Cinematic Enlightenment

        In History on Film/ Film on History, historian Robert A. Rosenstone calls attention to the negative connotation of cinema as an inaccurate medium that “distorts the past, fictionalizes, trivializes, and romanticizes important people, events, and movements, and falsifies history”, while arguing that this viewpoint must be negated (Rosenstone 5). In order to counteract this connotation, Rosenstone proposes that audiences and historians need to acknowledge cinemas’ impact on modern conceptions of history by reading films in a similar manner to primary sourced texts. With this in mind, I apply Rosenstone’s methodology to Nikolaj Arcel’s film A Royal Affair to convey how film has reconstructed the Enlightenment for my digital salon.

        In order to evaluate Nikolaj Arcel’s film A Royal Affair as a primary source, I divided my digital salon into three major sections; an introduction to my research, close readings of crucial texts from the Enlightenment, and my discussion and evaluation of the film’s historical authenticity. In the first section of my digital salon, I provide a brief summary of Robert A. Rosenstone’s scholarship that I apply to the film. In the following section, I briefly introduce the film synopsis before addressing my inquiry into the film’s historical authenticity. To further evaluate Nikolaj Arcel’s reconstruction of the Enlightenment, I draw on Rousseau's The Social Contract, and the Discourse of the Origins of Inequality in the following section since they are directly referenced in the film.  Despite the fact that my digital salon applies Rosenstone’s methodology to only one historical film concerning the Enlightenment, it provides an example of how historical films reconstruct history and shape how modern audiences understand past events.