Kim Nelson is a film and media maker, speaker, and professor who focuses on history, spectatorship, and screen culture. She is an associate professor of film and the director of the Humanities Research Group, The Live Doc Project, and the Moving Histories Network at the University of Windsor in Canada.
Making History Move: Five Principles of the Historical Film
Rutgers University Press, March 2024
Why was 12 Years a Slave so powerful? What did the 1985 documentary Shoah accomplish that the thousands of books written on the holocaust could not? University of Windsor professor of film Kim Nelson explores these questions and many like them in her new book, Making History Move: Five Principles of the Historical Film (Rutgers University Press, March 15, 2024). Nelson finds five principles that underpin the construction of historical narratives and what makes them so important and unique for viewers.
The five principles include Narration (how history is constructed into a story), Evidence (the interpretation and accounting of historical data), Reflexivity (breaks in the illusion of film), foreignness (exposing the strange and exotic in the past), and Plurality (the representation of the past from different points of view). Making History Move illuminates the form of history with the most significant impact on public perceptions of the past and collective identities in the present.
Praise for Making History Move from leading scholars in the field of film and history:
“Lucid and engaging, Making History Move directly confronts the theoretical and pragmatic questions that have repeatedly surfaced in studies of history and film. Nelson illuminates five principles that underpin the representation of the historical past in moving images. Filled with vivid ideas and marked by rigorous analysis, the book provides a blueprint for a genre that has increasingly shaped cultural understanding of the past.”
— ROBERT BURGOYNE, author of The New American War Film
“This is a wide-ranging and highly original piece of scholarship, which brims with fresh insights into the historical film. Nelson’s analysis of her subject is clear and compelling; she builds judiciously on existing scholarship in the field and creates a productive and adaptable toolkit for scholarship yet to come.”
— JONATHAN STUBBS, author of Hollywood and the Invention of England
“No one is better suited to undertake this project than Nelson, herself both a filmmaker and a scholar. She builds on the insights of a broad range of scholars in the field to produce what no one has yet achieved: a rigorous, comprehensive, and yet nuanced account of how moving histories work, providing a powerful methodology for future generations of film scholars.”
— ALISON LANDSBERG, author of Engaging the Past: Mass Culture and the Production of Historical Knowledge
“This is the book Hayden White never wrote, a readable, stunning work that shows in detail how the term historiophoty, a word he coined in 1988, is central to understanding the growing field of film and history.”
— ROBERT A. ROSENSTONE, author of History on Film/Film on History