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Film Nation

Film Nation

Hollywood Looks at U.S. History, Revised Edition

Robert Burgoyne

From The New World to United 93, analyzing films that establish an alternative history of the United States

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176 Pages, 6 x 9 in

Paperback
9780816642922
Published: March 12, 2010

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Film Nation

Hollywood Looks at U.S. History, Revised Edition

Robert Burgoyne

ISBN: 9780816642922

Publication date: March 12th, 2010

176 Pages

8 x 5

"Film Nation is distinguished by Robert Burgoyne’s critical acuity, his on-the-money remarks about the subjects he interrogates, as well as the singularity of his focus on American Cinema and the ways by which film suggests much about American national identity." —Cineaste

"In Film Nation Robert Burgoyne argues that popular film plays a crucial role in formulating the imagined community of the nation state. A rewarding read." —Film and History

"Film Nation rewards the reader with a continuous flow of stimulating ideas about how to discuss the content of recent history films." —Journal of American History

"Any historian who is interested in investigating film as history should forget about disciplinary turf wars and read Robert Burgoyne’s Film Nation: Hollywood Looks at U.S. History. A theoretically sophisticated but clearly and elegantly written work." —Rethinking History

Events of the past decade have dramatically rewritten the American national narrative, bringing to light an alternate history of nation, marked since the country’s origins by competing geopolitical interests, by mobility and migration, and by contending ethnic and racial groups.

In this revised and expanded edition of Film Nation, Robert Burgoyne analyzes films that give shape to the counternarrative that has emerged since 9/11—one that challenges the traditional myths of the American nation-state. The films examined here, Burgoyne argues, reveal the hidden underlayers of nation, from the first interaction between Europeans and Native Americans (The New World), to the clash of ethnic groups in nineteenth-century New York (Gangs of New York), to the haunting persistence of war in the national imagination (Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima) and the impact of the events of 9/11 on American identity (United 93 and World Trade Center).

Film Nation provides innovative readings of attempts by such directors as Martin Scorsese, Clint Eastwood, and Oliver Stone to visualize historical events that have acquired a mythical aura in order to open up the past to the contemporary moment.

Preface to the Revised Edition, Acknowledgments, Introduction, 1. Race and Nation in Glory, 2. Native America, Thunderheart, and the National Imaginary, 3. National Identity, Gender Identity, and the Rescue Fantasy in Born on the Fourth of July, 4. Modernism and the Narrative of Nation in JFK, 5. Prosthetic Memory/National Memory: Forrest Gump, 6. The Columbian Exchange: Pocahontas and The New World, 7. Homeland or Promised Land? The Ethnic Construction of Nation in Gangs of New York, 8. Haunting in the War Film: Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima, 9. Trauma and History in United 93 and World Trade Center, Notes, Index