Traditionally what we were taught about history at school amounted to little more than a celebration of our nation’s glorious past. We learnt, for example, about the myths of the origin of our country, the lives and loves of our glorious kings and queens, the battles and wars we had won and lost, the rise of Empire and the gradual enfranchisement of our citizenry. Quite another view of history, however, is that it is our attempt to illuminate rather than celebrate the past. In this case, the information we call history is usually based either on testimony (“I was there and this is what I saw”) or on documents whose authenticity can be independently verified. Both sources of information may be open to dispute.
This Autumn we present three fiction films that address the interplay of memory and history in the attempt their protagonists make to describe or discover what took place in the past.
3 October 2009 - A Self Made Hero (Un héros très discret, 1996, Audiard, France)
Mathieu Kassoviz is the younger and Jean-Louis Trintignant the older version of Albert, our hero who, from humble beginnings in Occupied France, rises to find himself an officer in the army and eventually a member of the government. A very funny story but one that has a serious warning about what can happen when history finds itself in a tussle with memory.
17 October 2009 - Raise Ravens (Cria Cuervos, 1976, Saura, Spain)
Carlos Saura’s exquisite Cria cuervos heralded a turning point in Spain: shot while General Franco was on his deathbed, the film melds the personal and the political in a portrait of the legacy of fascism and its effects on a middle-class family (the title derives from the Spanish proverb: “Raise ravens and they’ll peck out your eyes”). Ana Torrent (the dark-eyed beauty from The Spirit of the Beehive) portrays the disturbed eight-year-old Ana, living in Madrid with her two sisters and mourning the death of her mother, whom she conjures as a ghost (an ethereal Geraldine Chaplin).
14 November 2009 - Waltz with Bashir (2008, Folman, Israel)
The film opens with a dream (an invitation to interpretation?) and moves to Folman’s attempt to overcome his amnesia of his part in the 1982 Israeli incursion into Lebanon. The first 88 minutes of the film are animated in a very particular way; they include a discussion with a psychiatrist who warns about the unreliability of the very testimony we are about to witness. The last 2 minutes of the film are live action contemporary film. If we understand Folman to be standing in for the State, we have a profound meditation on national amnesia and that nations as well as individuals can repress unwelcome memories.
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