After spending the last month or so living a nomadic lifestyle, what seemed like a state of eternal moving has come to an end and I finally got settled in my new apartment. After a few days, I was apparently lost without the thrill of living out of a suitcase and having no idea where many of my personal possessions were, so I got packed again and went back to Toronto for the weekend. The main reason was to go to the Virgin Music Festival, but I also worry that I've developed some sort of sadistic addiction to moving, as though I don't recognize myself unless my shins are covered in Ikea furniture-inflicted bruises.
While I was at home, I had the chance to catch up with the goings on at the film festival, particularly with regard to Passchendaele (which I am Matrix-level excited to see). After forcing myself to move on from my nostalgia for last year's festival (where thanks to a well-connected friend, I got to go to all the galas and parties and thus spent 13 days straight having more free food and drinks and less sleep than I ever thought possible), I turned my focus to looking further into the most expensive movie ever made in Canada (an unheard of 20 million bucks). The force of nature behind this film - Paul Gross - is an impressive guy and a great Canadian. I say this not only because he played a mountie and a soldier and isn't especially hard on the eyes, but because he single-handedly fought to have this film made and therein for Canadian history to have a voice in the public realm.
I got to thinking about the various stages that he went through in order to make this film and was pleased and impressed to find that there was an element of public history in all of them. His inspiration came from his grandfather and therefore having the experience of the Great War within living memory. History certainly resonates far more in the mind when its being told as a first-person account. This motivated him to learn more and most importantly, to respect and honour not only the soldiers who gave their lives in the war, but the value that event has to all Canadians as a part of our history and a defining moment in nationhood. I always say that as a human being, the most important part of history is not memorizing dates and facts, but to feel history, to connect emotionally with the events of the past, from which one can develop an understanding of human experience and why history matters. Not everyone can be (or wants to be) a historian in the academic sense, but I think everyone is capable of feeling history, because human emotions have remained pretty much the same throughout time - love is joy and death is sadness. It's for this reason that I see great value in film and television as a way to make people see and feel the power of the past. For all the criticism - much of it warranted - that pop history receives, it is arguably the most effective and accessible way to communicate historical information to the public. Because of this movie, many people will feel something and learn something about Canadian history that they may otherwise never have known. What they see might tweak their interest and inspire them to pursue further learning. I think this potential is incredible and something historians must acknowledge as a necessity in the field as the world becomes ever more digitized and impersonal.
I wanted to urge everyone to check out the website for Passchendaele as it is a brilliant example of both public history and digital history. Paul Gross has posted all his grandfather's letters from during the war, has a blog that he wrote throughout the filming of the movie and has interactive programs to give kids an incentive to learn about the war and how people felt during that time. There's the opportunity for kids to write their own letter from the front as they'd imagine it and vivid before and after pictures of the farmland/battlefields of WW1. In doing further research, I found out that in addition to doing it because it mattered very much to him to get the info out to people, the detail put into the website was a tool he used to raise the money needed to make the film. He met with Canada's richest people and as many people from the government as he could and used the website to show them why this movie needed to be made and thus why they should give him the money to make it. This is a whole other avenue of public history and one particularly relevant to this class. This film has come at a really good time for those of us in the program as it's a really good example of public history and digital history in practice as well as a great example of what passion and perseverance in history can accomplish.
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