Pedagogy and Film

Dave Postles (pot@leicester.ac.uk)
Wed, 11 Oct 1995 09:37:55 +0100

I'm not a medievalist, but it seems to me that the general problems facing
early modern historians and film (the recreation of the early modern world
in the cinema) poses similar methodological problems. Indeed Pierre
Sorlin's _Restaging the Past_, Paul Smith's edited collection _Film and the
Historian_ and a collection edited by K.R.M. Short (_Feature Films as
History_) are a good place to start. A few years ago I taught a course
'Cinema and History' which got much deeper than simply the "illustrative"
aspects of recreating the past - ideologies in particular - and it was a
lot of fun as well. I used, for example, The Return of Martin Guerre,
where the relationship between oral/written traditions, feminist
approaches to the past (his stories/her stories), notions of the "rule of
law" (or rather, "rule" - "order" - "law") were among the issues raised.
But, of course, atmosphere was important, depictions of communities and
authority too - but atmosphere invokes ideologies too?

David Dean
davdean@ccs.carleton.ca

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