ABSTRACT
Hollywood fi lms have dominated the world market since the 1920s, but the United States has had no monopoly on the historical. Indeed, it is not diffi cult for the historically inclined to make the case that European and, to some extent, Latin American and Asian countries have over the years produced far more serious, interesting, and profound explorations of the past on screen than have issued from America. The great majority of these works have, nonetheless, utilized the same six practices of mainstream historical fi lm mentioned in the last chapter, focusing their linear and self-contained stories on individuals or small groups who exemplify or stand in for larger historical events and processes. Perhaps the two major differences with these foreign (to Americans) fi lms has been a greater willingness to create works which place entirely fi ctional characters in specifi c historical settings, and a tendency to be more open to sad or tragic, though equally uplifting and moral, endings.
