
Retrovisions
Reinventing the Past in Film and Fiction
- 176 pages
- English
- PDF
- Available on iOS & Android
About this book
The contributors to Retrovisions consider what happens to history in the movies. Focusing on films and texts from the 1950s to the 1990s, the contributors argue that the past has always come to us by way of previous texts and culturally bounded aesthetic categories, and that history films - to the despair of historians - have always taken a 'postmodern' approach to their subject, seeing the past as a dynamic resource for exciting stories and poetic, morally uplifting untruths. Why do certain decades appeal at certain times? And what does the renewal of interest in narrative history reveal about our culture at the start of the new millennium? The authors address the variety of ways in which history can be used, refashioned and made over to reflect current concerns - and how history films from the past can be reinterrogated to learn what they tell us about their own times. The films discussed include Elizabeth, Shakespeare in Love, Culloden, The Avengers, Titus, and several adaptations of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, including Cruel Intentions.
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Information
Table of contents
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- 1. Introduction: Retrovisions: Historical Makeovers in Film and Literature
- 2. 'No Man's Elizabeth': The Virgin Queen in Recent Films
- 3. Shakespeare in Love and the End(s) of History
- 4. Reflections on Sex, Shakespeare and Nostalgia in Trevor Nunn's Twelfth Night
- 5. Black Rams Tupping White Ewes: Race vs. Gender in the Final Scene of Six Othellos
- 6. Cool Intentions: The Literary Classic, the Teenpic and the 'Chick Flick'
- 7. Peter Watkins's Culloden and the Alternative Form in Historical Filmmaking
- 8. Mrs Brown's Mourning and Mr King's Madness: Royal Crisis on Screen
- 9. The Grandfathers' War: Re-imagining World War I in British Novels and Films of the 1990s
- 10. 'Charm, Bowler, Umbrella, Leather Boots': Remaking The Avengers
- 11. Forbidden Planet and the Retrospective Attribution of Intentions
- Index