Screening the past : film and the representation of history / edited by Tony Barta.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Screening the past : history since the cinema / Tony Barta -- Captain Bligh as mythic cliché / Greg Dening -- Re-screening the past : subversion narratives and the politics of history / Daniel J. Walkowitz -- Smart Jews : from the Caine mutiny to Schindler's list and beyond / Sander L. Gilman -- A stab in the back on a Sunday morning : the melodramatic imagination and Pearl Harbor / Geoff Mayer -- Losing the peace : some British films of postwar adjustment / Brian McFarlane -- The scent of distant blood : Hammer films and history / Sue Harper -- Film Nazis : the great escape / Tony Barta -- Marcel Ophüls' November days : the forming and performing of documentary history / Stan Jones -- Braveheart and the Scottish aesthetic dementia / Colin McArthur -- Borders and boundaries : history and television in a postmodern world / Ina Bertrand -- Television and our understanding of history : a distant conversation / Pierre Sorlin -- Letatlin and Ern Malley : history refracted through Impossibility and hoax / David Perry -- Projected lives : a meditation on biography and cinematic space / Kathryn Millard -- Enchanted experience / Ross Gibson.

Film and television have been accepted as having a pervasive influence on how people understand the world. An important aspect of this is the relationship of history and film. The different views of the past created by film, television, and video are only now attracting closer attention from historians, cultural critics, and filmmakers. This volume seeks to advance the critical exploration scholars have recently begun. Barta begins by addressing the various ways the past is screened for our understanding and relates the art of film to other media. The essays that follow deal primarily with the changing perspectives of political and social developments{u2014}and changing concepts of ideology, gender, or culture{u2014}in films and television programs made for historically shaped reasons. Chapters by filmmakers explore issues of context and intent in their own projects. Scholars and general readers interested in film and cultural studies will find this an important volume.