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Join us next Wednesday for a book launch at Cinémathèque Québécoise for
INSIDE THE HISTORICAL FILM
By Bruno Ramirez
5:30 PM – cocktail and book signing
7:30 PM – lecture and screening
From cinema’s beginnings filmmakers have turned to the past for their stories, so much so that in many ways our historical culture is shaped more in the movie theatre than in the classroom. Inside the Historical Film argues how and why film can enrich our understanding of the past.
In the following excerpt from Inside the Historical Film, Bruno Ramirez speaks with Toronto-based director/screenwriter Deepa Mehta about the nature of “storytelling” and her Oscar-nominated film, Water.
Mehta’s approach to the past differs significantly from that of most professional historians. In her historical films, in fact, she doesn’t start by exploring the past in search of a story; rather, as she explains, “it is the story that propels me to the past.” Of the six directors who participated in these conversations, she stresses the “storytelling” nature that film has for her the most. Her primary concern, she emphasizes, is with telling a good story. But that entails rooting her characters in a specific place and time and recreating the story’s context as faithfully as possible. She focuses on the initial idea that led her to research the status and treatment of widows in India and explains how that idea transmuted into a story that led to her film Water. She also discusses the challenge of adapting Bapsi Sidhwa’s historical novel Cracking India into a screenplay that resulted in her film Earth.
For both films, the historical context was the India of the 1930s and 1940s, when the struggle for independence, the oppression of women, and the delicate balance between religious factions shaped much of that colonial universe. While trying to be as objective as possible in dealing with such themes, she does not hide her emotional involvement both as a woman and as a member of a family that, along with millions of people, was uprooted as a result of India’s partition. Moreover, as a member of the artistic and intellectual Indian diaspora, she brings her own perspective on the historical process of decolonization that, as she explains, has often been misunderstood, and whose repercussions are still felt today.
BRUNO RAMIREZ: You are one among a relatively small number of contemporary writers/directors who have turned to the past to tell their stories. Two of your most important films, Earth and Water, are set in the context of the decolonization of India and the partition that was imposed by the British colonial power. What has led you to that choice and to that particular historical context?
DEEPA MEHTA: It is not the past that has drawn me to my films; it’s the story. If the story takes me to the past, I couldn’t make it, I guess, more contemporary and bring it to the present. There were some stories that I felt had to be authentic and that required setting them in the past. But it is not so much about the past and the partition of India as it is about friends and how they reacted when the sectarian wars happened. So it was the story that propelled me to the past, as opposed to me looking into the past for a story.
BR: Let’s start with Water, which is set against the background of the independence movement led by Gandhi. In fact, you show Gandhi toward the end of the film in a most revealing sequence, and yet much of the story unfolds in a widows’ house.
DM: Exactly, I grew up in India and I had come across Indian widows. But when I was filming in Varanasi, in India, that was the first time I came to such close proximity to the phenomenon of Indian widows. So, I got to know one of them and went with her to a widows’ house and that was the first time, actually, that I saw a widows’ house. And I realized that it is a whole institution – not just the philosophy of Indian widows – a whole system that is actually set up to propagate that institution. When I saw that, it really made me very curious about the whole phenomenon. I started to do research, and I went farther and farther back in time. I also came across one of the most amazing contemporary books on India – Perpetual Mourning by Martha Alter Chen. The research she has done into the whole phenomenon is fabulous. Once I read that, I went farther back into the whole philosophy of Indian widows and went back to the chapters of the holy books of Hindus, and the more you delve into it, the more you understand. At first I did not do that research with the idea of doing a film on it; I did it because I was really very curious. Once I was deep into the research, I told myself “it would be fabulous,” because the phenomenon that really intrigued me was child marriage and consequently child widows. And once I pursued that interest in child widows, I realized it would be a great story. So I did not go into the past to look for that story; the story happened, so to speak, because I was pursuing that phenomenon in time. For it does not take place now; if I wanted to do a story about child widows set in our time, it would be totally inauthentic because it does not happen anymore. It was banned in the 1940s.
To learn more about Inside the Historical Film, or to order a copy online, click here.
For media requests, please contact Jacqui Davis.
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