Wednesday, December 21, 2016

History Embedded in the Atmosphere: Comparing ¨Beloved¨ and ¨Ida¨

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When studying slavery, especially the more mechanical and elaborate aspects of it, the inevitable comparison is made between it and an event such as the Holocaust. However, a quirky connection was drawn when I thought of what Beloved and the 2013 Polish film Ida. Just as the former is a post-slavery story from the perspective of black women, Ida is a post-Holocaust road trip film that follows two women in Poland who investigate the fate of their Jewish family. 
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The more I think about it, the more similarities there are. Within both works, the horrific event which set the course of the entire story is not only ¨over¨, but never explicitly mentioned as much as marginal events are either spoken of or thought about as vaguely as ¨these two people were shot.¨ When Toni Morrison wrote Beloved, she felt that a more compelling story could be generated if she wrote about slavery from a smaller scope as opposed to a grand or macro view of the whole, and we see a similar deal with Ida. In the film, we know that a fifth of Poland´s population perished along with how the killings continued with the Soviet occupation. Unlike films such as Schindler´s List and Son of Saul, which are great in their own rights, there are no instances of violence within Ida. However, as David Denby of New York Times noted, the history is embedded within the film, and it provides an eerie tone and bottomless atmosphere. Although it is clear that neither of these works were intended to be similar, Beloved and Ida both seamlessly blend the past and the present. 

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