Provocative excerpts from primary and secondary sources (some with audio glosses). Read the rationale behind these sound bites for more information.
251-260 of 734 Sound Bites. [show all]
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251) When filmmakers criticize historians for applying an inappropriate set of criteria to the evaluation of film, they often cite the problem of comprehensiveness. Too often, they argue, academics examine films with an interest in finding a complete, balanced, and detailed exposition on a subject. Scholars expect films to explore multiple causes of behavior and events and point out other accounts of what happened, much as an historian attempts in footnotes or reflective analysis. Academics, they claim, readily expect the same breadth of coverage they seek in a book and complain too frequently that a film "leaves out" important information or alternative explanations. But is it valid to evaluate films by the standard of comprehensiveness? (Robert Brent Toplin, "Filmmaker" 1213) [SoundBite #251]
252) Although nobody wants to meddle with the private and personal message of a movie, sometimes it is proper to bring a motion picture into public consciousness, at least as a beginning point for interpretation and understanding, and to free the work from the iron grip of aesthetics so that audiences will understand its cultural meaning. For this purpose, we need to return to the power of words, and realize that sometimes a word, properly chosen and used, can be worth a thousand pictures. (Ray B. Browne ix-x) [SoundBite #252]
253) [There is] the emergence of a hybrid national narrative that turns the nostalgic past into the disruptive "anterior" and displaces the historical present -- opens it up to other histories and incommensurable narrative subjects. (Homi Bhabha 318) [SoundBite #253]
254) The human mind seems to require a usable past because historical memory is a key to self-identity, a way of comprehending one’s place in the stream of time, and a means of making some sense of humankind’s long story. It is nearly impossible to step outside of time, to cut oneself off from the past as if its hand were not upon us. The study of history, moreover, reveals the long, hard path of human striving for dignity. (Gary Nash et. al. 8-9) [SoundBite #254]
255) Rather than generating historical amnesia, as is so often claimed, film and media may generate its opposite, an inability to stop obsessing about an event. (Robert Burgoyne, "Prosthetic") [SoundBite #255]
256) As a form of narrative interpretation that brings to spectacular life the sweeping themes of the historical past, the Hollywood historical film has played a decisive role in articulating an image of America that informs, or in some cases challenges, our sense of national self-identity, an image of a nation that is then projected to the world. (Robert Burgoyne 2) [SoundBite #1370]
257) Leaders continue to use the past to foster patriotism and civic duty and ordinary people continue to accept, reformulate, and ignore such messages. (John Bodnar 20) [SoundBite #257]
258) By prosthetic memories I mean memories which do not come from a person's lived experience in any strict sense. Prosthetic memories are memories that circulate publicly, that are not organically based, but that are nevertheless experienced with one's own body by means of a wide range of cultural technologies; prosthetic memories thus become part of one's personal archive of experience, informing not only one's subjectivity, but also one's relationship to the present and future tenses. These memories are not lived, nor are they "natural," and yet they both organize and energize the bodies and subjectivities that take them on. (Alison Landsberg, "Prosthetic" 33) [SoundBite #258]
259) The political and social structure, including the principal political values of a people, directly shapes the notions of time and of history that prevail among them. (Meyer Fortes, qtd. in Kammen, Mystic 5) [SoundBite #259]
260) I assume that history is not a well-ordered city (despite the neat stacks of the library) but a jungle. I would be foolish to claim that my guidance is fallible. The only thing I am really sure of is that we who plunge into the jungle need to think about what we are doing, because there is somewhere we want to go. (Howard Zinn 55) [SoundBite #260]
