A contact of mine is raising money for a documentary about Basque children who escaped to England in 1937.   The contact only has a few hours to raise another tens of thousands of pounds for the project, or they risk losing everything.

There are other historical films, however, where time was even more urgent.

My contact’s film, “To Say Goodbye”, is  the story children who were evacuated from Bilbao in the time of Franco.  These children were then taken to England.  They were only meant to be in Britain for 12 weeks, but many have lived their entire life in exile.

The filmmakers plan to make an animation, using the recorded voices of the last surviving children.

Under the funding rules of a broker they are using, the filmmakers need to raise over 58,000 pounds within the next few hours.  Time will probably run out long before you read this.  By then, “To Say Goodbye” will probably say goodbye to the money that has been pledged so far.

Promoting the British War Effort

In his book, The History of the British Army Film & Photographic Unit in the Second World War, Dr Fred McGlade writes about the struggle to create films to get America involved in the war effort. It seems the Germans were spending a lot of money on movies, and the Brits were losing the propaganda war. Much of the footage we have of the Second World War today is because of a small group of dedicated men who filmed what was then current events. (See The British Photographic Unit in the Second World War.)

One of the first conflicts to be recorded on film was the conflict in Crimea. The invention of the photograph has changed history. We know much more about the American Civil War than most previous wars, as the number of photographs of that war tell us stories much quicker than words ever could.

The misuse of the Camera

Some war films and other “histories” have been pure propaganda.

I came across an old news report of a First World War battle being staged. The reporter witnessed the scene of a local baron, showing his prowess, through a kind of contemporary re-enactment. His forces were firing valiantly at a fictitious enemy.

Unfortunately for him, some real soldiers watched the events, didn’t know it was staged, and took up arms against the baron and his actors.  As they fled the real enemy, the reporter saw the Baron’s true character.

Telling the story of Armenia

Another story about World War I grabbed my attention. It was a book called “Ravished Armenia”

The book tells how Aurora Mardiganian escaped torture and massacre, and the horrors she went through.

Here Aurora tells of what she witnessed happening to another girl:

“And you, my little one,” [Hagdi Ghafour] said, just as low and soft.  And he repeated the questions to her he had spoken to her sister. She spoke softly, too – softer than had her sister, yet just as firmly. “She was my sister. With her I saw my mother die, and now you have taken her. I, too, have asked God to take me again to Him. You may kill me also, but I will never submit to you.”

After this, Hagdi Ghafour threatened to kill her as a warning to the others.  Three men with whips (called Bashi-Bazouks in the text) stood near.  They stripped the girl of her clothes and swung her “like a hammock.”

“Then, while we screamed with the horror of it, the third bashi-bazouk brought his whip down upon the swaying body.”

“I shut my eyes so I could not see, but I could not shut out the sound of the whip cutting into the flesh, again and again, until I lost count. Even when the girl screamed no more and her moans died away the whip did not stop for a long time. Then suddenly I realized the blows had ceased.  I looked and saw one of the bashi-bazouks lifting the girl’s body from the floor. He held her by the waist, and her arms and bleeding legs hung limp. She was dead.”

The author then spoke of seeing bodies on the side of the road, “I counted bodies laid at the roadside until I could count no longer! I wondered if God could make room for all of them in heaven.”

While Mardiganian escaped, time was running out for her fellow Armenians. The world needed to be convinced that Armenians deserved statehood, to prevent those tragedies from happening again.

The book was serialized in the Washington Times in 1917. But not all Americans read books and stories in the newspaper in the 1910s. The story had to be told on film as well, in order to reach a wider audience.

Aurora Dramatizes her own Story

In 1919, the Washington Times told the story of how this book became a film.

Aurora Mardiganian, still refered to as a girl, was no movie star. When she came to the ballroom of the Hotel Plaza, the “little waif” “hesistates at the door; a tear glistened in her eyes.”

According to an Washington Times, her mind didn’t hear the music of the orchestra and “bright lights of the New York Ballroom”, but rather the “darkness of the tents” and the rattle of the “drums which beat a call to summon an execution squad.”

She now had a new struggle.  The film had to be completed, to show the world, those who don’t read books, that Armenia was a nation worth saving.

A film was made, shot “just as Aurora remembered it.”

“Come down,” the director told her as one scene was to be shot, “just as you did at Geulick.”

Filled with memories, Aurora lept “to the balcony rail” and “threw her body over until her feet began to dangle over…” she lost her grip, bulky rugs folded around. She fell to the ground, and her foot bent under her and was crushed.

The Doctors attended Aurora, and gave her painkillers. Her ankle was fractured. Doctors orders included plenty of rest.

“But that will delay the making of my picture – and the committee wants it quickly, that they may let all America see it.” she protested.

She lept out of bed. “See” she cried “see, all is well already – it does not hurt at all – I can walk and do my picture all right now.”

At first, Aurora was carried.  They shot the scenes where “she could stand or sit still.” and not put weight on her fractured ankle.

The hurt seemed to heal, and Aurora denied that there was any more pain.  She re-enacted “wild” scenes of escape, of the enemy raiding the camps. “Aurora declared that her ankle was so well that she could do whatever was required of her.”

The picture was finished within the scheduled time frame. The last scene to be shot featured Aurora “on the deck of a steamship reaching her arms to the Statue of Liberty.” When this was shot, Aurora collapsed on that deck, moaning in pain.  Now that her work was done she could admit that it hurt.

The film could now be released, and the world would be convinced.

(Alas, it was not to be. Armenia did not gain a secure independence until the end of the Cold War.  And by then, it was much smaller than the homeland envisioned by Woodrow Wilson and others of the time.)

The Nanking Massacre

In 2009, Lu Chuan went to the small Welsh town of Lampeter to tell students about his film “City of Life and Death” which depicts events known as the Nanking massacre.

In his research for this project, Chuan visited libraries in China and Japan, finding documents which will probably still be there twenty years from now. As an ex-military man, Chuan also saw the benefit of interviewing Japanese veterans who were present at the massacre.

These men often welcomed Lu Chuan into their homes, offered him tea, but stood in an awkward silence. The interviews, from what I understood the translator say, appeared fruitless. Lu Chuan relied on his experience in the Chinese military to try and understand the way a soldier thinks. A Japanese soldier is just a soldier after all.

Not everyone agreed with Chuan’s version of the story. Despite Chuan’s past success and fame, and despite the fact that “City of Life and Death” included top Chinese talent and was very well done, it was rejected from some Chinese film festivals. The Japanese actors involved, according to Chuan, received death threats, and some had moved to China.

Chuan’s decision to tackle this topic seems to have cleared the way for other films about the Nanking massacre.

As history passes, old monuments wash away. There may not always be physical pain involved in talking about the past, there way not always be death threats and broken feet. However, there is another kind of pain that many filmmakers (and authors and lecturers) have to over come. There is the pain that is caused by the bad memories of the past.

When the story is worth telling, a storyteller must learn how to live with that pain it causes the storyteller until that story is told.

Writing hurts, research hurts, memory can hurt, and we should respect the right of others who remain silent about the past and chose not to go through that pain.  Some choose to cover it in fiction, others merely point the researcher in the direction of stories similar to their own.

I remember a child once telling me that “you never cry daddy.” Sometimes we need to hide the pain until our job is done.

The firing squad’s commander decided to shoot the retiree first, because he had the least time left to live. So, they blindfolded the poor old guy and the commander shouted:

“Ready!”

“Aim!”

The retiree, an avid birdwatcher, thought he saw a frigate bird (also known as the hurricane bird) in the distance.  So he immediately (and enthusiastically) shouted “Hurricane! Hurricane!”

The firing squad panicked and ran away. When they came back, the retiree had gone off to invent the game of golf.

Next they decided to shoot the “job seeker” -  in this economy he had the least to live for.

So they put him against the post and the commander shouted:

“Ready!”

“Aim!”

In the heat of the day, the job seeker hallucinated and thought he saw his girlfriend dancing with a cup of water and calling his name.

“Marcia!” he shouted with a dry mouth. “Give me some!”

The firing squad thought that he saw Martians, and they ran away screaming their heads off.

Well, when they got back, the jobseeker had gone off to establish himself as the world’s first career counsellor, and only the head hunter was left.

When they tied the head hunter to the pole, he was a very happy bunny.  He “knew” these assassins were idiots who’d run at a moment’s notice, and knew just how to outwit them.

So when the commander shouted “Ready!”

“Aim!”

The head hunter looked out into the distance with a false but convincing cry of alarm and interrupted:

“Fire, Fire, Fire!!”

Soon after the smoke cleared, the commander got a promotion and his squad were given hefty bonuses (subsidised by the taxpayer of course.)

Adapted from a playground favorite by Vasco Phillip de Sousa