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of over four hours, and over the years, the director constantly modified it, adding scenes, cutting them for special re-releases, and rearranging their order. It exists now in various media, including mid- to poor-quality VHS and even delicate prints in a handful of archives.
This book undertakes a variety of theoretical approaches as appropriate for each analysis. This means that in the interest of concision, I often leave finer details untreated. Some major influences on my approaches include Roland Barthes’ Mythologies (Paris: Seuil, 1957), especially the final essay “Le Mythe aujourd’hui”; David Rodowick's synthesis of Deleuze: Gilles Deleuze's Time Machine (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997); Robert Rosenstone's Film on History/History on Film (New York: Longman/Pearson, 2006); Henri Rousso's The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944 (Translated by Arthur Goldhammer, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), and finally Hayden White's essay coining the term “historiophoty”: “Historiography and Historiophoty” in American Historical Review 93.5 (December 1988).