ABSTRACT
Constantly reaffirmed, the belief of most contemporary English writers of history is that through sustained, painstaking and disinterested effort they may work their way towards a knowledge of the truth about the historical past. Yet temporality ensures that the past, even if it is the past as yesterday, only exists for us in its traces. In this respect historywriting has a similar ontological status to cinema. Film presents objects, figures, landscapes, cities and the bric-a-brac of everyday life with a breath-taking actuality not possible from any other means of representation (the three dimensions of space but also movement) but only on condition that those very objects, figures, etc. are placed somewhere else, ‘made present’ on the screen ‘in the mode of absence’ (Metz 1975, p. 48); history-writing is able to present a world of people, events and structures resembling our own in the most extraordinary complexity and detail, a non-fictional world, but only on condition that it is absent.
