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Film as Evidence, Film as History and Film in History: Some African Perspectives
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 April 2022
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During my undergraduate years, a long time ago now, I cannot remember a single instance when any form of film was used for any purpose whatsoever in a history course at Cambridge University. Yet clearly film has become more acceptable to the historical academy as a whole in recent years. My own experience of engaging with film has been in three ways: with film as a form of historical evidence; through exploring the role film has played ‘in’ history, possibly by influencing opinions and policies; and, most controversially for historians at large, with analysing film as attempted history, as a form of history itself.
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References
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1 For further discussion of these approaches, see Bickford-Smith, V. and Mendelsohn, R., ‘Film and History Studies in South Africa Revisited: Representing the African Past on Screen', South African Historical Journal (Hereafter SAHJ), 48 (2003) pp.1-9.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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3 Two books that examine western cinematic stereotyping of third world ‘others’ are Shohat, E. and Stam, R., Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media, (London and New York, 1994) and Cameron, K.M., Africa on Film: Beyond Black and White, (New York, 1994).Google Scholar
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28 Bickford-Smith, ‘Picturing Apartheid’ discusses these sequences and analyses the successes and failures of these films in far greater detail than is possible here.
29 Biko, I Write What I Like, p.28.
30 See the chapters by Saul, Baum and Nasson in Black and White in Colour.