ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how films and television series (what I will call “new television”) exhibit and “do” history. I argue that film and television series are able to present more quickly and sometimes more efficiently a historical, phenomenological density that traditional historical writing (e.g., the writing of empirical histories) is unable to do. In doing so, they offer important additions to the writing and doing of history that thereby need to be seriously considered in any estimation of historiography. In order to make these claims, I consider the work of Edmund Husserl, Stanley Cavell, Siegfried Kracauer, and Walter Benjamin in relation to these issues while also focusing on the films of Tarantino and new television works like HBO’s Betty and others.
