Camera Historica

Antoine de Baecque proposes a new historiography of cinema, investigating how cinematic representation changes the very nature of history and our understanding of it. Whether portraying events that occurred in the past or stories that were unfolding before their eyes, certain twentieth-century filmmakers have used a particular mise-en-sc#xE8;ne to give form to history. This phenomenon, which de Baecque terms the "cinematographic form of history," disrupts the very material of film, much like historical events themselves disturb the progress of human narrative. De Baecque defines, locates, and interprets cinematographic forms in seven distinct bodies of cinema: 1950s modern cinema and its conjuring of the morbid trauma of war; French New Wave and its style, which became the negative imprint of the malaise felt by young contemporaries of the Algerian War; post-Communist Russian films, or the "de-modern" works of catastroika; contemporary Hollywood films that attach themselves to the master fiction of 9/11; the characteristic mise en formeof filmmaker Sacha Guitry, who, in Si Versailles m'#xE9;tait cont#xE9;(1954), filmed French history from inside its chateau; the work of Jean-Luc Godard, who evoked history through his own museum memory of the twentieth century; and the achievements of Peter Watkins, the British filmmaker who reported on history like a war correspondent. De Baecque's introduction clearly lays out his theoretical framework, a profoundly brilliant conceptualization of the many ways cinema and history relate.