| This study identifies a subgenre within contemporary avant-garde cinema that has taken up the problem of historical narrative in light of postmodern critiques of historical discourse. It examines how some recent film-makers have used the film medium to create new possibilities for the representation of history.; Like other interdisciplinary forms of postmodern cultural study, this subgenre at once critiques the formal social science discipline of historiography and revitalizes it by complicating the relationships between aesthetic production and historiographic practice.; The films, made between 1974 and 1999 by Eleanor Antin, Craig Baldwin, Charles Burnett, Abigail Child, Daniel Eisenberg, Ernie Gehr, Gianikian/Ricci-Lucci, Jean-Luc Godard, Patricio Guzman, Leandro Katz, Claude Lanzmann and Abraham Ravett, are seen as an emergence from and a rethinking of the concerns of earlier modernist structural and materialist film practices. As a cine-poetics, this study is a series of close readings (identifying such narrative elements as allegory, virtuality, sideshadowing, testimony, temporal simultaneity, and appropriation) that show how the cinematic techniques these artists have developed challenge basic assumptions about the representation of the past and how their films have created new cinematic forms and discussions.; I argue that the most innovative approaches to representing historiographic temporality in cinema are coming out of aesthetically based cinematic practices, rather than those that are sociologically bound such as realist dramas and social documentaries which replicate conventional forms of historiography. At the same time, these new films reflect many of the epistemological shifts in the way time is understood in our society, often marking changes in social formation and the nature of events that become historicized. These cinematic practices are read in relation to a diverse range of contemporary theoretical approaches to history (Hayden White, Michel DeCerteau); philosophy (Gilles Deleuze, Giorgio Agamben); literary theory (Walter Benjamin, Michael Andre Bernstein, Shoshana Felman); and psychoanalysis (Freud, Eric L. Santner), all of which have innovatively rethought forms of historiography. By doing this I show how historiographic practices within avant-garde cinema are essentially interdisciplinary and, moreover, that historiographic scholarship and aesthetic approaches to representations of past events are not antithetical, but are interrelated and dependent on one another. |
