Peterloo, Industrialization and the British Radical Tradition: Filming History from Below
摘要
In Chaps. 2 and 3 , we discussed films about two major events which changed the world. The American and French Revolutions not only had a lasting effect on the political and social development of the two countries in which they occurred. They also provided a template and an ideology that the alienated and disgruntled in any colony or state could use thereafter to challenge the status quo. The present chapter is devoted to films about the campaign to establish the Rights of Man, first enunciated in America and France, in nineteenth-century Britain. In this case, however, the focus is on one single incident in the history of that struggle, not the campaign overall. Single-incident dramas are ideal vehicles for filming history from below. They are small enough in time and space for the story to be accurately told and the motives and mindset of individuals caught up the event to be properly explored. There is no need for glaring factual shortcuts or simplistic characterization. At their best, when they are films in which the voiceless are given a voice, they are equivalent to the academic historians’ microhistory and serve to illuminate the complexity of the wider context in which the incident occurred.