Cinema Historiography and Narratives of Recognition and Forgetting

• In Event: The History of Fiction and the Fiction of History

Abstract

My essay addresses the politics of cinematic historical narration, specifically as it concerns stories and descriptions of political loss, historical forgetfulness, marginalization, and disappearance. It centers on the concept of historical sensation, a phrase coined by the Dutch cultural historian Johan Huizinga to express the uncanny feeling of the historian that she is re-experiencing the past with immediacy, yet distinct from mere intellectual cognition. The concept describes what Huizinga suggests as the nearly uncanny sense of a collapse between the historian and the society that is the object of study. I will explore the mimesis of historical sensation through the analysis of two filmmakers whose work reflects two competing, yet complimentary, practices of making visible historical sensation. I will examine the French film essayist Chris Marker, in juxtaposition with the Thai director and visual artist Apichatpong Weerasethakul. While I bring in some of their non-cinematic work to bear on the subject, I will focus on Marker’s A Grin Without a Cat (1977) and Weekasethakul’s Memoria (2021). Both film-makers establish techniques of cinematic narration which allow for the literal and figurative expression, and potentially the political recognition, of history’s ghosts, while avoiding the twin specters of nostalgia or melancholy.
The stakes of this project are twofold. First, I seek to highlight how and why Huizinga’s concept of historian sensation may productively intervene in contemporary conversations about political recognition of historical subjects whose narratives risk disappearance. Second, I hope to expand the conversation between textual and cinematic forms of historical narrative, by examining the cinematic techniques of historical representation outside the genres of the documentary or the ‘historical picture’, suggesting cinema’s unique benefits for narratives that remain alive to the possibilities of the historical sensation.

Author

• Douglas C. Dow, University of Texas at Dallas