ABSTRACT
Cinema, television, and the Internet are major sources for access to historical knowledge. Nonetheless, numerous instances of media’s appropriations of history are controversial because historians, social critics, and film scholars have debated over what constitutes an “accurate” version of past events. It is my contention that, from the silent cinema to the present, media have contributed to an expanded understanding of history. This essay does not claim that written and visual histories are identical, but it maintains that visual and aural technologies “contribute to historical thinking” (Rosenstone, 2006, p. 12). This essay examines how the media have made use of the past through identifying various forms and styles for making visual history and will focus particularly on relations between war and cinema. The films discussed include national epics, World War II documentaries and feature films, postwar counter-epic and anti-war films, heritage and anti-heritage treatments of the past, philosophic explorations in film of history and memory, particularly postcolonial treatments of history, and contemporary versions of history through filming of the Vietnam and Iraq Wars.
