Film and History

The long, rich history of Francophone cinematic culture has been largely absent from the pages of French Historical Studies. The current issue offers a corrective by initiating dialogue between historians and film studies specialists, and this introduction lays a groundwork by briefly sketching intellectual and cultural contexts for the articles that follow. Brett Bowles, Christian Delage, and Thibault Guichard examine films that recover voices silenced by abuses of state power or antistate terror, adding to existing work on how visual media preserves evidence of violence and so broadening our understanding of how history is constituted. Vanessa Brutsche engages a rich literature on how cinematic fictions represent the past with an article that explains how two popular films of the 1970s married historical “truths” with contemporary cultural referents to reappraise the French past and challenge illusions of progress. Kamel Ben Ouanès and Patricia Caillé’s overview of Tunisian cinema explores its complex relationship to state, civil society, and an international “Third Cinema” while reminding us how much Francophone cinema has become transnational in contexts of production and subject matter alike.