Towards New Ways of Representing History: Generic Innovations in the Historical Biopic in Spain

As virtual sites of public memorialization, historical biopics play an important part in shaping our view of the past. The genre employs a range of formal and narrative strategies in order to create persuasive narratives about historical characters and events. However, nation-specific socio-cultural and industrial conditions frequently determine whose lives are deserving of biographical treatment and how their stories are told. The following comparative analysis of two recent historical biopics, Clara Campoamor, The Forgotten Woman (Clara Campoamor, la mujer olvidada, Laura Mañá, 2011) and While at War (Mientras dure la guerra, Alejandro Amenábar, 2019), foregrounds some of these nation-specific circumstances in the Spanish context. It then proposes that these two works employ innovative strategies that signal possible new avenues for the historical biopic in Spain. In the case of Clara Campoamor, Mañá suggests alternative ways of representing historical female figures in the public arena, whilst in his film Amenábar mobilizes the conventions of the Hollywood biopic to aid transnational readability.

A NARRATIVE ABOUT THE AUTHOR's MISSION IN THE MEDIA ENVIRONMENT (ON THE EXAMPLE OF AN INTERVIEW WITH A. IVANOV)

At the time of the reconfiguration of the literary environment in modern times, the analysis of the narrative that is constructed in interviews given by the authors about the publication of the book acquires special significance. The author takes the position of an expert on his own creativity, folding information down to formulas that satisfy different types of readership. The author produces a narrative that is not artistic, but has many properties of this type of narrative in connection with the specifics of the psychology of creativity. The narrative of a writer placed in a situation of publicly speaking about himself will obey the laws of representing “history of himself” as the hero of a “great story of creativity”, culturally and nationally determined. Social conventions on the writer's mission create a narrative framework for self-interpretation. The scheme of organization of human and literary experience determines the ethical and aesthetic parameters of the “narrative about the author”. The article shows how in an interview with the writer A. Ivanov (2003-2006) the metatext about the author's mission was formed. The recurrence of the narrative makes it possible to single out three vectors of the writer's self-identification: the boundaries of the artistic method, the archetypal plot of creativity, the legitimacy of the province in the production of national meanings.

Formation of historical memory as a strategy of modern mass literature

The article is devoted to the urgent problem of the formation of historical memory in different texts of Russian mass literature (B. Akunin, A. Chiz, D. Miropolsky and others).An analysis of the “Artifact-Detective” series gives reason to make sure that the consequence of changes in the authors’ historical consciousness has become the formation of a new strategy for representing history, focused on modeling of historical process. Modern retro detective stories and historical novels represent a variety of artistic versions of historical events. They are aimed at the formation of a new historical consciousness that’s why they are distinguished by clear discursiveness and a sort of provocativeness. National histories in these works are integrated into the “global”, and the main source of ideas about the past are myths, legends and fictional assumptions. Nostalgia for the past, interest in redrawing history is a peculiar way of avoiding the present: the lack of understanding of the present in modern literature is obvious. The processes of creating new historical myths in the mass historical consciousness make works of mass literature especially significant for identifying certain sociocultural trends.

Angelopoulos and the Lingua Franca of Modernism

This book examines the oeuvre of Theo Angelopoulos, whose films are deeply immersed in the historical experiences of his homeland, Greece, while the international appeal of his work can be attributed to his firm commitment to modernism as a formal response to the crises and failures of world history in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It considers some of the main themes in Angelopoulos' filmography, including the crisis of representation and the force of mediation; the question of representing history and how to come to terms with the past; the failures of the utopian aspirations of the twentieth century; issues of forced political or economic migration and exile; and the persistence of history in a supposedly post-historical present. This introduction discusses the lack of critical attention that Angelopoulos' cinema has received in the Anglophone scholarship and provides a historical overview of Angelopoulos' modernist cinema. It also summarises the individual chapters that follow.