Today being the 153rd birthday of Jose Protacio Rizal,
I’ve dug up a series of columns I wrote nearly two decades ago, at about the
time I was writing the script of a film with the working title
Dapitan. The title became Rizal sa Dapitan when the film was shown. The film, directed by Tikoy
Aguiluz, starred Albert Martinez as Rizal and Amanda Page as Josephine Bracken.
Here’s the first column, which is really more about film adaptations of historical material.
MATTER OF FACT
Jose F. Lacaba
Manila Times, December 28, 1996
Messing with history
“ARE filmmakers,” a recent Associated Press feature
asks, “beholden to historical accuracy?”
The question has cropped up in connection with a new
film, The English Patient, touted by
critics as among the best of 1996. It’s a question that has always bothered me,
having written or co-written a number of screenplays based on true-life stories
about real people.
The English Patient is based on a novel by
Michael Ondaatje—in other words, on a work of fiction, a work of the
imagination, not a history. But the principal character, Count Laszlo de
Almasy, a Hungarian in wartime North Africa, happens to be a historical figure.
As played by Ralph Fiennes, Almasy is, in the words of
the AP report, “a brooding, handsome dreamer—a haunted desert explorer who
pursues the woman he loves obsessively and collaborates with Nazis in a last
attempt to save her life.”
That creates a problem. The real Almasy, according to
the daughter of a Hungarian diplomat in wartime Egypt, was a willing
collaborator who gave the Nazis lists of people to be arrested.
Elizabeth Pathy Salett, the diplomat’s daughter,
describes the film as “amoral and ahistorical” and contends that “movies like
this should be more faithful to what actually happened.”
The problem, as I have discovered in my other
incarnation as a screenwriter, is that it is devilishly difficult to be
faithful to what actually happened when you’re writing drama. You have to bend
reality a bit because your producers and your audience expect heightened action
and raging passion where historical records show only uneventfulness and
anticlimax.
In Operation: Get Victor Corpus, the Rebel Soldier, for which I did the first draft of the script (but
don’t blame me for the kilometric title), history was a little skirmish between
an army unit and a small band of New People’s Army guerrillas, according to my
informant, Victor Corpus himself. Cinema was a slew of helicopters dropping
bombs, deafening explosions, and stuntmen somersaulting all over the jungle.
In Eskapo, for
which (again) I did the first draft of the script, history was two escaped
political prisoners hiding in the trunk of a car that succeeded in leaving a
prison camp without incident, according to my informants, Geny Lopez and Serge
Osmeña themselves. Cinema was guards learning of the escape at the exact moment
when the car goes past the prison-camp gate, then firing at the wildly fleeing
car.
In Dapitan, a
film-in-progress for which I did the third and fourth drafts of the script,
history was two politico-military commandants named Ricardo Carnicero and Juan
Sitges with contrasting attitudes toward their prisoner, Jose Rizal. The
fourth-draft script has an unnamed composite character identified as
Komandante.
A hyper-realistic script on Rizal’s four years of exile
in Dapitan would have to be written in many languages—the Spanish of Rizal’s
“jailers” and Jesuit mentors; the Hongkong English of Josephine Bracken; the
Laguna Tagalog of Rizal’s sisters; the Cebuano Visayan native to Dapitan; plus
German, French, Italian, Latin, even a smattering of Hebrew, the languages that
the polyglot Rizal used in his correspondence with Ferdinand Blumentritt and
other European scientists.
Not being a polyglot, I made do with dialogue that is
mostly Spanish-flavored Tagalog—no ngunits, subalits, and marahils—but shifts to English when Josephine comes into Rizal’s life.
In my own defense, I can only say that the explosions
in Victor Corpus and the gunfire in Eskapo
were not in my script drafts, but even if
they were, I wouldn’t have been the first to mess with history for cinematic
purposes.
The real Bonnie and Clyde were small-time hoods, not
the tragic, romantic lovers portrayed by Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway.
The real Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid were
nondescript gunslingers, not the glamorous outlaws played by Paul Newman and
Robert Redford.
The real Pocahontas was not—according to Everything
You Know Is Wrong by Paul Kirchner—a sexy
Disney cartoon with “Barbie-like figure and attire,” but a girl of only 11 or
12 years old at the time in question, who “would have gone around almost
naked.”
In the journal that screenwriter-director Neil Jordan
kept while filming Michael Collins, he
speaks of creating a composite character, the double agent played by Stephen
Rea, who dies violently midway in the film. But this character was given the
name of an actual double agent who lived on to a ripe old age, outliving
Michael Collins himself, whose death ends the film.
Filmmakers aren’t the only ones who have shown little
respect for historical accuracy. Shakespeare himself was never bothered by the
question raised by Associated Press. The real King Macbeth of Scotland, for
instance, was not the murderous whoreson depicted in the play, and he didn’t
die when Birnam wood came to Dunsinane, according to the Reader’s Digest
Book of Facts.
“Far from being an ambitious usurper, as Shakespeare
describes him, Macbeth had a claim to the Scottish throne which was at least as
good as that of his rival, Duncan. Furthermore, Duncan was killed in open
battle in 1040 and not murdered by Macbeth as Shakespeare’s play claims. In
fact Duncan was a young, ineffectual king—not Shakespeare’s venerable and
gracious sovereign. And after Macbeth seized the throne by force, he went on to
reign for 17 prosperous years, from 1040 to 1057, when he was killed by
Duncan’s son Malcolm III.”
