Film and History

This theme investigates the underutilized comparative mode in film history research, focusing on how systematic cross-regional and cross-temporal comparisons can reveal larger patterns and factors shaping cinema cultures. It is concerned with moving beyond monocentric, localized studies of film exhibition and audience practices to integrate data and test hypotheses that explain cultural similarities and differences across contexts. Emphasizing methodological rigor, this approach can harness digital tools and interdisciplinary methods to enable broader historical generalizations and understanding.

This research area concentrates on how films serve as historical and cultural artefacts that not only capture but also construct meanings, symbols, and ideologies of specific time frames and societies. Studies examine how cinema narrativizes social realities, propagandistic aims, national identity formation, and the expression of diverse discourses related to politics, ethnicity, and social issues. Films are approached as dynamic spaces where lived cultural experiences intersect with historical processes, enabling an understanding of both the aesthetics and sociopolitical functions of cinematic representations.

This thematic cluster probes the complex relationships between cinema, history, and other visual media by focusing on how films negotiate temporality through anachronism, intermedial references, and artistic migration. It explores how films evoke multiple temporalities, not only through narrative but via visual and formal strategies that challenge linear or document-based historical understandings. The studies engage with art-historical theory, philosophical inquiries into historical representation, and case analyses of filmmakers who deliberately invoke anachronism to provoke new cognitive and affective responses to history.

This research area traces the historical and ideological rationales behind cinema's adoption in educational contexts, exploring multi-faceted arguments—technological, cultural, moral, cognitive—that have justified its use in schools. It examines shifting educational discourses that promote film as a modern pedagogical instrument, capable of moral instruction, aesthetic sensitization, and fostering audiovisual literacy. The approach integrates perspectives from film, education, and cultural policy to understand the evolving relationship between cinematography and schooling across different historical moments and geographies.

This theme explores documentary and narrative film as mediums of postcolonial memory work, focusing on how visual representation, oral testimony, and historical inquiry intersect to examine colonial and postcolonial legacies. It emphasizes microhistorical approaches and intercultural dialogues within cinema that confront trauma, social upheaval, and marginalized identities, often providing counter-narratives to dominant historiographies. Such work reveals visual media's capacity to mediate collective memory and public discourse in postcolonial contexts.

This research thread focuses on the rediscovery, historiography, and reconsideration of regional and language-specific cinemas, emphasizing their role in cultural identity formation and nation-building. It addresses how film industries tied to minority or regional languages assert cultural specificity and negotiate legacies of marginalization, restoration, and critical reevaluation. This involves archival recovery, translation, and cross-cultural academic collaboration that collectively reshape the dominant narratives of national cinema histories.

This theme interrogates the role of film media in producing and perpetuating racialized and gendered stereotypes, often aligned with ideological state or imperial interests. Analyses focus on how cinematic narratives normalize hegemonic versions of history and identity, especially within the contexts of colonialism, racism, and gender oppression. The discourse reveals the complexities of cultural representation, including the ways marginalized identities are excluded, exoticized, or instrumentalized within popular media forms, impacting collective memory and cultural politics.