Juan Camilo Parrado Prieto English Class Essay August the 16th.

The Historical Film The academic history recently has put interest in the film making and the audiovisual resources, which in the past years was looked only as another entertainment. However, the possibilities of the historic science in this media are still being explored, not in the approach of making a history of the Seventh Art, but in the one of introducing a whole new way to produce history, a new historiographical method that not involve entirely the writing skills. Until now, this new historical technique has in it two principal ways to be approached: traditionally and experimentally. Traditional filmmaking can be described in one word: Hollywood. The traditional historical film has a strong influence from the film industry in its origin, and this means that this kind of film is more conventional, because its purpose is not to make history in its actual meaning; its purpose is to tell us a story developed in the past. This means, the film maker has the idea to show us the past just like it was, a reconstruction that means to be the reality. This kind of historical filmmaking doesnt have issues with the

subjective/objective element that has been explored by the historiography since the past century. It has its own research elements and this approach does not mean is the wrong one, in its dramatic and documental productions. Dramatic productions are easy to find, since the times of Cleopatra or Spartacus, this kind of production has been explored, in the latest years this can be shown on movies like Gladiator or Alexander. These productions are categorized by a lineal way to show the events and the individual characters. The documental productions are, in the mostly of examples, marked by a

huge political or ideological meaning. This can be seen in movies like Zeitgeist (all entirely false by the way) ,the Michaels Moore Farenheit 9/11 and Bowling for Columbine or the History Channel ones. These are categorized by an extensive use of the archive and the sources, limited by them and usually the only elements that are shown. Experimental filmmaking is much more complex and it involves a whole new way to do both the filming and the production of history. This kind of approach has traditional elements but is separated in many characteristics. The lineal way to show the history is left behind to make an entire analysis of the time and the multiple ways to view a single event (Sans Solei can be an example of this). The realism is separated too, showing us a preoccupation about the subjectivity (movies like Quilombo or Ceddo are examples).The individual characters are left behind too, to give more importance to collective figures ( Battleship Potemkin is a good example of this). In films like Shoah, we can see documental productions without the use of any image of the past but only the memories of the people that lived it. This characteristics are shared and can be different in all the movies. This approach is the one that the new historians are seeing as the principal way to do an audiovisual historiography.