To see the past

Early on in the history of the new medium, a few people saw part of its promise as just this ability to make us see the past. A French drama critic in 1908 described the aspirations of film as not only the ability to reproduce the contemporary world, but also ‘to animate the past, to reconstruct the great events of history through the performance of the actor and the evocation of atmosphere and milieu.’ More than 125 years after the birth of cinema, historians, critics, reviewers, and the general public still wonder if this promise of film as history has been fulfilled. A decade after this morally and politically regressive masterpiece, Russian film-maker Sergei Eisenstein began to use film to provide the fledgling Soviet Union with its own history and foundation myths – the two notions being in Russia, as in all countries, closely intertwined.

Computer Science · Historical and Cultural Archaeology Studies · History · Oral History, Memory, Narrative Analysis · Philosophy, History, and Historiography