ABSTRACT
History became filtered through cinema. This This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book focuses on Ernst Lubitsch's history films and the years 1919-1924, this too is diachronically bound within a larger history of what might be called the "cinematic regime of historicity", which still deeply informs relationships to the past. It uses the concept of "historical consciousness", to study how people relate to and understand the past, a regime entails a horizon of possibilities of how societies experience and conceptualize historicity. The book outlines the cinematic regime of historicity correlating with the emphasis on bodily experience of history. It offers an approach to analyzing the intersection of historicity and embodied reception by focusing on silent cinema in postwar Germany. The book connects both the historical culture of popular film and the academy to the corporeal senses and sensations, which undergird the very construction and reception of history.
