Provocative excerpts from primary and secondary sources (some with audio glosses). Read the rationale behind these sound bites for more information.

711-720 of 734 Sound Bites. [show all]

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711) The erosion of the presumed boundary between factual and fictional discourses has been the subject of much anguished commentary, with films that focus on the historical past sometimes held to standards of authenticity and verifiability that nearly equal the standards applied to scholarly historical texts. (Robert Burgoyne 5) [SoundBite #4316]

712) As a myth of national origin, the western serves and emblematic nationalist function, for it is a form capable of mediating and containing the central contradiction in American ideology – the contradiction posed by race. (Robert Burgoyne 48) [SoundBite #4317]

713) Melodrama constitutes a privileged form of popular connection with the past, and has provided a "particularly significant form of participation and investment within American commercial culture since World War II." (Robert Burgoyne 60) [SoundBite #4318]

714) Vietnam was represented in the 80s mainly as a family trauma, embodied in the person of the psychologically disturbed veteran, who the family structure alone could cure. Even when the American family was not present in the narrative, anxiety over the family was never the less visible in a displaced form, shifted onto the Vietnamese peasant family. The massacre or murder of a peasant family, often with the Vietnamese child represented as the sole survivor, became a standard seen in these films. (Robert Burgoyne 78) [SoundBite #4319]

715) Traditional forms of historical explanation, relying on concepts of human agency and causality, assume a kind of narrative omniscience over events that, by their scale and magnitude, elude a totalizing explanation. Modernist forms, in contrast, offer the possibility of representing, for the Western world, the traumatic events of the 20th century, such as the two world wars, the Great Depression, and the use of genocide as a state policy, in a manner that does not pretend to contain or define them. (Robert Burgoyne 89) [SoundBite #4320]

716) The extraordinary degree of contestation and debate circulating around recent interpretations of the American past has brought into view the powerful role that social memory plays in constructing concepts of nation. (Robert Burgoyne 104) [SoundBite #4321]

717) The contemporary desire to re-experience history in the sensuous way speaks to an analogous desire to dispel the aura of the past as object of professional historical contemplation and to restore it to the realm of affective experience in a form that is comparable to sensual memory. (Robert Burgoyne 105) [SoundBite #4322]

718) The reasons for the popularity of the gangster hero during the early years of the depression are still a matter of conjecture. There has always been room for the antihero an American popular culture (witness Billy the Kid and Jesse James), but these were usually cast in the Robin Hood "rob the rich to feed the poor" mold. The urban, ethnic gangster seldom had any such redeeming qualities in the films of the early 1930s, although by the end of the decade, the second cycle of gangster films, which began in 1935, concentrated on the role of the crime fighters and their war against criminals. (John E. O’Connor and Martin A. Jackson 68) [SoundBite #4323]

719) The evidence of the commercial film is useful because of its appeal to a mass audience. Common themes in films often reflect the years, desires, ideas, attitudes, or beliefs of the mass audience to which they play. (John E. O’Connor and Martin A. Jackson 19) [SoundBite #4324]

720) Historians using novels, memoirs, and other literary productions often make assumptions of effect when they have no audience analysis upon which to depend. The difference between using film and literature as historical evidence is one of degree, not of quality. If anything, film evidence may be more useful because of its wider audience. (John E. O’Connor and Martin A. Jackson 19) [SoundBite #4325]