Pictures of Girlhood: Modern Female Adolescence on Film
2007; Volume: 37; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1548-9922
Autores Tópico(s)Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies
ResumoHISTORY ON FILM/FILM ON HISTORY. Robert A. Rosenstone. Pearson, 2006. 182 pages; $26.00. REAL MCLUHAN In Woody Allen's Annie Hall, director's alter ego, Alvy Singer, is annoyed in a movie line when person behind him (a media studies professor) pontificates upon media theories of Marshall McLuhan. A frustrated Singer then produces real McLuhan, who informs verbose professor that he has no understanding of modern media. When my colleagues in historical profession dismiss film history or narrowly focus their film commentaries upon cinematic adherence to historical detail, I wish that I could summon eloquent Robert A. Rosenstone to expose their lack of intellectual imagination. Lacking such powers, I will simply have to rely upon Rosenstone's insightful on Film/Film on to counter conventional wisdom that real history may only be conveyed via written word. Rosenstone, who teaches history at California Institute of Technology, is author of such scholarly works as John Reed, Romantic Revolutionary (1975) and innovative Mirror in Shrine: American Encounters with Japan (1988), in addition to being one of first historians to seriously study film and theorize impact of cinema upon historical thinking. In on Film/Film on History, Rosenstone argues that filmmakers who seek to understand present through engaging with have much in common with academic historians; for both refer to actual events, moments, and movements from in their efforts to construct history. Of course, critics of history depicted on silver screen maintain that filmmakers often invent dialogue and play loose with facts. Thus, filmmakers lack objectivity of academic historians. Influenced by post modernism, Rosenstone challenges myth of scholarly objectivity, observing that academic historians are reconstructing a version of with written word just as a film director does with celluloid. Traditional historians use traces of to develop their historical interpretations by deciding which facts and events and from whose perspective to tell story. It is a reading of past, but it is not the past which scholars are able to recreate. Rosenstone questions notion of scientific history, concluding, History (as we practice it) is an ideological and cultural product of Western world at a particular time in its development, one when notion of 'scientific' truth based on replicable experiments, has been carried into social science, including history (where no such experimentation is possible (133). In line with Aristotle, Rosenstone believes that muse of history should be realigned with ethics and poetry. Such realignment might encourage greater acceptance of cinematic history by academics who often bemoan fact that public increasingly obtains its history through film and media. …
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