The Omnipotence of Simulacra: Charles II and the Divine Right of Signs

Building on the earlier reasoning of Barthes, Baudrillard, and Jameson, this article reads the hyperproduction of historical signs as a symptomatic expression of the loss of History and argues for a new mode of cinematic historiography (under Deleuze's sense of ”falsifying narration” and Baudrillard's conception of ”neo-realism”), operating under an epistemology which, in its revised explanation of our relationship with history, should now be seen to occupy the space of the real. Michael Hoffman's 1994 film Restoration, representing a filmic genre newly described as ”historical cine-fiction,” is shown to be simultaneously an example of contemporary nostalgia and a validation of the neo-real.