ABSTRACT
There are numerous ways in which films can express historicity. The first and most obvious form is found in films that engage the past by making historical events, circumstances, and characters the subject of the film narrative. That history may constitute the backdrop of the story recounted, or occupy the center of narrative focus. Such films tend to adopt realist conventions that purport to represent faithfully a history whose meanings are fixed and verifiable. Yet, attention must be paid to the way historical films deploy rhetoric and formulate social, cultural, and political discourses that are themselves open to analysis. In this case, historicist critique entails not simply the study of the historical truth a film represents and a judgment concerning its objectivity and veracity, but also involves an examination of the discourses the film enunciates, that is, the things that can be said with respect to the history in question that are recognized and understood to be true by the audiences that view them. These enunciations can take on any number of forms including discourses on race, gender, sexuality, class, and various institutions of power, utterances that formulate the film’s meanings in political and ideological as well as specifically historical terms.
