In the movie theatre, history risks drowning in sensory response, in pleasure, or in shock. Yet the cinema can also contribute to a special knowledge of history. Cutting across genres and modes of filmmaking, exploring the effects of duration, gesture, movement, mise-en-scène, framing and editing, recognising affective connotations and the intricacy of figural-poetic devices, this article weighs the impact of the senses and the imagination vis-à-vis the cinema’s historical task. In transforming the narrative past tenses of both fiction and history into the present tense of film viewing, the cinema may be said to loosen the critical grip of writing (history’s ‘proper medium’), to destabilise legibility and interpretation, to interfere with the retrospective, synthetic work of history. But this variability, the inherent ‘impurity’, even promiscuity of the medium also invests cinematic experience with a vitality and urgency: it implicates us in what we see, it animates our response, which is at once aesthetic and ethical.
