Slaves on Screen
Film and Historical Vision
People have been experimenting with different ways to write history for 2,500 years, yet we have experimented with film in the same way for only a century.
Noted professor and historian Natalie Zemon Davis, consultant for the film The Return of Martin Guerre, argues that movies can do much more than recreate exciting events and the external look of the past in costumes and sets. Film can show millions of viewers the sentiments, experiences and practices of a group, a period and a place; it can suggest the hidden processes and conflicts of political and family life. And film has the potential to show the past accurately, wedding the concerns of the historian and the filmmaker.
To explore the achievements…
Natalie Zemon Davis is the author of several books, including The Return of Martin Guerre and Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives. Davis is the Henry Charles Lea Professor of History Emeritus at Princeton University and Adjunct Professor of History and Senior Fellow, Centre for Comparative Literature, University of Toronto. Davis lives in Toronto with her family.
