Provocative excerpts from primary and secondary sources (some with audio glosses). Read the rationale behind these sound bites for more information.
591-600 of 734 Sound Bites. [show all]
< 551-560 561-570 571-580 581-590 591-600 >
591) History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake. (Stephen Daedalus in James Joyce's Portait of the Artist as a Young Man) [SoundBite #378]
592) Before condemning the historical feature film as an almost unadulterated fantasy that compares unfavorably with other modes of ostensibly factual narrative, however, it is worth considering the degree to which the same tendencies and representational modes encountered in the historical feature film are pervasive throughout mass-mediated culture in which we now live. (Mike Chopra-Gant 87) [SoundBite #1249]
593) While Hollywood may not have a legal responsibility to tell the full truth, I would argue that they definitely do have a moral obligation to do so. By constantly misrepresenting the facts to the American people, Hollywood fails to better its audience in any noticeable way and instead perpetuates the ignorance of a nation -- a true shame. (Brian Carroll, Lehigh University) [SoundBite #1838]
594) The South African poet Breyten Breytenbach wrote, "You do take your language with you wherever you go -- but it is rather like carrying the bones of your ancestors with you in a bag: they are white with silence, they do not talk back." It is the historian's job to make those bleached bones talk back. It is her distinctive and defining responsibility to make ancient texts speak to the present -- speak to us, to our problems, in our language. She must transform the dead into conversational partners. (David Harlan 52) [SoundBite #322]
595) One should look skeptically upon the mass media's engagement with history, not only because of the vast possibilities for historical revision, but equally because of the mass media's standard mode of address: a dissemination of predigested messages that require no active engagement or thought on the part of the individual consumer. (Alison Landsberg 67) [SoundBite #320]
596) [Historical films] come to grips with the past, making use of the available scholarship and setting out a cinematic interpretation of history that concerns issues that still trouble us in the present. (Robert Burgoyne 6) [SoundBite #1371]
597) The radical historian will . . . emphasize those facts we are most likely to ignore -- and these are the facts as seen by the victims. (Howard Zinn 41) [SoundBite #313]
598) A film is not a book. An image is not a word. This is easy to see (and say) but difficult to understand. At the very least it means that film cannot possibly do what a book does, even if it wanted to do so. And, conversely, a book cannot do what film does. . . . The larger point: the rules to evaluate historical film cannot come from the medium itself -- from its common practices, and how they intersect with notions of the past. The rules of visual history have yet to be charted. (Robert Rosenstone 14-15) [SoundBite #26]
599) [Barthes'] description of the plenary amplitude, the somatic intensity of the cinematic experience, especially the sense of rewitnessing the historical past, is a vivid reminder of the primacy of reenactment in the historical film. (Robert Burgoyne 8) [SoundBite #1376]
600) Suppose that all knowledge of the gradual steps of civilization, of the slow process of perfecting the arts of life and the natural sciences were blotted out . . . suppose a race of men whose minds, by a paralytic stroke of fate, had suddenly been deadened to every recollection, to whom the whole world was new. Can we imagine a condition of such utter helplessness, confusion, and misery? (Frederic Harrison, qtd. in Commager 2-3) [SoundBite #14]
