup with assertions that have
been contradicted by findings of the Truth Commission (1991) and Report
of the Armed Forces (2000).
9. S. Stern, quoted in in F. Blanco, ‘Deviants, Dissidents, Perverts: Chile Post
Pinochet’, unpublished PhD thesis, The Ohio State University (2009), p. 50.
10. Vivian Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), p. 261.
11. Besides La Batalla de Chile (Patricio Gúzman, 1973–1979), well known
internationally, there are many more excellent documentaries, for instance
Sebastián Moreno’s Ciudad de los Fotógrafos (2006); Carmen Castillo’s auto-
biographical work La flaca Alejandra (1994) and Calle Santa Fe (2007); Pena de
Muerte (Tevo Díaz, 2012), Actores Secundarios (Pachi Bustos, 2004); Fernando
ha vuelto (Silvio Caiozzi, 1998).
12. In the 1990s, four important fiction films emerged: La Luna en el Espejo
(Silvio Caiozzi, 1990), La Frontera (Ricardo Larraín, 1991), Amnesia (Gonzalo
Justiniano, 1994) and the exhibition of Imagen Latente (Pablo Perelman,
1987). Within the documentary genre, the topic has been covered even dur-
ing the dictatorship, for instance with Ignacio Agüero’s No Olvidar (1982).
Using ‘documentary’ as a rather undifferentiated marker, I refer here mainly

to journalistic or more testimony-driven documentaries.
13. J. Mouesca and C. Orellana, Breve historia del cine chileno: Desde sus orígenes
hasta nuestros días (Santiago: LOM, 2010), p. 214. The domestic audience for
Chilean films has settled at six percent of total spectators or one million since
1999, despite an increase in production; see, e.g., R. Trejo Ojeda, Cine, neolib-
eralismo y cultura: Crítica de la economía política del cine chileno contemporáneo
(Santiago: Editorial Arcis, 2009); J. Mouesca, Plano secuencia de la memoria
de Chile: Veinticinco años de cine chileno (1960–1985) (Santiago: Ediciones del
Litoral, 1988) and V. Schmöller, Kino. Die chilenische Filmlandschaft nach 1990
(Aachen: Shaker Media, 2009).
14. See U. Jacobsen and S. Lorenzo, La imagen quebrada, Palabras cruzadas: Apuntes
y notas (provisorias) sobre el ensayo fílmico (en Chile) (Valparaíso: Fuera de
campo, 2009); John King, Magical Reels: A History of Cinema in Latin America
(London: Verso, 1990); M. Villarroel, La voz de los cineastas: Cine e identidad
chilena en el umbral del milenio (Santiago: Cuarto Propio, 2005).
15. The regime censored and prohibited images, burnt films and stock, imposed
censorship laws and closed all film schools.
16. See J. L. Déotte, ‘El Arte en la Época de la Desaparición’, N. Richard (ed.),
Políticas y estéticas de la memoria (Santiago: Cuarto Propio, 2000), pp. 149–161.
17. G. Liñero, Apuntes para una historia del video en Chile (Santiago: Ocho Libros,
2010).
18. L. Reygadas, ‘Imagined Inequalities: Representations of Discrimination and
Exclusion in Latin America’, Social Identities 11 (2005), p. 489.
19. Of course, the regime provided the necessity to ‘heal’ the social body as
rationale to justify its brutality.
20. Compare C. Urrutia, ‘Hacia una política en tránsito’, Aisthesis: Revista Chilena
de Investigaciones Estéticas 47 (July 2010), pp. 33–44.
21. Cited in Mouesca, Plano secuencia, p. 167.
22. Urrutia, ‘Hacia una política en tránsito’, p. 42.
23. Judith Butler, War: When is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2010).
24. A. Jocelyn-Holt, Espejo retrovisor: Ensayos histórico-políticos 1992–2000 (Santiago:
Planeta, 2000), p. 89.
25. Tom Gunning, ‘To Scan a Ghost: The Ontology of Mediated Vision’, Grey
Room 26 (Winter 2007), pp. 94–127.
26. Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination
(Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), pp. 8 and 18.
27. Pablo Corro considers the desire to see these ghosts as necessary to become
political subjects; P. Corro, Retóricas del cine chileno: ensayos con el realismo
(Santiago: Cuarto Propio, 2012), p. 228.
28. See for instance J. R. Ballengee, The Wound and the Witness: The Rhetoric of
Torture (Albany: SUNY Press, 2009); Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish:
The Birth of the Prison (London: Penguin, 1991); T. Moulian, Chile actual:
anatomía de un mito (Santiago: LOM, 1997); Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain:
The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press,
1985).
29. For example, Patricio Aylwin, first post-dictatorship president; Patricio
Bañados, presenter of the NO campaign; and the sociologist Eugenio Tironi
appear as themselves.
132 Nike Jung
30. J. D. Bolter and R. A. Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge,

MA.: MIT Press, 1999), p. 6.
31. Bolter and Grusin, Remediation, p. 47.
32. This analysis is taken from C. Urrutia, ‘NO, la película’, La Fuga, 2012 (http://
www.lafuga.cl, accessed 9 September 2013).
33. Paul Willemen in D. H. Jeffries, ‘Comics at 300 Frames per Second: Zack
Snyder’s 300 and the Figural Translation of Comics to Film’, Quarterly Review
of Film and Video 31 (2014), p. 237.
34. See Richard, Cultural Residues.
35. In the original, ‘el discurso oficial es él de la publicidad’: Orlando Lübbert in
A. L. Barraza, ‘Nuevo Cine Chileno 2005–2010’, unpublished PhD thesis,
Universidad de Chile (2011), p. 49.
36. In the Spanish original, René’s trademark line is ‘Lo que van a ver a continu-
ación está enmarcado en el contexto social del Chile actual … Hoy Chile piensa en
su futuro.’
37. Georg Ritzer in Barraza, ‘Nuevo Cine’, p. 50.
38. For instance, Nick Pinkerton refers to the ‘seductive vapidity’ of the ‘No’
campaign, and its ‘most inanely positive … [design] imaginable’; Anthony
Lane finds it ironic that the campaign led to a ‘substantial transformation’
despite its superficiality.
Pinkerton, ‘NYFF: Pablo Larrain’s NO and the Marketing of Freedom’,
The Village Voice, 13 October 2012 (http://blogs.villagevoice.com, accessed
13 February 2013); Pinkerton, ‘In NO, It’s the Ad Men vs. the Dictator’,
The Village Voice, 13 February 2013 (http://www.villagevoice.com, accessed
13 February 2013). See also Anthony Lane, ‘Ways to Win: A Good Day to Die
Hard and NO’, The New Yorker, 25 February 2013 (http://www.newyorker.
com, accessed 25 February 2013).
39. C. D. Flores, Excéntricos y astutos: Influencia de la consciencia y uso progresivo de
operaciones materiales en la calidad de cuatro películas chilenas realizadas entre
2001 y 2006 (Santiago: LOM, 2007), pp. 32–34.
40. Pam Cook, Screening the Past: Memory and Nostalgia in Cinema (New York:
Routledge, 2005), p. 2. The rejection of nostalgia as sentimental and unthink-
ing is fortunately being reassessed.
41. See Svetlana Boym, Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001).
42. For Boym, the critical potential of nostalgic desire lies in its ‘rebellion
against the modern idea of time, the time of history and progress’. She
claims, however, that nostalgia seeks instead a form of enshrined archive,
‘private or collective mythology […] to obliterate history’, Boym, Future of
Nostalgia, p. xv.
43. Dominic LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
44. G. Long, ‘Chile Still Split Over Gen Augusto Pinochet Legacy’, BBC, 9 September
2013 (http://www.bbc.co.uk, accessed 11 September, 2013).
45. W. Pino-Ojeda, ‘Latent Image: Chilean Cinema and the Abject’, Latin
American Perspectives 36 (2009), pp. 133–146, emphasis added.
46. ‘Los que están por ahí, los que miran desde fuera, los que se mantienen neutros,
indiferentes.’ N. Richard and J. Arrate, ‘Las Derrotas son Completas solo cuando
los vencidos olvidan las razones por las que lucharon’, Revista Cultural 32 (2005),
p. 192.
47. This argument is made, for example, by Blanco, ‘Deviants, Dissidents, Perverts’,
p. 18.
48. Barraza, ‘Nuevo Cine’.
49. A. Estévez, ‘Dolores políticos: Reacciones cinematográficas’, Aisthesis: Revista
Chilena de Investigaciones Estéticas 47 (July 2010), p. 16.
50. Greg M. Smith, Film Structure and the Emotion System (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2003).
8
Remember 1688? The
Draughtsman’s Contract,
the ‘Glorious Revolution’
and Public Memory
James Ward
Traditionally, the origins of the modern British state have been traced
to the sequence of events known as the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688.
Leading an invasion from the Netherlands, Prince William of Orange
displaced the reigning monarch, James II. In his absence, James was
adjudged to have abdicated, but he fought to regain the throne. With
the final military defeat of James at the battle of Aughrim in July 1691,
William ruled jointly with his wife, James’s daughter Mary II.1 Under
their reign, the French-style state which James envisaged, and had
begun to construct, was dismantled. In its place came institutions which
came to be regarded as characteristically British. The narrative estab-
lished around these developments, popularized by a long line of writers
including John Locke, Edmund Burke, Thomas Babington Macaulay and
G. M. Trevelyan, depicts the national polity taking a decisive step into
modernity while honouring ancient traditions of liberty.
UK public memory returned to this founding moment when the state
prepared to mark the revolution’s 1988 tercentenary. Speaking as Lord
Chancellor, the Conservative peer Quentin Hogg stated that 1688 had
laid ‘the foundations from which evolved, peacefully, the system of
parliamentary democracy under a constitutional Monarch which we
enjoy today, and which has inspired the constitutions of many other
Countries of the world’.2 Such summaries drew on an historiographi-
cal tradition which had, by the mid-20th century, been elevated to the
status of ‘national narrative’, as Richard A. Cosgrove notes. The centre-
piece of this account was the notion of 1688 as natural culmination of a
native ‘tradition of liberty’.3 Described by Trevelyan as ‘the most English
thing that was ever done’, the revolution was portrayed as a peaceful,
inevitable and distinctly un-revolutionary development which set the
134
1688, The Draughtsman’s Contract and Public Memory 135
nation on a course towards ‘power and prosperity’ that ‘attracted the

envy of other, less blessed countries’.4
However attractive to someone of the Lord Chancellor’s age and politi-
cal instincts, by the time he made his speech such sentiments were up
for review. In contrast with the bicentennial celebrations of the American
and French revolutions in 1976 and 1989, 1988 ‘fell flat’ in the UK, with
public commemorations described as ‘sedate and dull affairs’.5 The Times
marked the anniversary with almost parodic reserve, noting that ‘The
Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh watched a yacht race off Torquay yes-
terday’.6 Steve Pincus suggests that the gradualist and organicist account
of the revolution had become so ingrained by 1988 that ‘there was little
left to celebrate’.7 Equally current at this time, however, were recogni-
tions that in 1688 a foreign power had staged an invasion and occupa-
tion, that what took place was not a revolution but ‘a plot by some
people’, and that the revolution’s aftermath provided one of many
historical antecedents for the Northern Ireland troubles.8 The year 1688
began to be forgotten because it was no longer usable or desirable as a
myth of origin. As an instance of successful resistance to foreign inva-
sion, the 400 anniversary of the Spanish Armada was more enthusiasti-
cally commemorated in 1988, and remains more prominent in public
memory today. The 1988 tercentenary did, however, provoke a lively
reassessment by professional historians.9 Although the historiographi-
cal debate that ensued remains, in one expert’s words, ‘up for grabs’, it
has not filtered through to public consciousness.10
Notwithstanding the long tradition of celebrating their ‘immortal
memory’, the revolution and its protagonist William III are even less
prominent in public memory today than at the time of the tercente-
nary. Confirmation of this obscurity came for some in February 2013,
in the form of a minor controversy in the UK media sparked by the BBC
television quiz, University Challenge. The show’s host Jeremy Paxman
read out a quote from William III, asking: ‘Which royal figure made
that claim when he landed at Brixham, in Devon, in 1688?’ When he
received the response ‘William I’, Paxman expressed scorn and mock-
sympathy before declaring the answer to be ‘William of Orange, of
course.’ The fallout was predictable: Paxman was accused of bullying,
and the incident was cited by the historian David Starkey as evidence of
‘an extraordinary evacuation of basic historical knowledge’ from history
classrooms.11
The inevitable absorption of this incident into obsessive debates
about educational standards and the culture of the BBC is unfortunate
because it obscures more complex and far-reaching questions about
136 James Ward
cultural memory and amnesia. Current anxieties about the forgetting of

1688 may reflect concerns about the loss of ‘basic historical knowledge’
but, as I will argue here, the revolution’s retreat from popular memory
is only partial, and stems from its transformation from a patriotic myth
into a multi-layered narrative which yields contested and divisive
meanings. A pertinent analogy for this transformation can be found in
Peter Greenaway’s film, The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982).
The Draughtsman’s Contract
Perhaps the only commercially successful feature film set in the revo-
lutionary period, Greenaway’s film can be read as an allegorical reflec-
tion on the 1688 revolution, as can be seen from the following brief
summary of its action, but also from its ongoing reception in public
memory, as the rest of this essay contends. Set in 1694, the film cen-
tres on Mr Neville, the draughtsman, who arrives to spend a night at
Compton Anstey, the country home of the Herbert family. Neville is
asked by Mrs Herbert to produce a series of drawings of the house which
she will give to her husband as a gift with a view to repairing their mar-
riage. Mr Neville knows that Mrs Herbert is without property: although
she inherited Compton Anstey from her father, ownership passed to her
husband on their marriage. He therefore names terms which are meant
as an insult rather than a serious offer: 12 drawings in return for 12
sexual favours. To his surprise, she agrees.
As the drawings progress it becomes clear that Mr Hebert will not
return from his visit to Southampton and it also emerges that the draw-
ings implicate various male members of the household, including the
draughtsman himself, in his disappearance. Apprised of this fact by Mrs
Herbert’s daughter, Sarah Talmann, the draughtsman agrees to a second
contract: to complete the remaining six drawings in return for six
further encounters with Sarah. Through these encounters, the women
hope to produce an heir who will eventually inherit Compton Anstey.
Having completed the commission, Neville subsequently returns to the
estate, now run jointly by Mrs Herbert and her daughter, and agrees to
complete a 13th drawing. While working on this last commission, he
is murdered by the male members of the household who have detected
in Neville’s drawings evidence of their being cuckolded or implicated in
Mr Herbert’s murder. Neville’s death scene is performed as the execution
of a final, parodic, contract recited by his assailants as they burn his
drawings and put out his eyes with flaming torches. Mr Neville is then
beaten to death and his body thrown into a moat.
The film’s title and its tragi-farcical premise of contractual prolifera-

tion allude to the revolution as theorized by John Locke, who gave the
classic account of the argument that James II had violated the con-
tractual basis of sovereignty.12 The year 1694 is also when the Bank of
England was founded, a fact which ties the film’s plot loosely to the
‘financial revolution’ generally held to have followed the political revo-
lution of 1688.13 The inheritance plot underlines the thematic impor-
tance of property, along with the legal and financial instruments that
enable its acquisition and transfer. This theme presents the most obvi-
ous in a series of allegorical correspondences between the events of the
film and those of the historical period in which it is set. By the begin-
ning of the film, ownership of the house has, like the throne, passed
from a father to a daughter, but control is exercised in practice by the
son-in-law, Mr Herbert. This pattern is set to continue. Next in line are
Mrs Herbert’s daughter, Sarah, and her German husband, Mr Talmann.
As the Talmanns have so far failed to produce children, the inheritance is
in danger of reverting to a distant relative, much as the crown passed to
the Elector of Hanover, George I, after the death of the childless Queen
Anne in 1714.
In addition to this small-scale reprisal of the larger dynastic saga,
many other details in the film recall minutiae of the Williamite succes-
sion. The draughtsman’s 13th drawing is of an equestrian statue, which
echoes the traditional depiction of William III in public art found in
many British and Irish cities. Insinuations that Mr Herbert died after
falling from his horse which was startled by a mole recall directly the
circumstances of William’s death, while Mr Neville’s outsider status in
the household is based not only on social class, but also on Scottish
and Catholic sympathies that invoke the Stuart-Jacobite opposition to
William and his successors. The film also dramatizes the Anglo-Dutch
cultural exchange that took place as a result of William’s invasion, and
Holland’s replacement of France as a dominant influence on English
lifestyles and fashions.14 Mrs Herbert and Mrs Talmann invite a Dutch
landscape gardener, Van Hoyten, to mastermind ‘a new management of
the grounds’ based on ‘an entirely fresh approach’ based on softening
the French-inspired geometrical aesthetic favoured by Mr Herbert. This
notation of triangular cultural interaction continues beyond the film’s
cinematic iteration: the only available language tracks on the 2004 DVD
release are English, French and Dutch.15
Overall, Greenaway’s film is crammed with allusions to the Glorious
Revolution and its aftereffects. Individually these function as direct invo-
cations of historical setting but in combination they suggest an underlying
138 James Ward
historiographic allegory: to use Astrid Erll’s term, The Draughtsman’s

Contract might be seen as a ‘memory-making fiction’.16 It displaces the
longstanding ‘national narrative’ of 1688 by telling the story of the revo-
lution through the social and cultural change it initiated. Viewed from
a modern standpoint, the film can also be read in the context of 1688’s
partial erasure from the canon of public memory, and the attempts to
reinstate it that have taken place since the film’s release in 1982.
Compelling though its accumulation of relevant detail might be,
Greenaway’s film is not traditionally interpreted as having much to do
with history or memory. Detractors and admirers alike have tended to see
the film as an extravagant pastiche in which period setting is deployed
mostly for aesthetic effect and which does not depend on contextualizing
historical knowledge for its interpretation. Greenaway is described as pre-
senting an ‘emphatically postmodern’ version of the 17th century and is
himself ‘reluctant to call [The Draughtsman’s Contract] a period movie’.17
Criticism of Greenaway’s film tends to use terms like ‘baroque’ not to
indicate a precise period but to describe the stylistic excess regarded
as characteristic of his authorship.18 Those few critics who have com-
mented directly on the film as an historical fiction have not judged it
kindly. Robert Mayer groups the film alongside Michael Hoffman’s 1995
adaptation, Restoration, as an example of period films which do little
more than ‘revel in the opportunity to represent […] opulent settings,
dazzling costumes and makeup, and spectacularly amoral characters’.
Ingo Berensmeyer asserts that the revolutionary period has been largely
ignored in historical cinema, notwithstanding ‘Peter Greenaway’s self-
reflexive and artistic The Draughtsman’s Contract’.19
The artistry and self-reflexivity of Greenaway’s film can be seen, how-
ever, as integral rather than inimical to its historiographical project. As
well as typifying the ability of 1980s period film to provoke both seri-
ous reflection and hostile reaction on the question of historicity, The
Draughtsman’s Contract embodies the tension between remembering and
forgetting that characterizes more recent debates on the politics of mem-
ory in Britain and Ireland. In contemporary discourse, 1688 can be framed
either as half-remembered pageantry or as a divisive and still-contentious
political rupture. It is both ‘an aristocratic parlor game’ and a genuinely
revolutionary moment whose significance is ‘immense and on-going’.20
Focusing on the revolution as a shibboleth which reveals wider fractures
in modern politics and culture, this essay suggests that Greenaway’s
film, produced when the longstanding triumphalist narrative of 1688
was beginning to come under scrutiny, now functions as a cultural
expression of the revolution’s estrangement from public memory. The
impressive body of interpretation which has grown up around the film’s

aesthetic virtuosity, its ludic intellectualism and its ‘cold, cruel, and dis-
tant’21 sexuality might therefore be supplemented by a reading of the
film as a commentary on the Glorious Revolution’s relegation in public
memory from foundation myth to marginal obsession.
Remembering and forgetting 1688
Although Greenaway described The Draughtsman’s Contract as being

‘about excess’,22 themes of absence and evacuation are equally impor-
tant to the film’s aesthetic and plot. It starts with jokes about urination
and defecation and credits its protagonist with the ‘godlike power of
emptying the landscape’. After her first encounter with the draughts-
man, Mrs Herbert is shown spitting and vomiting into a basin. The
film ends with a complementary sequence. A servant employed as a
human statue who spends the film adopting poses around the grounds
of Compton Anstey, and who thereby serves as a mute witness to the
events of the film, climbs down from his mount and gorges on a pine-
apple only to spit it out. Greenaway has commented that, as well as
an Englishman repulsed by the ‘foreign’ taste of the fruit, the servant
represents a baffled or disgusted viewer ‘spitting out the film’.23 Such
rejection is perhaps inspired by the initial suggestion but ultimate
absence of conventional narrative devices. Generically speaking, the
film is a murder mystery with no body; a whodunit in which the mur-
derer’s identity remains unknown at the end of the narrative. A puzzle
with a void rather than a solution at its centre, and in which literal and
metaphorical voiding are constant, the film is uniquely placed to depict
an event which has allegedly fallen victim to what Starkey terms an
‘evacuation of historical knowledge’.
Since the film’s release, the notion that the Glorious Revolution rep-
resents a lacuna in public memory has intensified. Concerns about the
forgetting of 1688 began to surface in earnest in the lead-up to the revolu-
tion’s 1988 tercentenary, when it was identified as ‘a relatively unknown
period in […] history’.24 The erosion of 1688 from popular memory has
only ever been partial, however. Outside the work of professional histo-
rians, the revolution retains a mnemonic presence, albeit a puzzling and
controversial one. Remembering 1688 is now a minority pastime, which
unites an otherwise disparate range of commemorators. The revolu-
tion’s memory is now confined geographically to one corner of the UK,
politically to the neo-conservative right, and artistically to marginal or
avant garde treatments. As each of them reflects and is reflected in the
140 James Ward
historiographic character of The Draughtsman’s Contract, I will elaborate

these contexts in turn.
The Irish question
When cries go up about the Glorious Revolution being all but forgot-
ten, they are sometimes met by assertions that this is not the case in
Northern Ireland. Public commemoration, focused on William’s vic-
tory over James II at the Battle of the Boyne, nearly two years after his
landing in Devon, is an annual event. These commemorations, which
centre on marches by members of the Orange Order, tend to be seen in
the context of the region’s troubled recent history, its ongoing disputes
about emblems and cultural identity, and their potential to spill over
into public disorder. This continues to be the case even though, in keep-
ing with changing attitudes to other cruxes of memory such as the First
World War, efforts have been made in and between both jurisdictions
on the island of Ireland to recontextualize the Williamite era through
pluralist approaches to history and memory. The most obvious public
gesture has been the visit by Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Bertie Ahern
and Northern Ireland first minister, Ian Paisley, to the site of the Battle
of the Boyne in May 2007. Both men made speeches emphasizing the
location’s importance as a site of memory and posited an emotional
link, if not a causal one, in public memory between the battle and
the Northern Ireland troubles, as in Ahern’s remark that it would
‘take time and hard work to heal all the wounds of those times and of
our more recent tragic history’.25 This work is ongoing. Much as each
politician’s affectation of statesmanship has been obscured in popular
memory by financial scandal and the ongoing instability of Northern
Ireland’s political institutions, the revolution has not retreated quietly
into heritage, but remains prominent and divisive.
Widely identified as a subtext in Greenaway’s film, the Irish dimension
of the revolution is referred to in the following exchange:
mr neville The Garden of Eden, Mr Talmann, was originally intended

for Ireland. For it was there, after all, that St. Patrick eradi-
cated the snake.
mr talmann The only useful eradication that ever happened in Ireland,
Mr Neville, was performed by William of Orange four
years ago on my birthday.
Along with a reference to Scotland as England’s oldest colony, this

dialogue shows how the film, in spite of its provincial setting, refuses
exceptionalist narratives of 1688 as an English revolution. Instead it

places the revolution in a ‘three kingdoms’ context, anticipating the
revisionist historiography that gathered pace from the late 1980s.
By noting that the Battle of the Boyne took place on his birthday,
Talmann also establishes a context of personal experience and recollec-
tion. Providing the setting and subject matter of the exchange, gardens
reinforce this idea of memory as a process through which historical
narratives are embedded within local and personal settings. The con-
nection between individual bodies and gardens as sites of memory is
made explicit in sexualised puns about the rights of access conferred in
the draughtsman’s contract to Mrs Herbert’s ‘mature country garden’.
Like the individual body, the garden is both a property to be contested
and a private space which registers external change.
Gardens and gardening are also part of the wider cultural mythos
of 1688. Lisa Jardine suggests that William’s entry into London on 18
December 1688 bypassed Whitehall not because he lost his way but
because, as an ‘enthusiastic amateur gardener’, he wanted to view the
ornamental garden at St. James’s Park.26 When the tercentenary of 1688
came round in 1988, the event was celebrated with special issues not
only of History Today but also of Home and Garden magazine, reflecting
the tradition that 1688, as The World magazine put it in 1753, was an
event as ‘remarkable in the annals of GARDENING as those of govern-
ment’.27 In cinema, Nina Gerlach has argued, ‘the unnatural appearance
of Baroque and Neo-Baroque garden design is often associated with
corrupt tyrants’ and such ‘garden images […] morph into symbols of
ignorance, oppression, or murder’.28 As well as being part of the film’s
country-house aesthetic, then, gardens function both as historical fact
and a metaphor for the revolution’s ambivalent reception in popular
memory. Talmann’s talk of ‘eradication’, which literally means ‘to pull
up by the roots’, combines the genteel discourse of garden cultivation
with an aggressive metaphor of military extermination. It reflects the
film’s ability to encode historical memory paradoxically: the revolution
registers both as a moment of extreme trauma and as a pleasing footnote
in the history of decorative arts and in the lifestyle and consumption
habits of the leisured class.
Recovering 1688
As the garden scene shows, Ireland is a site of memory which upsets

traditional narratives of 1688 as a peaceful, consensual and conserva-
tive revolution. In the years since the film’s release, however, the loss
of such narratives has itself become a kind of trauma for politicians and
142 James Ward
public intellectuals of the British right. In his British Channel 4 series,

Monarchy, David Starkey, whose concerns about amnesia were noted
earlier, described the events of 1688 as ones which ‘we have forgot-
ten, or do not care to remember’, in spite of their having ‘invent[ed]
modernity itself’.29 Michael Portillo, an ex-Conservative cabinet minis-
ter, included the revolution in a radio series called Things We Forgot to
Remember.30 Both programmes, it should be stressed, affirm the modern
consensus that William’s accession involved invasion and conquest,
with Portillo’s account acknowledging that ‘the revolution was only
secured in Ireland and Scotland by force and with much loss of life’.
Both also reflect the degree to which 1688 persists in public memory
today through complaints that it has been forgotten.
A more militant attempt to re-inscribe the importance of 1688 has
been mounted by the Conservative politician Michael Gove, occasion-
ally in tandem with the academic and media historian Niall Ferguson.
This began when, in opposition as shadow education secretary, Gove
complained in a widely publicized speech that the years between 1688
and 1745 had become a ‘dark age’ in public recollection because of
their neglect in school history lessons.31 In government as education
secretary, Gove sought to redress this neglect by rewriting the national
history curriculum for England. Ferguson was initially invited to over-
see this redesign, which formed part of a wide-ranging programme of
educational reform. These policies proved so divisive that Gove was
relieved of ministerial office in July 2014. Even though Ferguson’s pro-
posed curriculum was rejected as too inclusive of European and world
history,32 he continues like Gove to popularize the Glorious Revolution
as integral to recovering lost memories of British greatness. In his own
2012 BBC Reith lectures, Ferguson identified the revolution as hav-
ing enabled ‘England to become Great Britain and, indeed, the British
Empire, by giving the English state unrivalled financial resources for
making – and winning – war’.33 Such interpretations represent a more
nuanced version of the traditional public memory of 1688. David
Cannadine described this position, when it was last made prominent
by Conservative prime ministers in the 1980s and 1990s, as one which
stressed ‘the essential Englishness of the United Kingdom, its separate-
ness from the rest of Europe, the long and unbroken continuity of its
traditions and precedents, and its unique characteristic institutions’.34
Such narratives have been enthusiastically revived with the return of
Conservative-led government. The exceptionalism which fuels them
has been further enabled by devolution and by the increasing militancy
of opposition to the UK’s integration within the European Union. All
of these factors have also renewed the topicality of The Draughtsman’s

Contract and its take on 1688.
Estranging history
Even though media representations have cropped up in relation to

other issues of commemoration and public memory,35 the absence
of film from the latest iteration of the 1688 debate has been notable.
Although forgotten in this context, The Draughtsman’s Contract remains
relevant today because of its engagement with the historical roots of
modern British exceptionalist political and cultural identity, especially
given that recent debate about these issues carries strong echoes of the
1980s. Deploying a version of ‘necessary anachronism’, the film depicts
such identities as contested and under pressure even as they are being
formed in 1694.36 Dialogue in the film satirically equates exceptional-
ism with philistinism and imposture, for example in Mr Talmann’s
remark that ‘the best Englishmen are foreigners’ or his assertion that ‘to
be an English painter is a contradictory term’. Even so, and despite its
self-conscious internationalism, reflected in debts to Alain Resnais’ Last
Year at Marienbad (1961) and French academic structuralism, the film was
produced and consumed as uniquely English. It was praised in the US for
its depiction of ‘magnificent English landscape’ and exhibited in France
under a title which invoked nostalgically English topoi, settings and gen-
res, Meurtre dans un jardin anglais.37 The Draughtsman’s Contract represents
the trailing, art-house edge of the new wave of culturally British filmmak-
ing most famously heralded by Chariots of Fire (1981). Co-funded by the
British Film Institute (BFI) production board and the film production arm
of Channel Four, The Draughtsman’s Contract was ‘a modest but genuine
commercial success’,38 which owed its existence to institutions founded
to preserve and encourage native traditions of filmmaking.
In this context, criticisms of mainstream 1980s period film might
apply equally to Greenaway’s movie. In a provocative account of period
film in the Thatcher era, Andrew Higson triggered a bitter debate which,
like other controversies of history and heritage addressed in this essay,
is showing signs of recurrence. Higson wrote that such films offer ‘a
fantasy of Englishness, a fantasy of the national past’.39 This is exactly
what Greenaway’s film does, but the fantasy is meant to be recognized
as such, an artful construction which is alienating as well as immersive.
The film therefore inverts the nostalgic perspective so often associated
with 1980s period film by forcing viewers to confront received versions
of heritage and historical memory. In this regard, Greenaway’s work
144 James Ward
has been linked to that of Derek Jarman, with both said to share in an
‘abandonment of many of the humanist themes that had been a feature
of earlier art cinema’.40 Like Jarman’s Jubilee (1978), The Draughtsman’s
Contract focuses on the ways in which ‘memory, and consequently
history, is produced’41 and goes further by offering film itself as such a
means of production.
By creating a ‘memory’ of 1688 that is manifestly farcical The Draughts-
man’s Contract reimagines the ‘glorious’ past as grotesque. These quali-
ties place The Draughtsman’s Contract among a small group of texts that
respond imaginatively to the Glorious Revolution and its estrangement
from popular memory through strategies of defamiliarization using
quirks of genre, subject and premise. Joan Aiken’s ‘Wolves Sequence’
(1962–2005) of children’s books, for example, takes place in a counterfac-
tual version of the 19th century. In this ‘period of English history that
never happened’, the Glorious Revolution was either averted or reversed
by a Stuart Restoration. In the 1830s, with James III on the throne,
England is physically and symbolically joined to Europe by a Channel
Tunnel from Dover to Calais.42 Although its ingenuity will be lost on
children who have not been exposed to Michael Gove’s history curricu-
lum, Aiken’s reimagining of Victorian Britain as a Stuart monarchy with
close ties to Europe can be seen as both transgressive and reactionary:
it violates a cherished historical narrative but the imagined alternative
is darker, stranger and more oppressive. Similarly, Neal Stephenson’s
Quicksilver (2003), part of his ‘Baroque Cycle’ novel sequence, embeds
the revolution in a science-fiction plot based around cryptography,
science and alchemy. Both novel sequences share their reworking of
once-familiar political history as arcane, fantastic and cryptic with the
1988 collaboration between the Michael Clark Dance Company and
The Fall, I Am Curious, Orange. Staged in Amsterdam and London to
mark the revolution’s tercentenary, it baffled dance critics at the time,
who described it in terms that recall some of the more outspoken
criticisms of The Draughtsman’s Contract as a ‘delinquent brew of lurid
costumes, grotesque props and silly jokes’.43 The excesses which pro-
voked such distaste are now recognizable as part of a process whereby
orthodox narratives of 1688 became subject to surreal and hyperbolic
reinvention. As well as acknowledging that patriotic myths of 1688 no
longer represented a ‘usable past’, these texts created counter-memories
emphasizing the revolution’s hidden sectarian legacy, the disunity of
the United Kingdom and the lack of any continuity other than formal
resemblance between the dysfunctional institutions of the present and
the ‘aristocratic parlor game’ of 1688.
After I Am Curious, Orange, Clark starred in and choreographed

Greenaway’s 1991 feature, Prospero’s Books. Their collaborative work on
Shakespeare is comparable to their separate reworkings of the Glorious
Revolution: in each case a canonical memorial text, whether of history
or literature, is divested of narrative coherence and reinvented as a
fragmentary, enigmatic and visually spectacular challenge which delib-
erately courts incomprehension and rejection. Formally speaking, such
reinvention has affinities with the efforts of other guardians of the spirit
of 1688 detailed above. As with the Orange Order’s commemorations,
or Michael Gove’s assault on the history curriculum, there is a confron-
tational rather than collaborative use of memory, an act of provoca-
tion in which a wider public is challenged about what they think they
know about the past. Possible audience responses to this challenge as
mounted by Greenaway will provide some final reflections.
Conclusion
The year 1688 was once at the centre of the UK’s ‘national narrative’.
It is now a marginal obsession that unites otherwise disparate interest
groups. Greenaway’s film prefigures the abandonment of this narrative
and its transformation into arcana through a ‘national allegory’ of the
production, consumption and excretion of historical memory. Fredric
Jameson coined the term ‘national allegory’ in a controversial essay on
what he called ‘third-world literature’. His definition is predicated on
the assertion that ‘[t]he story of the private individual destiny is always an
allegory of the embattled situation of public third-world culture and society.’44
Although criticized for its totalizing and restrictive approach to a vast
diverse and multinational literature, Jameson’s term can be removed
from its ‘third world’ application and usefully applied to artworks
which allegorically prefigure or embody the breakdown of national-
istic or patriotic consensus on the past. Individual predicaments in
such works can indeed stand for the ‘embattled situation of […] public
culture’, and of memory culture in particular. Jameson’s emphasis on
the third world, as a supposed geographical or cultural ‘periphery’, can
also be modified to reflect marginalization to the periphery of public
memory, or to use Aleida Assmann’s schematic, shifts from canonical to
archival cultural memory.45
Ian Buchanan’s work on the film Jindabyne (Ray Lawrence, 2006) applies
this modified notion of national allegory in the context of the 2008 Australian
government apology for its treatment of Aboriginal peoples. Although
operating in a very different context, Lawrence’s film, like Greenaway’s,
146 James Ward
deals with the revision of national narratives and founding myths, and
aims both to confront and represent public indifference and amnesia.
Like The Draughtsman’s Contract, Jindabyne figures transition from celebra-
tory to traumatic versions of the past at a diegetic level through violence
against individual bodies and, at a formal level, through violation of narra-
tive codes. As Buchanan argues, Lawrence’s film ‘seems to set up a generic
murder-mystery narrative’46 but refuses to resolve this set-up in line with
the conventions of the genre.
Although both embody indifference in – and abjection from – public
memory, audience responses to the fate of the murdered Aboriginal
woman in Jindabyne will be very different from those to Mr Neville and
Mr Herbert in The Draughtsman’s Contract. As the latter pair are at once
obnoxious and implausible as naturalistic characters, viewers will most
probably experience an evacuation of sympathy comparable to the evac-
uation of knowledge bemoaned by Starkey. Rather, and again in tune
with the wider canon of 1980s period film, symbolic and sympathetic
focus transfers to properties – both the country house which drives the
film’s inheritance and murder plots, and the smaller props which render
the film’s period setting in exquisite detail.
Of particular note among these are the draughtsman’s drawings which
go up in flames and the pineapple which the statue-servant spits out in
the film’s final frames. The burning of the drawings represents a final
violation of the titular contract through the destruction of the material
outcome it was designed to produce. By signalling an end to the film,
it also amounts to a symbolic renunciation of the contract between
filmmaker and viewer – a particularly personalized one given that the
drawings were done by Greenaway and that his hands are shown at
work on them in periodic close-ups throughout the film. Embodying
contractual violation, the destruction of the drawings arrests the pro-
duction of historical memory, halting the processes whereby history is
enacted through official documents, preserved in archival records and
transferred to cultural memory through artistic representations. A final
twist comes in the fact that viewers witness the burning not of the
actual drawings but of high-quality copies. In a film which persistently
foregrounds inauthenticity this adds a final, perverse, insistence on the
value of genuine originals.
The statue-servant who witnesses the burning does so while acting as
the rider on the equestrian statue which is the subject of the draughts-
man’s final, uncompleted drawing. He therefore represents a parodic
embodiment of William III, and more generally of the neo-classical
ideal of using public ‘monuments of great actions’47 to inspire a virtuous
citizenry in its observance of patriotic memory. Like the equestrian statue,

the pineapple which he climbs down to gorge on is an over-determined
symbol of monarchy and power specific to modern representations of late
17th century England. Viewed in close-up in the establishing shot that
prefaces the murder scene, the fruit is a parting gift from Mrs Herbert to
Mr Neville, and invokes Hendrick Danckerts’ painting, Charles II Presented
with a Pineapple (c.1675–1680).
Images of the fruit and allusions to the painting abound in historical
film and literature, including The Libertine (Laurence Dunmore, 2004),
Jeanette Winterson’s historical novel Sexing the Cherry (1989) and Restoration
(1995), where the pineapple is often said or implied to have been grown in
England using the latest horticultural techniques.48 It therefore symbol-
izes the technological basis of British imperial and financial expansion,
processes which were accelerated, as Greenaway’s film acknowledges,
by the ‘grafting’ of Dutch innovation and expertise onto the English
political system. Much as the burning of the drawings forces attention
on the linear production of history and memory by interrupting it, the
servant’s reaction to the taste of the pineapple reminds viewers that, how-
ever elaborately crafted, narrative history need not be absorbed passively
into memory. Overall, then, Greenaway’s film constitutes a significant
intervention in the production and reproduction of 1688 in cultural
memory. The film prefigures the revolution’s estrangement in the double
sense of its removal from the mainstream of familiar memory and its
reinvention as an exotic, spectacular and disturbing manifestation of a
half-forgotten and dreamlike past. Some elements of The Draughtsman’s
Contract have dated and although Greenaway’s authorial flamboyance
made it appear unique, the film as a whole is in many ways more typical
of 1980s period cinema than was initially recognised. But as a critique
of the workings of public memory, The Draughtsman’s Contract remains
exceptional, timely and indeed prescient.
Notes
1. Accounts of the revolution and its impact can be found in Steve Pincus, 1688:
The First Modern Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009) and Tim
Harris, Revolution: The Great Crisis of the British Monarchy, 1685–1720 (London:
Allen Lane, 2006). I would like to thank Matthew Ward for his help with the
research for this chapter.
2. ‘Glorious Revolution and Bill of Rights: Tercentenary Celebration’, Lord
Hailsham, statement in House of Lords, 17 March 1986, Hansard 1803–2005
(http://hansard.millbanksystems.com, date accessed 1 March 2014).
3. Richard A. Cosgrove, ‘Reflections on the Whig Interpretation of History’,
Journal of Early Modern History 4 (2000), p. 155.
148 James Ward
4. Cosgrove, ‘Whig Interpretation’, pp. 154–155, citing G. M. Trevelyan, The

English Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1938).
5. Pincus, 1688, pp. 27–28.
6. Alan Hamilton, ‘Queen in Plea for Tolerance’, The Times, 21 July 1988.
7. Pincus, 1688, p. 27.
8. Tony Benn, ‘Happy Inglorious: Tony Benn on Why He Opposed Yesterday’s
Tercentenary Celebrations at Westminster’, The Guardian, 21 July 1988;
Kieran Cooke, ‘The Day That Ulster Catholics Stay Indoors’, Financial Times,
13 July 1988, p. 8.
9. The years immediately after the tercentenary saw a large number of edited
collections based on commemorative conferences and lectures. These include:
Jonathan Israel (ed.), The Anglo-Dutch Moment: Essays on the Glorious Revolution
and Its World Impact (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Eveline
Cruickshanks (ed.), By Force or by Default? The Revolution of 1688–1689 (Edinburgh:
John Donald, 1989); Lois G. Schwoerer (ed.), The Revolution of 1688–1689:
Changing Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), Robert
Beddard (ed.), The Revolutions of 1688 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991).
Textbooks such as John Miller’s The Glorious Revolution (Abingdon: Routledge,
1983) were updated (second edition 1997) to reflect new understandings of
1688. Monographs such as Pincus’s 1688 and Tim Harris’s Revolution built on
this initial period of reassessment.
10. Tim Harris, ‘James II, The Glorious Revolution, and the Destiny of Britain’,
The Historical Journal 51 (2008), p. 775.
11. History Curriculum Debate on BBC1 Sunday Politics show, 3 March 2013
(transcribed at http://historyworks.tv). Also available to view at https://
www.youtube.com. The other participant in the debate, Professor Sir Richard
Evans, elsewhere described the ‘Glorious Revolution’ as a ‘politically loaded’
term which exemplified the reduction of history education to the rehearsal
of ‘a celebratory, patriotic national narrative’. See Evans, ‘Michael Gove’s
History Curriculum is a Pub Quiz not an Education’, New Statesman, 21
March 2013 (http://www.newstatesman.com); ‘Beware Meddling with the
History Curriculum’ (letter to The Times, 1 March 2013, transcribed at http://
historyworks.tv). All websites accessed 7 March 2014.
12. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1960; reprinted 1999), pp. 367–368.
13. John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1783
(Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1990); Daniel Carey and Christopher
J. Finlay (eds), The Empire of Credit: The Financial Revolution in the British Atlantic
World, 1688–1815 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2011).
14. Lisa Jardine, Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland’s Glory (London:
HarperCollins, 2008), Chapters 5–8.
15. The Draughtsman’s Contract (BFI DVD release, 2004). All reference from the
film are based on this edition.
16. Astrid Erll, ‘Literature, Film and the Mediality of Cultural Memory’, in Erll
and Ansgar Nünning (eds), A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies (Berlin:
De Gruyter, 2010), p. 395.
17. Bridget Elliott and Anthony Purdy, Peter Greenaway: Architecture and Allegory
(Chichester: Academy, 1997), p. 10.
18. Elliott and Purdy, Peter Greenaway, pp. 10–17
19. Robert Mayer, Eighteenth-Century Fiction on Screen (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 2002), p. 1; Ingo Berensmeyer, ‘Staging Restoration England in the
Post-Heritage Theatre Film: Gender and Power in Stage Beauty and The
Libertine’, Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 56 (2008), p. 14.
20. Pincus, 1688, p. 29; Erin Bell, ‘War and Memory: The “Glorious Revolution”
on British television’, paper presented at ‘Révoltes et révolutions dans l’Europe
moderne au cinéma et à la télévision’ conference, University of Caen, 5–7
September 2012, p. 2.
21. Robert Murphy (ed.), The British Cinema Book (London: BFI, 1997), p. 260.
22. Ibid., p. 259.
23. Greenaway, director’s commentary, BFI DVD.
24. Pincus, 1688, p. 14.
25. Bertie Ahern, speech at the site of the Battle of the Boyne, 11 May 2007
(http://cain.ulst.ac.uk); see also Ian Paisley’s speech on the same website
(both accessed 31 March 2014).
26. Jardine, Going Dutch, p. 21.
27. David Jacques, ‘Who Knows What a Dutch Garden is?’, Garden History 30
(2002), p. 120.
28. Nina Gerlach, ‘Historical Garden Design is an Ethical Argument in Film –
“Certain Gardens Are Described as Retreats When They Are Really Attacks”’,
Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes 33 (2013), pp. 102–103.
29. David Starkey, Monarchy, series 3 episode 2, Channel 4, broadcast 20 November
2006 (http://www.channel4.com/programmes, date accessed 17 April 2014).
30. BBC Radio 4, Things We Forgot to Remember, series 5 episode 4, broadcast 9
October 2012 www.bbc.co.uk/programmes, date accessed 18 April 2014).
31. Ben Chu, ‘What was the Glorious Revolution, and Should it be taught in
Schools?’, The Independent, 12 March 2009 (http://www.independent.co.uk,
date accessed 20 April 2014).
32. Evans, ‘Michael Gove’s History Curriculum’.
33. Available at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes, date accessed 20 April 2014;
see also Ferguson’s defence of the revised history curriculum (http://www.
theguardian.com, date accessed 20 April 2014).
34. David Cannadine, ‘British History as a “New” Subject’, Welsh History Review
17 (1995), pp. 313–314.
35. Michael Gove, ‘Why does the Left Insist on Belittling True British Heroes?’,
Daily Mail, 2 January 2014 (http://www.dailymail.co.uk, date accessed 2 May
2014). This article attacks film and television representations of the First
World War, including The Monocled Mutineer (1986), Oh! What a Lovely War
(1969) and Blackadder (1983–1989).
36. Gyorgy Lukács, The Historical Novel (London: Merlin, 1962; reprinted 1989),
p. 61, defines necessary anachronism as the exaggerated presentation in
historical fiction of ‘tendencies which were alive and active in the past
(but whose later significance contemporaries could not see) […] with that
emphasis which they possess in […] the present’.
37. Vincent Canby, ‘Film: The Draughtsman’s Contract’, New York Times, 22 June
1983 (http://www.nytimes.com, date accessed 4 May 2014).
38. Michael Brooke, ‘The BFI Production Board: How the BFI tried to create
an alternative British art cinema’ (http://www.screenonline.org.uk, date
accessed 6 May 2014).
150 James Ward
39. Andrew Higson, ‘Re-presenting the National Past: Nostalgia and Pastiche
in the Heritage Film’ in Lester D. Friedman (ed.), Fires Were Started: British
Cinema and Thatcherism (London: Wallflower Press, 2006) p. 96.
40. John Hill, British Cinema in the 1980s (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999) p. 68.
41. Jon Davies, ‘Surfaces, History, and Noise in Derek Jarman’s Jubilee’ (http://
www.kersplebedeb.com, date accessed 8 May 2014).
42. Joan Aiken, The Wolves of Willoughby Chase (London: Jonathan Cape 1962;
reprinted 2004), p. 8.
43. Nadine Meisner ‘Oranges and Lemons’, The Sunday Times, 21 August 1988;
compare Robert Mayer’s description of The Draughtsman’s Contract as revel-
ling in ‘opulent settings, dazzling costumes and makeup, and spectacularly
amoral characters’.
44. Fredric Jameson, ‘Third-World Literature in the Age of Multinational
Capitalism’, Social Text 15 (1986), p. 78. Emphasis in original.
45. Aleida Assmann, ‘Canon and Archive’, in Erll and Nünning (eds), Companion
to Cultural Memory Studies (Berlin: De Gruyter), pp. 100–104.
46. Ian Buchanan, ‘Symptomatology and Racial Politics in Australia’, Rivista
Internazionale di Filosofia i Psicologia 3 (2012), p.114. See also Buchanan,
‘National Allegory Today – A Return to Jameson?’, in Buchanan and Caren
Irr, On Jameson: From Postmodernism to Globalization (Albany: State University
of New York Press, 2006) pp. 173–188.
47. George Berkeley, ‘Alciphron; or, The Minute Philosopher’ (1732), The Works
of George Berkeley 3 vols. (London: J.F. Dove, 1820), ii, p. 81.
48. The Royal Collection Trust (http://www.royalcollection.org.uk, date accessed
16 May 2014) states that the pineapple in the painting is more likely to have
been imported. Winterson’s novel is the only one of the sources listed that
explicitly acknowledges this.
9
Not Thinking Clearly:
History and Emotion in
the Recent Irish Cinema
Jennie M. Carlsten
The Irish narrative cinema of the last 20 years has been preoccupied
with themes of loss and grieving, often setting stories of individual
mourning within the context of wider national traumas. Dealing with
such cataclysms as the Irish Civil War, institutional abuse, mass emigra-
tion, the Northern Irish Troubles and the societal ruptures of the Celtic
Tiger (the economy of the Irish Republic), these recent films provide a
site for confronting and negotiating the troubled past. In this essay,
I explore the idea of an ‘emotional reading’ of historical films, using a
few of these recent films as examples.
The reference to historical realities in the Irish narrative film is both
explicit and oblique. Kings (Tom Collins, 2007) deals with the impact
of mass emigration on communities and individuals, as do Child of
the Dead End (Desmond Bell, 2009) and Cré na Cille (Robert Quinn,
2007). The ‘Troubles’ are the subject of Breakfast on Pluto (Neil Jordan,
2005), Five Minutes of Heaven (Oliver Hirschbiegel, 2009), Bloody Sunday
(Paul Greengrass, 2001), Fifty Dead Men Walking (Kari Skogland, 2008)
and Omagh (Pete Travis, 2004). All of these films use the fracturing
devices of flashback, ellipsis and repetition to show the intrusion of
violent past events on the present. The 1981 Hunger Strikes provide
the backdrop of the films Silent Grace (Maeve Murphy, 2001), H3 (Les
Blair, 2001) and Hunger (Steve McQueen, 2008), relying on flashback
to recall a pre-traumatic state.1 Films like Song for a Raggy Boy (Aisling
Walsh, 2003) and The Magdalene Sisters (Peter Mullan, 2002) deal with
the historical subject of institutional abuse. In Song for a Raggy Boy,
flashback and repetition are used to suggest a parallel between the pro-
tagonist’s personal losses, sustained in the Spanish Civil War, and the
injustices and violence of life in a Catholic industrial school for boys.
The Magdalene Sisters uses an episodic structure, fragmented storylines
151
152 Jennie M. Carlsten
and flashback to show the abuse and degradation experienced by girls

sent to the Magdalene laundries. The Irish Civil War and its impact on
individual families is examined in Ken Loach’s The Wind That Shakes the
Barley (2006), How Harry Became a Tree (Goran Paskaljevic, 2001) and
the earlier film, Korea (Cathal Black, 1995). The ‘Celtic Tiger’ and the
rise and fall of the Irish economy have had rupturing effects upon Irish
society and upon the lives of individuals. The recourse to a fragmented,
episodic and repetitive form is apparent in such films as Intermission
( John Crowley, 2003), About Adam (Gerard Stembridge, 2000), Goldfish
Memory (Elizabeth Gill, 2002) and Adam and Paul (Lenny Abrahamson,
2004). Finally, the issues of domestic violence, parental abandonment,
and mental illness (and their wider social effects) are explored, post-
Celtic Tiger, in such fractured films as Snap (Carmel Winters, 2010), All
Good Children (Alicia Duffy, 2010), The Fading Light (Ivan Kavanagh,
2009) and Helen (Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor, 2008).
Do these films, with their unabashed appeal to emotion, tell us any-
thing about the actual historical events? Do they in any way add to
our historical understanding of the Irish past, or indeed the present?
Historians and film scholars alike have long expressed doubt about the
ability of fiction film to represent the past. While this doubt stems in
large part from concerns about factual accuracy and the reliability of
sources, it also reflects a deep distrust of the affective potential of the
medium.2 Robert Rosenstone, an advocate for the study of history on
film, expresses that distrust when he writes that ‘Film emotionalizes
history. Even documentaries too often go overboard with emotion
for the exploited and the oppressed.’3 Rosenstone goes on to criticise
the ‘emotional tug’ of mainstream narrative films: ‘That tug is melo-
drama. The substitution of certain overwrought forms of emotion for a
deeper understanding of personal and social realities. A way of blind-
ing ourselves to social, political, economic – even personal – analysis
and understanding.’4 Elsewhere, Rosenstone writes of ‘an audience
conditioned by Hollywood aesthetics, an audience which, in general,
prefers nostalgia to history and emotion to thought.’ This is not to
mischaracterise Rosenstone’s position, however. He does not deny the
possibilities of such emotional appeal, but calls upon us to recognize the
fundamentally different nature of the medium and to ask how much
credence it might be granted:
Through actors and historical witnesses, it gives us history as tri-

umph, anguish, joy, despair, adventure, suffering, and heroism. Both
History and Emotion in the Recent Irish Cinema 153
dramatized works and documentaries use the special capabilities of

the medium – the close-up of the human face, the quick juxtaposi-
tion of disparate images, the power of music and sound effect – to
heighten and intensify the feelings of the audience about the events
depicted on the screen … Film thus raises the following issues: To
what extent do we wish emotion to become a historical category?
Part of historical understanding? Does history gain something by
becoming empathic? Does film, in short, add to our understanding
of the past by making us feel immediately and deeply about particu-
lar historical people, events and situations?5
Since Rosenstone posed this last question, others with an interest in the
relationship between film and history have answered it, with a quali-
fied ‘yes’, concluding that the emotional power of film can provide, at
its best, a unique means to access the past and engage viewers. Debra
Ramsay, for instance, writes that ‘Rather than being seen as detrimental
to historical representation, emotion is regarded as essential in closing
the temporal distance between the events of the past and the present.’6
Pam Cook has alluded similarly to the critical value in appealing to
viewer memory: ‘in the very act of addressing audiences as nostalgic
spectators and encouraging them to become involved in re-presenting
the past, the media invites exploration and interrogation of the limits
of its engagement with history.’7 The involved and invested spectator is
a site for the making of historical understanding.
Memory is deeply enmeshed with emotion, subjective and coloured
by individual feeling and sentiment. Robert Burgoyne argues that histo-
rical films may lay claim to ‘the mantle of authenticity and meaningful-
ness with relation to the past – not necessarily of accuracy or fidelity
to the record, but of meaningfulness, understood in terms of emotional
and affective truth.’ Burgoyne uses Alison Landsburg’s notion of pros-
thetic memory to explain how dramatic film can turn the historical
event into a felt personal experience.8
The ideas of prosthetic memory and affective truth suggest that film
is uniquely and wonderfully positioned because of emotion to create
empathy and social connection – or indeed, the converse, alienation
and social division. Understanding the emotional discourses of a film
can create a more critical spectator and a more nuanced understanding
of the past. Through an ‘emotional reading’ of the films, we can see that
the recent Irish cinema is marked by identifiable formal characteristics,
and is open to meaningful historical engagement.
Emotional readings
What do I mean by an emotional reading? It is generally difficult for

film studies to even talk about emotion. There has, thus far, been no
unified approach. Emotions, moreover, are prone to evaluative and
moralistic labelling: thus one hears about ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ emo-
tions. Cinema studies relegate discussion of emotion largely to psycho-
analytic theorists, where the conversation centres around fear and
desire. Theorists looking to explain the relationship between film and
emotion have relied primarily on concepts of viewer identification, tied
to ideas of false consciousness and viewer passivity and complicity. This
becomes the basis for a denigration of ‘mainstream’ or narrative cinema
as the endorsement of dominant ideology, lacking the potential for
genuine social change or reflection. The result is a set of false binaries –
art versus popular; emotion versus reason – and an underestimation of
the cognitive and emotional activity of film viewers.
These binaries have underpinned the ways in which both historians
and film scholars have approached film, but insight from other discip-
lines compels new methods of looking at history on film. Cognitive
scholars, convinced by the findings of science and anthropology,
embrace a new understanding of how the human brain actually works.
The old divide between emotion and cognition simply no longer holds
up. Greg Smith, Carl Plantinga, Murray Smith and others have led the
way in developing an approach which goes beyond accounts of iden-
tification and desire. These ‘cognitive scholars tend to discuss emotion
states in terms of goals, objects, characteristics, behaviors, judgments,
and motivations.’9 The growing area of cognitive film studies uses sci-
entific models, within a humanistic framework, to advance evidence-
based explanations for our subjective experience of cinema. Not a
single theory, cognitive film studies encompasses a range of methods,
from those rooted in the ‘hard sciences’ to more humanities-based
approaches.
Among cognitive theorists, there is a general agreement that emotional
response does occur, individually and on a social level, and that these
responses are guided by film form. There is disagreement over the extent
to which viewers are capable of alternative responses, and variation about
which aspects of film form are most efficient at eliciting viewer response,
but the correlation between specific techniques and the understanding of
specific emotion is a core proposition of any such approach.
Torben Grodal explains the film-viewing process as ‘flow’.10 The
model of filmic emotion he provides is based on the way the brain
processes information. He has named this the PECMA flow model:

Perception, Emotion, Cognition and Motor Action.11 As a viewer
watches a film, emotional response becomes more complex, proceeding
through the stages of flow to attain resolution. Certain elements facili-
tate the ‘flow’ of emotional response or, conversely, restrict the flow
and prevent the viewer from emotional engagement. Flow is blocked
by ‘associative, nonnarrative montage or by other redefinitions of the
reality status of the images’.12 Spectacle and action are conducive to
flow, while moments of visual arrest, discontinuity editing or abstract
imagery constrain flow. Flow is also affected by formal elements which
produce a ‘subjective aesthetic’: still photographs, slow or accelerated
motion, sound effects, repetitive movement or associative editing.13
Emotional understanding is impeded or facilitated through specific
formal elements within a given film.
The centrality of film form to emotion is echoed by Susan Feagin,
who argues that individual readers of a literary work are capable of
different types of response to the text – sympathetic, empathetic, and
meta-level – and the formal devices of the work determine which type
emerges. Whereas in real life, an individual may empathise based on
‘second-order beliefs’ (his or her beliefs about another person’s beliefs),
readers instead experience ‘art empathy’, imagined emotions triggered
by formal features. Feagin goes so far as to propose that these features
might be more critical to the establishment of emotional engagement:
Our thoughts occur as a result of many different factors, including

the length of sentences, vocabulary and diction, shifts in voice,
recurrence of images, allusions, and juxtaposition of episodes. These
features of the literary work prompt our emotional responses to it,
just as much as, or more than, and even instead of, our beliefs about
what anyone would believe, desire, think of, or feel in real life.14
Feagin is speaking here of literature, but goes on to extend her observa-

tions to other media, turning from general discussion of emotion and
the arts to look fruitfully at specific strategies employed in film.
Films can’t make us feel anything, and they certainly can’t make us
all feel the same thing. What they can do is to extend an ‘invitation to
feel’, as Greg Smith puts it. One of the ways that films do this is through
generic emotion markers – shorthand codes which we recognize and
which help us to identify on-screen emotion, without necessarily
engaging with that emotion. Such narrative codes are useful in under-
standing characters or making predictions, and they may predispose us
to accepting a given interpretation of history, especially where that gels

with our own experience – but replicating some piece of an emotional
state is a different matter.
Acknowledging that the emotion system is highly flexible, and indivi-
dual viewer response highly diverse, Smith asks how films manage
nevertheless to maintain an emotional appeal. His answer is that film
structures must first create ‘a predisposition toward experiencing emo-
tion: a mood’.15 Then the individual film must sustain that mood
through a series of perceptual hints, which he calls cues. Smith asks
what specific structures are best suited to take advantage of properties
of the emotion structure. In my own research, I try to identify some of
these within the historical and cultural context of one small national
cinema, and in relation to its own past.
My discussion is rooted in the proposition that ‘imagined’ emotions
are invited or encouraged by a film’s use of specific formal techniques,
and on the observation that fractured narratives are endemic to the
recent Irish cinema. This noticeable fracture arises from the disruption
and manipulation of the three dimensions of film time: order, duration
and frequency, through flashback, ellipsis and repetition. These formal
elements function as emotion cues, inviting and guiding emotional
orientation.16 In the remainder of this essay, I will look at these three
dimensions and the way in which their deployment is intrinsic to emo-
tional engagement with Irish history on film.
Order: flashback in Kings
The recent Irish cinema is highly fractured and uses the disruption
and manipulation of film time to represent a traumatic past, engage
with collective and prosthetic memories of cataclysmic events, and
to offer an emotional orientation to these memories. The recent Irish
films are hybrids; they use the flashback in ways associated with both
Hollywood cinema and modernist or avant-garde cinema. In films like
Kings, The Butcher Boy (Neil Jordan, 1997), Omar (Kacie Smith, 2010),
Song for a Raggy Boy or Snap, the flashback performs many of the func-
tions Maureen Turim ascribes to the classical Hollywood variant (to
individualise historical experience, for example), while also creating
subjectivity and uncertainty around past events (as in the art cinema
variant).17 The framed flashback is fairly standard in Hollywood genre
films, used to clarify and contain events of the past. In recent Irish films
like Mickybo and Me (Terry Loane, 2004) or Love and Rage (Cathal Black,
2000), the framed flashback is used to question closure, and to show the
past and the present as less clearly demarcated. The device shows one
individual’s highly subjective experience of history: events and their
meaning are left ambiguous. Flashback is motivated, within the narra-
tive, by a subject’s attempts to deal with traumatic memories and the
emotions engendered by loss. In other cases, the flashback interrupts
the otherwise chronological narrative to represent the pre-traumatic
state and traumatic event. In these examples, the past is an intrusion
that stops the flow of action in the present. The flashback is clearly
associated with traumatic loss, and the flashback form replicates for the
viewer the emotional process of recalling that loss.
Tom Collins, in his feature film Kings, uses the flashback in sophisti-
cated and multifaceted ways to represent and express the emotions of
loss. Collins adapted the screenplay of Kings from Jimmy Murphy’s
stage play The Kings of the Kilburn High Road. It is an Irish-English bilin-
gual film. Collins made the decision to turn a linear ‘real-time’ play into
a fractured, achronological narrative.18 The plot of Kings is deceptively
simple: six friends emigrated from the West of Ireland to England in the
1970s; one of the men, Jackie, has died suddenly, killed by a train. The
others gather for his wake. However, the wake is less about remember-
ing or mourning Jackie than it is about recalling the various conflicts
and recriminations of the survivors. The film is structured around these
conflicts which are triggers for flashbacks through which the story of
the group is revealed. At the end, the men are more traumatised, and
further from any sort of closure, than they were at the start. Jackie’s
death is only one of the losses the men have endured, although it pro-
vides the opportunity for their miserable reunion. As the film unfolds,
it becomes clear that Jackie’s death may not have been an accident; the
men respond to this in ways that embody the various stages of grief:
denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.
After an evening of drinking and arguing, the men come together
to toast their dead friend, an action which triggers the film’s final
flashback sequence. As the camera pans between the men, Git, witness
to Jackie’s demise, tells the cynical Jap: ‘You don’t know; you weren’t
there.’ Jap, refusing to accept the truth, replies: ‘It doesn’t matter if
I was there or not.’ The camera pans to Máirtín on the other side of the
table. The next cut enters the flashback; a medium shot of Git, walking
with purpose through a train station. The next shot is from the optical
point of view of a closed circuit television camera, showing a jumpy
and pixellated view of Jackie walking out of the frame. In the next
medium-long shot, apparently that of another closed circuit camera,
Jackie walks onto the train platform. Yet another change in orientation
occurs with the next cut and subsequent over-the-shoulder shot of Git,
following Jackie. The next tracking shot recalls a dream Git had at the
film’s start; a point-of-view shot of the train approaching. A full frontal
medium shot frames Jackie on the platform. At this point, the flashback
is interrupted by a brief return to the wake; in close-up, Máirtín declares:
‘I don’t know.’ With the next cut, the flashback returns; now, the camera
appears to be positioned on the train itself as it moves forward; Jackie is
on the right-hand side of the frame. In the following frontal shot, Jackie
crosses himself. The flashback is again interrupted by a single shot from
the wake, as Jap answers Máirtín: ‘Well, I do, and I say he slipped.’ The
camera circles unsteadily, to a close-up of Git’s face. Next, Git, in the
flashback, walks onto the train platform. The next shot is again from
the train itself; Jackie now appears on the right-hand side of the frame.
The next three shots cut between close-ups of Git and Jackie’s faces;
then, Jackie falls toward the camera in a low-angle frontal shot; the
camera appears to be placed on the tracks. A quick cut and Jackie’s fall
is repeated, this time in a straight-on shot looking directly at the front
end of the train – Git’s point-of-view, presumably. This is reinforced
by the reaction shot, a close-up of Git’s horrified face. No dialogue is
audible in the scene; only the sounds of the braking train. An extreme
close-up shows a photograph of the friends, taken on the day of their
emigration; it blows along the train tracks where Jackie has dropped it.
Within this complex flashback sequence, multiple transitions occur:
in time, in camera placement, in character alignment and in viewer
orientation. Despite the initial suggestion that this is a memory of
Máirtín’s, the editing and camera placement shift between motivated
point-of-view shots and seemingly unmotivated angles and move-
ments. Moreover, we see that Máirtín was not physically present at
the event. It is impossible to ascribe the scene to any one character’s
experience or position. Is it Máirtín’s imagination? Is it Git’s memory?
Objective surveillance footage? The scene leaves little doubt about what
happened to Jackie, and yet the enigma of his death remains unresolved
and unsettling.
Kings contains 13 separate flashback sequences. Each is visually coded
and differentiated from the ‘present-day’ strand of the narrative
through the use of different film stocks, camera formats and filters.
The flashbacks are sometimes motivated by dialogue or still images
and indicated by sound bridges, close-ups, etc. At the most conven-
tional, they are psychologically motivated, oriented to an individual
point-of-view and cued by a technical device (such as the fade) or set
apart by formal variation. However, the film just as often confounds
these expectations – through the inconsistency of transitional devices

and especially through violations of subjectivity. These transgressions
blur the lines between ‘private memories’ and ‘shared’ slippages in time.
Within sequences, there is inconsistency of point-of-view and of the
depth and range of knowledge attributable to characters. This discon-
nects the flashback from the subjective experience of a single character
and undermines any claim to identification or privileged perspective on
the part of the viewer.
The flashback is used here in some conventional ways (not least,
opening out an admittedly ‘stagebound’ scenario) – as a framing device;
to set apart the past as a discrete historical unit; to unlock an enigma
(the precise nature of Jackie’s death); as a confessional; and to render a
wider historical experience in terms of individual experience. As discussed
above, these are characteristics of the use of flashback in, for instance,
Hollywood genre film. The flashback also functions here in ways
commonly associated with art cinema – to cast doubt on a version of
events, to present the possibility of unreliable narration and as a subjec-
tive marker. This represents a characteristic fusion of the classical and
modernist use/interpretation of the flashback device.
The first group of flashbacks show the men prior to their emigration
in 1977. These are set in Connemara, and represent a nostalgic and ide-
alised shared past. These segments are shot on Super-8 film, using a mix
of negative and reversal film stocks. The images are grainy and the col-
our is heavily saturated. Slow-motion, dissolves and super-imposition
are combined within the sequences, enhancing their dreamlike qual-
ity. The deliberately shaky camerawork and shifting, hazy focus create
the effect of amateur footage. The saturated colour footage is intercut,
at seemingly random points, with moments of black-and-white. The
change from colour to monochrome invokes a shift in registers: from
home-movie colour to newsreel black-and-white; from private memory
to public history. The conflation of the private and public spheres, of
individual experience and collective experience, underwrites the film’s
engagement with both personal loss and national trauma.
Despite its placement (prior to the main narrative), the opening
sequence of Kings is coded as a flashback through the transitions and
use of intertitles. The first image of the film fades in slowly and comes
into hazy focus: a ‘Galway hooker’, a traditional sailing ship used in the
West of Ireland; the image is accompanied by a male vocalist singing a
traditional Irish ballad. Titles announce that this is Conamara (the Irish
language spelling), Ireland, in 1977, and a succession of brief images –
young sailors; a harbour with a stone wall in the foreground, a fleet of
sailing ships – establishes the setting and emotional timbre of the film’s
prologue. On the soundtrack, accompanied by English-language sub-
titles, an Irish radio announcer says that the annual boat race has been
cancelled, the ships’ crews lost to emigration. The image of the harbour
fades to black. A single intertitle reads: ‘Over the years generations of
Irish people emigrated to escape poverty and unemployment at home.
Thousands found work on the building sites of England. Many settled
in North London, in places like Camden Town and Kilburn.’ This title
fades to black, and then fades in on a grainy, handheld shot of a group
of men, walking away from the camera towards a ferry. A series of quick
cuts introduces us to the film’s main characters as youths, smiling at the
camera, as if for a home movie. From an extreme close-up of one man’s
eyes, the image cross-dissolves to a medium shot of the group – now
walking towards the camera in slow-motion, laughing, drinking and
carrying their suitcases. The image fades, and the title ‘Kings’ appears as
the sound of traffic noises transitions the viewer to the next, present-
day segment, beginning with a conventional establishing shot of a
tower block and the caption ‘London, Thirty Years Later’.
This first sequence immediately establishes several of the major
themes as well as the emotional tenor of the film. The visual quality of
these shots – 8mm, handheld, grainy, poorly focused and saturated –
gives the images an aged effect by mimicking the familiar look of that
era’s home movies, and invokes emotions associated with nostalgia –
loss and longing. The traditional, even clichéd images of Ireland are
integral to this sense of nostalgia. The personal story suggested by
the images – the departure of six individuals from their boyhood
home – is transformed into something more ‘historical’ than ‘home
movie’, through the insertion of the black-and-white ‘documentary’
shots, the voiceover of the radio announcer, and the multiple images
of non-characters. The use of fades to transition in and out of the
sequence clearly sets it apart both temporally and stylistically, and helps
the viewer to organise this within the achronological narrative. Finally,
the sequence is neither psychologically motivated nor definitively
identified with an individual character.
Kings is on one level about the violent death of an individual and
the loss felt by the surviving mourners, but on another level, it is very
much about the collective traumas of emigrant communities – language
loss, alienation, isolation. The flashback in this case carries a political
charge, challenging dominant narratives of a past experience (emigra-
tion as a triumphalist move to a better life, for example) and a reflec-
tion on present-day reality (the parallel experience of today’s emigrants
to Ireland, for example). Significantly, the flashback also functions as

an intrusion into the present which disrupts and arrests the emotional
flow, and which invites readings of irony and ambiguity about the
past. Kings keeps the viewer rationally involved, but also draws on the
viewer’s emotional experience.
Duration: ellipsis in Bloody Sunday
Ellipsis is an aspect of duration, controlling the pace at which informa-

tion is revealed or amended. This includes information that adds to an
emotional reading of the film. Ellipsis and pause also replicate aspects of
the traumatic state, in which individuals cannot or will not remember
some details of an event, and yet also can become immersed in the rec-
ollection of other details. Ellipsis recalls Roland Barthes’s ‘discontinuous
nature of mourning’, and produces a disjointed effect that evokes the
condition of grief.
On another level, ellipsis produces a literal absence within the narra-
tive, a loss of image and information for the viewer. Ellipsis, by calling
attention to the moments of absence or narrative silence within a film,
reminds the viewer of the limits to both historical knowledge and artis-
tic or linguistic representation. This is the case in such films as Hunger,
Adam and Paul and Bloody Sunday; ellipses are not used to drive the nar-
rative forward, but to suspend the narrative and evoke emotions of loss.
Like the flashbacks described above, ellipses can create emotional as
well as intellectual uncertainty and ambiguity. It is not just the limits of
historical knowledge which are foregrounded, but the limits of language
and visual representation altogether. This is ellipsis, not for the sake of
continuity and concision, but as a black hole.
Paul Greengrass’s Bloody Sunday (2002) uses ellipsis to create a sense
of emotional and epistemological uncertainty in the retelling of a more
public historical narrative. The film is a dramatic account of the events
of 30 January 1972, when British army paratroopers fired upon civil
rights marchers in Derry, Northern Ireland. Fourteen civilians were
killed.19 Bloody Sunday has been one of the most fiercely contested and
emotive incidents in modern Irish history.
Bloody Sunday is a narrative film that is imitative of a documentary,
cinéma vérité style. Shaky, handheld camerawork, unmotivated pans
and zooms, naturalistic sound and lighting, non-classical framing and
obstructed point-of-view shots are used in conjunction with a grainy
and desaturated film stock. The film employs a chronological three-act
structure; the events unfold over a single day, beginning by showing
the preparations of the marchers and ending on the same evening,

following the classical Hollywood model of rising dramatic tension,
goal-oriented characters, causal relationships and clearly articulated
deadlines. Aspects of melodrama permeate the film and the sense of
objective realism is offset by moments of subjectivity. Bloody Sunday
is neither documentary nor art cinema; it is aimed at a commercial
audience and is clearly narrative filmmaking.
Within Greengrass’s film, narrative ambiguity is generated by what is
not depicted onscreen; crucial information is ellipsed. Specifically, one
essential detail is unseen – who fired first. The first live rounds fired are
heard but not explained and their source is not shown; the ‘mystery’ of
those shots – perhaps the central point of contention – provides some of
the chaos and uncertainty which drives the action in the second act of
the film. Leaving doubt about the origin of those shots allows viewers to
follow their own preconceived understanding. The film projects doubt,
which the viewer may ignore if desired, or exploit to meet his or her
own needs and orientation.20
There is clearly an epistemological dimension to the use of ellipsis in
Bloody Sunday. The ambiguity engendered by the narrative form and the
use of blackouts is complemented by the film’s refusal to limit itself to
a single, central subject. The dominant structural device of the film –
its intercutting between storylines – results in a polysemic text that
offers a plurality of voices. The film shuttles between four narratives –
the British General Ford and his men; the paratroopers; Ivan Cooper
and his fellow march organisers; and Gerry Donaghy and his friends –
intercutting to show the cross-purposes, misunderstandings and mount-
ing tensions. Bloody Sunday opens and closes with parallel press confer-
ences and commentary on the situation is delivered throughout by
the leaders of the respective camps. This creates the opportunity for
multiple points of viewer identification; the assumption that viewers
will orient themselves, emotionally, exclusively in respect to Cooper (as
most critics do assume) is a tenuous one. The multiplicity of voices and
viewpoints not only permits each player to articulate his own position,
but also provides some endorsement of those positions. Moreover, the
film emphasises the heterogeneity of perspectives through its presenta-
tion of dissent within communities. None of the communities created
by the film’s structure is unified or homogenous; each is fractured and
contentious.
The narrative uncertainty is echoed in the frequent use of fades-to-black,
each lasting only a few seconds, throughout the film. These fades
that punctuate Bloody Sunday serve not to create transitions between
sequences and settings (where a straight cut is more often used), but
rather, within scenes, where, like jump cuts, they create disjunction
and rupture. Just as the split narrative means that there are some details
left unseen, these blackouts are points where audience vision is denied;
literal representations of the ‘unknowing’ that occurs in relation to
history. Trauma theorists have written of the ‘black hole’ of traumatic
memory that ‘cannot be articulated within the structure of rational dis-
course’.21 At the same time, in Bloody Sunday, these blackouts (or black
holes) seem to call our attention to the film’s very incompleteness.
On an emotional level, the blackouts offer moments of dramatic
silence in opposition to the (over)spoken narrative, providing a sort of
‘breathing room’ from the visual and aural clamour of the film. Silence
and absence can be argued to draw attention to loss, or alternatively,
to conceal loss. Shoshana Felman suggests that such silence may func-
tion as ‘muted testimony’ that makes the viewer aware of the victims of
the trauma by their very absence; Elana Gomel conversely argues that
silence covers over the existence of the victim, denying their existence
and specificity.22 These moments are too brief, perhaps, to be considered
reflective, but they do create hesitation and invite contemplation.
Through its implicit acknowledgement of the subjective interpreta-
tion of events, Bloody Sunday calls the very concept of ‘witnessing’
into question. At the same time that it proposes vision as the source
of knowledge, it reminds us that our own vision is always incomplete
and subjective. Soldier 27, faced with the choice to assist in a cover-up
or speak out against his fellow soldiers, insists: ‘I saw what happened,’
to which his comrade replies with an alternative version of the day’s
events, concluding with: ‘You know what happened, right?’ Soldier 27
reluctantly accepts and repeats this version as truth. What one ‘sees’
and what one ‘knows’ and reiterates after the fact are not the same
thing. This scene is recalled at Cooper’s final press conference, at which
he insists: ‘They were innocent. We were there.’ To the assembled
journalists, the character of Eamonn McCann (Gerard Crossan) cries:
‘You saw it. You saw it. Go home and tell it.’ The viewer, of course, was
‘there’ as well and yet his or her own version of the story contains gaps
and uncertainties; ellipses in the emotional and historical record.
Frequency: circularity and repetition in Child of

the Dead End
Repetition can also alter the emotional discourse of a film. Like flash-
back and ellipsis, repetition is a feature of both Hollywood cinema,
where the redundancy of information serves the goal of viewer compre-

hension, and art cinema, where repetition provides association between
disparate elements or is used abstractly to create visual or aural patterns.
In the hybrid recent Irish cinema, repetition functions primarily as
an emotion cue. Repetition is inherent to the retelling of trauma, and
its presence in the recent Irish cinema is a reflection of the degree to
which these films are concerned, both thematically and formally, with
traumatic loss. In films like Shell Shock (Danis Tanovic, 2009), Savage
(Brendan Muldowney, 2009), Helen or Five Minutes of Heaven, the repeti-
tion of images, dialogue or events helps to express the traumatised
state of the protagonists, and to involve the viewer in the process of
their recovery. Repetition can reveal slight variations between vers-
ions of events, casting doubt on historical accuracy. Repetitive and
circular narratives can refuse closure and frustrate direct linear progres-
sion. Repetition also appears in the form of mosaic narratives, such as
Intermission, that present the world in an episodic and fractured fashion,
emphasising a lack of social cohesion. Finally, repetition can encour-
age shifts in perspective, introducing ambiguity about past events, and
offering multiple subject positions.
Des Bell’s 2009 Child of the Dead End (An Páiste Beo Bocht) is a docu-
drama based on the life of Patrick MacGill, an Irish poet and novelist.
MacGill came from an impoverished background, working as a railway
navvy before finding success through his (largely autobiographical)
novels, which dealt with the lives of poor Irish Catholic emigrants in
Scotland. MacGill was injured in World War I and afterwards suffered
from post-traumatic stress, or shellshock.
Halfway through the film, MacGill arrives in Scotland, destitute.
‘I approached the grand country house,’ says the narrator. ‘Inside, the
people were eating, drinking and making merry.’ The young MacGill is
filmed from behind, backlit in a medium shot that frames him against a
brightly lit window. The curtains are drawn; the people inside appear as
silhouettes in a tableau that fills the frame. The next shot shows MacGill
in profile, as he watches those inside. The light of the window, on the
left-hand side of the screen, contrasts with the darkness on the right,
where MacGill stands in the falling snow. The next shot is a medium
close-up of one of the silhouettes; a woman, laughing. Next there is a cut
and a close-up of MacGill’s face, through the glass, as if seen by some-
one looking out of the lit room. The next cut returns us to the original
tableau; MacGill’s back, framed before the window, as he bends to the
ground and picks up a rock. There is a cut, and then, again, a close-up of
MacGill’s face, on the other side of the window. As the camera looks out
at MacGill, the rock is thrown; the glass shatters. On the soundtrack, a

woman screams. An exterior shot of the house shows MacGill, running
from the scene. A quick-tempo strings motif begins, and the narrator
speaks again. ‘I ran for all my worth, a dog on my heels …’ The door
of the house opens, and a dog runs out in pursuit of MacGill. Here, an
iris-in occurs, transitioning to a segment of Charlie Chaplin footage;
Chaplin runs from a policeman, a dog nipping at his legs. The music
continues over the scene, and the growling of a dog is added. The
Chaplin scene ends with a cut to archival documentary footage, and the
narration moves on to the next chapter.
Over the next few sequences, MacGill achieves some literary success.
This brings him, eventually, to a dinner party with wealthy patrons,
including his future wife, Margaret. MacGill is asked to read one of his
‘navvy ballads’. He stands and performs, in a medium-long shot compo-
sed from the foot of the table, showing the opulence of the meal and
setting, which contrasts with the words of the ballad. ‘I’m fed when I am
working,’ recites MacGill, as a close-up shows Margaret’s admiring face.
The next shot is an image seen earlier – the profile shot of MacGill,
looking in through the window. The subsequent cut-back to the poet
indoors gives the impression that MacGill is looking at himself. The film
has circled back on itself, creating a disruption in the chronology and
bringing both MacGills – the starving navvy and the newly successful
writer – into collision. ‘But starve when on the tramp,’ the poem conti-
nues, and the next shot is another repeated image, the ‘first’ MacGill
in close-up, through the glass. ‘A stone has been my pillow’; there is a
cut and the repeated image of the exterior tableau and the silhouettes
within; ‘the moon above, my lamp.’ On this line, there is another cut,
back to the second MacGill as he concludes his reading. The guests clap,
and the sequence draws to a close. The sequence fractures the linear
progression of the narrative. It also signifies an emotional disruption.
The ‘first’ MacGill is a spectre that haunts his later self; even as MacGill
attains popularity and a taste of social mobility, he cannot leave behind
his past, his injured incarnation, or his connections to a traumatised
community.
This is an achronological, circular, and highly fragmented narrative. It
uses flashback and ellipsis to move between biographical episodes from
MacGill’s life, fictional depictions of scenes from MacGill’s novel, and
extra-textual archival material that parallels the biographical events.
The film is complex and self-conscious about its construction, deliber-
ately blurring the lines between fiction film and documentary. Bell uses a
mix of archival images and new live-action dramatic footage. The archival
material includes documentary footage, still photographs and snippets

of early fiction films. Bell juxtaposes and interweaves these materials
with dramatic re-enactments of events in MacGill’s life. The segments
function as mise-en-abyme, with the same actor (Cian Bell) playing both
the young MacGill, and his novel’s protagonist, Dermod. Images and
music are repeated throughout the film, highlighting the similarities
between Dermod and MacGill, and drawing attention to the interplay
between historical ‘fact’ and narrative film ‘fiction’. The film begins and
ends with scenes of MacGill’s later life in Hollywood; MacGill is played
by Stephen Rea in these scenes, and the first-person framing narration
by Rea spans the film to connect the disparate episodes and media.
Bell has said of the film that it is ‘a classic account of migration to
Scotland’.23 The film explores the losses of MacGill’s life: the death of
his brother; his own indentured servitude; his emigration; his war expe-
riences and subsequent physical and career decline. By combining and
confusing the historical, ‘objective’ past (located in archival footage and
biographical evidence) with the layers of fictional filmmaking (located
in the dramatised story of MacGill and the stories by MacGill), Child of
the Dead End conflates personal loss and personal narrative with the
national tragic narratives of poverty, emigration and war.
Conclusion
The themes of historical trauma and loss are rendered in these films as
dramas of individual mourning and recovery. The fractured narratives
are a strategy for expressing emotions of loss (personal and national)
and allowing the reassembly (or, equally, blocking the reassembly)
of previously held identities. Achronology is a strategy which reveals
something significant about the social and national context. As Allan
Cameron and David Martin-Jones have argued, achronological narra-
tives are suited to the story-telling paradigms of small nations (and
of ‘minor’, non-national cinemas) as a method of challenging or
re-establishing social identities, especially hybridised, marginalised or
contested national identities.24 It is through the emotional engage-
ment with viewers and access to prosthetic memory that such crucial
challenges are mounted.
Formal techniques shape the emotional discourse of the recent Irish
films. They obstruct the flow of emotion to prevent, ultimately, syn-
thesis or catharsis, and so avoid a false sense of closure or what Luke
Gibbons has called the ‘consoling fictions’ of history.25 Through emo-
tional readings, we might begin to explain the relationship of these
fractured formal strategies to narrative representation and recovery,

and to contextualise these films as products of national crisis and
change.
Notes
1. I name here just a few of the many ‘fractured’ films produced on these topics
over the last two decades.
2. It is worth noting that representation of the traumatic aspects of Irish
history has also been a contentious issue within Irish historiography. The
principal criticism made of Irish historians during the ‘revisionist contro-
versies’ of past decades was that by adopting a detached and neutral style
in analysing episodes such as the Great Famine of 1845, they have failed to
represent the traumatic dimension of the past that gives meaning to popular
historical narratives and consciousness. See, for instance, Brendan Bradshaw,
‘Nationalism and Historical Scholarship in Modern Ireland’, Irish Historical
Studies 24 (1989), pp. 329–351.
3. Robert A. Rosenstone, Visions of the Past (Cambridge MA: Harvard University
Press, 1995), p. 240.
4. Ibid.
5. Robert A. Rosenstone, ‘The Historical Film as Real History Film’, Historia 5 (1)
(1995), p. 13.
6. Debra Ramsay, ‘Flagging up History: The Past as a DVD Bonus Feature’ in
Robert Rosenstone and Constantin Parvulescu (eds), A Companion to the
Historical Film (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), p. 69.
7. Pam Cook, Screening the Past: Memory and Nostalgia in Cinema (Oxford and
New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 2.
8. See Alison Landsburg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American
Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2004).
9. Carl Plantinga and Greg Smith (eds), Passionate Views: Film, Cognition, and
Emotion (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), p. 3.
10. Torben Grodal’s work represents the most scientifically oriented end of
the spectrum of cognitive approaches. Grodal incorporates evidence from
the fields of neurology, neurochemistry and human evolution to build a
complex argument about our biologically determined responses to film.
11. Torben Grodal, Embodied Visions: Evolution, Emotion, Culture, and Film
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 146.
12. Grodal, Embodied Visions, p. 128.
13. Ibid., pp. 229–249.
14. Susan Feagin, ‘Imagining Emotions and Appreciating Fiction’, in Mette Hjort
and Sue Laver (eds), Emotion and the Arts (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1997), pp. 57–58.
15. Greg Smith, Film Structure and the Emotion System (Cambridge: Cambridge
16. I have focused here on aspects of film time; one might, equally, consider the
formal strategies which define film space: the cinematography, mise-en-scene
and soundscapes.
17. Maureen Turim, Flashbacks in Film: Memory and History (New York: Routledge,
1989).
18. Kings follows in the footsteps, thematically, of earlier Irish films about the
emigrant experience, notably I Could Read the Sky (Nichola Bruce, 1999) and
On a Paving Stone Mounted (Thaddeus O’Sullivan, 1978). These earlier films
also employ non-linear narrative structures.
19. Thirteen demonstrators and bystanders were killed on the scene; another
died several months later from his injuries. (http://cain.ulst.ac.uk, accessed
14 June 2014).
20. In my MA thesis, I considered the generation of resistant readings and polit-
ical ambiguity within Bloody Sunday and other Troubles films; some of these
ideas were first expressed in that discussion. [Jennie Carlsten, ‘A Cinema
of Resistance, A Resistance of Cinema: On the Limits and Possibilities of
Northern Ireland’s Commemorative Cinema’ (unpublished MA Thesis,
University of British Columbia, 2005), pp. 46–47].
21. Elana Gomel, Bloodscripts: Writing the Violent Subject (Columbus: Ohio State
22. Gomel, Bloodscripts, pp. 164–165, and Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub,
Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History
(New York: Routledge, 1992).
23. Staff Writer, ‘MacGill is Latest Donegal Story for Filmmaker Des Bell’, Donegal
Democrat, 9 June 2009 (http://www.donegaldemocrat.ie, accessed 14 June
2014).
24. See Allan Cameron, Modular Narratives in Contemporary Cinema (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); David Martin-Jones, Deleuze, Cinema and
National Identity: Narrative Time in National Contexts (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2008).
25. Luke Gibbons, ‘The Global Cure? History, Therapy and the Celtic Tiger’, in
Peadar Kirby, Luke Gibbons and Michael Cronin (eds), Reinventing Ireland:
Culture, Society and the New Economy (London: Pluto Press, 2002), p. 97.
10
Music and Montage: Punk, Speed
and Histories of the Troubles
Liz Greene
Emphasising the importance of speed to the moving image, Andre Bazin

noted that speed is implied by ‘a multiplicity of shots of ever-decreasing
length’.1 Within the montage sequence, speed has a particular impact for
an audience. Ken Dancyger notes how, over the last 30 years, the mon-
tage sequence has been shaped by the arrival of MTV but also by earlier
forms, such as experimental filmmaking, and television commercials.2
The centrality of pace in the music track provides the style for the mon-
tage itself. Dancyger says the montage sequence is abundant in terms of
style, and that style is placed above narrative within these sequences.
Time and place become less important within the montage sequence;
time can be any time, and place can be any place. The music video cre-
ates a feeling state, synthesizing human emotion from the music. It can
be dreamlike with no narrative continuum. Pace, subjectivity and close-
ups are used to intensify the montage sequence. Dancyger argues that a
faster pace causes events to feel more important to an audience.
With that in mind, it is useful to consider how montage sequences
are used within the documentary and fiction form to represent history.
If time and place can be obliterated by montage, what is the function
of MTV aesthetics within films representing history? How does the
montage sequence frame the past? How can a contested history be rep-
resented within a short montage sequence, and can that then influence
and inform new audiences learning about a Trouble(d) history for the
first time?
To unpick this further, I will turn briefly to film music scholarship.
Claudia Gorbman has noted the role of music in cinema:
If the advent of diegetic sound narrowed the possibilities of tem-

porality into a sort of relentless linearity, music could return as the
169
170 Liz Greene
one sound element capable of freeing up that temporal representa-

tion (thus music normally accompanies montage and slow motion
sequences, initiates flashbacks, and so on).3
Gorbman has argued that music functions as a free agent that problem-
atizes notions of linearity, narrativity and temporality, whereas diegetic
sound is locked to the picture. It is this power that music asserts within
a montage sequence that I want to explore by considering how music
punctuates a scene; gels us as an audience into a cinematic moment
within the audio-visual material; and sets a specific speed for the
action.4 Developing a socio-cultural critique of speed and music, Kay
Dickinson has investigated the use of MTV aesthetics and the centrality
of speed for youth audiences. She argues:
Speed has been important to teen identity since at least the ‘inven-
tion of the teenager’ and the ‘MTV aesthetic’ is merely a more recent
convulsion in this seductive mode of self-definition … Since then,
speed has played a sizeable role in youth differentiation from adult
lumberings: quick-witted youth versus faltering age. A glorification
of the moment – the moment of their ‘prime’, a moment which disa-
vows history and the primes of others now grown old.5
This can be identified clearly with the MTV aesthetic that emerged
during the 1980s, drawing on aspects of teenage culture dating back to
the 1950s. Dickinson suggests a complex position held by the teenager:
The teenage appropriation of speed dwells close to the treadmill

and the supermarket: enhanced speed, after all, requires more fuel,
greater consumption. These usages of speed are staged subversion
within the domains of capitalism, small-scale assertions of differ-
ence expressed through the lure of the commercial. Such strategies
are appealing from a position of no real ownership or control, but
a heightened knowledge of the market place: these subjects being
neither dupes nor revolutionaries.6
In arguing that teenagers are neither ‘dupes nor revolutionaries’, but

instead are etching out a space for themselves with the limited means
available to them, Dickinson outlines the potentially complex develop-
ment of youth rebellion, and how in certain heated moments acts of
rebellion can be attributed, in an overly simplistic way, to mindless
looting, as was the case with the 2011 London riots.7 It is the speed of
Punk, Speed and Histories of the Troubles 171
such countercultural movements that have often taken many media

commentators by surprise. It is this energy of youth rebellion, coupled
with the speed of pop and punk music that I would like to investigate
further within this essay.
Paul Virilio contemplates the political ramifications of speed. Turning
to war strategists, he quotes Sun Tzu who stated: ‘Speed is the essence
of war’.8 Virilio also quotes Joseph Goebbels, who claimed: ‘Whoever
can conquer the streets also conquers the State’.9 It was the speed with
which the streets were taken that was of vital importance to the Nazi
party. If we think about war, and, specifically, the Troubles in Northern
Ireland, which began in the late 1960s, the representation of that con-
flict also requires the use of speed in its audio-visual representations.
The speed of pop and punk music offers the perfect soundtrack to rep-
resent such action on screen.
On the one hand, Virilio’s argument is that speed is essential to con-
quest, and he points out that there is a willingness to give up space for
increased speed, placing an importance on time over space.10 We can
think here about the digital revolution and the importance of speed
and time as a process in our everyday lives.11 This effects all generations
who are impacted by new technologies. On the other hand, we have
renewable energy in new generations of teenagers who place significant
importance on speed in their lives. Historically, it has been the youth,
both as workers and students, who have been at the forefront of revolu-
tionary movements. As Michelle Chen argues: ‘Every revolution needs
two essential ingredients: young people, who are willing to dream, and
poor people, who have nothing to lose.’12 Young people have played a
significant role in the counterculture and have been at the sharp edge
of taking back the streets in many protest movements. They have also
been at the forefront of making and consuming music.
Youth and countercultures
In the late 1960s young people, as students and workers, became

involved in the civil rights movement in Northern Ireland, alongside
other sectors of society demanding equality in housing, employment
and voting rights. This movement sought inspiration by looking to
international struggles such as the black civil rights movement in the
United States, adopting both their tactics and songs to aid their strug-
gle.13 Young people, who were to spearhead this movement, had a sig-
nificant leader in Bernadette Devlin, the iconic socialist republican who
was elected as an MP in 1969 at the age of 21.14
172 Liz Greene
In the early 1970s, the Troubles saw increased sectarian division and
State repression. This particularly bloody period represented a setback
for the civil rights movement with its potential to unite Catholic and
Protestant youths.15 After the killing of three members of The Miami
Showband in July 1975 by Loyalist gunmen, musicians were no longer
regarded as being exempt from sectarian attack. Gerry Smyth outlined
the consequences of this attack, suggesting that it became difficult to
attract international acts to play in Ireland, both north and south of the
border.16 However, there was also an indirect positive outcome to this
situation. Irish bands began to gain exposure from the lack of foreign
competition, headlining gigs and promoting a home-grown music scene.
This led to a surge in rock and punk bands in the north and south of
Ireland. Punk became an attractive outlet for many, perhaps due to the
political frustrations of growing up during the Troubles. The noise of war
may also have had an impact on the music produced during this period.
David Hendy has suggested: ‘Revolution and war are unlikely to be quiet
affairs. For those caught in the thick of the upheaval and violence, the
experience might even be defined by noise more than anything else’.17
Hendy was referring explicitly to the French Revolution and the American
Civil War but the argument can be made that young people in Northern
Ireland used the energy and noise of punk music to reflect and rebuff the
noise that surrounded their daily lives. As Martin McLoone has outlined:
In some ways, late-1970s Belfast and punk were made for one another.
If there was an element of ‘the abject’ about punk – gobbing, vomiting –
there was no more abject a place in the Western world than Northern
Ireland, specifically Belfast in 1977.18
Although the Troubles represented a significant setback for all forms

of culture and society in Northern Ireland, it could be argued that its
chaos and noise offered the indigenous punk scene a unique prism in
which to construct an identity. Audio-visual images of both punk and
the Troubles in the 1970s thus become entwined in fast and frenzied
representations based on speed.
The clashes and the vistas
I have identified two different types of montage sequences in Northern

Irish cinema and television that are concerned with the Troubles,
which I have labelled as the clashes and the vistas. The clashes contain
images of street fighting. Starting with representations of the civil rights

movement and the Battle of the Bogside, these montage sequences con-
tinue into the Troubles. These are often framed at street level and nor-
mally follow and track the protestors as they oppose State repression.
Examples of the clashes can be seen in very early documentary footage
of the civil rights movement, such as the documentary Bernadette Devlin
( John Goldschmidt, 1969) and the more recent film Bernadette: Notes on
a Political Journey (Lelia Doolan, 2011).
The vistas on the other hand offer two vantage points. The first
provides a panopticon view of the city space, often made to look like
surveillance shots. The second type of vista offered is the travelling shot;
these occur both in the city and rural Northern Ireland. Examples of
the vistas can be seen in Shellshock Rock ( John T. Davis, 1979); Iris in the
Traffic, Ruby in the Rain ( John Bruce, 1981); and the more recent fiction
film, Good Vibrations (Lisa Barros D’Sa and Glenn Leyburn, 2012). The
clashes and the vistas offer various kinds of montage sequences, provid-
ing the viewer with different understandings of time and space. Music
in the main accompanies these sequences.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s work on the philosophical con-
cept of the rhizome offers a way to consider the territorialised space of
the vista montage sequence.19 They argue that there are connections
made between all elements. There is no hierarchy; the rhizome offers
an endless middle space. In the vista montage sequences we obtain a
labyrinthine view of a city, or a space; it highlights the expanse of the
city or space that is clearly defined, although the limits of the space are
omitted. In representations from Northern Ireland, these vistas offer a
visualised territorialised space. These vista sequences are cut to a music
track; quite often, this is punk music. The music creates a freeing up
of space within the audio-visual representation, offering a contrasting
aurally de-territorialised space.
To consider the clashes, it is worthwhile focusing on a couple
of audio-visual representations of Devlin.20 Within these montage
sequences, attention is paid to the street protests, illustrating the ten-
sions at the height of the civil rights movement. In Goldschmidt and
Doolan’s documentaries about Devlin, music is used within the clashes
to create a direct commentary on the visual action. Goldschmidt’s film
uses the music of Thunderclap Newman, ‘Something in the Air’, in a
central montage sequence. The montage is set up as a linear narrative: a
DJ from Radio Free Derry announces what is happening on the streets,
and then the music fades in as if it has been cued up live on air.21 The
174 Liz Greene
music is coded as diegetic, playing out onto the streets as the Battle of
the Bogside is filmed.22
The soundtrack is stitched together very carefully to produce the
effect of diegetic music that is coming from the streets, emphasising
that there is something literally in the air. We start to make connections
visually with the tear gas we are seeing and the revolutionary spirit of
the people from the Bogside. This piece of music stops abruptly during
the Battle and the scene returns to the DJ, and then to Devlin who is
speaking on the telephone, before returning once more to the street
protests as we hear the disintegrating sound of discordant piano music.
The rhythm, timpani and speed in which the music is being played
mirrors what we hear and see of stones and rocks being thrown at the
armoured patrol cars. The piano music is heard breaking down in order
to delineate the deconstruction of that space at that moment in time.
We see the armoured patrol cars covered in paint and battered by rocks
as musically the song starts to degenerate. We are positioned on the
side of the people from the Bogside and the music is cut deliberately to
make it feel as if it is part of that space, commentating on the action
onscreen.
In a key montage sequence, Doolan’s documentary uses Leonard
Cohen’s song ‘Everybody Knows’ to illustrate the global civil rights
struggle in 1968/1969. Doolan’s film does not use a narrator but instead
uses the voice of Devlin to bring us into this montage sequence, and
then uses a narrator from the archive to take us out of it. Again, this
is a very skilful way of presenting narration, using other elements to
provide the context within the documentary. ‘Everybody Knows’ also
provides another layer of commentary within the sequence. There
is footage here cut to a song written 18 years after the protests. The
film itself was made 42 years after the initial action in 1968. Doolan
utilises a song, which is written about a position of looking back
within a film made explicitly to look back at Devlin’s political career.
Cohen’s song is about defeat and pessimism and yet the film is cen-
tred on struggle and optimism. A duality is at play within the film:
we see within the montage struggles from around the world, the song
sets the tone, the lyrics are pessimistic yet the tempo and melody are
upbeat to match the action on screen. It evokes a sentiment outlined
by Antonio Gramsci in his prison letters: ‘I’m a pessimist because of
intelligence, but an optimist because of will.’23 We are presented with
a very complex narration of this action. We see time concisely com-
pressed through a montage of struggles, but it is a troubled time from
a position of looking back.
To consider the use of vista montage sequences, I will allude to two

examples: Shellshock Rock and Iris in the Traffic, Ruby in the Rain. Both
of these representations of Northern Ireland contain a similar use of
the panopticon shot within the montage sequence that I would like
to explore here. In Shellshock Rock, a creative montage sequence begins
from on high looking down at the city, as we hear a brass band play-
ing ‘Good King Wenceslas’. The passage is first played at an andante
(‘walking speed’) tempo and then is repeated at the faster allegretto pace.
The camera zooms out from a shot of a block of flats and pans right while
zooming out, and continues to pan right across the cityscape once the
camera is fully zoomed out. The film cuts to street level as we see punks
dancing around on the streets of Belfast to the same track but the music
has now picked up to the allegretto pace. There is a rhythmic connection
made between the earlier pan across the city and the circular dancing
movement of the punks. The camera pans right and left following one
punk and then zooming in to finally rest on another punk. Both edits
occur at the end of the verse. The film then cuts to the second punk
drumming at a concert. We hear the punk band, Rudi, playing ‘Big
Time’. The sound of wind can be heard in the mix and the film cuts
to two punks battling the wind as their umbrella is blown inside out.
‘Big Time’ continues throughout this exterior shot. The film briefly cuts
inside to a continuation of Rudi performing the song and then outside
again as the band disembarks from a bus in rural Northern Ireland. They
enter an Orange Hall. The handheld camera zooms out and tilts down
from a portrait of King William of Orange to a young punk looking at
the camera. What we hear is the sound of very loud wind mixed with
much lower punk music; this is ‘worldized’,24 but we do not see anyone
playing this music in synchrony. Director John T. Davis offers a poetic
way through the city out to the periphery of rural Northern Ireland. We
began by hearing the sound of a traditional brass band and this then
cuts to punk music and we hear how punk music can infiltrate both a
city and a rural space.
In Iris in the Traffic, Ruby in the Rain, Jake Burns, the lead singer of
Stiff Little Fingers, plays a minor role, as a punk called Ducksey. He
gives a demo tape to his friend Iris to listen to. She places the tape into
the cassette deck of her car. Burns can be heard counting in the band
with ‘One, two, three, four’ and the television play cuts to a panopticon
shot of the city. We hear the sound of ‘Alternative Ulster’ by Stiff Little
Fingers as the camera tilts upwards, tracking Iris’s car and then, when
her car goes out of shot, the camera pans left offering a cityscape of Belfast
that includes Samson and Goliath, the iconic cranes of the Harland and
176 Liz Greene
Wolff shipyard. Iris drives through the city. We experience the city as
she does. We see her passing a protest march and there is graffiti on the
walls in support of the hunger strikes by republican prisoners, calling for
the end of the H-Blocks, the name given to the Maze Prison where the
hunger strikes were taking place. Her car then falls behind an armoured
patrol car and a British soldier starts to make lewd gestures towards
her. But, with her punk music to protect her from outside forces, she
is easily able to rebuff his suggestive moves. The power of punk music
within the car allows her a way through the city. Here the punk music
is defiant, directly commenting on a time and a place, and offering a
political alternative.
In Iris in the Traffic, Ruby in the Rain we start with an almost identical
shot to that seen in Shellshock Rock, looking down over the rhizome
of the territorialised city. This cuts to street level with Iris driving. The
scene is perfectly timed to the music and sequence of action. We see the
city space unfolding. The music allows for a way through and a way to
survive Belfast in 1981. This is a moment of personal rebellion for Iris,
although she is hearing this song for the first time. The music sounds
loud on the soundtrack, but within the diegesis we know that it is not
having any impact on the surrounding events or people passed on the
streets. Music provides a way through the city, both aesthetically and
as a narrative device.
Good Vibrations offers examples of both the clashes and the vistas.
There are five musical montage sequences in the film. The open-
ing montage sequence uses the music of Hank Williams. Two other
sequences contain the music of Stiff Little Fingers, another uses the
guitar music of Bert Jansch’s ‘Angie’, coupled with a voice-over from
the character of Terri Hooley (Richard Dormer), and a further sequence
utilizes an original score by David Holmes. Except for the first montage
sequence, all the montages use fiction and archival footage to weave
together stories from Northern Ireland’s punk scene. I will discuss two
montage sequences in detail in order to illustrate the dominant aesthetic
style utilized by the filmmakers and to explore further how history is
being packaged within the film.
In the opening montage sequence, we are presented with a flash
forward through history in Northern Ireland from the 1950s through
to the 1970s based on Terri’s memories of growing up in Belfast. The
music used is a 1948 recording by Hank Williams, ‘I Saw the Light’. The
song is used here to allude to an incident when Terri loses his eye as
a young boy. A light is shone directly into his eyes by a doctor, which
leads into both a fast-paced montage sequence and the Williams song.
A connection is also made here to Terri as a young man in Northern

Ireland who ‘politically’ sees the light and walks a path that is consist-
ently anti-sectarian. In this montage sequence, we are looking and
listening back from a place of voice-over; we hear Terri as an adult nar-
rating his story as a way of introduction, but we are seeing him as Terri,
the young boy (Cathal Maguire). There is a fractured representation
of time as the film flashes forward from the image of the child that is
seen on screen, but also flashes back in terms of where the narrator is
positioned. The music is from an earlier time, but the music is clearly
something with which Terri identifies. We see an imaginary cowboy
figure appearing to him on occasion throughout the film, and we are
led to believe that this is Hank Williams.
The montage sequence is made up entirely of archival material. Cut
into this sequence are the following archival shots: idyllic children, rural
pastures, church, markets, celebrations and snooker being played. Then
the montage slows down for processions, Orange marches, the civil
rights movement and a ship leaving. The music starts to reverberate as
we see soldiers disembarking from a ship, women giving cups of tea to
the soldiers, bomb explosions, fire engines, the wounded being carried,
women pleading and blood-stained paths. The sequence speeds up and
slows down on action: after a still shot of a bomb explosion, the camera
hops – apparently as a consequence – and the same shot appears on the
television screen of Terri’s parents’ living room in the 1970s. The bombs
on the streets are being brought home.
What we have seen is a speeded up history of the beginning of the
Troubles presented through a one-minute montage sequence. We have
gone through the 1950s, the 1960s and into the 1970s at a frenetic
pace. The edit slows down at certain incidents: when the British troops
arrive in Northern Ireland the image starts to slow down to offer poign-
ancy to this moment. The music at this point starts to reverberate; we
hear it echoing through the space, and as the music becomes more
discordant the image starts to play against it, speeding up and slowing
down again. There is a loose connection between image and sound in
terms of speed, pace and rhythm. History is presented here in a dis-
junctive manner, but within a neat package of a montage sequence.
Time and speed are being played with; our attention is drawn to certain
moments and is taken away from these incidents almost as quickly
again.
I would like to argue that what is presented within this montage is
an impossible amount of information to take in. I had to watch this
sequence several times to make a note of all of the shots, speed changes
178 Liz Greene
and sound shifts. The editing of this sequence, the jerkiness of several
of the shots and the pace at which it is delivered, is too much for an
audience to absorb in a single screening. There is no space offered for
reflection to process all of this archival footage. It is an affective mon-
tage sequence; we are not meant to comprehend this material intellec-
tually but rather to feel or experience it in some way. The disjuncture in
pace also draws attention to this Trouble(d) time. Within the montage
we get elements that are fractured and it illustrates a way of consider-
ing traumatic memory. The sequence flashes forward and/or back and
this illustrates the impact of the Troubles. It is a jolting experience to
watch and comprehend. As an affective piece of editing it is effective.
However, it seems important to ask if this sequence helps to deepen
our understanding of Northern Irish history. I contend that it does not
because as an audience we are not able to take it all in.
To offer another example from the film, I will consider the use of the
band Stiff Little Fingers within one of the montage sequences. A fictional
Stiff Little Fingers does not appear within the film but they are presented
within the soundtrack and they are featured twice on the soundtrack
album, which, perhaps, can explain why the music is included in the
film. The song ‘Gotta Getaway’ is used to gel archival footage to the
fiction material, in order to offer a sense of cohesion, in terms of time,
place and history. The band travels out from the city with Terri, leaving
from the Good Vibrations shop in order to play a gig in rural Northern
Ireland (this is reminiscent of the scene, discussed above, in Shellshock
Rock when Rudi play a gig in an Orange Hall). The montage illustrates
the dangerous nature of rural Northern Ireland in the late 1970s. This
sequence is composed of fiction shots of the band Rudi getting into the
van, Terri asking if anyone can drive, locking the van, the van on the
road in rural Northern Ireland, archival footage of a road sign, showing
directions to Dundalk, Newry, Crossmaglen and Castleblayney (towns
close to the border), a helicopter overhead, armed RUC (police) officers
walking through fields. The montage sequence then cuts back to the
fiction footage of a wide shot of the van travelling on a rural road, then
to an archival shot of a man taking aim with a rifle, and back again to
footage of the van on the road in a closer shot, back to the archive of
soldiers in a field, and then soldiers in a town, to a shot of a paramilitary
soldier and then a group of paramilitary soldiers stopping a civilian car,
before, finally, the montage cuts back to the van on the road passing a
sign for Bellaghy.
The music begins just as Terri asks: ‘Wait, does anyone know how to
drive this fuckin’ thing?’ The band are heard cheering as Terri locks up
the van and when the montage sequence cuts to the van on the road,
the music track can be heard but there is no other diegetic sound heard.
The music is non-diegetic, and when the lyrics come to two renditions
of ‘Gotta Getaway’, the diegetic location sound is reintroduced and the
sound can be heard of the van travelling on the road. The non-diegetic
music dominates the rest of the soundtrack within this sequence but
fades down completely when the camera shows the inside of the van.
The lyrics directly comment on the act of getting away. Importantly,
the tempo of the music is speeded up within the film, although it used
the original 1978 single release. The section of music used for the film
from the original track is 88.6 beats per minute (bpm), but on the film
version this has been speeded up to 99 bpm.25 The music does not
feel organic to the space, due to the increased tempo and non-diegetic
usage. Similarly, the later use of ‘Alternative Ulster’ in another montage
sequence in Good Vibrations uses a speeded up version of the song. It
cuts between fiction and the archive to deliver an historical context to
a punk song. The montage sequence attempts to place these characters
in a specific space, with time and place drawn upon through the archi-
val material. However, Good Vibrations fundamentally fails to deliver
within these types of montage sequences as there is no attempt made
to connect the fiction footage visually with the archival material. The
image jars between each cut, due to the differences in lighting, grain
and texture of the image. Adding additional speed to the music or the
image does not aid the narrative understanding here.
The overarching history lesson in Good Vibrations is that the Troubles
were all a bit mad, and if only more people listened to records and
did not shoot each other so much, then wouldn’t it all be grand?
Problematically, Terri is offered as not only the saviour of punk, but
also the only way forward for peace in Northern Ireland. This can be
illustrated by an embarrassingly simplistic scene in a pub when Terri
gathers together both Loyalists and Republicans and offers them some
records in order to keep the peace and allow his business to stay open.
Keeping both sides happy is reduced to a pay-off and nothing further is
developed or drawn out from the film. Ultimately, the film caricatures
a deeply complex and contested history.
To conclude, I would like to return to Dickinson’s argument and
pose the question of whether we can still say that speed is a charac-
teristic of the young. Punk music was the last significant youth-based
countercultural movement before MTV. The generation that grew up
with MTV is now approaching or settling into middle age. In Western
capitalist economies, those aged over 50 have an ability to consume
180 Liz Greene
in ways that the young are denied. The 2008 economic crisis has seen
consumption shift towards an older demographic.26 It is now the
middle-aged body more frequently seen on the treadmill in the gym,
attempting to (re)gain the body they never appreciated or ever had to
begin with. With amphetamines, super-caffeinated and sugared bever-
ages, and wristbands that track your every step, the quantified self is
attractive to the middle-aged as they race against time, consuming
speed and exercise to ward off the immanency of old age and death.27
A fear of the future may drive a nostalgia for a lost youth.28 The middle-
aged provide the audience who can pay for the cinema ticket, buy the
DVD, CD soundtrack and Terri’s 2010 autobiography, Hooleygan: Music,
Mayhem, Good Vibrations.29
When an archival history within a montage sequence is speeded up to
a beat and a rhythm, we have to question how this material is utilised.
In Bernadette Devlin and Bernadette: Notes on a Political Journey, the music
is used to comment directly on the action, either as the soundtrack as
the events occurred, or from a position of looking back at past events.
The music is used to frame the montage sequence. In Shellshock Rock
and Iris in the Traffic, Ruby in the Rain the montage sequences are cho-
reographed to the music, allowing the music a position of authority
within the narrative. In Good Vibrations the various montage sequences
tend to use the music as a backdrop to the action, sometimes fading in
and out of songs, or speeding them up in order to move on to the next
scene. Ironically in a film about the origins of punk music in Northern
Ireland, the music track is not given the care and attention one might
expect. The consequence of this is that the montages are ultimately less
effective and there is no real sense of the audience being stitched into
a time and a place. History is left as a backdrop, and in many ways is
dispensable within the overall narrative.
Notes
1. Andre Bazin, ‘The Evolution of the Language of Cinema’, What is Cinema?
Vol. 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1958, 2005), p. 25.
2. Ken Dancyger, The Technique of Film and Video Editing: History, Theory, Practice,
fifth edition (London: Focal Press, 1993), pp. 267–276.
3. Claudia Gorbman, ‘Why Music? The Sound Film and Its Spectator’, in Kay
Dickinson (ed.), Movie Music: The Film Reader (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 39.
4. Gorbman, ‘Why Music?’, p. 39.
5. Kay Dickinson, ‘Pop, Speed, Teenagers and the “MTV Aesthetic”’, in Movie
Music: The Film Reader, p. 147.
6. Dickinson, ‘Pop, Speed’, p. 149.
7. For a more nuanced reading of the London Riots, see Laurie Penny,
‘Panic on the Streets of London’, Penny Red: Every Human Heart is a Revolutio-
nary Cell (9 August 2011) (http://pennyred.blogspot.co.uk, accessed 14 July
2014).
8. Paul Virilio, Speed and Politics (translated by Marc Polizzotti), (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1977, 2007), p. 149.
9. Virilio, Speed and Politics, p. 30.
10. Ibid, pp. 61–72.
11. See Timothy Scott Barker, Time and the Digital: Connecting Technology,
Aesthetics, and a Process Philosophy of Time (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College
Press, 2012) for a process philosophy reading of time.
12. Michelle Chen, ‘What Labor Looks Like: From Wisconsin to Cairo, Youth
Hold a Mirror to History of Workers’ Struggles’, in Daniel Katz and Richard A.
Greenwald (eds), Labor Rising: The Past and Future of Working People in America
(New York: The New Press, 2012), ebook, no page.
13. George McKay, ‘The Social and (Counter) Cultural 1960s in the USA,
Transatlantically’, in Cristoph Grunenberg and Jonathan Harris (eds), Summer
of Love: Psychedelic Art, Social Crisis and Counterculture in the 1960s (Liverpool:
University of Liverpool Press, 2005), p. 57.
14. See Bernadette Devlin, The Price of My Soul (London: Pan Books, 1969).
15. See Eamonn McCann, War and an Irish Town, second edition (London: Pluto
Classics, 1993).
16. Gerry Smyth, Noisy Island: A Short History of Irish Popular Music (Cork: Cork
17. David Hendy, Noise: A Human History of Sound and Listening (London: Profile
Books, 2013), p. 201.
18. Noel McLaughlin and Martin McLoone, Rock and Popular Music in Ireland:
Before and After U2 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2012), p. 133.
19. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia (translated by Brian Massumi) (Minneapolis, MN: University
of Minnesota Press, 1987), pp. 3–28.
20. Due to the limitations of space, I am unable to discuss Duncan Campbell’s
film Bernadette, 2008, 38 minutes. Campbell’s film does not use music or
montage in the way that Goldschmidt and Doolan do; rather his approach is
experimental and associative, utilizing sound effects much more frequently
than score music or pop songs. For further reading on Campbell’s film see
Liz Greene, ‘Placing the Three Bernadettes: Audio-Visual Representations
of Bernadette Devlin McAliskey’, in Jill Daniels, Cahal McLaughlin and
Gail Pearce (eds), Truth, Dare or Promise (Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge
Scholars Press, 2013), pp. 112–134.
21. For more on Radio Free Derry see Paul Arthur, ‘March 1969–September 1969:
In Search of a Role’, People’s Democracy 1968–1973 (Belfast: Blackstaff Press,
1974), (http://cain.ulst.ac.uk, accessed 14 July 2014).
22. For more on the Battle of the Bogside, see Russell Stetler, The Battle of the
Bogside: The Politics of Violence in Northern Ireland (London: Sheed and Ward,
1970), http://cain.ulst.ac.uk, accessed 14 July 2014).
23. Antonio Gramsci, Letters from Prison, vol. 1 (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1994), p. 299.
182 Liz Greene
24. The term ‘worldized’ was coined by Walter Murch to describe a sound recorded
or created in studio or elsewhere that is then treated to sound as if it is heard
in another acoustic location and is often played to sound as if it is diegetic.
25. Here I used Beatunes software in order to perform a beat analysis of the
tracks.
26. David Kingman, ‘Spending Power Across the Generations’, Intergenerational
Foundation (London, December 2012), pp. 1–32.
27. ‘The Quantified Self: Counting Every Moment’, The Economist (3 March
2012) (http://www.economist.com, accessed 14 July 2014).
28. For an in depth discussion on nostalgia and punk music, see Andy Medhurst,
‘What Did I Get? Punk Memory and Nostalgia’, in Roger Sabin (ed.), Punk
Rock: So What? The Cultural Legacy of Punk (New York: Routledge, 1999),
pp. 219–231 and Martin McLoone, ‘Punk Music in Northern Ireland: The
Political Power of “What Might Have Been”’, Irish Studies Review 12 (2004),
pp. 29–38.
29. Terri Hooley’s autobiography was written in conjunction with Richard
Sullivan. Terri Hooley and Richard Sullivan, Hooleygan: Music, Mayhem, Good
Vibrations (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 2010).
11
Reflections on What the Filmmaker
Historian Does (to History)
Robert A. Rosenstone
At a certain age, an age I have reached, the impulse is less to do new

research and/or scholarship than to take the time to reflect on the
scholarship that one and others have done in recent decades. Much of
my own scholarly activity in the last quarter century has been devoted
to the topic of the history film, by which I mean the dramatic motion
picture that focuses on verifiable people, events and movements set
in the past. I distinguish between the history film and the more com-
mon term, the ‘historical film’, because the latter can also refer to any
important film that has been made in the past. Sometimes a film can
be both. Orson Welles’ masterpiece, Citizen Kane (1941), for example,
falls into both categories. As a history film, it is a thinly veiled biogra-
phy of powerful newspaper publisher, the Rupert Murdoch of his day,
William Randolph Hearst. As a historical work, it is famous for its use
of multiple perspectives on the past (long before Akira Kurosawa’s cele-
brated film, Rashomon (1950)), its fragmented and contradictory way of
telling a story, its special deep-focus photography and its luscious use
of black-and-white.
My project has been to try to understand the questions of what
exactly is a history film; how does it relate to the kind of history we
academics have been taught to do; what, if anything, does it add to
our understanding of the past; and how does it do so? In other words,
I am interested in the question: what does the historian filmmaker do
to history? As well as in the larger question of how we academics in
the field of history can/should (?) think about the past/history as it is
presented to us in the visual media. In a way, this article is in part a
request and an invitation to readers for help in trying to understand the
phenomenon of history presented in our contemporary (and no doubt
future) media. To investigate the theory and philosophy of history as
183
184 Robert A. Rosenstone
transmitted in the visual media is not only valuable of itself. I also see
it as a step towards preparing ourselves to understand the past/history
as it is and will be presented in the electronic media which has swept
the globe and become our chief source of information about the world
of past, present and future.
By focusing on the dramatic history film and, more particularly, on
the mainstream film produced in Hollywood and its suburbs in Europe,
Latin America and Asia, I do not wish to denigrate other forms, such
as the standard documentary or the mixed genre work which intercuts
dramatic and documentary sequences (such as director Des Bell’s provo-
cative film, The Enigma of Frank Ryan (2013)), or the frankly innovative/
experimental film which traces its lineage back to Sergei Eisenstein’s
Battleship Potemkin (1925) and October (1928). While I have written about
these kinds of films, I have focused most of my efforts on the standard
dramatic history film because if one can show that this form, with its
obvious inventions, can engage in ‘doing history’, then the contributions
of the other forms to historical discourse will fall into place easily.1
We all know that in the contemporary world the electronic media,
with its strong visual components, now challenges the longtime sway
of print over our construction and understanding of reality. Film, itself,
is hardly a contemporary medium. Now over a century old, the motion
picture has from its earliest days used the past/historical events as one
of its main sources of stories. From the short, almost static tableau
pieces made in the first decade of the 20th century – such as The Last
Days of Pompeii (Arturo Ambrosio and Luigi Maggi,1908) from Italy, The
Assassination of the Duc of Guise (Charles Le Bargy and André Calmettes,
1908) from France and Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Edwin S. Porter, 1903) from
the US – down to the last two winners of the Academy Award for best
picture, Argo (Ben Affleck, 2012) and 12 Years a Slave (Steve McQueen,
2013), the motion picture set in the past (I don’t think we need here to
argue over whether to call it a genre) has been a staple of the medium
all over the world. Yet theorists and philosophers of history have hardly
dealt with what this form – this medium – does to (and for) the past.
Odd, I think, for surely it is has become one of our chief means of doing
public history and conveying an understanding the past? I have been
engaged in this task on and off for a quarter century now, and I could use
help from other quarters, particularly from scholars for whom the rules,
codes and conventions we have for telling and assessing the telling of
the past are of major importance.
The question I want to raise here is a simple one: can film – and I refer
particularly to the dramatic film – ‘do history’? Can film, to use a word
Reflections on What the Filmmaker Historian Does 185
the theorist Alun Munslow likes to use, engage in ‘historying’?2 (To me

this seems to be a useful new word, for, in describing the process by
which we turn the remains of the past into what we call history, it does
not specify a single methodology or process for doing so). If you ask this
question of an academic historian, she or he will in virtually every case
answer: ‘No.’ For historians tend to think of the feature film as no more
than entertainment, a medium which distorts, trashes and otherwise
corrupts the meaning of the past, and does so in the name of making
profits out of a mass audience. But the issue is hardly so simple. Our
consciousness as a culture has become too deeply enmeshed in the visual
and electronic media for the profession to keep denying that there exist
forms of historying other than words on a page. In writing about the his-
tory film here, I want to explain something about where I have been on
this question and how I think film works to render a version of history.
In the early days of motion pictures, some visionaries expressed hope
for film as a conveyer of history. A French critic in 1908 saw one of the
major tasks of this new medium as being ‘to animate the past, to recon-
struct the great events of history’.3 In 1915, the great American director
D. W. Griffith predicted: ‘The time will come when the children in the
public schools will be taught practically everything by moving pictures.
Certainly they will never be obliged to read history again.’ People would
not, in order to learn about Napoleon, ‘have to wade laboriously through
a host of books, and ending up bewildered, confused at every point by
conflicting opinions about what did happen’. Through film, the reader
would receive ‘a vivid and complete expression’ of the past; they would
be ‘present at the making of history’. More recently, the late French critic
Roland Barthes wrote that attending a screening of Battleship Potemkin
was like ‘sitting at the balcony of history’, watching the past unfold.4
***
Academic historians have been much less sanguine about – and much
more dismissive of – the history film. Their normal response is to say
that films destroy the past rather than allow us to see it. But I want to
raise the possibility that the promise of the visionaries has been and is
being fulfilled, if not necessarily in the way that pleases the traditions
by which we academic historians create history. Maybe these visionaries
dimly foresaw that the new medium would change what we mean when
we use the word ‘history.’ Maybe they foresaw a new kind of history
for an age when images would become more important to society than
words; a world in which we have a vision of the past, in which we see
the stories, live them, attach our emotions to the people and causes
long gone. Maybe in such a world the factual details are less important
than the emotion of immediacy, identification with our forebears – all
the powerful elements, the kinesthetic feeling (knowledge?) created by
colour, movement, and sound which are not part of the world we histo-
rians create on the page. We take our current form of written history for
granted. We forget that when we write the past we always are translat-
ing a bright and noisy world into the black-and-white of the silent page,
and that much is lost in this translation.
The possibility that film could be a way of doing history was first
raised within academia, as far as I can tell, by French historian Marc
Ferro. In the English translation of his 1977 collection of essays, Cinema
et histoire, the title of the last chapter poses the question: ‘Does a Filmic
Writing of History exist?’ For most of the essay, Ferro’s answer is ‘No’.
Filmmakers, he says, do no more than blindly incorporate either a
nationalist or a leftist ideology into their renditions of the past. This
makes their films no more than transcriptions ‘of a vision of history
which has been conceived by others’. Yet towards the end of the chapter
Ferro relents and admits that there are exceptions to this judgement.
Certain directors, he says, possess a historical vision strong enough to
transcend both broad ideological forces (such as nationalism, commu-
nism and democracy) and the traditions of their countries. This allows
them to create independent interpretations of history, to make ‘an origi-
nal contribution to the understanding of past phenomena and their
relation to the present’.5 The directors he names are Andrei Tarkovsky,
Russia; Ousmane Sembene, Senegal; Hans Jurgen Syberberg, Germany;
Luchino Visconti, Italy; and an unspecified group of Polish filmmakers
(which must surely include Andrjez Wajda). All of them, I might add,
are powerful filmmakers whose works show them haunted by history,
though they are not necessarily realistic directors who attempt to stick to
the ‘facts’ as we know them. Syberberg’s most famous work, Hitler – A Film
from Germany (1977), a kind of long visual essay, is highly artificial in its
presentation, taking place on what is obviously a sound stage and using,
among other devices, puppets for some historical figures; Sembene, in
Ceddo (1977), compresses decades of the struggle between native reli-
gions, Christianity and Islam in West Africa into one invented village.
So Ferro is not talking about the accuracy of detail but, as he says, about
‘a vision of history’.
In 1980, another French scholar, Pierre Sorlin, published The Film in
History, a book devoted to the issue of how the dramatic feature ‘restages
the past’. Even more than Ferro, Sorlin expresses suspicions about the
possibility of film doing history. In detailed analyses of several classic
movies dealing with the French and Russian Revolutions, the American
Civil War and the Italian Risorgimento (such works as La Marseillaise of
Jean Renoir, 1938; Birth of a Nation by Griffith, 1915; and The Leopard by
Visconti, 1963), he argues that all of them are not really historical but,
essentially, ‘fictional’. Even those based on historical evidence ‘recon-
struct in a purely imaginary way the greater part of what they show’.6
(And just to remind you, Visconti is on Ferro’s list as a director with a
strong historical vision.)
In dealing with Eisenstein’s October, that famed depiction of the
Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, Sorlin shows a certain ambivalence,
an emotion I want to highlight because it is a very common one felt
by historians when confronted with history on the screen. Initially
Sorlin dismisses October as no more than a piece of ‘propaganda’ for
the Soviet regime. Then towards the end of his analysis, he comes
around to explaining that in fact the film’s interpretation of the Russian
Revolution is not an expression of party-line Bolshevik ideology, but an
independent vision of the events of 1917. And though he never moves
to call the film a work of history, his attitude seems to tilt slightly
towards Ferro. For if October is not a work of propaganda, might it be
history?
Sorlin, in an argument too often ignored by people who write about
the history film (here I mean historians and journalists and others who
comment on such works), suggests that precisely like written works of
history, an historical film must be judged not against our current knowl-
edge or interpretations but with regard to historical discourse/under-
standing at the time it was made. This means that when, say, we are
condemning the vicious racism of Birth of a Nation (1917), we must keep
in mind that the film was neither a bizarre personal nor a purely com-
mercial interpretation of the American Civil War and Reconstruction,
but in fact a decent reflection of the best academic history of its own
time, the early 20th century.
In a collection of essays entitled Feature Films as History (1981) that
emerged from a conference held in 1977 at the University of Bielefeld
in Germany, D. J. Wenden of Oxford considered the question of how
Battleship Potemkin works to illuminate an historical event. After com-
paring the film’s account of the ship’s mutiny with written works on
the same topic, and showing, among other things, that there was no
slaughter committed on the steps of Odessa (though there was a slaugh-
ter elsewhere in that city), Wenden suggests that rather than creating
a literal reality, Eisenstein makes ‘brilliant use of the ship’s revolt as
a symbol for the whole revolutionary effort of the Russian people in
1905’.7 This is the first instance I know of in which an historian makes

a move towards suggesting that the nature of the medium and its practices
of necessity create a kind of history, one we might call symbolic history.
***
The first major published discussion of the history film among histo-
rians in the United States came in the December 1988 issue of that
most traditional of journals, The American Historical Review. In a forum
devoted to film, five historians wrote pieces supporting or critiquing
the idea of history on film.8 My own essay, ‘History in Images/History
in Words’, was the lead essay, the one to which others responded. A
major highlight of the forum came in the article by Hayden White,
who took the opportunity to coin a useful term, ‘historiophoty’, which
he defined as ‘the representation of history and our thought about it in
visual images and filmic discourse.’9 If the term has only been used spar-
ingly in the last quarter century, this may say more about historian’s
relationship, or lack of it, to the visual media than about its usefulness.
(I have recently been informed by a student from Beijing that courses
on historiophoty are taught at their university). What White failed to
take up is this question: how does historiophoty sit in relation to tra-
ditional historical discourse? Can it be seen as part of it, a commentary
upon it or a wholly separate realm of history?
In the last quarter century, the study of history and film has flourished
around the world. Essays and reviews have been published in a variety
of historical and film journals, with occasional special issues devoted to
the topic; conferences have been held in at least ten countries, including
the US, UK, France, Germany, Spain, Finland, Morocco, South Africa,
Argentina, Brazil and Australia; single author books and anthologies
number to date more than 100, and these have been published in many
languages, including English, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese,
German, Czech, Polish, Korean and Hebrew. Scholars from disciplines
other than history and film studies now focus on the topic. These
include literature, political science, cultural studies, memory studies,
medieval studies, classics and law (and no doubt others I have missed).
The approaches taken vary, as do the kinds of subject matter. You can
find studies of individual films, of genres (i.e. war film, biopic, epic, topi-
cal and meta-historical), or of groups of films from a single country or
on a single subject (e.g. Second World War, the Holocaust, Revolution,
the Ancient World, Latin America, Joan of Arc, the Vietnam War, etc.).
From my point of view, all these studies lie along a broad spectrum.
At one end are those scholars who are interested in whether there can
be what Ferro calls ‘a cinematic writing of history’; at the other, those for
whom the writing of the past is less of an issue than what history films say
about the development of a genre; or how they reflect and comment upon
the times in which they were produced; or how they embody national or
cultural myths, beliefs and ideologies; or inflect a particular field of study.
The different approaches to the historical film are no doubt rooted in the
ongoing discourses of the different fields. At one end of the spectrum you
find narrative historians (my own background) who are likely to ask rather
traditional and even simplistic questions about the past: what happened,
why, where, how, to whom and, finally, what did it mean? At the other end
of the spectrum (including, I think, much of what is done in Film Studies),
the history film is taken as a more self-contained and less referential object.
Here the data of the past counts for little, and what becomes important are
the themes embodied in the characters, stories and genres, as well as those
embedded in the cinematography, production design, editing, colour,
music and acting. This means we can have works (such as those in a recent
volume I edited along with Constantin Parvulescu, a professor of Film
Studies at the University of Timosoara, A Blackwell Companion to Historical
Film) devoted to subjects such as the History of Petroleum, or Slavery, or
The Legacies of Colonialism, or Revolution, or based on important events
or moments in the history of a particular nation, which make little or no
reference at all to the scholarship of historians.10
***
Even the best writing by film scholars seems less interested in the truths
of past people and movements than in their meaning in the contempo-
rary world. Let me give one example by Robert Burgoyne, among the best
of the Film Studies scholars interested in the history film. His chapter
on Saving Private Ryan (1998) in the book, The Hollywood Historical Film,
never bothers to consider to what extent the film truthfully engages the
issues, events and results of the Allied invasion of Normandy. Burgoyne
is less concerned with the details of the past than with what the work
conveys about America’s changing relationship to its own history. He
reads Private Ryan as part of a larger cultural project which he calls the
‘reillusioning of America’ after the disillusionment of the Vietnam era.
He sees the film as ‘a call to corrective action, a call to the community
to return to its foundational principles’. Ultimately Saving Private Ryan
offers audiences in the US a ‘“way home” to mythic America, reaffirm-
ing American national identity after the crisis of Vietnam’.11
The chapter by Burgoyne represents a general scholarly tendency
to see history films as, essentially, commentaries on or reflections of
political, social and intellectual issues of the time in which they were
produced. They can, of course, be viewed that way. Like any artefact or
cultural product – a novel, painting, building or piece of technology – a
film of necessity reflects the questions and concerns of its own era. But
so, I should add, do the history books we write, as the changing histo-
riography on any topic such as the French Revolution, or the American
Civil War, or the causes for the rise of capitalism, will clearly demon-
strate. But with regard to the history film, the question remains: is that
all they are about? Or, like our written works, are they too about making
meaning of the past?
Rare is the historian who is willing to accept the medium as a legiti-
mate way of historying. Perhaps the one closest to doing so – other
than yours truly – is Natalie Zemon Davis, a superb scholar of early
modern Europe, who served as consultant on The Return of Martin Guerre
(1982) and then wrote a fine micro-history by the same name. Her later
book, Slaves on Screen, a detailed study of five films about slavery from
the time of Spartacus to the US in the 19th century, including Stanley
Kubrick’s Spartacus (1960) and Cuban director Gutierrez Alea’s The Last
Supper (1976), goes quite a way towards validating the history film in
its current form. Zemon Davis believes that such works engage with
historical discourse and add, through the powers of the medium, to
our understanding of the past, in this case the costs of slave systems for
both masters and slaves. Yet she also betrays an uneasiness about films,
in her insistence that they adhere to the traditional standards of writ-
ten history.12 But, I am tempted to ask, why this insistence? We already
have books, and a lengthy tradition of evaluating their evidence, argu-
ments and interpretations. What we don’t yet have is a very good sense
of the history film; what we don’t know is where the past rendered in
the visual media – with its movement, sound and colour – is located
with regard to traditional history.
‘Historical films should let the past be the past,’ Zemon Davis says on
the last page of the book. But this is certainly one thing we who write
works of history never do. It is precisely our task not to leave the past
alone but, by turning it into history, to hold it up for use (moral, political,
contemplative) in the present. To Zemon Davis I am tempted to respond:
let historical films be films. Which is to say that, rather than assuming
that the world on film should somehow adhere to the standards of writ-
ten history, why not see if it has created its own standards over the last
century, techniques for turning the past into history which are appropri-
ate to possibilities and practices of the medium, including those of drama,
which is the standard way in which film tells its stories, past or present.
To return to Ferro, let me ask: can we accept his definition of history

as ‘an original contribution to the understanding of past phenomena
and their relation to the present’? To me it seems a perfectly good way
of defining history. If we accept it, the problem becomes one of deter-
mining exactly what elements of film can make for ‘an original contri-
bution’. Changing the medium in which we are historying necessarily
takes us back to one very basic question: what exactly do we want from
the past? Data that is verifiable? For that we could have lists, or return
to the practice of writing chronicles. Are we looking for role models
or, like the Greeks and Romans, a record of events which allows us to
contemplate human morality? Or do we want – as history has devel-
oped in the West in the last few centuries – a story that aims to show the
development over time of events, movements, moments and people in
the past, along with reflections on what those actions (should and do)
mean to us today? If this is our goal, then it is important to remember
what we have learned from the theorists such as Hayden White and
Frank Ankersmit, that the raw data from the past only turns into fact
at the moment it is encoded into a narrative; and that creating a narra-
tive of necessity involves us in realms of cause and effect, literary form,
and arguments and value systems which do not arise from the data but
precede it and help to create its meaning.
What do we want from history? In his book Faces of History: Historical
Inquiry from Herodotus to Herder, a survey of Western historical theory
and practice, Donald R. Kelley raises the question by asking: what is the
good of studying the past? He then provides the range of answers which
have been given over the last two-and-a-half millennia in the West:
1. History preserves and celebrates the memory of notable events and

persons.
2. History is didactic, providing moral or political lessons, usually on
the grounds that human nature, despite different customs, is at
bottom the same.
3. History is a form of self-knowledge, or the search for self-knowledge.
4. History is a form of wisdom, a way of extending human horizons
backward and forward in time, and beyond local experience and
concerns.13
The history film can certainly provide all of these elements. If this were
not an essay but a lecture, I would, to support this assertion, have been
showing you and explicating clips from various films I have analyzed in
other essays, films such as Glory (1989), Frida (2003), Born on the Fourth
of July (1989), or October. Here on the page we will have to make do

with some explication of a film I know quite intimately, the 1982 epic/
biopic, Reds (1982), which was in part based upon the research I did for
my book, Romantic Revolutionary: A Biography of John Reed (1975), and on
which I served as historical consultant. That film preserves the memory
of John Reed, known in his own day as an important journalist,
activist, and author of the famed eye-witness account of the Bolshevik
Revolution, Ten Days That Shook the World (1919), along with that of
his wife, the writer Louise Bryant, and the creative bohemian-radical
subculture of Greenwich Village in the second decade of the 20th cen-
tury to which they belonged. It provides lessons into the pleasures and
consequences of breaking Victorian norms and in the costs of radical
activism in the face of governmental repression (Reed is arrested more
than once). It helps us understand our own attitudes towards social,
political and aesthetic change in a dynamic society; and it extends our
horizons by letting us glimpse and vicariously participate, not only in
that bohemia, but in the major historic upheaval we know of as the
Russian Revolution.14
Reds was a big budget ($40 million, the most expensive production
of its time), commercial film, produced in a milieu in which economic
reward is usually seen as the only value system. It is certainly not typi-
cal, but it is hardly the only film out of Hollywood to speak seriously
about the past. Among more recent examples, one can name the last
two winners of the Academy Award for best picture, Argo and 12 Years
a Slave, along with the winner of several other awards, Lincoln (Steven
Spielberg, 2012). One is more likely, however, to find serious history
films made as independent works or produced outside the US, in
Europe, South American, Africa, Asia or Australia, in countries where
the burdens of the past lie heavier on the culture than they do in the
US. But wherever they are made, the question for the historian is how
do they work? How do they create a historical world? How can we think
about that world?
In many ways, directors of history films are not so different from his-
torians. The filmmaker becomes interested for some reason in a problem
or topic or individual or group which has meaning at a personal, psycho-
logical or even financial level. She or he then engages in research, prob-
ably not in paper archives (though in preparing Reds, Warren Beatty did
spend some time looking at the Reed papers at Harvard and, besides, he
had access to my research files). Finally the filmmaker takes traces of
the past and utilizes them to create a story which, much as in written
works of history, has an artificial (or arbitrary) beginning and ending,
and a moral lesson that is derived not from those traces but from the
historian’s own beliefs, desires, insights, values and intentions.
The differences between words on the page and images and sounds
on a screen alone ensure that there will be vast differences between the
historical worlds created by the academic historian and the filmmaker.
Unlike so many of us trained in academia, the filmmaker does not go
through some standardized programme in how to do research, analyze
documents and present the past. Yet for all our training, I would argue
that we historians learn how to write history mostly by reading the
work of other historians. My own experience in graduate school, admit-
tedly a half century ago, did not include a single class, or indeed a single
hour, devoted to the question of how actually to write a work of history.
It was assumed we knew by reading the work of others. In a similar way,
filmmakers learn how to make a history film by watching the films
of their predecessors and contemporaries in order to understand the
possibilities and practice of the history film as it has developed over
the decades.
Clearly the kind and extent of the research filmmakers do is rather
different from that undertaken by professional historians. It is likely
that directors have assistants to do research for them (a practice that is
not unknown to some famous historians, with their teams of research-
ers – e.g. Doris Kearns Goodwin, who in one notorious case would later
blame her researchers for the mistakes she had made). The research may
not be as extensive or rigorous as that done by academics, and certainly
a great deal of it is about the look of the past, about costume, architec-
ture, artefacts: those details which the critic Roland Barthes dismissed
as ‘reality effects’.15 For Barthes, the visual surfaces of the past – the
settings, landscapes, sounds, costumes – were mere notations and not
part of the meaning of history. But in the history film they achieve the
level of becoming facts, an integral part of the world of the past and
thus are important elements of meaning in this realm of visual his-
tory. These ‘reality effects’ often tell us a great deal about the people,
processes, activities and lives of times gone by.
There are, of course, major differences between history in words and
history in images. Because the history film is a dramatic form with all
the demands of that tradition, because it is limited in time, because by
creating the past a director must tell us more about individual scenes in
the past than any historian could be expected to know, the history film,
even the most serious, contains (as Sorlin wrote more than 30 years
ago), a great deal of invention. Elsewhere I have argued that invention
itself, invention that is apposite, invention that carries out the essence
of the moment/time/people/events, is not a weakness but the strength

of the history film. The invention of dialogue, characters and scenes
helps to create the dramatic structure without which the history film
could not communicate. History, after all, is not just a recitation of the
facts of the past, but a story full of whatever meaning we impose upon
the traces of the past. Facts are important as a beginning, but processes
I label condensation, alteration, combination and metaphor are what
allow the director to present the past into two-hour (or slightly longer)
dramatic presentations. To me invention, as long as it is apposite, does
not falsify the history on film, it is what makes it possible.
The ultimate test of a work of history is, after all, not the truth of indi-
vidual verifiable facts, but how the work engages the larger discourse,
the questions, answers, interpretations, and data which constitute that
discourse on any particular historical topic. The dramatic film will never
be a good medium for getting across lots of accurate data; its role, rather,
is to show us a past which is emotional, to interest us in the questions
surrounding the subject at hand and to interpret that subject by means
of a story with a beginning, middle and end, usually but not always, as
Jean-Luc Godard once said, in that order.
This is how a film like Glory (Edward Zwick, 1989) works as history.
It tells the story of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, one of the earliest
all-black military units of the Union Army in the Civil War. Despite the
fact that regimental histories exist, listing all the names of those who
fought in the 54th (including two sons of Frederick Douglass, the most
famous free black spokesman of his time), the four main soldiers in the
film are invented; indeed each is a stereotype (the angry activist, the
country boy, the wise elder and the free northern black), or a metaphor
for a position black Americans could take (then and now) towards the
conflict. And many of the telling incidents in the film were also created
by the screenwriter and director. Yet the leading historian of the Civil
War, James McPherson of Princeton, has endorsed Glory as an excellent
work of history for, though some details may be invented or wrong, the
portrait it gives of the struggles of African American soldiers has for him
the solid ring of truth.16
I would say the same thing about the portrait of Jack Reed in Reds.
Yes, the film is rather different in its interpretation of Reed than what
you will get from reading my biography. As one might expect, director
Beatty places much more emphasis on the importance of Reed’s
relationship to Louise, both the affairs they have with other people and
on their domestic life, than I do (though the incidents mentioned are
pretty much the same). Yet I would argue now, as I did not argue 30
years ago, that Reds is still a recognizable and valid interpretation of the
man and his times. I may not agree with the interpretation, but this has
nothing to do with any alterations to – or inventions about – the past
contained in the film. It arises, rather, because of differences between
the mindsets, beliefs and values of the two biographers (Beatty and
myself), as well as in the nature of the media itself, and from the reasons
for – and aims of – the project undertaken by the historian.17
What does the historian filmmaker do to history? He or she creates
what White calls historiophoty. Filmmakers animate the past, and let
us glimpse moments of our history. If one says that this is not the real
past because it is so different from the history we write on the page, let
us remember that we have no access to a real past, but only our rendi-
tions or depictions of it. Certainly we know that the past was a not a
soundless and colourless world on paper, but more like the one we see
on the screen, a world filled with colour, sound, dialogue and action, all
of which are missing from the pages of our books. The filmmaker histo-
rian gives us a past full of colour, life, drama. To do so, she or he works
with rules that do not apply to historiography but to historiophoty.
The filmmaker historian does not simply make the world of the past
accessible only to the larger public, but to historians as well, sometimes
within but particularly outside our own fields. After years of research-
ing and writing Reed’s biography, I can never think of his adventures
without to some extent seeing him in terms of some images created by
Reds’ director Beatty.
The history film also provides us with a visceral experience of the
past, creating for us what scholar Alison Landsberg has termed ‘pros-
thetic memories’.18 These are memories (including bodily memories) of
events we have not lived through but only experienced on screen. Such
images, sounds and feelings, such memories of the past encountered on
screen become part of our own memory bank as well (this is an idea you
can test on yourself). Through film we come close to the feeling of hav-
ing lived in another time and place. The medium allows us to relate to
people and events of the past, to history, on a more intimate level than
do our books and, if Landsberg is correct, perhaps, on a more lasting
level as well. As other scholars work in this field, I hope we will come to
understand better what the realm of historiophoty does to our under-
standing of the past. At the very least, the history film can be a powerful
commentary. If you have seen Glory, you have been introduced to the
dilemmas and contradictions of being a black soldier in the Union
Army during the American Civil War, of being subject to racism in a war
meant to end racism. In Reds you are introduced to a radical bohemian
subculture in early 20th-century America, with a critique of capitalism

and the war machine that is often downplayed or hidden in standard
textbooks. These two films are among a host of works which provide an
experience of the past unavailable in the works of academic historians
who write words on page. And since we don’t make films, it would seem
to be part of our job to understand the structures, conventions, mean-
ing and perhaps the impact of these visual texts. Let me conclude by
calling on those of you who read these words and have an interest in
this topic to help in the process of investigating the history film in an
effort to understand the knowledge of the past provided by the visual
media and thus fill out and complete our notion of historiophoty.
Notes
1. See Robert A. Rosenstone, History on Film/Film on History (Harlow: Pearson,
2012), pp. 57–78; Rosenstone, ‘Film and the Beginning of Postmodern History’,
in Rosenstone (ed.), Visions of the Past (Cambridge, MA, 1995), pp. 198–225.
2. Alun Munslow, The Future of History (New York and London: Routledge,
2010), pp. 8–9.
3. Cited in Nicolas Tredell, Cinemas of the Mind: A Critical History of Film Theory
(Cambridge: Icon, 2002), p. 15.
4. Quoted in Melvyn Stokes, D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (New York and
Oxford, 2007), p. 8; Robert Burgoyne, The Hollywood Historical Film (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2008), p. 8.
5. Marc Ferro, Cinema and History (translated by Naomi Green) (Detroit: Wayne
State University Press, 1968), pp. 158–164.
6. Pierre Sorlin, The Film in History: Restaging the Past (Totowa, NJ: Barnes &
Noble, 1980), p. 21.
7. D. J. Wenden, ‘Battleship Potemkin – Film and Reality’, in K. R. M. Short
(ed.), Feature Film as History (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1981).
8. Robert A Rosenstone, ‘History in Images, History in Words: Reflections on
the Possibility of Really Putting History onto Film’, American Historical Review
93 (1988), pp. 1173–1192.
9. Hayden White, ‘Historiography and Historiophoty’, American Historical
Review 93 (1988), p. 1193.
10. See Robert A Rosenstone and Constantin Parvulescu (eds), A Blackwell
Companion to Historical Film (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012).
11. Burgoyne, The Hollywood Historical Film, pp. 50–73.
12. Natalie Zemon Davis, Slaves on Screen: Film and Historical Vision (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard, 2000).
13. Donald R Kelley, Faces of History: Historical Inquiry from Herodotus to Herder
(New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 12.
14. See Rosenstone, History on Film/Film on History, especially chapters 2, 3, 6, 7
and 8.
15. See Roland Barthes, ‘The Reality Effect,’ translated from the French and
reprinted in The Rustle of Language (translated by Richard Howard) (New York:
Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1986), pp. 141–148.
16. See James M. McPherson, ‘Glory’, in Mark C. Carnes (ed.), Past Imperfect:
History According to the Movies (New York: Henry Holt, 1995), pp. 128–31.
17. See the contrasting views in Rosenstone, ‘Reds as History,’ in Visions of
the Past, pp. 83–106 and in Rosenstone, History on Film/Film on History,
pp. 101–124.
18. See Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American
Remembrance in an Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia University Press,
2004).
Index
About Adam, 152 Andrew, Dudley, 27

Abrahamson, Lenny, 152 Annales School, 19–20
achronology, 166 Annaud, Jean-Jacques, 35
Adam and Paul, 152, 161 Anne, Queen, 137
advertisements, 12, 14, 125, 127. An Páiste Beo Bocht (Child of the Dead
see also commercials End), 151, 163–6
affect, 34, 52, 126, 128, 129, anti-semitism, 96
152, 178 apartheid: and South African TRC,
politics and, in Portuguese cultural 102–15
memories, 65–79 Arcel, Nikolaj, 34, 38
affective economy, 66, 79 archival cultural memory, 145
affective encounter, 66, 70, 72, 74–9 archival evidence, 14, 26, 27, 28,
affective identification, 52 118, 120, 126, 146, 165–6
affective truth, 153 changing conception of, 12
affective turn, 65–8 film archives, 19
Affleck, Ben, 184 Northern Ireland ‘Troubles,’
Africa, 68, 186. see also 176–80
South African TRC TRC archive of apartheid history,
Aguilar, Paloma, 49–50, 54 102, 109, 113, 115
Ahern, Bertie, 140 archival image, 66–79, 165
Ahmed, Sara, 66–7, 70, 77, 79 archival silencing, 68
Aiken, Joan, 144 Arendt, Hannah, 87
Akelarre (Witches’ Sabbath), 37, 38 Argo, 184, 192
Akin, Fatih, 43 Armendáriz, Montxo, 34
Aldgate, Anthony, 23–4, 25, 26 Aróstegui, Julio, 49, 50, 54
Alea, Gutierrez, 190 Arroniz, Joan, 52, 57–8, 59, 60
Allende, Salvador, 78, 123, 124 art-house cinema, 8, 39, 143
All Good Children, 152 Arts and Humanities Research
Almanya – Willkommen in Council (AHRC), 11, 32
Deutschland (Almanya – Welcome Assassination of the Duc of Guise, 184
to Germany), 43–4 Assmann, Aleida, 145
Amaren ideia (Mum’s Idea), 43 Audiard, Jean-Jacques, 39–40, 88, 89
Ambrosio, Arturo, 184 audience reception, 14
America in the Movies (M. Wood), 22 audience studies, 15, 25
American Civil War, 172, 187, 190, Auschwitz, 118
194, 195 Australia, 145, 188, 192
American Historical Review, 5, 188 Autonomous Basque Community,
amnesia, 57, 77, 136, 142, 146 35, 36
amnesty, 48, 101, 115 Avala Film, 90
and forgiveness, 113–15 avant-garde cinema, 139, 156
South African TRC, 102–5, 108, AVNOJ, 91
111, 113 Axis forces, 85, 90, 92. see also
Anderson, Benedict, 97–8 Nazism
198
Index 199
Baier, Jo, 35 Bolshevik Revolution (1917),

Ballesteros, Isolina, 52 187, 192
Baltic States, 94 Bondarchuk, Sergei, 92
Bangert, Axel, 3 Bondebjerg, Ib, 44–5
Bank of England, 137 Bordeaux Jews, deportation of, 88
Barbie, Klaus, 88, 89 Bornay, Natalia Sanjuán, 10, 13
Barrenetxea, Igor, 56 Born on the Fourth of July, 191–2
Barros D’Sa, Lisa, 173 Bosnia-Herzegovina, 91, 92
Barthes, Roland, 185, 193 Boswell, Matthew, 42
Basque heritage films, 35–8, 41, Boyne, battle of (1690), 140, 141
43, 45 Breakfast on Pluto, 151
Basque Language Television, 41 Breathless, 60
Battle of Neretva, 92 Brennan, Teresa, 77
Battle of Sujetska (The Fifth British army, 161, 162, 176, 177
Offensive), 90 British Empire, 142, 147
Battleship Potemkin, 184, 185, 187–8 British Film Institute (BFI), 143
Bazin, Andre, 169 British films
BBC, 90, 135, 142 The Draughtsman’s Contract, 136–41
Beatty, Warren, 192, 194, 195 ‘free cinema,’ 24
Before the Fall (Napola), 34 heritage films, 32–3, 34, 36, 37, 38,
Beijing, 188 41, 42, 45
Belarus, 84, 85, 94–7 new wave, 143
Belfast, 172, 175, 176 British identity, 24, 143
Belgrade, 90, 93 British Pathé, 12
Bell, Desmond, 11, 151, 164, 166, 184 British television, 41, 142, 143
Benavente, Fran, 59 Broz, Budisavljevic, Jovanka, 93
Benjamin, Walter, 73, 74, 75, 109 Broz, Josip. see Tito
Bennett, Jill, 67, 72 Bruce, John, 173
Berensmeyer, Ingo, 138 Bruzzi, Stella, 70
Berghahn, Daniela, 43–4 Bryant, Louise, 192
Bermeo, Nancy Gino, 68–9 Brynner, Yul, 92
Bernadette Devlin, 173–4, 180 Buchanan, Ian, 145, 146
Bernadette: Notes on a Political Journey, Buchenwald, 111, 112
173–4, 180 Bulajic, Veljko, 91, 92
B-Film – Birmingham Centre for Film Burgoyne, Robert, 9, 153, 189–90
Studies, 32 Burke, Edmund, 134
Bickford-Smith, Vivian, 4 Burton, Richard, 90, 92
Bielski, Tuvia, 96 Butcher Boy, the, 156
Biko, Steve, 103 Butler, Judith, 122, 123
Birth of a Nation, 83, 187
Black Book (Zwartboek), 40 Cabinet of Caligari, The, 20
Black, Cathal, 152, 156 Call the Midwife, 41
blackouts, 162, 163 Calmettes, André, 184
Blackwell Companion to Historical Film Cameron, Allan, 166
(R. Rosenstone and Camino, Mercedes, 10
C. Parvulescu, Eds.), 189 Cannadine, David, 142
Blair, Les, 151 Cantell, Saara, 34
Bloody Sunday, 151, 161–3 Carion, Christian, 34
Blum, Leon, 87–8 Carlsten, Jennie M., 4, 11, 13
200 Index
Carnation Revolution (1974). Spain, 48–63

see under Portugal collective mentality, 20–1
Carry on ... up the Khyber, 2 Collins, Tom, 151, 157
Catching the Dream (Tarok), 40 Come and See, 95
Ceddo, 8, 186 Comintern, 91–2
‘Celtic Tiger,’ 152 commemoration, 54, 135, 139,
Center for Studies of Contemporary 143, 145
Reality (CERC), 128 commercials, 127, 169, 170
Centre for World Cinema (University communist countries, 84, 91, 92
of Leeds), 32 Communist Information Bureau
Channel Four, 142, 143 (Cominform), 91
Chaplin, Charlie, 165 Communist Party of Portugal, 69
Chapman, James, 8, 10 Communist Party of Yugoslavia, 91, 92
Chariots of Fire, 32–3, 143 communist resisters, 86, 87
Chen, Michelle, 171 Connemara, 159–60
Chetniks, 90, 93 Conquest of Albania, The (La Conquista
Chetniks! The Fighting Guerrillas, 90 de Albania), 36–7
Child of the Dead End (An Páiste Beo Conservative party, 142
Bocht), 151, 163–6 Cooke, Paul, 3
Chile, 78 Cook, Pam, 153
Pinochet dictatorship: Larraín’s Cooper, Ivan, 162
trilogy, 118–30 Cosgrove, Richard A., 134
Chirac, Jacques, 89 Costa, José Filipe: Linha Vermelha, 68,
Christie, Ian, 13 69–72, 73, 78
Cinema and History (A. Aldgate), 25 countercultural movements, 171–2,
Cinéma et Histoire (M. Ferro), 23, 186 179
cinema impact (effet cinéma), 26 Cox, Alex, 8
Cinema Komunisto, 90, 93–4 Cré na Cille, 151
Cinema Paradiso, 44 Croatia, 91, 93
cinematic propaganda. see Croats, 89, 93, 94
propaganda films Crowley, John, 152
cinematic texts, in historical research, Cruz, Jacqueline, 56
18–28 cultural codes, 120
Citizen Kane, 183 cultural identity, 140, 143
Clark, Michael, 144, 145 cultural memory, 135–6, 145, 146, 147
Clermont-Ferrand (France), 87 Danish, 39–40
Coetzee, Dirk, 106, 107–8 Portuguese, 65–79
cognitive film studies, 154 cultural studies, 1, 24, 26, 27–8, 188
Cohen, Leonard, 174
Cold War, 86, 97 Dadaism, 102
collaboration: and resistance, 11, 39, Dalmatia, 93
84, 87–9, 90, 96–7 Danckerts, Hendrick, 147
collaborative processes: film-making Dancyger, Ken, 169
and film-viewing, 11–12 Danish Film Institute, 39
collective amnesia, 57, 77, 136, Danish heritage films, 38–41, 45
142, 146 Darke, Chris, 88
collective identity, 93 ‘dark heritage,’ 38, 42
collective memory, 1, 9, 10–11, 32, Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of
43, 45, 97, 119, 121, 156 Others), 32, 42–3
Index 201
Davis, John T., 173, 175 ellipsis, 151, 156, 161–3, 165
Defiance, 96 Elsaesser, Thomas, 32, 46
de Gaulle, Charles, 88 emigration, 151, 156–63, 164–7.
De Kock, Eugene, 106 see also migration
Deleuze, Giles, 173 emotion, 13, 65–6, 128
Delic, Stipe, 90, 92 ‘emotional reading,’ 151, 153, 154–67
Denmark, 39, 40. see also Danish Enemy at the Gates, 35
heritage films Enigma of Frank Ryan, The, 184
Derin, Seyhan, 43 En kongelig affaere (A Royal Affair), 34, 38
Derrida, Jacques, 113, 114, 115 Erll, Astrid, 79, 138
Der Untergang (Downfall), 41, 42 ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna), 37
De Sousa Dias, Susana, 72–7, 78, 79 Eternal Fire (Fuego eterno), 37, 38
Devlin, Bernadette, 171, 173–4 Eurimage, 45
diasporic memory, 43, 44 European Cinema: Face to Face with
Díaz, Tevo, 122 Hollywood (T. Elsaesser), 32
Dickinson, Kay, 170–1, 179 European heritage films, 10, 32–46
digital revolution, 171 European Union (EU), 44–5, 142
digitisation, 12 ‘Europuddings,’ 35, 45
directors. see filmmakers Euskal Telebista, 41
‘disappeared,’ the, 65, 79, 120, 123–4
Django Unchained, 3 Faces of History: Historical Inquiry from
documentaries, 21, 27, 43, 51, 57–62, Herodotus to Herder
87, 89, 153, 173, 174, 184 (D. R. Kelley), 191
camera as documentarian tool, 103, Fading Light, the, 152
105, 108, 109 Fantoni, Gianluca, 4
dictatorship and revolution in fascism, 68, 74, 85, 88, 90
Portugal, 67–79 resistance to, 10, 83, 86, 88, 90,
and fiction films, 52, 118, 119–21, 91–2
122, 165 Faurschou-Hviid, Bent, 39
postmemory, 43 Feagin, Susan, 155
Donaghy, Gerry, 162 Feature Films as History
Doolan, Lelia, 173–4 (D. J. Wenden), 187–8
Doriot, Jacques, 87 Felman, Shoshana, 163
Downfall (Der Untergang), 41, 42 Ferguson, Niall, 142
Downton Abbey, 41 Ferreira, Patricia, 51–3, 53–7
dramatic history films, 4, 41, 70, 153, Ferro, Marc, 2, 5, 18, 23, 25, 26–7,
161, 165–6, 183–96. see also his- 186, 187, 188–9, 191
torical films fiction films, 52, 57, 84, 96, 127, 128,
Draughtsman’s Contract, The, 8, 138, 166, 173
136–47 and documentaries. see under
Duchamp, Marcel, 72 documentaries
Duffy, Alicia, 152 historical films, 118, 152
Dunmore, Lawrence, 147 Fifth Offensive, The (Battle of Sujetska), 90
Dutch films, 40 Fifty Dead Men Walking, 151
film archives, 19. see also archival
Eastern Europe, 42, 94, 97 evidence
East Germany, 42–3 ‘Film Europe’ and ‘Film America’
Eichmann, Adolf, 87 (A. Higson and R. Maltby,
Eisenstein, Sergei, 184, 187 Eds.), 14
202 Index
filmic fact (fait filmique), 26 From Russia with Love, 2

Film in History, The (P. Sorlin), 186–7 From Sambo to Superspade
filmmakers, 9, 13 (D. J. Leab), 22
historians, 6, 11, 21–2, 26, 183–96. From the Pole to the Equator, 73
see also heritage films; Fuego eterno (Eternal Fire), 37, 38
historical films Furhammar, Leif, 25
filmmaking, 8, 13, 109
and film-viewing, 11–12, 15, 146 Galt, Rosalind, 33
Films and British National Identity: Gansel, Dennis, 34
From Dickens to Dad’s Army Gazeta Wyborcza, 96
( J. Richards), 24 George I, king, 137
film semiotics, 22–3 Gerlach, Nina, 141
film studies, 1–2, 11, 14, 15, 21, 25, German Democratic Republic (GDR),
26, 27, 33–4, 154, 188–9 42–3
First World War, 140 German films, 20, 34, 186
Five Minutes of Heaven, 151, 164 heritage films, 10, 35, 41–4, 45
Flammen & Citronen (Flame & Citron), Nazi cinematography, 21
39, 40 German television, 41
flashback, 151–2, 156–61, 165, 170 Germany. see German films; Nazism
Flores, Carlos, 122 Gernika bajo las bombas (Guernica
Foot, Michael R., 90 under the Bombs), 41
Ford, General, 162 Gianikian, Yervant, 73
forgetting, 10, 42, 48, 50, 53, 58, 62, Gibbons, Luke, 166
101, 115 Gibbs, Anna, 67
and forgiveness, 103, 113–14 Gill, Elizabeth, 152
injustice of, 75 Girl with a Pearl Earring, the, 34
and remembering. see Glorious Glistrup, Morgens, 40
Revolution (1688) Glorious Revolution (1688), 134–5
and South African TRC, 103, 111, Irish question, 140–1
113, 114, 115 remembering and forgetting,
forgiveness, 4, 54, 113–15 135–6, 141–7; The Draughtsman’s
and South African TRC, 102–3, 104, Contract, 136–41, 143–7
105, 111, 113 Glory, 191, 194, 195
Fortunati, Vita, 59, 48, 75, 79 Gluchowski, Piotr, 96
For You (Zuretzako), 43 Godard, Jean-Luc, 60, 194
foundational films, 83–98 Goebbels, Joseph, 171
France, 23, 40, 184 Goldfish Memory, 152
Jews, rounding up of, 87–8 Goldschmidt, John, 173, 174
resistance, memorialization of, 40, Gomel, Elana, 163
84, 85, 86–9 Good Vibrations, 173, 176–9, 180
Franco, General Francisco, 36, 48, 50, Goodwin, Doris Kearns, 193
51, 58, 62–3, 68 Gorbman, Claudia, 169–70
free cinema, 24 Goujon, Alexandra, 94
French Revolution, 135, 172, 187, 190 Gove, Michael, 142, 144, 145
Freud, Sigmund, 20 Gramsci, Antonio, 174
Frida, 191 Greece, 85
From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological Greenaway, Peter: The Draughtsman’s
History of the German Film Contract, 8, 136–47
(S. Kracauer), 20–1 Greene, Liz, 4, 13
Index 203
Greengrass, Paul, 151, 161, 162 regional and transnational

Griffith, D.W., 83, 185, 187 frameworks, 14
Grodal, Torben, 154–5 sources, 12
Guattari, Félix, 173 historical inclusivity, 12–13
Guernica under the Bombs (Gernika bajo historical research, 84, 192, 193
las bombas), 41 cinematic texts, use of, 18–28
historical stories, 12–13
H3, 151 historiography, and film, 7–9,
Halbwachs, Maurice, 97 134, 135
Handspring Puppet Company, ‘historiophoty,’ 5, 188, 195, 196
104, 105 ‘historying,’ 185, 190, 191
Hansen, Mark, 65–6, 74, 76 History Today, 141
Harlan, Thomas, 69–70, 71, 73, 79 history writing, 193
Hartman, Geoffrey, 67 Hitler, Adolf, 20, 42, 86, 87
Hearst, William Randolph, 183 Hitler: A Film from Germany, 8, 186
Helen, 152, 164 Hoare, Marko Attila, 93, 94
Hendy, David, 172 Hoffman, Michael, 138
Hennlich, Andrew, 4 Hogg, Quentin, 134–5
Henri 4, 35 Hollywood cinema, 13, 22, 119, 156,
heritage films, 3, 10, 32–4 163–4, 184, 192
‘dark heritage,’ 38, 42 Hollywood Historical Film, The
definition, 34–5, 38 (R. Burgoyne), 189
European, 10, 34–46 Holmes, David, 176
and heritage industry, 44–6 Holocaust, 84, 96, 111–12
television, importance of, 40–1 Holocaust studies, 79, 87
Herodotus of Halicarnassus, 19 Home and Garden magazine, 141
Hesling, William, 5 Hooleygan: Music, Mayhem, Good
Higson, Andrew, 14, 33–4, 143 Vibrations (T. Hooley and
Hilberg, Raul, 118 R. Sullivan), 180
Hiroshima, Mon Amour, 8 Hooley, Terri, 176, 180
Hirschbiegel, Oliver, 41, 151 Hopper, Tom, 32
Hirsch, Marianne, 73–4 House of Games, 113
Historian and Film (P. Smith), 21 How Harry Became a Tree, 152
historians Hudson, Hugh, 32–3
and historical films, 1–2, 3, 4–7, Hughes-Warrington, Marnie, 3, 6
8–9, 10, 11, 18–28, 183–96 Hughes, William, 21–2
historical documentaries. see Hunger, 151, 161
documentaries Huntingdon, Samuel, 68
historical films, 1–3, 25, 27, 32, 39, Hvidsten gruppen (This Life), 40
83–4, 183–6
and collective memory, 9–11. I Am Curious, Orange, 144, 145
see also heritage films I Am My Mother’s Daughter (Ich bin
definition, 2–3, 118 Tochter meiner Mutter), 43
‘emotional readings,’ 151, 153, Ich bin Tochter meiner Mutter (I Am My
154–6 Mother’s Daughter), 43
filmmaker historians, 183–96 identity, 9, 51, 52, 53, 56, 58, 59,
future of, 11–15 66, 76. see also national
and historiography, 7–9 identity
medium and form, 3–7 cultural, 140, 143
204 Index
Image as Artifact: The Historical Khatyn (Belarus), 95

Analysis of Film and Television ( J. King, Louis, 90
E. O’Connor), 24–5 Kings, 151, 156–61
immigration. see migration Kings of the Kilburn High Road, the
institutional abuse, 151–2 ( J. Murphy), 157
Intermission, 152, 164 King’s Speech, the, 32
invention, 7, 18, 170, 184, 193–4, 195 Kinoedelia (‘Film Week,’ Moscow),
Ireland 108–9
and Glorious Revolution (1688), kino-eye camera: and Ubu, 102–15
140–1, 142 Klimov, Elem, 95
historical films: ‘emotional reading’ Koepnick, Lutz, 33
of, 151–2, 156–67 Konstantinovic, Leka, 93
Irish Civil War, 152 Korea, 152
Irish Republican Army (IRA), 11 Kowalski, Marcin, 96
Iris in the Traffic, Ruby in the Rain, 173, Kozara, 91
175–6, 180 Kracauer, Siegfried, 20–1, 22
Isaksson, Folke, 25 Kramer, Robert, 78
Italian fascism, 85, 86, 90 Kubrick, Stanley, 190
Italy, 84, 85–6, 184, 186, 187 Kudinenko, Andrei, 96, 97
Ivory, James, 32–3, 34, 44 Kurosawa, Akira, 183
Izquierdo, Jesús, 49
Labanyi, Jo, 50, 56, 59
James II, king, 134, 137, 140 Lacombe Lucien, 87
Jameson, Fredric, 145 La Conquista de Albania (The Conquest
Jansch, Bert, 176 of Albania), 36–7, 38
Jardine, Lisa, 141 Ladegaard, Claus, 39, 40, 40–1
Jarman, Derek, 144 La Marseillaise, 187
Jarry, Alfred: Ubu plays, 102, 103, 106, Lamberti, Elena, 59
111, 112 Landsberg, Alison, 9, 153, 195
Jewish Pale of Settlement, 94 Landy, Marcia, 10, 13
Jews, 87, 88, 89, 94, 95–6. see also Lanzmann, Claudio, 87
Holocaust Larraín, Pablo: dictatorship trilogy,
Jindabyne, 145–6 118–30
Jocelyn-Holt, Alfredo, 124 Last Days of Pompeii, the, 184
Johannesburg (South Africa), 113 Last Supper, the, 190
Jordà, Joaquim, 57, 58 Last Year at Marienbad, 143
Jordan, Neil, 151, 156 Laval, Pierre, 87
Joyeux Noël (Merry Christmas), 34, 35 Lawlor, Joe, 152
Jubilee, 144 Lawrence, Ray, 145–6
Julià, Santos, 50, 60 Leab, Daniel J., 22, 23
Jung, Nike, 4, 11, 13 Le Bargy, Charles, 184
Leopard, the, 187
Karlovy Vary, 40 Leyburn, Glenn, 173
Katyn, 95 Libertine, the, 147
Kaufmann, Michael, 108 Lincoln, 192
Kavanagh, Ivan, 152 Linha Vermelha, 68, 69–72
Kelley, Donald R., 191 Link, Caroline, 43
Kentridge, William, 4, 101–15 Lives of Others, the (Das Leben der
Kerner, Erich, 95 Anderen), 32, 42–3
Index 205
Loach, Ken, 152 reconciling trauma and, 53–7

Loane, Terry, 156 transnational economy of, 11
Locke, John, 134, 137 traumatic, 57, 163, 178
Love and Rage, 156 travelling memories, 79
Lowenthal, David, 9 UK public memory: and ‘Glorious
Lucchi, Angela Ricci, 73 Revolution,’ 134–47
Lukashenko, Alexander, 94 memory crisis, 48
Lumière Company, 19 memory-making fiction, 138
memory studies, 65, 66, 79, 84
Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 134 Merry Christmas ( Joyeux Noël), 34, 35
McCann, Eamonn, 163 Metz, Christian, 22–3
McDonaldización, 127 Miami Showband, 172
McGarry, Fearghal, 11 Michelson, Annette, 109
MacGill, Patrick, 151, 163–6 Mickybo and Me, 156
McLoone, Martin, 172 migration, 41, 43–4, 45, 151, 166
McPherson, James, 194 Mihailovic, Draza, 90
McQueen, Steve, 3, 151, 184 Milice française (French Militia), 87
Madsen, Ole Christian, 39, 40 Mr Selfridge, 41
Magdalene Sisters, the, 151–2 Mitrovic, Zika, 91
Maggi, Luigi, 184 Mitterrand, Francois, 88, 89
Malle, Louis, 87 Mlangeni, Bheki, 106
Maltby, Richard, 14 Mocidade Portuguesa, 74
Mandela, Nelson, 103 Molloy, Christine, 152
Man with a Movie Camera, 105, Monarchy (Channel 4), 142
108, 109 Monk, Claire, 33
Marías, Luis, 41 montage, 4, 74, 109, 126, 155, 169–70
Marks, Laura, 76 and histories of the ‘Troubles,’ 169,
Martin-Jones, David, 166 172–80
Mary II, 134 Montenegro, 92
Massumi, Brian, 65–6 Moulin, Jean, 88–9
Matuszewski, Boleslaw, 19, 25 MTV, 169, 170, 180
Maurice, 34 Muldowney, Brendan, 164
Mayer, Robert, 138 Mullan, Peter, 151
MEDIA, 45 Mulvey, Laura, 56
Mein Vater, der Gastarbeiter (My Father, Mum’s Idea (Amaren ideia), 43
the Guestworker), 43 Munslow, Alun, 185
memory, 1, 14, 128, 153, 158. see Murphy, Jimmy, 157
also collective memory; cultural Murphy, Maeve, 151
memory; prosthetic memory music, 4, 34, 104, 153, 169–75, 171,
apartheid history and TRC. see 172, 173, 174
South African TRC Mussolini regime (Italy), 85–6
confrontational use of, 145 My Father, the Guestworker (Mein Vater,
diasporic, 43–4 der Gastarbeiter), 43
embattled memories, 118–19
and forgetting, 42 Nadar (Swimming), 51, 52, 57–61,
and history, 1, 4, 9–11, 32, 39–40, 61, 62
43, 45, 96, 97, 119; in Naliboki Forest (Belarus), 96
contemporary Spain, 48–63 Napola (Before the Fall), 34
political uses of, 85, 138 narrative techniques, 3–4
206 Index
national allegory, 145 Para que no me olvides (Something to

national identity, 10, 24, 32, 42, 53, Remember Me By), 51, 52, 53–7,
56, 74, 122, 124, 189 55, 58, 62
Basque, 35, 37 Partisan films, 89–94, 97
Natureza Morta, 72–5, 79 Parvulescu, Constantin, 189
Navarre, 36, 37 Paskaljevic, Goran, 152
Nazism, 20, 21, 91, 171 Passerini, Luisa, 58
extermination policy, 94, 95 pataphysics, 102
German films about, 41–3, 44, 45 Pavone, Claudio, 85
resistance and collaboration, 39–40, Paxman, Jeremy, 135
45, 84–98 Paz, Abel, 59–60
Neretva, battle of, 92 PECMA flow model, 155
Nero, Franco, 92 Pena de Muerte, 122
newsreels, 21, 22, 25, 27, 104, Perpignani, Roberto, 70, 71
109, 159 Petain, Marshal, 87, 88
new technologies, 12 PIDE (Polícia Internacional e de
Nichols, Bill, 70 Defesa do Estado), 68, 73, 74,
Night and Fog, 86–87 76, 77
Nirgendwo in Afrika (Nowhere Pilcher, Rosamund, 41
in Africa), 43 Pincus, Steve, 135
Nixon, 5 Pinochet, Augusto, 78–9, 118, 125
NO, 4, 118–19, 125, 125–8 Pino-Ojeda, Walescka, 128
Northern Ireland ‘Troubles,’ 140, 151, Pinto, António Costa, 68
161, 171, 172–4 place, specificity of, 14
Hunger Strikes (1981), 151, 176 Plantinga, Carl, 154
nostalgia, 4, 13, 33, 34, 62, 68, 93, Poland, 94, 96, 186
94, 127, 128, 143, 152, 153, 159, Polish partisans, 96
160, 180 Porter, Edwin S., 184
Nowhere in Africa (Nirgendwo Portillo, Michael, 142
in Afrika), 43 Portugal
Carnation Revolution (1974),
Obaba, 34 68–72, 74, 78–9
O’Connor, John E., 5, 24–5 cultural memories, politics and
October, 184, 187, 192 affect in, 65–79
Okkupatsiia Mysteries, 96–7 postmemory documentaries, 43
Olea, Pedro, 37, 38 Post Mortem, 118, 123–5, 124, 129
Olega, Maider, 43 Processo Revolucionário Em Curso
Omagh, 151 (PREC), 68
Omar, 156 propaganda films, 19, 25, 26, 187
On Forgiveness (Derrida), 114 Prospero’s Books, 145
Operation Barbarossa, 91, 94 prosthetic memory, 13, 153, 156,
Operation Spring Breeze (Opération Vent 166, 195
printanier), 87–8 Prout, Ryan, 57
Ophuls, Marcel, 87, 89 punk music
Orange Order, 140, 145 and histories of the Troubles,
Oxford Dictionary of Law, 113 171–80
Paisley, Ian, 140 Quicksilver (N. Stephenson), 144

Papon, Maurice, 88, 89 Quilez, Laia, 52
Index 207
Quinn, Robert, 151 Russian Revolution, 187, 192

Ryan, Frank, 11
Rabinowitz, Paula, 13 Rzecpospolita, 96
racism, 187, 195
Radio Free Derry, 173 Salazar-Caetano regime (Portugal), 68,
Ramsay, Debra, 153 70, 72–3, 74, 75–7
Rashomon, 183 Samdereli, Yasemin, 43
realistic films, 3, 13 Sánchez, Pablo, 49
Rebolledo, José Ángel, 37 Sanders, Mark, 103
reconciliation, 4, 50, 51, 61, 68, 85, Savage, 164
119. see also South African TRC Saving Private Ryan, 189
trauma and memory, 53–7 Scenes from the Class Struggle in
Red Army, 90 Portugal, 78–9
Reds, 192, 194–5, 195–6 Schmith, Jörgen Haagen, 39
Reed, John ( Jack), 192, 194–5 Schneider, Robert A., 5
re-enactment, 9, 126, 166 Scholl, Sophie, 41, 42
Reeves, Nicholas, 27 Scotland, 140, 142, 164, 166
reinvention, 144, 145, 147 Second World War, 38, 41, 45, 84–5,
Reith lectures (BBC), 142 189. see also Nazism
Renoir, Jean, 187 collaboration and resistance, 39–41,
reparation, 51, 56, 60, 112 83–98
repetition, 22, 118, 126, 151, 156, sectarianism, 144, 172, 177
163–6 Self-Made Hero, A (Un héros très discret),
Republic of Uzice, the (Uzicke 39–40, 88
republika), 91 Sembène, Ousmane, 8, 186
resistance films, 10, 38–41, 42, 45, semiology, 22–3
83–98, 120 Senegal, 186
Resnais, Alain, 8, 86–7, 143 Serbia, 91
restitution, 50, 60 Serbs, 89, 93, 94
Restoration, 138, 147 Sex, Drugs and Taxation (Spies &
Return of Martin Guerre, Glistrup), 40
The (N. Zemon Davis), 6–7, 190 Sexing the Cherry (J. Winterston), 147
Revenge, The (Zemstal), 34 Shadow Procession, 108
Ribeiro De Menezes, Alison, 11, 13 Shakespeare, William, 145
Richards, Jeffrey, 23–4, 26, 90 Sharpeville Massacre, 104, 106
Romantic Revolutionary: A Biography of Shell Shock, 164
John Reed (R. Rosenstone), 192 Shellshock Rock, 173, 175, 176,
Rome Open City, 85 178, 180
Room With A View, A, 32–3, 44 Shoah, 87
Rosenstone, Robert, 1, 2–3, 4, 6, 7, 8, Silent Grace, 151
14, 15, 25, 27, 78, 83, 91, 152–3, Silverman, Kaja, 76, 78
188, 189, 192, 195 situationism, 102
Rossellini, Roberto, 85, 86 Skogland, Karli, 151
Rothemund, Marc, 41 slavery, 3, 111, 184, 189, 190, 192
Rousset, David, 111–12 Slaves on Screen (N. Zemon Davis), 190
Rousso, Henri, 88 Slovenes, 89
Royal Affair, A (En kongelig affaere), Slovenia, 91
34, 38 Smith, Greg, 154, 155–6
Rudi, 175 Smith, Kacie, 156
208 Index
Smith, Murray, 154 Subirana, Carla, 51, 52–3, 57–61

Smith, Paul, 18–19, 21 Sujetska, battle of, 92
Smyth, Gerry, 172 surrealism, 102
Snap, 152, 156 Swimming (Nadar), 51, 52, 57–61,
Sobchack, Vivian, 120 61, 62
social identity, 9 Syberberg, Hans-Jürgen, 8, 186
Socialist Federal Republic of
Yugoslavia. see Yugoslavia Tahtitaivas talon yllä (Stars Above), 34
society, cinema and, 23–4, 27 Tanovic, Danis, 164
Solino, 43–4 Tarantino, Quentin, 3
Something to Remember Me By (Para que Tarkovsky, Andrei, 186
no me olvides), 51, 52, 53–7, 55, Tarok (Catching the Dream), 40
58, 62 Taylor, Elizabeth, 90
Song for a Raggy Boy, 151, 156 Taylor, Jill, 104, 105, 112
Sophie Scholl – Die letzten Tage (Sophie teen identity, 170
Scholl: The Final Days), 41 television, 40–1, 67, 142, 143
Sorlin, Pierre, 2, 25–6, 186–7, 193 10 Drawings for Projection, 103,
Sorrow and the Pity, the, 87 104, 112
sources, 12, 83. see also archival Ten Days that Shook the World, 192
evidence Thatcherism, 24
South African TRC (Truth and Things We Forgot to Remember (radio
Reconciliation Commission), series), 142
102–15 Third Reich, films about, 41, 42
Soviet Union (USSR), 91, 95, 96, This Life (Hvidsten gruppen), 40
97, 109 Thrift, Nigel, 66
Spain, 10, 48, 49, 51–3, 68. see also Thunderclap Newman, 173–4
Spanish Civil War Times, The, 135
Amnesty Law (1977), 45 Tito, 10, 90, 91–3, 97
Law of Historical Memory (2007), Todorov, Tzvetan, 48, 59, 62
48–9 Tony Manero, 118, 121–3, 123, 129
Spanish Armada, 135 Toplin, Robert Brent, 5
Spanish Civil War, 38, 43, 48–63, 68, Tornatore, Giuseppe, 44
91–2, 151 Torre Bela, 69, 70, 71
Spartacus, 190 traumatic histories, 38, 46, 123–4
speed, 169–80 Irish cinema, 151, 156–66
Spielberg, Steven, 192 Portugal, 65, 67, 68
Spies & Glistrup (Sex, Drugs and Spanish Civil War, 48, 49, 50, 51,
Taxation), 40 52, 53–7, 58, 59
Spies, Simon, 40 traumatic memories, 57, 163, 178
Stalingrad, 41 Travis, Pete, 151
Starkey, David, 135, 142, 146 Trevelyan, G.M., 134
Stars Above (Tahtitaivas talon yllä), 34 Troubles, the. see Northern Ireland
Stasi, 42–3 ‘Troubles’
Stembridge, Gerard, 152 Truth and Reconciliation Commission
Stephenson, Neal, 144 (TRC). see South African TRC
Stereoscope, 102, 112, 114, 115 Turajlic, Mila, 90
Stiff Little Fingers, 175, 176, 178 Turim, Maureen, 156
Stone, Rob, 3 Tutu, Archbishop Desmond, 104,
Stuart Restoration, 144 105, 115
Index 209
12 Years a Slave, 3, 184, 192 Walsh, Aisling, 151

Tzu, Sun, 171 Ward, James, 4, 8
Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (1943), 96
Ubu and the Truth Commission (play), Warsaw Pact, 92
104, 105, 111, 112, 113 Webber, Peter, 34
Ubu Cuckolded (play), 112 Webster, Paul, 89
Ubu Tells the Truth, 102–13, 115 Weine, Robert, 20
Ukraine, 94–95 Weinrich, Harald, 115
Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 184 Welles, Orson, 92, 183
unconscious optics, 75 Wenden, D.J., 187–8
Ungría, Alfonso, 36–7 Westwell, Guy, 12, 14
Un héros très discret (A Self-Made Hero), White, Hayden, 5, 111, 188,
39–40, 88 191, 195
United States of America, 22, 184, 188 White, Richard, 5
University Challenge (BBC), 135 Wiene, Robert, 20
University College of London: Film William III, king (William of
and Historians conference (1968), Orange), 134, 135, 137, 141, 142,
21 146, 175
University of Bielefeld, 187 Williams, Hank, 176, 177
University of Timosoara, 189 Wind That Shakes the Barley, The, 152
Ustashas, 93 Winter, Jay, 9
Užice republika (The Republic Winters, Carmel, 152
of Užice), 91 Winterson, Jeanette, 147
Witches’ Sabbath (Akelarre), 37, 38
Verhoeven, Paul, 40 Witek, Piotr, 6
Vertov, Dziga, 101, 102, 104, 105, Wood, Michael, 22
107, 108–9, 112, 115 World, The (magazine), 141
Vichy France, 87, 88, 89
Vidal, Belén, 34 Yavuz, Yüksel, 43
Vietnam, 189 Young, Terence, 2
Vigne, Daniel, 7 youth: and countercultures, 171–2
Vincendeau, Ginette, 33 YouTube, 12, 27
Virilio, Paul, 171 Yugoslavia, 10, 84, 85, 89–94, 97
Visconti, Luchino, 186, 187
Vlakplaas, 106, 108, 112 ZDF, 41
von Donnersmarck, Zemon Davis, Natalie, 5, 6–7, 190
Florian Henckel, 32 Zemstal (The Revenge), 34
Zubizarreta, Javi, 43
Wajda, Andrzej, 34, 186 Zuretzako (For You), 43
Walker, 8 Zwartboek (Black Book), 40
Wall Street Journal, 3 Zwick, Edward, 96, 194

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Film, History and Memory

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10 Music and Montage: Punk, Speed and Histories of

3.1 Trauma and generational memory in Para que no me

Axel Bangert teaches German cinema studies at New York University

Natalia Sanjuán Bornay holds a BA in translation and interpreting

Mercedes Camino is Professor of Cultural History at Lancaster

Jennie M. Carlsten is Lecturer in the School of Media, Film and Journalism

Paul Cooke is Centenary Chair of World Cinemas at the University of

Gianluca Fantoni is Lecturer in Italian at Nottingham Trent University.

Liz Greene is Lecturer in Communications at Dublin City University.

Andrew J. Hennlich is Assistant Professor of Art History at the Gwen

Nike Jung is a PhD student in the Department of Film and Television at

Fearghal McGarry is Reader in Irish History at Queen’s University

Alison Ribeiro de Menezes is Professor of Hispanic Studies at the

Robert A. Rosenstone, Professor of History Emeritus at the California

Rob Stone is Professor of Film Studies at the University of Birmingham

James Ward lectures in 18th-century literature at the University of

It may be useful to begin by considering why history on film provokes

past for entertainment purposes, inevitably calls for subjective value

Medium and form

Although film provides an important source of historical knowledge,

inevitable departures from the historical record described by Rosenstone

need to have some knowledge of the history of film, its changing

A practical example of this proposition is provided in this volume by

of many to do so was exemplified by the American Historical Review’s

Although not calculated to appeal to historians – who are generally

is not solely about events; it is also about the relationships between

Piotr Witek has drawn attention to similar methodological commonalities:

The selection of source documents, the ways by which historians

Although most historians would recognise these parallels, the tendency

serving as a historical consultant on Daniel Vigne’s eponymous 1982

Rosenstone has similarly observed how the attempt to represent the

In short, preoccupation with the problems of history on film can

Film and historiography

only to shed light on historical thought at the time of its production,

Film and memory

Memory is a fundamental mechanism of social identity. Jay Winter

historicization of memory provides one of the most valuable ways by

The future of the past on screen

This volume originated from an interdisciplinary collaboration between

1. A recognition that filmmaking and film-viewing are collaborative

2. A broadening of the notion of ‘sources’.

3. A broadening of the notion of ‘historical stories’.

Keeping in mind Paula Rabinowitz’s claim that ‘testimony is always a

4. Consideration of formal reflexivity and transparency about any

5. Attention to the sensory and the cognitive.

6. Attention to the specificity of place.

7. Attention to reception and audience.

11. Robert Schneider, Perspectives on History, May 2006 (http://www.historians.

36. Westwell, ‘Critical Approaches’, p. 578.

We need to study film and see it in relation to the

Historians who base their research principally on cinematic texts may,

[film] can quite easily be faked, or put together in such a way as

emotions of the spectator. Moreover, it is often a relatively trivial and

The concerns identified by Smith remain relevant and should not be

legitimized the use of a wider range of evidence in historical research,

of a national film industry appears, nowadays, quite an adventur-

utilize essential written documents, historians must know how focus,

Metz.21 Although film semioticians may have developed a more objec-

by film-makers’.29 Richards would take an important further step with

too rigid to be profitably adopted, O’Connor’s work contains several

those who produced it. This consideration prompts a fundamental ques-

Film, History & Memory - Jennie M. Carlsten

Film, History & Memory - Jennie M. Carlsten