In the late 1980s, historian Hayden White suggested the possibility of forms of historical thought unique to filmed history. White proposed the study of historiophoty, an imagistic alternative to written history. Subsequently, much scholarly attention has been paid to the category of History Film. Yet popular concerns for historical re-presentation and heritage have not fully addressed aesthetic effects of prior history films and emergent imagistic-historiographic practices. This dissertation identifies and elaborates one such alternative historiographic practice on film, via inter-medial study attending to British and American history films, an instance of multi-platform digital historiography, and an animated film a category of film often overlooked in history film studies.
Central to this dissertation is Gilles Deleuzes development of varieties of the Movement Image. Deleuzes Movement Image includes the discursive image, a form which has not yet broken the coherence of sensori-motor connections between the object perceived and the affective response of the viewer. Related to the discursive image, I propose that the descriptive image can capture what the larger category representation and the cinema-specific spectacle cannot.
Drawing from literary and art-historical conceptions of the differences between descriptive and narrative forms, I propose that in the history film, the descriptive image functions as a meta-critical aesthetic, insisting that viewers perceive naturalized relationships as instead contingent. I argue that, rather than a mature form of realism, the descriptive image is a form of critical realism. Descriptive images are characterized by: long takes of long shots; the co-presence and co-equivalence of objects; a point of view neither neutral nor attributable to a character; and expressions of scope or forms for framing that assert that the given view is only one view from the set of possible views.
Thus I examine exemplary texts that demonstrate a difference between narrative understanding and descriptive understanding. These texts, despite their material differences, similarly present mixed historiographic forms, and enable us to see what studies of history on film, in their interest in re-presentation over presentation, have often missed: descriptive images allow us to differentiate the event of the film from an inadequate copy of an historical event.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:PITT/oai:PITTETD:etd-04142011-072549 |
| Date | 30 June 2011 |
| Creators | Patterson, Alison L. |
| Contributors | Marcia Landy, Phd, Colin MacCabe, PhD, Adam Lowenstein, PhD, Randall Halle, PhD, Troy Boone, PhD |
| Publisher | University of Pittsburgh |
| Source Sets | University of Pittsburgh |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.library.pitt.edu/ETD/available/etd-04142011-072549/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to University of Pittsburgh or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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