Antoine DE Baecque. Camera Historica

There are two approaches to writing history through films: the first, more common, aims to view history through the window of films, using the cinema as just another source; the second, more demanding, aims to write a cinematically inflected mode of history, sensitive to the myriad ways in which films give form to, rather than simply represent, history. Antoine de Baecque's monograph offers an ambitious and exciting contribution to the latter tradition. Moving beyond the idea of film as a transparent representation through which we can see history, de Baecque's stated objective is to “answer questions raised by history through films, through figures that are specific to cinema, while avoiding the dissolution of either history or film into a purely illustrative conception of the relation between the two” (p. 13). Riffing off the title of Roland Barthes' Camera Lucida (1981), de Baecque's Camera Historica reinvents the film camera as a historical tool, or rather fabric, impressed upon by the pressures and forces of history. Under his pen, no longer is the film camera merely an instrument of documentary observation or entertainment spectacle; it becomes a, if not the, historical lens of the twentieth century. Whether or not you agree with the author's privileging of film's allegorical claim to history, he still provides a captivating and poetic cultural analysis of cinema's conjuring of new forms of history.

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