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What is history on film?

The answer usually given to this question is that history is a set of events and circumstances, or perhaps a set of interpretations of those circumstances, that is translated more or less accurately and adequately onto the screen. The activities being undertaken as part of ‘What is History on Film?’ express a different view: they treat history as the outcome, the product, of bodies of film texts, rather than as that which pre-exists those texts. Project activities include:

• A case study of Italian cinema, intended as a proof-of-concept study to demonstrate the utility of a Critical Digital Humanities approach to film and history and its applicability to other national contexts or transnational and regional contexts (like Europe as a whole);
• Videographic (audiovisual) approaches to analysing history on film;
• A study of the political/historical classic The Battle of Algiers (Italy/Algeria 1966).