Fear, Love and Historical Film Natalie Zenon Davis and the Desire for the FutureThe text presents the emergence of historian Natalie Zemon Davis’s reflection on cinema, from her consultancy for the production of the 1982 film Le retour de Martin Guerre and its author’s subsequent book, The Return of Martin Guerre, from 1983, through the book Slaves on Screen, from 2020, and scattered interventions in the 21st century. The text demonstrates how Davis’s reflection on history and cinema has been inserted into the framework of the formation of the historiographical discussion on historical films in the USA since the 1980s. Davis’s originality is highlighted, as she postulated the idea of cinema as a “thought experiment about the past”, an imagination as the future of the past, by combining critical-historiographic, aesthetic and ethical judgments in a historiographical evaluation of cinema. She lived a love for films and tried to “resolve” the historical anxiety that they cause in historians.
KEYWORDS
cinema and history; Natalie Zemon Davis; historical film