The peer-reviewed open-access online journal "Research in Film and History" invites proposals for its third issue "Sources – Meaning – Experience: Film and Historical Research".
In the 1960s, audiovisual media started to be considered a research object by professional historians who approached them as historical evidence or didactic material; they were therefore first and foremost concerned about their historical accuracy and authenticity. Rather soon, these attempts were contested by more elaborate approaches formulated within film studies, and this imbalance in the conceptualization of film/history liaison remained thereafter largely unaltered.
Renewed debates about the use of audiovisual media were initiated in the late 1970s by historians such as Marc Ferro, Robert Rosenstone, and Pierre Sorlin, who problematized the historical potential of films and outlined a wide range of methodological and epistemological issues. In the preface to the collected essays Images Write History, Rainer Rother noted that “a historian is interested in a feature film with a historical subject not only because he sees it as a competing form of historiography”. 1 Whereas recent historical studies that employ film as their material indeed go far beyond the question of facticity or peculiarities of film reception, audiovisual media still seem to be kept on the margins of academic history in favor of other, more conventional sources.
"Research in Film and History" aims to provide a platform for an interdisciplinary discussion that explores versatile encounters between history and audiovisual media. We invite professional historians who incorporate film and other media into their research, and we equally welcome contributions from film scholars who adopt historical approaches and methodology in their work. We encourage submissions that use and reflect on new approaches as well as papers that focus on theoretically informed case studies.
Possible contribution topics include:
- Methodological aspects of applying audiovisual media as a primary or secondary source in historical research: What are the challenges, limitations, and advantages and what is, in sum, the historical potential of audiovisual media?
- Beyond the measure of objectivity: The problematization of such phenomena as historical experience, empathy, and memory in historical research on the material of audiovisual media.
- New interdisciplinary directions: How can the mutual enrichment between film studies, historical studies and various sub-disciplines be advanced further? What are the perspectives and pitfalls of interrogating audiovisual media as a source in microhistory and related research?
"Research in Film and History" welcomes contributions written in English. Please submit abstracts (max. 300 words) by January 07th, 2020 in MS Word file formats to film-history@uni-bremen.de
A style guide for submissions can be found here https://film-history.org/submit
Notification of acceptance is February 07th, 2020. Complete drafts are due Mai 07th, 2020. All articles submitted should be original work and must not be under consideration by other publications.
If you have any further enquiries, please feel free to contact film-history@uni-bremen.de
1 Rother Rainer, „Vorwort: Der Historiker im Kino,“ in: Bilder schreiben Geschichte: Der Historiker im Kino, ed. Rainer Rother (Berlin: Wagenbach, 1991), 8.