ABSTRACT
From Mildred Pierce and Brief Encounter to Raging Bull and In the Mood for Love, this lively and accessible collection explores film culture's obsession with the past, offering searching and provocative analyses of a wide range of titles.
Screening the Past engages with current debates about the role of cinema in mediating history through memory and nostalgia, suggesting that many films use strategies of memory to produce diverse forms of knowledge which challenge established ideas of history, and the traditional role of historians.
Classic essays sit side by side with new research, contextualized by introductions which bring them up to date, and provide suggestions for further reading as the work of contemporary directors such as Martin Scorsese, Kathryn Bigelow, Todd Haynes and Wong Kar-wai is used to examine the different ways they deploy creative processes of memory.
Pam Cook also investigates the recent history of film studies, reviewing the developments that have culminated in the exciting, if daunting, present moment. The result is a rich and stimulating volume that will appeal to anyone with an interest in cinema, memory and identity.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part |44 pages
Reviewing the past
chapter |6 pages
Introduction
chapter |14 pages
Duplicity in Mildred Pierce
chapter |9 pages
Women and the Western
chapter |13 pages
The Pleasures and Perils of Exploitation Films
part |46 pages
Memory in popular British cinema
part |54 pages
Stars, iconoclasm and identification
part |31 pages
Martin Scorsese and postclassical nostalgia
chapter |6 pages
Introduction
chapter |5 pages
The Last Temptation of Christ
chapter |5 pages
Scorsese's Masquerade
chapter |5 pages
The Age of Innocence
part |44 pages
Reinventing history