How to Re- Narrate the History through a Film? A Dialogue with Special Reference to the Movie ‘The Name of the Rose’

Abstract

Humans have made the history, interpreted it in different ways and haveultimately broken their bondage to history in the postmodern era. They have produced many ideologies to make, to interpret and to justify history. It is true that many disciplines have helped the man to do so and, cinematography as an advanced and technology oriented academic discipline has effectively come forward today to give meanings to the history of yesterday. Why do we define or re-define history? The answer to that question is that such re-definitions that we make, in turn; define us, our knowledge, our present power relationships with society, and our relation to history itself or, in other words, our present identity or lack of identity (Zizek, 2002 ). The identity that we struggle to justify in order to exist in this material world, finally attribute to our ideological relationship to history. Therefore, we are nostalgic about history but we do not live in history. Film, as a less serious, pleasure oriented form of art, compared to the written forms of modern art such as novels or poetry (Best and Kellner, 1991) there is a common misunderstanding that it cannot decisively interfere into the academic or public sphere to do something worthwhile. Contrastively, in this thesis, we attempt to show that a film as a mass form of art is sufficient to re-define and re-narrate history in retrospection as done by the written texts of the previous generation. If any written document narrates history as an arbitrary metaphysical construction in the way the narrator of that particular history wants to see it, the post modern art too is capable in doing so by ascribing serious meanings to history. Such ascribed meanings are as valid as those in any written textual source and can decisively change the present signs and values system if seriously and consciously studied. That is one of the reasons why we preferred the movie to the novel ‘The Name of the Rose’ (1983) by Umberto Eco (1932- ). We study the movie ‘The Name of the Rose’ (1986) by Jean Jacques Annaud with a post-structuralist stand point to demonstrate the above hypothesis. In addition, the portrayal of woman in this movie appears unavoidable for the man to surpass and the male has no other way but to submit to her beauty and the bodily seduction but, in the end, the man, in search of the future better world, overcomes her. The dualistic relationship between the woman as a ‘sexual being or as the primordial Other’ (Beauvoir, 1997 ) and the man as the builder of civilization or the Self (Ibid, 1997) will be discussed in the last segment of this thesis.