ABSTRACT
Troeltsch's personal efforts to rekindle the philosophy of history signaled hope for History in crisis, but fizzled with his passing. Reading the excerpt as he did, Harnack implicitly coupled the death of Troeltsch with a nearly futile attempt to redeem nineteenth-century historicism in crisis. Wurtenberg included the urgency of crisis in his advocacy for implementing motion pictures in historical instruction. This chapter discusses the intersection of film and historical thought in at least two interrelated ways. It reveals how certain films "featured" the crisis of historicism: the relativity of views of the past, demands for new history, and ruptures in historical traditions through form and content. Connected with the first claim, the chapter argues that the escalation of cinema's reach and influence affected the writing of historical literature and thought, resulting in the adoption of imagistic and formal features borrowed from film.
