Robert Burgoyne
Robert Burgoyne is a writer and lecturer whose work centres on the theory and representation of history in film. The author of six books and numerous essays, his work has been translated into eight languages. He has lectured in thirteen countries. Robert was formerly Chair in Film Studies at The University of St Andrews and Professor of English and Film Studies at Wayne State University. His most recent book The New American War Film will appear in fall 2023.
His books include:
Refugees and Migrants in Contemporary Film, art and Media
The Epic Film in World Culture
Film Nation: Hollywood Looks at US History
New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics
The New American War Film (forthcoming)
Dr Burgoyne’s chapter for the forthcoming Routledge Companion to History and the Moving Image:
THE DIGITAL RESCUE OF DOCUMENTARY HISTORY
They Shall Not Grow Old has been lavishly praised for its spectacular remediation of combat footage from WWI -- its conversion of scratched, faded, and deteriorating celluloid into a digital pastiche of period-accurate colors, sounds, and life-like movement. It has also been roundly criticized for its exclusive focus on the Western Front, depicting a fighting force consisting solely of white male British soldiers, as well as for its frequent, imaginative interpolations of digital elements, including the substitution of background scenes and the painting in of colors that were invisible on the original film stock. While I am sympathetic to each of these critiques of the film, I feel they are based on a somewhat narrow perspective, deriving their authority from the notion of the archive as the prime ground and baseline for representation, the foundational and unerring reality that predicates all later symbolic expression. In this essay, I explore Mieke Bal's notion of "preposterous history" as a way to illuminate the particular historical and representational questions posed here, which revolve around how we read the images of the past. I consider whether the film may better be seen not as the restoration of the historical real, but rather as a work of quotation; not in terms of its fidelity to original sources but rather as a form of mimesis; not as portraying a past reality but as producing a reality effect, along the lines discussed by Roland Barthes. Seen in this light, They Shall Not Grow Old, rather than simply adhering to or deviating from the "truth" of the archive, becomes an enriched, intertextual project that brings several different discursive frameworks into view, an act of re-framing that links the memory of the past with perspectives that have consequence in the present.
They Shall Not Grow Old, 2018