Camera Historica: The Century in Cinema by Antoine de Baecque (review)
2013; Volume: 43; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1548-9922
Autores Tópico(s)Cinema and Media Studies
ResumoAntoine de Baecque Camera Historica: The Century in Cinema Translated by Ninon Vinsonneau and Jonathan Magidoff Columbia University Press, 2012 Illustrated, xv + 398 pagesIn introduction to this provocative and sometimes exasperating book Antoine de Baecque recounts epiphanic moment when he realized that cinema embeds historical realities within its framed images. He argues that such untimely irruptions constitute cinematographic of (3) that can be discovered in films especially after Second World War. With enthusiasm of convert, de Baecque shows how can reconstruct past imaginatively as well as provide an archive of its lived worlds. Cinema can be an interpretive tool to understand and one that professional historians, he alleges, do not understand: Historians are not cinephiles (9). De Baecque, professor of cinema studies at University of Paris X Nanterre and former editor of Cahiers du Cinema, proclaims triumphantly that the present book is intended to affirm arrival of what might be called age of in film (380).De Baecque's revelation about and occurred after watching Resnais' Night and Fog and Hiroshima mon amour as well as Rossellini's Europa '51. In particular he cites shots where survivors of concentration camps gaze directly at camera, an image of mass death in which history itself is staring at (32). De Baecque traces origins and subsequent invocations of these haunting images in number of films, arguing that they represent rupture in that films directors subsequently explored. Death frequents post-war cinema in new forms. Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux, for example, represents demise of Tramp, a contemporary incarnation of figure of Wandering Jew (56) and, astonishingly, the profound moral of Monsieur Verdoux is that modern society turns us all into mass murderers (52). He traces how films of Sam Fuller and Alfred Hitchcock embody new realities about horror and mass extermination in complex dynamic of images and disclosed forms (74). In The Trouble with Harry, for example, Hitchcock fully partakes of hallucinatory resurgence of foreclosed images of mass death, even if he draws from it exact opposite life lesson (63).De Baecque finds films of Peter Watkins particularly impressive. In works such as Culloden, first broadcast by BBC in 1964, Watkins employs techniques of contemporary news reportage and British documentary to reconstruct an eighteenth-century batde. Interviews with participants, use of hand-held cameras, and reporters who provide commentary on gruesome scenes of massacre and rape make past come alive. De Baecque argues that in Culloden and other films Watkins draws particular attention to historical events in which suspension of law and civil liberties result in murderous consequences of might over right or what de Baecque calls the deathblonT (188). …
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