Book Review
Synoptique, Issue 11.1
Fall 2025
Book review on Malte Hagener and Yvonne Zimmermann, eds. How Film Histories Were Made: Materials, Methods, Discourses. Amsterdam University Press, 2023.
“How Film Histories Were Made: Materials, Methods, Discourses is a self-reflexive anthology of essays that reaches beyond the book’s subtitle to develop a sensibility in relation to film history that is inclusive, expansive, and porous. As Trinh T. Minh-ha challenged and moved beyond the premises of ethnographic documentary filmmaking in her 1982 Reassemblage to “speak nearby” her subjects, How Film Histories Were Made achieves a similar proximity and co-habitation with film histories. The anthology considers the making of film histories as an act that reckons not only with the medium itself but also with historiography and history.”
