Philip Rosen

Philip Rosen is Professor Emeritus of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University, where he is also affiliated faculty in the Departments of American Studies and English.  He was founding director of the graduate program in Modern Culture in Media, is a former chairperson of that department, and was previously chairperson of the Screen Studies program at Clark University.  He has published extensively in several countries and languages on a wide range of topics related to film and media theory and history, as well as cultural critique and theory, and he has given keynote addresses to several international conferences, including that of the Film Studies Association of Canada (the Martin Walsh Lecture.)  Among his publications is the book Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory. 

Historical Reality Effects in Cinema, Then and Now

Ankersmit's concept of "sublime historical experience" proposes an underlying, unacknowledged dream of historical thinking: a quest for direct experience of the past in the present, genuine contact to overcome the gulf between the historian's present and actuality of the past.  This dream may be compared and contrasted to cinema.  For example, the referential assertions about the past of historiography resonate with the much-debated idea that there is a special cinematic "impression of reality."  In particular, indexical film images and sounds exhibit objects that existed in the past of the spectator but are perceived in the present of film-viewing.  Historical representation in films may add another layer of pastness to cinema's indexical, archival, and documentary capacities, constructing narrative and physical reality-effects (Barthes) for the spectator's perception.

To elaborate, explore, and test this theoretical and descriptive framework, this paper will consider two pairs of major British and U.S. films about World War I:  Battle of the Somme (1916) and They Shall Not Grow Old (Peter Jackson/2018); Hearts of the World (D.W. Griffith, 1918) and War Horse (Steven Spielberg/2011.)  They were selected for the following parameters: a) produced during the war vs. the war as the historical past; b) made in the era that crystallized dominant filmic conventions vs. a century later in a digital, multi-media era;  c) documentaries employing actuality footage of the war vs. fiction films reenacting war scenes.  Consideration of these films will focus on reality effects as pressure points of historical representation in cinema and the contradictory dream of temporal simultaneity.