WRITING YOUR FAMILY HISTORY by Deborah Cass

Author:Deborah Cass [Deborah Cass]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781847974426
Publisher: Crowood
Published: 2012-05-05T16:00:00+00:00

Film and Documentary References

I also referred my readers to the literature of Thomas Hardy who set his novels in and around nineteenth-century Dorset and chronicled the lives of people living in the rural towns and villages. Tess of the d’Urbevilles is set in Shaftesbury, shows an intimate knowledge of the town and follows the downfall of Tess Durbeyfield. I mentioned to my readers the film of the book, and while Ann Cass’s experiences were obviously very real, the film Tess (1980) shows her plight as a poor agricultural worker fallen on hard times, working in all weathers. To give my readers a visual realization of how Ann Cass might have worked and its probable nature, this does rather well.

If you think that to compare your relatives’ lives with Hollywood films is rather fanciful, let me tell you of my great-grandfather’s comparison of his own experiences to those depicted in the cinema. In a letter that he wrote to his grandson he makes mention of the film How Green Was My Valley (1941) which shows a mining community. He says that, ‘it was very good, but to an old miner who knows, the falling debris in the mine was very overdone’, and how he thought the exaggerated size of the firing box ‘very funny’! His reference to the film and the fact that he thought it was good, despite the exaggeration in the action scenes, I think lends a certain legitimacy to your directing your readers to filmic ‘reproductions’ of social history. Unfortunately, I do not know whether my great-grandfather ever read the book How Green Was My Valley by Richard Llewellyn to know whether the author’s descriptions of family life in the South Wales mining area in the latter part of the nineteenth century were accurate. As another example, anyone involved in the D-Day landings in 1944 will almost certainly know of the films The Longest Day and Saving Private Ryan which give as realistic accounts of the landings as any re-enactment could (although the latter deals exclusively with the American involvement). For younger readers they would serve as the nearest idea they are likely to get of what it was like to have been there.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.