[ecrea] An international conference on film and media

Reimagining American History in Film and Media



A  Two Day International Conference at Tel Aviv University, The English 
and American Studies Department.



June  14-15, 2015.




Keynote speaker - Professor Elisabeth Bronfen, University of Zurich.



The fascination with American history in popular culture is not a new 
phenomenon. However, in recent years, we have witnessed an ever growing 
interest in American nation formation. Thus recent films increasingly 
focus on the Civil War, for one, and on revisiting slave narratives as 
significant tales for contemporary viewers. Recent examples include such 
films as Tarantino’s Django Unchained (2012), Spielberg’s Lincoln 
(2012), Timur Bekmambetov’s Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter (2012), Lee 
Daniels' The Butler (2013), Gore Verbinski’s The Lone Ranger (2013), 
Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave (2013), and Shawn McNamara’s Field of 
Lost Shoes (2014). Television series, like Sleepy Hollow and American 
Horror Story also point to the increasingly Gothicized return to an 
(imagined) past, which is also present in more “realistic” shows like 
the highly successful House of Cards, which returns to the Civil War as 
a point of significance for  the protagonist’s current political 
aspirations. An episode of Da Ali G Show returns to the South where 
“Borat” attempts to buy a (white) slave. As these examples  suggest,  
the resurgence of interest in certain historical events is closely 
related to the present political moment.



This obsession with seminal historical events in the nation’s past is 
expressed in manifold ways in film and media. In History on Film/Film on 
History, Robert Rosenstone sees “the history film as part of a separate 
realm of representation and discourse, one not meant to provide literal 
truths about our past, but metaphoric truths.”  These “metaphoric 
truths” take many forms, from the romanticized and sentimentalized 
accounts of a glorified past, to works attempting a greater degree of 
verisimilitude, to the more overtly gothic and science-fictional 
portrayals. As Robert Burgoyne notes in Film and Nation, these films 
explore the “reshaping of our collective imaginary in relation to 
history and to nation.”  Elisabeth Bronfen's reading of   Django 
Unchained  as a film where a "new myth" is created, but one that has 
"history" in it, is relevant to the ways in which other  films address 
the historical as mythical and vice versa. It is this intersection of 
history and myth which we aim to explore.







We seek papers on these various returns of the historical to the 
contemporary scene. Possible topics include but are by no means limited to:



"New" Renditions of the past



The present concern with the historical as opposed to past representations



The use and abuse of history



The role of nostalgia and emotion in the retelling of past events in 
film and media



The current  political climate and its  role in reshaping the past in 
film and media



The role of historical trauma in retelling the past in film and media



Changing aesthetic practices and their role in the perception and 
representation of the past



Historical ghosts and revenant figures



Reimagining American wars



Memory and trauma; images of crisis



The representations of gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, and 
class and economics



Theoretical and critical approaches to historical representations





 Please send abstracts of 200-300 words to 
(Reimagining.History /at/ gmail.com) by 31.12.2014 to the conference 
organizers, Dr. Yael Maurer and Dr. Sonia Weiner.







Dr. Yael Maurer

English and American Studies

Tel Aviv University



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