Broad in scope, this interdisciplinary collection of original scholarship on historical film features essays that explore the many facets of this expanding field and provide a platform for promising avenues of research.

Notes on Contributors viii Introduction 1Robert A. Rosenstone and Constantin Parvulescu Part 1 History and the Medium of Film 1 Politics and the Historical Film: Hotel Rwanda and the Form of Engagement 11Alison Landsberg 2 History as Palimpsest: Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (1975) 30Maria Pramaggiore 3 Flagging up History: The Past as a DVD Bonus Feature 53Debra Ramsay 4 The History Film as a Mode of Historical Thought 71Robert A. Rosenstone Part 2 Filmmakers as Historians 5 Julia’s Resistant History:Women’s Historical Films in Hollywood and the Legacy of Citizen Kane 91J. E. Smyth 6 Mark Donskoi’s Gorky Trilogy and the Stalinist Biopic 110Denise J. Youngblood 7 The Subjects of History: Italian Filmmakers as Historians 133Marcia Landy 8 AndrzejWajda as Historian 154PiotrWitek Part 3 Telling Lives: The Biopic 9 Oliver Stone’s Nixon: The Rise and Fall of a Political Gangster 179Willem Hesling 10 Authorial Histories: The Historical Film and the Literary Biopic 199Hila Shachar 11 The Biopic in Hindi Cinema 219Rachel Dwyer 12 The Lives and Times of the Biopic 233Dennis Bingham Part 4 Cinema and the Nation 13 GangWars:Warner Brothers’ The Roaring Twenties Stars, News, and the New Deal 257Paula Rabinowitz 14 State Terrorism on Film: Argentine Cinema during the First Years of Democracy (1983–1990) 283Mario Ranalletti 15 Fossil Frontiers: American Petroleum History on Film 301Georgiana Banita 16 Sounding the Depths of History: Opera and National Identity in Italian Film 328Roger Hillman Part 5 Wars and Revolutions 17 Generational Memory and Affect in Letters from Iwo Jima 349Robert Burgoyne 18 Post-Heroic Revolution: Depicting the 1989 Events in the Romanian Historical Film of the Twenty-First Century 365Constantin Parvulescu 19 In Country: Narrating the IraqWar in Contemporary US Cinema 384GuyWestwell Part 6 Premodern Times 20 Heart and Clock: Time and History in The Immortal Heart and Other Films about the Middle Ages 407Bettina Bildhauer 21 The Anti-Samurai Film 425Thomas Keirstead Part 7 Slavery and the PostcolonialWorld 22 The Politics of Cine-Memory: Signifying Slavery in the History Film 445Michael T. Martin and David C.Wall 23 The African Past on Screen: Moving beyond Dualism 468Vivian Bickford-Smith 24 Colonial Legacies in Contemporary French Cinema: Jews and Muslims on Screen 490Catherine Portuges 25 “What’s Love Got to Do with It?”: Sympathy, Antipathy, and the Unsettling of Colonial American History in Film 513Louis Kirk McAuley Index 540

The first comprehensive collection of perspectives in a growing field of research, this essential volume seeks to answer questions that lie at the heart of our response to the genre. How does a narrative history film speak about the past? What does it reveal about the generation creating it? How can we tell its fictions from its truths? Can popular entertainment of this kind also be a serious purveyor of historical knowledge and understanding? Featuring contributions from international scholars in the fields of History, Film Studies, Anthropology, and Cultural and Literary Studies, this collection offers a variety of interdisciplinary approaches. A rich diversity of themes is taken into consideration, ranging from the nature of cinematic truth and the poetics and politics of the history film, to its interplay with written accounts of the past and its place in the classroom. The essays tackle inclusive subjects, such as how the form developed in different political contexts, alongside more focused assessments of individual films and auteurs. Prefaced with an introductory survey of the field by its two distinguished editors, this new Companion is a notable contribution to the field.