Historiography and Historiophoty
Hayden White addresses the dilemma of “historiography” on the assumption that historical evidence is often as much visual as it is oral and written in nature. He therefore shows that the concept of historiophoty (the representation of history and the beliefs about history in visual imagery and filmic discourse) can be equivalent to historiography (the representation of the past in verbal images and written discourse) when dealing with past events. In this way, the visual material is no longer just an “illustration” of the written or said, but can be an autonomous instrument of studying and representing the past. The dilemma of a film’s historical value as historiophoty can be treated as a rising opportunity for the historical audiovisual expression to become an equivalent, independent method of representing human development.
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