Screening the Past: Memory and Nostalgia in Cinema

Description

This lively and accessible collection explores film culture's obsession with the past, offering searching and provocative analyses of a wide range of titles from ldred Pierce and ief Encounter to ging Bull and the Mood for Love . reening the Past engages with current debates about the role of cinema in mediating history through memory and nostalgia, suggesting that many films use strategies of memory to produce diverse forms of knowledge which challenge established ideas of history, and the traditional role of historians. The work of contemporary directors such as Martin Scorsese, Kathryn Bigelow, Todd Haynes and Wong Kar-wai is used to examine the different ways they deploy creative processes of memory, arguing that these movies can tell us much about our complex relationship to the past, and about history and identity. Pam Cook also investigates the recent history of film studies, re-viewing the developments that have culminated in the exciting, if daunting, present moment. Classic essays sit side by side with new research, contextualised by introductions which bring them up-to-date, and provide suggestions for further reading. The result is a rich and stimulating volume that will appeal to anyone with an interest in cinema, memory and identity.

Pam Cook is Professor of European Film and Media at the University of Southampton. She is co-editor of The Cinema Book (BFI, 1999), and her many publications on film include Fashioning the Nation: Costume and Identity in British Cinema (BFI, 1996) and I Know Where I'm Going! (BFI, 2002)