Vous consultezLe téléfilm historique postmoderne : spectacularisation de l’Histoire et « montage hystérique »

This text is about a kind of film, generally made for television, that would seem to imply, at first, neither narrative strategy nor spectacular effects: the historical television film. But the so-called post-modern historical television film includes these two features, and this metamorphosis appears in the substitution of the logic of the plausible to the one of the historical truth and in a “spectacularization” noticeable both in the picture and in its mode of editing. The paper approaches this question from the viewpoint of semantics (the logic of the plausible where diegetic logic dominates the historical data) and pragmatics (conditions of reception determined by the genre horizon of expectations). The examples analyzed, (among which The Last Day of Pompei), demonstrate a cross-breeding between the true and the plausible, while the historical documentation becomes a fictional material. The study of the series Bloodliest Battle (French title: Jurassic Fight Club), shows, on the level of “hysterical editing” as it is called, a formal technique of very fast rhythm and a wealth of audiovisual effects which contribute to the confusion between the true and the plausible.