Reproducing the Tragedy

Reading through “Visual Technologies, Image Reproduction and the Copy” in Practices of Looking, made me reflect back on a recent arts article I read on CBC, called “Reliving the Tragedy.” One of the newest Canadian historical dramas to hit theatres is Polytechnique, a film based on the Montreal massacre of ten women from Ecole Polytechnique in 1989. The medium of film has been particularly influential in blurring the lines between reality and fiction, especially with the documentary genre but also with the use of real, historical events and people as blockbuster inspiration. Thinking about the reproduction of so many historical events and people through the dramatic and consumable medium of film has made me think about how we continually reshape and reiterate the “ugly” parts of human history in time for the next Academy Awards.

Among the Oscar nominees of 2009, as with many past Academy Awards, are a handful of Hollywood dramatizations of historically significant people and events, including Milk, The Reader and Frost/Nixon. It seems as if you are almost guaranteed an Oscar with a big-budget tear-jerker on the darker instances of humanity, such as the Holocaust or any of the wars in the world. But is wining an Oscar really the only motivation to retell these often tragic happenings in human history? I wonder what purpose these “reproductions” of history serve. And as Sturken and Cartwright question in their analysis of the proliferation of images of the Leftist icon Che Guevara, does consistently reproducing tragic events via cinema alter the meaning and
significance of them?

My guess would be yes. But I wonder how, and it what ways. Do these stories lose their significance when they are told through Hollywood actors and actresses? Are we doing the victims of these atrocities justice by allowing the masses to view their stories for $10.00 each? Do these films provide a serious commentary to these events, or are they pure “entertainment”? Can cinema capture the “truth” of these events?

I personally don’t think I’ll be watching Polytechnique.