Prelude: The Tree of History

Introduction: The Cinematographic Forms of History

Disciplinary Uncertainties

Cinema as Historian

Cinema and History: An Analogy of the “Half-Cooked State”

Cinema Pursues the Path of History to Reveal What Is Hidden Even from Memory

The Sensible Fabric of the World

1. Foreclosed Forms: How Images of Mass Death Reemerged in Modern Cinema

The Look-to-Camera: A Modern Form of History

The Gaze of Death in Action

How History Reemerges Through Cinema

Alain Resnais and the Editing of Time

Monsieur Verdoux, or How Chaplin Puts to Death His Inner Wandering Jew

“Faces with Black, Rat-Like Eyes”

Hitchcock and the Indelible Corpse

Man Alone in the Face of the Machine of Death

Mass Death: Neither Reconstruction nor Mise-en-scène

2. From Versailles to the Silver Screen: Sacha Guitry, Historian of France

“Doing Versailles”: Controversial Project and Historical Polemic

Guitry and the Revenge of History

A Certain Vision of History

The Spectacle of Court Society

3. “Me? Uh, Nothing!” The French New Wave, Politics, and History

Hussar Thought

A Cinema “That Has Nothing to Say”

Heroes of the New Wave and Militants of Disarray

Politicization via Malraux

An Intrinsically Political Cinema: Filming Life with Style

The Algerian War: The Intimate Drama of the New Wave

Torture: The Limit Experience of the New Wave

A Political Janus-Face

4. Peter Watkins, Live from History: The Films, Style, and Method of Cinema’s Special Correspondent

Making War Through Making Films

The Time of Filmed Reportage

The Trials and Tribulations of an Exiled Filmmaker

The Deathblow as a Stylistic Form

Edvard Munch, or How to Resist the Passage of Time

The Watkins Way: History in Common

The Besieged Citadel and the Martyr Figure

The Alter-Filmmaker

5. The Theory of Sparks: A History in Images, According to Jean-Luc Godard

Taking Art Out of the Museum and Projecting It into History

From Langlois to Godard: A Historical Passage Through Images

From The Voices of Silence to Histoire(s) du cinéma, or, The Fraternity of Metaphors

The Historiographical Virtue of Histoire(s) du cinéma

Can Histoire(s) Redeem History?

6. Demodern Aesthetics: Filming the End of Communism

A Demodern Collapse

Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker: Communism Put to the Test of the Zone

Alexei Guerman’s Khrustalyov, My Car! Communism at the Bottom of History’s Closet

Aleksandr Sokurov’s Russian Ark: Communism Sapped by Nostalgia

Emir Kusturica’s Underground: Into the Bowels of Communism

A Few Images for “Those Who Are Lost”

7. America Unraveled: Master Fictions in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema

Revealing Resurgences: Under the Whip of Catwoman

End-of-the-World Films

“Very Bad Films”: Inside the Laboratory of Bad-Taste Films

Tim Burton, America’s Primitive

American Cinema Put to the Test of 9/11

Conclusion: All Histories Are Possible

Notes

Illustration Credits

Index