In the tumultuous era of the late 1960s and early 70s, several currents of American art and culture coalesced around a broad sensibility that foregrounded the immediacy of lived experience, whether as an aesthetic or political imperative. But in popular cinema set in the historical past, this sensibility acquired complex additional resonances by speaking to immediacy and ephemerality through a framework of history, myth, nostalgia, and other forms of experience associated with temporal alienation or distance. The Presence of the Past argues for the film-philosophical importance of the soundtrack for cultivating an imagined experiential understanding of the past.
