Film, History and Memory

Film, History and Memory examines the relationship between film and history, exploring the multiplicity of ways in which films depict, contest, reinforce or subvert historical understanding. This volume broadens the focus from 'history', the study of past events, to 'memory', the processes – individual, generational, collective or state-driven – by which meanings are attached to the past. This approach acknowledges how the significance of the historical film lies less in its empirical qualities than in its powerful capacity to influence public thinking and discourses about the past, whether by shaping collective memory, popular history and social memory, or by retrieving suppressed or marginalized histories. This study aims to contribute to the growing literature on history and film through the breadth of its approach, both in disciplinary and geographical terms. Contributors are drawn not only from the discipline of history but also film studies, film practice, art history, languages and literature, and cultural studies.

Fearghal McGarry teaches history at Queen's University, Belfast, UK. He has written widely on radicalism and revolution in Ireland, most recently The Rising. Ireland: Easter 1916. He has led two major projects exploring the relationship between film and history, and has worked as a historical consultant on a number of documentaries and films.

Jennie M. Carlsten is Lecturer in Film at the School of Media, Film and Journalism at the University of Ulster, Ireland. She received her doctorate in Film Studies at Queen's University, Belfast, where she subsequently worked as a postdoctoral researcher with the School of History and Anthropology. She has published on the topics of cinematic emotion and Irish cinema.