ABSTRACT
Allowing an embodied audience to view and experience historical bodies fragmented on screen, whether through simulated dismemberment or editing techniques, updated the cultural sense of history. This was the carnally charged history reaching audiences across the globe and eclipsing novels, monographs, and magazines. Set against the freezing pole of historicism, Dutch historical theorist Ankersmit has recently explored what he terms "subjective" and "sublime" historical experience. Ankersmit's work represents a major shift from his earlier narratological studies and helps to validate and envision subjective prelinguistic experience as a mode of history. By clothing bodies with history, the film doubles the cinematic apparatus itself, which covers the past (like snow) with a surface. Pushing the limits of the frame with bodies and textiles signaled the historicity and importance of the material. The countless ups and downs, usually including death and battle, were in some measure due to duration.
