Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

A History of 1970s Experimental FilmQuestions of History

A History of 1970s Experimental Film: Questions of History [What are the decisions made when a historical moment is selected, con- textualised within particular frameworks and used to narrate the past? What exactly is the evidence determining the ‘facts’ of history? Should history, as cultural historian Marius Kwint suggests, ‘fully admit to its illusory and constructed nature, and stop pretending that it refers to a real process which is amenable to systematic analysis and even prediction’?1 Should it admit to the sometimes arbitrary choices made by the historian who follows a hunch or a path with a head already full of ideas, but who through necessity gets momentarily side-tracked as new discoveries make themselves visible? What are the positioned approaches taken by historians, bringing their world-views to shadow the table where chosen sources are spread out for examination? How are these sources revealed in the light of the future moment of the new history’s arrival? These questions raise possibilities which the practice of history brings to the fore, and to my mind these positioned approaches cannot pretend to exist within the certainties of a definitive methodology. Instead, I believe they should embrace an openness required for a methodology of discovery more akin to Paul Feyerabend’s ‘conviction that anarchism, while perhaps not the most attractive political philosophy, is certainly excellent medicine for epistemolog/ (Feyerabend’s italics).2] http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png

A History of 1970s Experimental FilmQuestions of History

Download PDF
23 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/springer-journals/a-history-of-1970s-experimental-film-questions-of-history-TzsTQwUPVy
Publisher
Palgrave Macmillan UK
Copyright
© Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 2015
ISBN
978-1-349-47491-2
Pages
12 –35
DOI
10.1057/9781137369383_2
Publisher site
See Chapter on Publisher Site

Abstract

[What are the decisions made when a historical moment is selected, con- textualised within particular frameworks and used to narrate the past? What exactly is the evidence determining the ‘facts’ of history? Should history, as cultural historian Marius Kwint suggests, ‘fully admit to its illusory and constructed nature, and stop pretending that it refers to a real process which is amenable to systematic analysis and even prediction’?1 Should it admit to the sometimes arbitrary choices made by the historian who follows a hunch or a path with a head already full of ideas, but who through necessity gets momentarily side-tracked as new discoveries make themselves visible? What are the positioned approaches taken by historians, bringing their world-views to shadow the table where chosen sources are spread out for examination? How are these sources revealed in the light of the future moment of the new history’s arrival? These questions raise possibilities which the practice of history brings to the fore, and to my mind these positioned approaches cannot pretend to exist within the certainties of a definitive methodology. Instead, I believe they should embrace an openness required for a methodology of discovery more akin to Paul Feyerabend’s ‘conviction that anarchism, while perhaps not the most attractive political philosophy, is certainly excellent medicine for epistemolog/ (Feyerabend’s italics).2]

Published: Nov 27, 2015

Keywords: Popular Culture; Position Approach; Move Image History; Experimental Film; Public Collection

There are no references for this article.