ABSTRACT
The Nietzschean historiographical categories that were the jumping off point for the delineation of historiographical approaches are actually more distinct from each other than the categories used here. This chapter explains French promotional materials on musical films, as there is a more revealing correlation between the advertisements and the films themselves. To echo Vivian Sobchack, the promotional activities of the Hollywood studios and the French production companies are often 'onomatopoetic' of the spectacles their films offered. The chapter also explains the tragedy of the Hapsburgs, as seen by Anatole Litvak and Max Ophuls. Anatole Litvak's Mayerling and Max Ophuls's De Mayerling a Sarajevo narrate two similarly tragic histories of events befalling the rulers of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Hapsburgs. Though arguably the most tenuous of the films examined here in its relationship to history, The Adventures of Robin Hood explains the context of the decor of history because it is arguably a limit case.
