Thursday, November 3rd for a Rough Cut talk by Prof. Efrén Cuevas from University of Navarra in Spain. Prof. Cuevas will be giving a talk entitled “New Paths for Exploring “History from Below”: Microhistorical Documentaries”.
Traditional historical documentaries strive to project a sense of objectivity, producing a top-down view of history that focuses on public events and personalities. In recent decades, in line with historiographical trends advocating “history from below,” a different type of historical documentary has emerged, focusing on tightly circumscribed subjects, family archives, and often first-person perspectives. In my recent book Filming History from Below: Microhistorical Documentaries, I categorize these films as “microhistorical documentaries.” They include Péter Forgács’s films dealing with the Holocaust; documentaries about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; Rithy Panh’s film on the Cambodian genocide, The Missing Picture; films about the internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War such as A Family Gathering and History and Memory; or Jonas Mekas’s chronicle of migration in his diary film Lost, Lost, Lost. In my presentation, I will outline the key features of these documentaries, identifying their parallels with written microhistory and showing how they use the filmic tools to underscore specific traits such as their affective dimension or their essayistic approach. I will finally focus briefly on a paradigmatic example, The Maelstrom, by Péter Forgács.