Rethinking the historical film form: trauma, temporality and indirect representation in historical essay films

ABSTRACT In film scholarship, historical film has been identified as a form that portrays events and experiences that took place in the past. By building on Caruth’s concept of indirect representation, however, this article identifies a new historical film form that is not necessarily set in the past, but engages with questions regarding history, memory and historical representation. It conceptualizes this new form of ‘historical essay film’, and by analysing Voice of My Father, argues that rather than manifesting a desire to represent traumatic events directly, historical essay films refrain from the presumption that the medium of film can represent the reality of past events. To this end, they engage with past traumas indirectly through narratives that are set in the present day. The study further contends that the main thrust of historical essay films is to probe the discursive fields in which certain moments of the past are fixed, narrated and become predominant while others remain overlooked and unaccounted for. The article concludes with the claim that, as a consequence of their unconventional formal structures, historical essay films diminish the temporal distance between the past, present and future while also opening up new possibilities for rethinking what historical representation means.