How Does the Film Form Historicize the Film Narrative and the World Depicted on the Screen? Analysis of the Phenomenon on Selected Examples

Abstract

The article deals with the issue of aesthetic-formal strategies of historicizing the film narrative and the screen world presented in historical cinema. It shows by means of which strategies – formal means of expression – the film narrative and the world depicted are historicized. In the introduction, a key analytical concept – historicity – is introduced. The category of historicity is shown as heterogeneous, requiring each time a conceptualization relativized to the cultural context of its use. In the article it is conceptualized in various ways, e.g. as: variability/existence in time (a way of understanding time); repetition; past; chronological; linearity; layering; rhythmic; causal; development; progress; shift/turn to the past/references to the past; (futuristic) projection of the past; tradition; memory of the past; (historical) consciousness; scholarly (historiographical); momentousness; obsolescence/ anachronism/ archaicity/ antiquity; style of thought; narrative; discursive; documentary/source; meta-historical; genre. The strategies of historicizing the film narrative and the cinematic world presented are conceived in the text as the numerous ways of equipping the film with various kinds of formal/filmic signs of historicity, allowing to obtain in the act of actualization of the work by the viewer/researcher the impression of the effect of historicity of the narrative and the world presented. They form the film poetics of historicity. In the following sections of the article, signs of historicity in the function of historicizing the cinematic narrative and the depicted world are analyzed on the example of various films. They consist of (1) paratexts; (2) the composition of the film narrative.