Audiovisual History

The aim of this chapter is to consider relevant theories of visual and audio history whose ontologies a histosphere absorbs and elaborates. The first section surveys the relatively new field of visual history. It argues that a histosphere creates not just disparate images but a visual sphere in which history is brought to life. Research into audio history is an even newer and less developed field. The second section therefore sketches the outlines of an audio history of film and examines the aesthetics and function of film sound, understood as an equally important expressive dimension of histospheres. The two aspects are brought together in the third section: The fusion of sound and vision makes the historical film not just a model of a historical world, but a form of perception in its own right.

Experience and Remembering

This chapter shows that forms of experience and memory are not mere effects but constitutive processes of histospheres. Accordingly, the first section explores the complex interrelationship between film, body, and memory. It argues that embodied memories make it possible to experience a film’s historical world as a physical reality, and add a bodily experiential dimension to the mise-en-histoire. Building on these considerations, the second section combines them with theories of media-generated memories: Histospheres draw not just on existing embodied memories and conceptions of history, but are actively involved in producing personal experiences with identity-forging potential. The third section examines the workings of reminiscence triggers, whereby filmic figurations link the film’s historical world to the spectator’s embodied memories and produce a kind of déjà vu effect.

Modeling and Perceiving

The aim of this chapter is to develop a theory of how filmic figurations are already fused with conceptions of history during the mise-en-scène process, and thereby enable historical experiences. The first section will therefore examine the theoretical concept of figuration and the special relation between cinematic illusion and historical reference. The second section analyzes the strategies used by historical films to create filmic spaces and model an internally consistent, temporally arranged historical world. Building on this, the third section proposes that, for historical films, the film theory concept of mise-en-scène should be supplemented by a concept of mise-en-histoire: the imaginative referentialization of the historical worlds constructed by a film.

Immersion and Empathy

The aim of this chapter is to investigate histospheres as multi-immersive perceptual spaces that not only model a historical world but also profoundly influence our conceptions and interpretations of history. In this context, the first section examines the role of aesthetically modeled atmospheres and the moods they evoke. The second section builds on this examination by considering filmic space. Filmic atmospheres and spatial figurations of movement bring us physically and mentally closer to the action of the film. Another potent mechanism of perspectivation is film characters, and so the third section focuses on imaginative empathy with the characters who inhabit a film’s historical world. In combination with film experience as a mode of embodied perception, this inner perspective provokes interpretations and evaluations that we can extend to the filmic depiction’s historical references.

Film/History/Experience

This chapter describes the interactions and intersections between film experience and historical experience. The first section introduces the phenomenological theories underpinning the notion of film experience and applies them to the historical film. Focusing on concepts of embodied film perception, it discusses the spectator’s impression of making direct contact with a film’s historical world. This imaginary contact with history bears similarities to Frank R. Ankersmit’s theory of historical experience, which is examined in the second section. The interconnections between Ankersmit’s concept and Vivian Sobchack’s phenomenological theory of film experience are considered in greater depth in the third section. The aim is to develop a concept of histospheres in which sensuous and cognitive perceptions are fused into a unified cinematic experience of history.

Fiction Film and History

As well as taking stock of the existing literature on film and history, this chapter aims to develop a terminological apparatus for describing the conceptual core of the historical film. The first section makes reference to a classic semiological model according to which a film’s production of meaning is determined by its specific arrangement of signs. It draws parallels to debates within historical studies that have enabled a reassessment of fiction film as a historiographical medium and mode of conceptualizing history. Building on these considerations, the second section posits a genre of popular fiction film defined by its referential relation to historical events, individuals, and lifeworlds. The third section argues that this is less a matter of incontrovertible factual accuracy than of generating a feeling of authenticity.

Refiguring Historical Consciousness

By way of conclusion, this chapter examines the relationship between historical films and theories of historical culture. At the heart of its discussion is the thesis that appropriation of histospheres in spectators’ reception has a refigurative effect on our historical consciousness. On this view, the historical experiences generated by films augment the conceptions of history we have acquired from written accounts and sources with a physical-sensory dimension. Consequently, this chapter argues that two new forms of remembering make a substantial contribution to transforming our historical culture: The reminiscence triggers integrated in the audiovisual design of a historical film prompt spontaneous or “unbidden” memories that come to us contingently and are essentially receptive. The mise-en-histoire’s referentialization, by contrast, is a productive act of remembering.

Appropriation and Configuration

This chapter will seek to demonstrate that the process of appropriation also irrevocably inscribes the aesthetic parameters of a cinematic-historical way of thinking into our historical consciousness. Building on theories of the phenomenological relationship between the spectator’s body and the world, the first section develops a model of incorporative appropriation of history, which it connects to constructivist and cognitive approaches. The second section raises the specific experience of historical films described in the previous section to the status of paradigmatic core of a historical film genre, which it fleshes out based on a phenomenological conception of genre. Its systematic account of this genre integrates the theoretical discussion of the distinctive characteristics of historical films from the preceding chapters.

Introduction

This chapter introduces the term histosphere to refer to the “sphere” of a cinematically modeled, physically experienceable historical world. The prefix “histo-” denotes here not just (popular conceptions of) history, but also a particular bodily dimension. In the phenomenological space between audiovisual figurations and historical experience, a histosphere functions—in the manner of histology—as an innervated tissue that relays the potential semiotic meanings of the cinematically constructed past via physical-sensory stimuli. Against the general assumption that the constitutive feature of historical films is that they represent history, it is instead their audiovisual modeling and figuration of a historical world, which enables an immediate experience of history.