Making History
Post-Historical Commemorations of the Past in British Television
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.36399/GroundingsUG.1.277Keywords:
Documentary, The World at War, History, Historiography, National History, TelevisionAbstract
The postmodernist re-evaluation of historical study has led to an awareness of the value of the moving image to the historian. Film can present us with glimpses of a past independent of discourse and its unique link with reality carries with it inevitable assumptions of authenticity. Yet the selection and manipulation of material by the filmmaker, and the dependence on causality or the establishment of ‘fact’, makes historical documentary as problematic as any other mode of historiography. National history is shaped as national identity, and, ultimately, acts of commemoration say as much about the present as the past.
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