Constructing a Biopic Screenplay: Fictional Invention in the Biopic with Scant Evidence

<p>As a creative practice research project, this thesis sets out to write a screenplay about Suresh Biswas (1861-1905), a little-known Bengali adventurer who was a wild-life trainer and circus-performer in Europe and later became a Captain in the Brazilian army. The early biographies of Biswas, based on limited and unreliable evidence, pose a challenge to the screenwriter in terms of narrative reconstruction of his life as a biopic. While more information has become available recently, this project examines the creative and critical issues associated with researching this figure, overcoming the problem of scant evidence and positioning him within a presentist context. Drawing on Rosenstone’s conceptual model for understanding how historical knowledge manifests in fictional narratives, it investigates the nature and function of fictional inventions in biopics and the ways in which screenplays make creative use of evidence. In writing Biswas’ biopic, I use the microhistorical research method, knowledge about biopic script-drafting processes, and Bhabha’s notion of ‘vernacular cosmopolitanism’ to present Biswas as a non-Western, non-elite 19th century cosmopolitan, thereby constructing a counter-narrative to the dominant discourse of cosmopolitanism as a matter of exclusive Western, elite privilege. I argue that it is through a judicious mix of fictional invention and a diligent study of evidence that a screenwriter can get closer to the historical subject. The thesis thus initiates in practice, moves to biopic history and criticism, reverts to practice with knowledge about research and writing that not only enables me to overcome my screenwriting problem but also leaves behind a set of insights for other screenwriters working with scant biographical evidence.</p>

Constructing a Biopic Screenplay: Fictional Invention in the Biopic with Scant Evidence

<p>As a creative practice research project, this thesis sets out to write a screenplay about Suresh Biswas (1861-1905), a little-known Bengali adventurer who was a wild-life trainer and circus-performer in Europe and later became a Captain in the Brazilian army. The early biographies of Biswas, based on limited and unreliable evidence, pose a challenge to the screenwriter in terms of narrative reconstruction of his life as a biopic. While more information has become available recently, this project examines the creative and critical issues associated with researching this figure, overcoming the problem of scant evidence and positioning him within a presentist context. Drawing on Rosenstone’s conceptual model for understanding how historical knowledge manifests in fictional narratives, it investigates the nature and function of fictional inventions in biopics and the ways in which screenplays make creative use of evidence. In writing Biswas’ biopic, I use the microhistorical research method, knowledge about biopic script-drafting processes, and Bhabha’s notion of ‘vernacular cosmopolitanism’ to present Biswas as a non-Western, non-elite 19th century cosmopolitan, thereby constructing a counter-narrative to the dominant discourse of cosmopolitanism as a matter of exclusive Western, elite privilege. I argue that it is through a judicious mix of fictional invention and a diligent study of evidence that a screenwriter can get closer to the historical subject. The thesis thus initiates in practice, moves to biopic history and criticism, reverts to practice with knowledge about research and writing that not only enables me to overcome my screenwriting problem but also leaves behind a set of insights for other screenwriters working with scant biographical evidence.</p>

How Asthma Becomes a Part of Self: Illness and Treatment Narratives Based on Patients with Chronic Diseases

Increasing people turn the sufferings of illness into human “errors” and resort to medical science and technology for remedy instead of making meaningful moral responses to illness. This is not completely effective, and it will let them fall into the dilemma of humanitarian spirit. It is necessary to pay attention to the patient’s subjective world from the perspective of illness narratives. Based on the process of patient’s disease view, the writers explored the mutual influence of disease and the subject. In light with the life course of a patient with chronic disease and the daily experience, the writers started from three aspects: the social environment of disease, the social and cultural significance of disease pain and the process of interaction between patients and asthma, in order to reveal the social and cultural characteristics of chronic disease and how the disease becomes a part of their lives. Disease is interpreted as a kind of narrative reconstruction. By connecting different aspects of life, patients can repair the fracture among their bodies, themselves and the world. It is a kind of subjective treatment that patients give meaning to their personal experience in their own way, and then understand themselves and construct new identities and life scenes.

Paper Witnesses

This chapter traces the emergence of a literature of testimony in the years following World War II. However, this new tendency does not immediately reshape the literary field, which was dominated in the 1950s and 1960s by the (mostly) anti-documentary approach of the nouveau roman. Later, however, the document becomes central to explorations of the national past. In Marguerite Duras’s La Douleur (1985) and Patrick Modiano’s Dora Bruder (1997/1999), the “found text” is a figure of the personal and cultural repressed, before becoming a site of simultaneous identification and separation. Written traces set in motion a quest for the past, while narrative reconstruction aims to restore immediacy to the personal archive (as in Duras’s war notebooks), or to point to intimate truths beyond the impersonality and violence of the bureaucratic record (as in the documents collected by Modiano). In the wake of these experiments and at the turn of the twenty-first century, French and Francophone works alike experiment with documentary or hybrid approaches to historical trauma—especially in cases where fictionalization is perceived to be ethically risky, such as the Rwandan genocide.

Organizing Internationally: Georges Abi-Saab, the Congo Crisis and the Decolonization of the United Nations

Why and how have ‘Third World’ international lawyers engaged with the law of international organizations? This article considers Georges Abi-Saab’s 1978 work The United Nations Operation in the Congo 1960–1964, an important but largely forgotten intervention in debates about the power and authority of the United Nations (UN) at the height of the post-World War II wave of decolonization. Fusing careful analysis of the legal rules and instruments that underwrote UN operations during the Congo crisis with a narrative reconstruction of the accompanying political and diplomatic negotiations, Abi-Saab’s book examines the organization’s involvement in the conflict following Congo’s formal independence from Belgium in June 1960, both during and after Dag Hammarskjöld’s tenure as UN Secretary-General. This article takes up Abi-Saab’s account of Hammarskjöld’s role in, and management of, the crisis. It demonstrates that Abi-Saab understood the Secretary-General’s office to be not only hedged in by significant ‘constitutional’ constraints on publicly justifiable action but also uniquely equipped to coordinate competing interests and facilitate collective action. It also demonstrates that this dual understanding of the Secretary-General – both ‘legalistic’ and overtly ‘political’ – informed Abi-Saab’s commitment to developing international law in and through international organizations.