Ramirez-ClioWordsMotion-1999

Clio in Words and in Motion: Practices of Narrating the Past
Author(s): Bruno Ramirez

Source: The Journal of American History , Dec., 1999, Vol. 86, No. 3, The Nation and
Beyond: Transnational Perspectives on United States History: A Special Issue (Dec., 1999),
pp. 987-1014
Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of Organization of American
Historians
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Cijo in Words and in Motion:
Practices of Narrating the Past
Bruno Ramirez
In participating in the debate on national and transnational perspectives on Ameri-

can history, I offer the reflections of a historian whose practice has unfolded along
two parallel courses: that of the professional historian working in academia and that
of a screenwriter of feature films whose stories are embedded in the past. Each has
forced me to approach history, the past, in a different manner and has helped me
become more aware of the intellectual and cultural stakes involved in narrating the
past. Drawing from that composite experience, I address this debate as one who believes
that the issue of national or transnational history may hardly be disassociated from
the question of our historical practices. Or to put it differently, I believe that prac-
tice, perspective, and personal experience interact in a dynamic way in each one of
us, influencing what we choose to narrate and how we do it. An openness toward
this interaction may help us both to see the transnational where we have only seen
the national and to place the nation in its proper historical dimension and spatial scale.
How I arrived at producing migration history both as a scholar and as a
screenwriter-as well as the perspective I came to adopt-is intimately bound up
with my personal experience. As I look back, from the time when, as an adolescent
growing up in Sicily, I first became interested in the United States till now, when I
am writing these words in freezing Montreal, I see an intellectual trajectory punctu-
ated by strong experiential moments and by places that constantly reoriented my course.
In his introduction to four of Federico Fellini's best-known screenplays, the Italian
writer Italo Calvino recounts the fascination that movies had for him as a youngster
and how through those mostly Hollywood-made films he constructed a vision of
America. His fascination did not prevent an awareness of the mystificatory process
going on in his head and in his guts, but he chose not to resist it, for "it was a partic-
ular mystification, different from the mystification that submerged us for the rest of
the day." Why? Because "as a spectator belonging to another system of mystifications
Bruno Ramirez is professor of history at the Universite de Montreal. He is also a screenplay writer.
I wish to thank the European University Institute, Florence, Italy, for the support it provided during the writ-
ing of a first draft. For helpful criticism of an early version of this paper during my Florence sojourn I thank Nina
Witoszek, Ewa Morawska, Marta Petrusewicz, Fraser Ottanelli, Sonia Floriani, and Nicole Malpas. Alice Kessler-
Harris and Christiane Teasdale provided criticism and much needed encouragement at critical moments. I am
especially grateful to David Thelen for his insightful suggestions and for persuading me to put some of my
thoughts and experiences on paper. This article is dedicated to him.
The Journal of American History December 1999 987

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988 The Journal of American History December 1999
I had something to learn both from the little tru

of mystification those Hollywood products gave me.'
That film-produced image of America was still as real and insidious years later
among youth of my generation; had I been able to articulate the feelings produced
by those two-hour immersions in that movie-made universe, I probably would have
used similar words. Though I came from a humbler and less cultured milieu, I found
myself in a much more privileged position than Calvino's. For America did not
come to me merely in images and cultural symbols, it came to me in flesh and blood
in the persons of Jack Hawkins, Bob Ewart, Carmen Fontana, Paul Littleton, and
many other United States servicemen stationed in the nearby Sigonella navy base
who came to worship in my church. Far from their homes and communities, and
finding their base's ghetto life unbearable, they were courageous enough to venture
into a city that may have puzzled them by its mixture of Greek, Arabic, Norman,
and Spanish architecture, its hybrid faces and dialect. Every Sunday they crossed the
threshold of a modest church where they sought fellowship with Sicilian Protestants.
If I disrobe the term of its religious connotations, "fellowship" in this case meant the
interpenetration of two universes where languages, lore, and temperaments ceased to
be barriers, becoming instead vehicles of knowledge, understanding, and mutual
appreciation. I must have been fifteen or sixteen when another American, out of
the blue it seemed to me, showed up in our church. The elders made me step near
the pulpit to translate the testimonial of this brother Herman (I forget his last
name), who, after his experience with the air force photographic crew in Hiroshima
or Nagasaki or both, had repented of his sins, though he had never managed to erase
from his memory those mushroom-like images. Perhaps the obsession caused by those
scenes of devastation stuck in his brain had pushed him to become an itinerant
preacher, touring the world and warning congregations such as ours of the evils
mankind is capable of. A few days later he left, headed for some other Sicilian town.
My fellowship with the young servicemen went on for several years due to the
high personnel turnover at the base. Unlike Calvino and most Italians who had to set-
tle for exported packaged images of America, I experienced rich bits of real Amer-
ica. I learned about Johnny Cash, Jimmy Rodgers, and Woody Guthrie, not from
commercially distributed records, but from huge tapes servicemen played at my
house or in their barracks. I could soon distinguish a New York accent from a Bos-
ton or Texas one. I heard stories about cattle raising in Kansas, shrimp fishing in
North Carolina, life in the military, and segregation all over the nation.
When, a few years later, I received a scholarship and entered the United States at
the Philadelphia airport, I was carrying with me much of the cultural boundary
crossing I had experienced in Sicily. That experience, in the chaos-ridden Lyndon B.
Johnson-Richard M. Nixon era, helped me sharpen my eyes and drove me to the
study of American history. There was so much I wanted to know about the country,
I Italo Calvino, "Autobiografia di uno spettatore" (Autobiography of a moviegoer), preface, in Federico Fellini,
Quattro Film (Four films) (Turin, 1975), xiii. Translation into English from Italian and French was done by Bruno
Ramirez.

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Practices of Narrating the Past 989
its people, its myths, its projections, and its subtle

of democratic repression.
If I have dwelt on this stretch of my life, it is bec
asymmetrical ways in which transnational cultural
have little to do with the formal relations between nat
dered in national historiographies. In choosing my
could have chosen a classical field in national history, s
the American Revolution, the Civil War, or the hi
chose labor history because I was fascinated by the
the American working class and, equally importan
cepts and analytical tools that had shaped my soci
that my supervisor at the University of Toronto w
movements of his eyebrows when I discussed such
Horkheimer, and, later, C. L. R. James. I also doubt
drafts I submitted to him (later leading to Whe
debated outside academia, in a study group mad
workers as well as drop-out university students. As
passage, the thesis defense, I remain convinced that
then popped up between my external examiner,
resulted not merely from his impressive scholarsh
encounter of different experiential trajectories.2
The Bobs, Pauls, and Carmens of earlier Sigonella days had let me into their
worlds. Now I had written a piece of their country's past that, in one way or another,
was that of their parents and grandparents. It was a story punctuated by collective
acts some of the servicemen might not have approved, but somehow, I still felt in
"fellowship" with them.
That mixture of perspective, personal experience, and practice also had ramifica-
tions back in Italy. And if I mention La formazione dell'operaio massa negli USA, the
first book published in Italy on the American working class and one that quickly
found its way to Italian universities and political activists alike, it is because it was a
truly transnational production, not only because of its content. Its three authors
were an Italian expatriate living in the Bronx, a German historian on a research fel-
lowship in the Boston area, and an intellectual sojourner working in Toronto. One sec-
tion had been written in German; another, my own, was written in English and had
to be translated into Italian by the publisher.3
In my three years in the United States, I knew next to nothing about the province
of Quebec, either as a geographical territory or as a society brewing troubling senti-
ments under the oppression, real or perceived, of English Canada. Then came the six
years I spent in English-speaking Ontario, and Quebec began to move closer and
closer to my mental universe. I started making brief trips to Montreal, trying to
2Bruno Ramirez, When Workers Fight: The Politics of Industrial Relations in the Progressive Era, 1898-1916
(Westport, 1978).
3 Gisela Bock, Paolo Carpignano, and Bruno Ramirez, Laformazione dell'operaio massa negli USA, 1898-1922
(The making of the mass-production worker in the United States, 1898-1922) (Milan, 1976).

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understand and feel the thick cultural-political bou

Canadian writer Hugh MacLellan back in the 1940s had called the "two solitudes."
It is an expression that has perhaps been overused, but it describes both the history
of Canada and the current state of Canadian historiography. In the sometimes con-
fusing clash of political ideologies, I soon found myself caught between the nation-
alist sentiment of French Canadians, who saw their English counterparts as
oppressors, and English Canadian nationalists, who saw themselves oppressed by the
United States but sought inspiration in Quebec nationalism. It was another sort of
asymmetry that my later work on migration movements would help me straighten
out, at least in my mind. In the meantime I was teaching United States history to an
increasingly multi-ethnic student body.4
I could not help experiencing English Canadian nationalism as a mostly academic
discourse nourished by many charts on United States-Canadian trade, frequent
conferences on United States branch plants, and grievances toward "American"
teaching staff, who were often accused of taking over Canadian faculties. If English
Canadian nationalism was sustained by any popular sentiment, I did not see it
except on that unforgettable day of pandemonium in the bars and streets of Toronto-
actually all over Canada, both English and French-when the Canadian national
hockey team captured the winning trophy of some world series by scoring the win-
ning goal against the Soviet team during the last thirty seconds. (I wonder how
many Canadian federalist politicians have since dreamed of those ephemeral
moments of national unity!)
What a switch I had to make, and not just linguistic, during those short sojourns in
Montreal. Quebecois nationalist sentiment in those days sparked all over: in the
oeuvre of artists working in theater, filmmaking, and popular music, among work-
ers and high-school kids, and in the choruses of beer-drinking youths accompanying
the latest song delivered by the local chansonnier. It was in one of those long, noisy,
and smoke-filled sessions that I found out that some of my new Montreal friends
had relatives and acquaintances fighting in a bitter, blue-collar workers' strike at
McGill University, the first ever to occur in that symbol of English Canadian domi-
nation of Quebec. Some of the strikers were janitors, others worked in the cafeteria
or in the building maintenance crew; all of them were immigrants from southern
Italy. One had his son Enzo studying in the same institution against which he was
striking. I had long known about the multinational character of McGill's teaching
staff. The strike opened my eyes to a transnationalism embodied in the actions and
stance of those humble immigrants who were taken for granted but in many ways
kept the university running. It was more than touching to see Italian immigrants'
children who had made it to the university helping draft grievances in a language
they had learned in their land of promise, while drawing inspiration from Italian
political literature. Greek workers likewise drew on their own backgrounds, which
served as encouragement to fellow Portuguese workers. Those friends' parents and
grandparents became the subjects of my immediate fieldwork when I put an end to my
Hugh MacLellan, Two Solitudes (Toronto, 1945).

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cultural blitzes a couple of years later and joined the hi

sity of Montreal as an "Americanist."
I settled in Montreal shortly after Quebec's political landscape had undergone a
major change. The province's new government was committed to the cause of sepa-
ration, and the new state began extending its protective wings over all that cultural
effervescence. Functionaries in three-piece suits were laying down rules for creativity,
producing more often than not stale air where a fresh breeze had blown. Quebec also
had a national history-meaning the history of French Canada-whose two main
living representatives had offices facing mine. It was a history that taught me a great
deal about the making of North America, but it was one that totally ignored the
multitude of immigrants who had made that province their new home. It also
shared with other national histories, whether English Canadian, American, Italian,
or French, an eloquent silence about the massive outflow of citizens who had aban-
doned their country and emigrated abroad. While struggling to adapt my teaching
of United States history to a mostly Quebecois audience, I could feel a new research
agenda forcing its way into my projects.5
Robert F Harney, a generous friend I had met at the University of Toronto and
the scholar who put immigration history on the map in Canada, may have tried to
make me feel guilty in a long letter that reached me in Montreal. The bottom line was
"I like your labor history, but we need you in immigration history, and now in Que-
bec you are standing in a historiographical desert." I had no qualms about the desert,
but I had recognized the artificiality of separating labor from immigration history,
even before Herbert G. Gutman tackled that and other artificial separations created
by the discipline of history in his classic text in United States historiography.6 I had
known it firsthand from a furniture maker, my father, who lived and worked on
three continents to help my mother raise four kids and to ensure them a basic high
school education. He had died too early to allow me to grasp the entirety of his
worker-immigrant-father experience, but I knew that his feelings about the Italian
nation-state were not much different from those of the immigrants I was now inter-
viewing in Montreal. They were people whose names and existence had been crossed
out once they left their national territory, no matter how important their remittances
were for the economy of many villages and towns and often of the nation, no matter
how the emotional, cultural, and, at times, political ties were kept alive by migration
networks extending between sending and receiving locations.
Such personal experiences do not automatically engender a specific historical prac-
tice. But they contribute a great deal by helping us see hidden paths where we had
only seen thick walls. They enlarge our terrain of action. Still, practice does not
I For the importance of French Canadian history to a continental perspective on United States history, see
Bruno Ramirez, "Shifting Perspectives from the North: Quebec," Journal of American History, 79 (Sept. 1992),
477-84.
6 Robert F. Harney's premature death in 1988 prevented him from consolidating his research into boo
For some of his most important essays and a complete bibliography, see Pierre Anctil and Bruno Ramire
If One Were to Write a History ... : Selected Writings by Robert E Harney (Toronto, 1991). Herbert G. Gutman,
"Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America, 1815-1919," American Historical Review, 78 (June
1973), 531-88.

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occur in a void; it is informed by personal values, shaped by social consciousness,

and projected toward specific goals within a particular cultural environment. A his-
torian may devote ten years of his or her life working on a given topic, motivated by
a desire to advance a methodology or to produce a first-rate monograph or to pub-
lish a book that ensures tenure. All are legitimate motivations that, I am sure, would
be reflected in his or her practice. Except for methodology, the inevitable nuts and
bolts of our trade, such concerns were far from tempting me. With Les premiers kal-
iens de Montreal, one of the publications growing out of my research, I wanted to
tell Quebec historians, as well as a wider French Canadian audience, that there were
important stories inextricably woven into that of their nation. More than that, I wanted
to give a voice to my friends' grandparents and other people of that generation, the
few ones still alive. I wanted readers to listen carefully to the story of Nicola Manzo
who ended up in Montreal, where he spent the rest of his long life, but who had
started his migrant experience in West Virginia. There he lost his father in a mine
explosion, "December 6, 1906, at 10 in the morning, in mine number 6. That
morning I had not gone to work because I was sick." The explosion wiped out of
existence thirty-six fellow villagers, blackening with mourning the narrow, winding
streets of the tiny Italian municipality of Fredonia, and it brought the sixteen-year-
old Manzo back home to his desperate mother. I wanted people to know Michele
Marcogliese, his pride in having cofounded a mutual benefit society among his fel-
low villagers in Montreal, and the quasi-religious commitment with which every
year on the day of Our Lady of Mount Carmel the society sent money to Casacal-
enda "so that everyone in the village could buy one kilo of meat."7
The voice I gave them was rendered in French, a language they could hardly read.
But I had received their full trust, and they were delighted that through me they
could communicate parts of their experiences to Quebec readers. I too was delighted
when, shortly after, a Montreal film director contacted me. He had become aware of
my research and was looking for ideas and material to fill a mandate by the Quebec
public television network (Tele-Quebec) to produce short documentaries on the life
of ethnic minorities in the province. I was even more delighted when the thirty-
minute documentary that grew out of our collaboration was largely devoted to the
life of Nicola Manzo. People who had seen a midlife picture of him in the book,
who had heard his voice through a written text produced by a professional historian,
and who read my analysis of the transnational context of his several migrations and
final settlement in Montreal could now hear his actual voice, subtitled in French. It
was a feeble voice in full harmony with the many wrinkles and stains of his face, a
whispering voice that bore the weight of a long past but was clear and audible enough
to convey his experiences as a railroad construction laborer, his and his wife's strate-
gies to make ends meet, and his pride in having been throughout his life a good com-
munity member amid his French-Canadian neighbors. He said much more through
his gestures, his dignified glances at the camera, his occasional laughter, and his long,
7 Bruno Ramirez, Les premiers Italiens de Montrial: Naissance de la Petite Italie du Qudbec (The first Italians of
Montreal: The birth of Quebec's Little Italy) (Montreal, 1984), 91, 122-23.

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perhaps painful, moments of silence as he strove to re

ers and layers of memory.8
Some of my colleagues and superiors, using the co
pline, were a little puzzled about how to classify my work. Was this Italian history?
Or Quebec history? The few who were familiar with the migration history being
produced in English-speaking North America and elsewhere probably asked them-
selves, "But didn't we hire an Americanist?" The puzzlement may have increased when
I began to take trips north to Quebec rural counties, gathering data from parish
records, notary deeds, and marriage registers as part of my project to confront another
kind of historiographical desert produced by Quebec national history. Ever since
Quebec sociologist Albert Faucher had written in 1964 that the exodus of more than
a half-million French Canadians to the United States was "the most important devel-
opment in nineteenth-century Quebec history," only one Quebec historian had ven-
tured into that territory. He was accompanied by a historical demographer and a
cultural anthropologist, who had presented his findings in a doctoral dissertation at
a university in the United States. National histories are reluctant to talk about the
massive departures of their citizens, who often were forced to do so by economic oppres-
sion and political injustice. Perhaps national pride prevents acknowledging collective
acts of abandonment. Or the omission may be through neglect of, when not con-
tempt for, people who have forfeited their right to be included in a national narra-
tive. It may also be the fear of traversing the boundaries of the nation's past, of
intruding into another national history, and of getting lost in unknown territory. Yet
in this case, the sociocultural landscape of eastern North America has been shaped by
migration networks that for generations linked Quebec and Acadian rural parishes
to New England cities such as Lowell, Massachusetts, Woonsocket, Rhode Island,
and Manchester, New Hampshire. I only needed to ask my students how many had
relatives living aux Etats to see a sudden forest of arms and many smiling faces. Fran-
cophone emigration became, by far, the most attractive subject among my graduate
students, giving rise to several theses and dissertations and making my department
the leading center throughout Canada of research in the field.9
The revival of immigration and ethnic history south of the Canadian border had
already translated into a substantial historiographical production on French Cana-
8 La storia, dir. Nick Zavaglia (Tele-Quebec, 1984).

9Albert Faucher, "Projet de recherche historique: Le'migration des Canadiens francais au XIXe siecle" (A
project of historical research: The emigration of French Canadians during the nineteenth century), Recherches
sociographiques (Quebec City), 2 (April-June 1961), 244. For the Quebec historian, see Yves Roby, Les Franco-
Americains de la Nouvelle-Angleterre, 1776-1930 (New England's Franco-Americans, 1776-1930) (Sillery, 1990).
For a Montreal-based, English-speaking historian, see Frances Early, "French-Canadian Beginnings in an Ameri-
can Community: Lowell, Massachusetts, 1868-1886" (Ph.D. diss., Concordia University, 1979). For the histori-
cal demographer and the cultural anthropologist, see Yolande Lavoie, LDmiigration des Canadiens aux ?tats-U
avant 1930. Mesure du phenomene (The emigration of Canadians to the United States before 1930. Quantifying
the phenomenon) (Montreal, 1972); and Pierre Anctil, "Aspects of Class Ideology in a New England Minority:
The Franco-Americans of Woonsocket, Rhode Island, 1865-1929" (Ph.D. diss., New School of Social Research,
1980). For subsequent historiographical developments, see Bruno Ramirez, "Emigration et Franco-Americanie: Bilan
historiographique" (Emigration and Franco-Americanness: A historiographical survey), in Le Qudbec et lesfranco-
phones de la Nouvelle-Angleterre (Quebec and New England's francophones), ed. Dean Louder (Quebec City,
1991), 3-12.

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dian immigrants and communities. But few authors had not let themselves be intim-
idated by the Canadian border and by what they perhaps perceived as an alien culture;
fewer had gone to see the parishes and counties that produced the subjects of their
books and articles. Perhaps that is because French Canadians, turned "Franco-
Americans," were studied from the perspective that sees immigrants as inevitable
candidates for Americanization, as thankful recruits of the receiving nation-state.
Despite the best intentions and the high quality of some of that scholarship, once
again human experiences and processes that transcended legal borders and cultural
boundaries had been fragmented by grafting them to one or the other national
narrative. 10
And once again I found myself in a privileged position-based in Montreal, fa-
miliar with both French Canadian and United States history, and surrounded by highly
motivated graduate students-that I tried to exploit by observing not only both ends
of the emigration process but also the in-between social and cultural space migrants
had filled. My scale of analysis had become North America-wide. When I merged
my two lines of research-Italians migrating to Quebec and French Canadians mi-
grating to the United States-the scale widened, encompassing now a good portion
of the North Atlantic space, and revealed circuits of labor, savings, hopes, and emotions
that gave human content to what some authors have called "the Atlantic economy."11
I now felt ready to write On the Move, not because I wanted merely to compare
two migration movements, although that was part of my analytical agenda. I wanted
to engage both United States and French Canadian national histories that neglected
or feared to cross that political and cultural boundary symbolized by the Canadian-
United States border. Moreover, I believed the empirical data drawn from three coun-
tries in two continents allowed me to articulate a perspective on migration that cap-
tured individuals and groups in their role as historical protagonists-however painful
their moves may have often been-and not as mere victims of impersonal economic
forces. It was a perspective that acknowledged the reality of nation-states and their legal
frontiers but called for a constant shifting of the point of observation over a supra-
national space crossed by individuals and groups, who carried with them their cul-
tures, their visions of the good life, and the weight of their past. In the course of
their lives migrants contributed not only to the growth and transformation of the
'0See, for example, Ralph Vicero, "Immigration of French Canadians to New England, 1840-1900: A Geo-
graphical Analysis" (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 1968); Philip T. Sylvia Jr., "The Spindle City: Labor,
Politics, and Religion in Fall River, Massachusetts, 1870-1905" (Ph.D. diss., Fordham University, 1973); Tamara K.
Hareven, "The Laborers of Manchester, New Hampshire, 1912-1922: The Role of Family and Ethnicity in
Adjustments to Industrial Life," Labor History, 16 (Spring 1975), 249-65; Tamara K. Hareven and Randolph
Langenback, Amoskeag: Life and Work in an American Factory-City (New York, 1978); Daniel J. Walkowitz, Worker
City, Company Town: Iron- and Cotton-Worker Protest in Troy and Cohoes, New York, 1855-1884 (Chicago, 1978);
and John T. Cumbler, Working-Class Community in Industrial America: Work, Leisure, and Struggle in Two Indus-
trial Cities, 1880-1930 (Westport, 1979). For an exhaustive bibliography, see Yves Roby, "Quebec in the United
States: A Historiographical Survey," Maine Historical Society Quarterly, 26 (Winter 1987), 126-59.
1 " See especially Brinley Thomas, Migration and Economic Growth: A Study of Great Britain and the Atlantic
Economy (Cambridge, Eng., 1954); Frank Thistlethwaite, "Migration from Europe Overseas in the Nineteenth
and Twentieth Centuries," in XIe Congres International des Sciences Historiques, Rapports (Uppsala, 1960), 32-
60; and, more recently, Dirk Hoerder, ed., Labor Migration in the Atlantic Economies: The European and North
American Working Classes during the Period of Industrialization (Westport, 1985).

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receiving societies but also to that of the societies t

subsequently returned. It was also a perspective tha
to adopt a variety of scales, each appropriate to the
For instance, how did those massive movements of labor and population impact
metropolitan and hinterland regions within the North Atlantic economy? How were
the debates in Quebec, Italy, and the United States articulated in the face of the con
stant flow in and out of migrant populations? How did a particular Quebec rural
county or an Italian agricultural town experience the out-migration of its youngest
and most productive population? And how did the prolonged back-and-forth travel-
ing, as well as the persistence of networks, engender migration traditions operating
through space and shaping the mental universe of those sharing them? The ques-
tions apply all the way down to the individual migrant, be it Nicola Manzo or
Horace Asselin, whose life trajectory across oceans, continental regions, and legal
borders affords us a multifaceted view of the ways economic structures, cultural
dynamics, and political conjunctures acted on the individual migrant as well as a
perspective on the personal and family dramas that separations and the fear of the
unknown may have caused.12
In the introductory comments to On the Move, I had remarked that, in analyzing
the history of those migration phenomena, I was adopting a "transnational and trans-
cultural" perspective. Written as most introductions are, just days before a manu-
script is mailed to the editor, the former of the two terms came to me naturally; I
was totally unaware that it was acquiring widespread usage and a variety of meanings
in several disciplines and public discourse. Again, my practice had interacted with
my experience."3
But why also "transcultural"? In my extra-academic activities in Montreal among
artists, writers, and intellectuals of various ethnolinguistic backgrounds, one of our
concerns had been the Canadian government's philosophy behind the policy of mul-
ticulturalism, in effect since the early 1970s. We voiced those concerns through a
cultural magazine, ViceVersa, we had founded, expressing them in the language an
author felt most comfortable with. Most often it was French, English, Italian, or
Spanish, but it also included the language of original drawings and photographs.
Multiculturalism's objectives were noble by any pluralist standard--acknowledging
the contributions of immigrant minorities, encouraging the retention of their cultures
to make a true Canadian "mosaic," and funding much-needed research on ethnocul-
tural diversity. Yet the policy's most conspicuous result had been the emergence of a
cultural industry, where old and newly constituted associations scrambled for gov-
ernment funds and old and overnight ethnic leaders staked out their grounds, con-
structed constituencies, and inevitably nourished a new sort of client-patron
relationship. There was no question that Canada was a multiethnic society. We were
reminded of it by public censuses, by the many ethnic celebrations coloring the
2 Bruno Ramirez, On The Move: French-Canadian and Italian Migrants in the North Atlantic Economy, 1860-
1914 (Toronto, 1991). For a skillfull discussion of the use of scale in historical analysis, see Richard 'White, "The
Nationalization of Nature," Journal of American History, 86 (Dec. 1999), 976-86.
13 Ramirez, On The Move, 13.

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landscapes of Montreal and many other cities, and by the polyglot sounds heard in
buses, subways, shopping centers, and public schools. But we felt that beneath the
neat and essentially static distinctions drawn by bureaucrats and ethnic leaders, sym-
bolized by the mosaic metaphor, there was a dynamic reality in which people daily
negotiated their differences. For example, Nicola Manzo had not needed the guid-
ance of multiculturalism to entertain good relationships with his French Canadian
neighbors throughout his life and be proud of it; nor was his an isolated case. Put dif-
ferently, Canadian multiculturalism acknowledged the ethnic diversity within soci-
ety, sought to valorize it, and tried to cast it into a model of multiethnic coexistence.
But official multiculturalism remained largely circumscribed to the political and
institutional sphere, far from the boundaries people bump against in their daily lives
and far from that terrain in which otherness brings out emotions ranging from under-
standing to hatred. For multiculturalism, otherness translated largely into folklore
and ethnic votes, and it is more than an irony that both concerns actually served to
publicly codify the otherness newcomers brought to Canadian civil society. I remem-
ber how disappointed and demoralized young artists, whether creating in French or
in English, felt when their works were officially classified as ethnic regardless of their
artistic worth. And I shall never forget the anger that Vincenzo Cappa, an Italian
immigrant worker, expressed during an interview over the fact that his Canadian-
born daughters were looked upon as "immigrants": "True, I came to this country
thirty years ago; but why do they have to bring it up all the time? And my two
daughters? They were born here, in Quebec; they are Canadians like anybody else.
But because they have an Italian name, ah 'they are immigrants!'""l4
Observing and experiencing those two layers of reality, the public one with its politi-
cal rationale and the private one with its daily struggle for recognition, helped me
sharpen my understanding of immigration in liberal, pluralistic societies. Immigrant
who had crossed a legal border to become residents or citizens of their new country had
to act on the otherness they carried. They had to learn how to live in a society that, like
most multiethnic societies, is marked by visible and less visible boundaries separating
traditions, cultural values, and mental universes. The act of crossing such a boundary
in either direction and even when it is perceived as 'transpassing'-generates authentic
cosmopolitanism. For the crossing, painful or easy, is a contagious act; it sheds values
bits of world views, and manners of being that will find their way in the larger society.
14 For aspects of the Canadian multicultural experience analyzed from a transnational perspective, see Bruno
Ramirez, "The Perils of Assimilation: Toward a Comparative Analysis of Immigration, Ethnicity, and National
Identity in North America," in From Melting Pot to Multiculturalism, ed. Valeria Gennaro Lerda (Rome, 1990),
143-67; Bruno Ramirez, "Les etudes ethniques et le multiculturalisme au Canada: Vers des nouvelles perspec-
tives" (Ethnic studies and multiculturalism in Canada: Toward some new perspectives), Revue internationale
d'tudes canadiennes (Ottawa), 3 (Spring 1991), 171-81; Bruno Ramirez, "Il Canada, l'immigrazione e il multi-
culturalismo: Genesi di una storiografia" (Canada, immigration, and multiculturalism: Genesis of a historiogra-
phy), Studi Emigrazione/ttudes Migration (Rome), 28 (no. 101, 1991), 49-58; and Bruno Ramirez,
"Multiculturalism, Immigration, and Ethnic Relations: Canada and the U.S.A. Compared," in Multiculturalism
and the History of International Relations from the 18th Century to the Present, ed. Brunello Vigezzi and Pierre
Savard (Ottawa and Milan, 1999), 123-34. For the most penetrating discussion of Canadian multiculturalism,
see Robert F. Harney, "'So Great a Heritage as Ours': Immigration and the Survival of the Canadian Polity,"
Daedalus, 117 (Fall 1988), 51-97. For Vincenzo Cappa's statement, see Caff! Italia, Montr4al, dir. Paul Tana
(ACPAV, 1985).

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We saw that kind of crossing going on all around us, a

on in the past. (This kind of boundary crossing would become one of the main themes
in the film La Sarrasine.) Social theorists may have subsumed those phenomena under
large categories such as assimilation, integration, or acculturation, but we saw crossings
as moments in which the interpenetration of differences, like the one I had experienced
at Sigonella, produced something new. Even if crossings did not erase boundaries, they
still engendered change on both sides. We called them "transcultural" to emphasize their
dynamic character. In a world marked by the reality of borders and the coexistence of
national cultures, transnationalism and transculturalism were but two moments of one
experiential continuum.15
In the meantime I had been realizing that there were too many elements of the
human past that the canons and conventions of my discipline did not allow me to
express; there were too many audiences who deserved an understanding of past human
experience but were impossible to reach by the written text. I needed a different lan-
guage, and film was there to give it to me.
II
Turning to film entailed crossing another kind of boundary. It is not merely the
obvious line between the world of academia and that of mass communication and
entertainment, where the often soothing and ritualistic atmosphere of most depart-
mental meetings contrasts with the feverishness marking a typical production meet-
ing when artistic, technical, and financial resources must be rapidly translated into a
film. More important is the boundary that separates my discipline, history-with its
traditions, its inner structure, and its language-from an activity requiring a radically
different kind of language and a more complex syntax. Since my crossing is
ongoing-it has not entailed abandoning one territory for another-it helps keep
alive my perception of the discipline of history and induces me to convey the nature
of the constraints I experience in it.
Having devoted most of my research efforts to historical topics that are transna-
tional, I have been spared the hegemonic role that national history may have exerted
on some of my fellow historians, whether Americanists or not. Still, in my academic
work and in my teaching duties, in particular, nation-states and national history are
realities I hardly can ignore. They are structured into the curricula of most history
departments, rising as boundaries that affect the working relationship among col-
leagues in ways that are often barely civilized.16
But even if my experience and my perspective allowed me to avoid the constraints
imposed by national history, there was one kind of constraint I could not escape, for
15 La Sarrasine, dir. Paul Tana (ACPAV, 1992). For the transformation of a topic of historical inquiry into a film
subject and then to a screenplay, see Bruno Ramirez, "The Other Frontier: A Montreal Story," ViceVersa (Mon-
treal), 21 (Nov. 1987), 23-24; and Bruno Ramirez and Paul Tana, Sarrasine, a Screenplay (Toronto, 1996). See
also Robert Harney, "The Immigrant City," ViceVersa, 24 (June 1988), 4-6.
16 For the transnational character of migration history as well as the practice it entails, see Donna R. Gabaccia,
"Is Everywhere Nowhere? Nomads, Nations, and the Immigrant Paradigm of United States History," Journal of
American History, 86 (Dec. 1999), 1115-34.

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I found it inherent in the discipline of history. Sin

truth" is its duty, history as discipline rests on a struc
pervades the methods adopted but also encompasses
of past human experience. From circumscribing the empirical datum through its
verification to its final interpretation, the historian follows an order of causality that
engenders one specific use of time-I call it "causal time"-within which the "his-
torical fact" occurred.
That structure of rationality gives scientific justification to the way the discipline
has been subdivided along both temporal and spatial lines. For example, in the field
of contemporary history, events occurring within the territory of a sovereign state or
within its narrative time frame become part of a national history, a sort of great river
into which flow themes that reflect the life and development of a nation-state. Most
of the history courses we teach, and not merely at the university level, grow out of this
rationality, as does the training we have undergone that has made most of us special-
ists in one given field enclosed within one national experience.
The temporal and spatial axes inherent in the discipline set limits to our imagina-
tion or, at least, to the ways we articulate past human experience. In my case, those
limits turned me to another language, one that made possible a fuller and richer artic-
ulation of past experience.
When, as a screenwriter, I circumscribe a past event and submit it to inquiry, I am
confronted with not one but many temporalities: emotional time (when emotions
build, leading to a concrete action); biological time (birth, the life cycle, and natural
death); social time (for instance, when workers in a nonunionized factory succeed in
organizing their first strike); political time (for instance, when a collective grievance
spawns an organized movement that makes a bid for power); and so on with eco-
nomic time or institutional, bureaucratic time.
Likewise, the spatiality of a human event I want to narrate grows out of the
actions and emotions of individuals I have to represent in flesh and blood rather than
out of one predetermined by geopolitical subdivisions. I say this because in much
historical writing-except for specific cases such as recounting a battle, a war, a ter-
ritorial dispute, the development of transportation, or an environmental history-
space is taken for granted. Even when the causality of the event being recounted
hinges on a specific place, very rarely does it receive the narrative role it deserves. Space
becomes an abstraction when often it is a protagonist.
Leaving aside the techniques of mise-en-scene, designed to give space the desired
narrative effect in each shot, in filmic narration space is an integral dimension of the
story, whether it is circumscribed to one room or extends across and beyond a national
territory. First and foremost, space radiates from the characters along scales that grow
out of their actions, emotions, and desires. Moreover, space is not only physical and
quantifiable as, for instance, the vast desert in the well-known film Lawrence of Arabia
or that theater of massacre that was Omaha Beach in Saving Private Ryan. Space is also
emotional, as Robert F. Harney has demonstrated in his skillful historical analysis of
Italian sojourners forced away from their families by economic hardship. Filmic lan-
guage has the power to show this emotional space and to make us feel it as an integral

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part of human experience. In Caffd Italia, Montrda

its physical and emotional dimensions. In a series of s
ment of Italian immigrants whom World War II had suddenly transformed into
"enemy aliens," the viewer sees the snow-covered military camp of Petawawa in a
remote location of northern Ontario, surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by
armed soldiers. One also feels in Mr. D'Amico's and Mr. Monaco's accounts of their
painful and humiliating internment experience the emotional space separating them
from their families. "We were so demoralized," says D'Amico, "because we thought of
our families; I wept in my corner, he wept in his corner." "Afflicted and in great pain,"
interjects Monaco, "the thought of our families was the deepest sorrow we felt." 17
Equally important, freed from the duty of having to demonstrate or argue a his-
torical truth, the past I seek to confront is not one mediated by, or filtered through,
scholarly controversies, theses, and paradigms. Rather, I strive to reach the past in its
raw nature-one that grows from the complexity, confusion, and muddiness of
everyday life, where human sentiments in all their varieties interact to produce events
that carry the story. My primary concern is to convey the human authenticity of
those events, to pursue their multilayered temporal pace and their spatial ramifica-
tions, and to bring out their dramatic qualities. My concern in many ways is not unlike
that expressed recently by Arthur Miller in his recollections of his early dramaturgi-
cal writing: "Was it possible to create a style that would at once deeply engage an
American audience that insisted on a recognizable reality of characters, locales, and
themes while at the same time opening the stage to considerations of public moral-
ity and the mythic social fates-in short, to the invisible?" Making events flow into
the stream of a national historical past is the least of my concerns.18
But the constraints that history as a discipline imposes on us as academics also
manifest themselves in the ways the discipline affects the production of historical
culture and its circulation within society at large. I am referring specifically to the
historiographical language, or the prevailing explicatory mode we adopt, and to its
main interlocutors.
The university expects us to produce historical knowledge, and most of us pursue
that end according to our capabilities, resources, sense of commitment, and profes-
sional ambitions. In the United States, where the organization of higher learning is
perhaps the most dynamic in the world, where competitiveness within the profes-
sion is particularly high and enhanced by a well-functioning professorial market, the
production of historical knowledge through dissertations, scholarly articles, and mono-
graphs has been impressive. The requisite of originality, coupled with the rapidity
with which new methodologies have risen, has intensified specialization and led to
such a proliferation of fields and subfields (often, in turn, competing among them-
7Lawrence of Arabia, dir. David Lean (Horizon Pictures Ltd., 1962); Saving Private Ryan, dir. Steven Spiel-
berg (Paramount Pictures, 1999); Robert F. Harney, "Men without Women: Italian Migrants in Canada, 1885-
1930," in The Italian Immigrant Woman in North America, ed. Betty Boyd Caroli, Robert F. Harney, and Lydio F.
Tomasi (Toronto, 1978), 79-101; Cafel Italia, Montrdal.
8Arthur Miller, "On Broadway: Notes on the Past and Future of American Theater," Harper', 298 (March
1999), 42.

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selves) that today hardly any aspect of the American past remains unexplored. There
is no question that individual and group efforts along with systemic pressures have
greatly advanced our knowledge of the past. But at what price!
Part of the price we are paying has been the character of the historiographical lan-
guage. Because we increasingly have been borrowing concepts from other disciplines
and because the new subfields' and new methodologies' struggle for recognition
encourages an analytical, argumentative mode of discourse, the historiographical text
has reached a level of terminological complexity never known before. In a scholarly
monograph I am currently writing, in which I claim to provide an original analysis
of migration from Canada and Europe to the United States, I am borrowing con-
cepts and methodologies from a half-dozen disciplines (historical demography to
macro- and micro-economics to geography). Moreover, I want to try to be as sensi-
tive as I can to issues of gender and ethnicity that are so central to the migration pro-
cess. No matter how much I try to simplify my language and exploit whatever stylistic
techniques I am capable of, my text cannot avoid an argumentative structure and a
technical terminology. My writing is molded by the awareness that I am addressing his-
torians and specialists in other disciplines who are interested in migration phenomena.19
I am sure my own example is the rule rather than the exception and reflects a real-
ity many of us have become aware of, namely, that the historical knowledge we pro-
duce remains largely within academia, either in specialized books and articles or, in a
diluted form, in textbooks-a genre that has given rise to an industry of its own.
History books written by professional historians for a wider, nonacademic audience
constitute an infinitesimal proportion of the books produced every year. And histo-
rians who bring their knowledge outside academia, whether in the mass media or
through personal engagement in their immediate communities, remain relatively few
though they are increasing in number. Of course, those walls of learning are not air-
tight, but, considering the quantity of historical knowledge we produce, only a small
portion reaches the wider society.20
Thus, the institutional system within which I produce and consume historical
knowledge, the rigid parameters that structure the discipline, and the language of
history that informs much of my written work render me ill equipped to penetrate
the wider culture in ways that help propagate a critical sense of our collective past
and that respond to the variety of needs consciously or unconsciously expressed in
our society.
An awareness of those limitations has led increasing numbers of professional his-
torians to reorient their practice. Committed to carrying some of their knowledge out
of academia and on to larger audiences, they have reassessed the value and place of
the analytical text and resorted to some other medium of communication, such as
exhibitions and filmmaking. Here they act most often as consultants but, increas-
ingly, as participants in the conception and production of projects. The recognition
9 Bruno Ramirez, Crossing the 49th Parallel: Migration from Canada to the United States, 1900-1930 (Ithaca,
forthcoming).
20 For a recent discussion of the politics and economics of history textbook writing in the United States, see
Alexander Stille, "The Betrayal of History," New York Review of Books, June 11, 1998, pp. 15-20.

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of this practice and its value in bringing historical knowledge to wider audiences is
attested by the growing coverage such productions have been receiving by promi-
nent historical journals. The marriage between cultural institutions and educational
television networks, on the one hand, and professional historians, on the other hand,
may change irreversibly the relation between scientifically produced knowledge and
its circulation in our society, for such media have proven to be the most apt vehicles
to transform that knowledge into historical culture. And it is a pleasant irony that,
thanks to the technological resources now available, film and exhibition reproduc-
tions are increasingly providing teachers with new opportunities to make history more
interesting and meaningful even for students afflicted by high rates of boredom.
III
How far can we push that practice to realize its fuller potential? Let us consider film-
making, the activity I am engaged in. Film is unquestionably the most technically
complex and controversial medium for communicating historical knowledge. If the
historical documentary genre has long proved its educational value, the same cannot
be said of the feature genre where the historian has to confront what John Tibbetts
has aptly called "the time-honored taboo in Western historiography against mixing
fact with fiction." It is worth looking more closely at this taboo from the standpoint
of a historian who resorts to filmic fiction to try to take viewers into the past and make
them reflect on the sense of that past.22
As long as history is viewed as the only discipline capable of attaining truth about
the past through scientific methods, the taboo will continue to exist. And so will the
debates between the proponents of what Robert A. Rosenstone has called "history in
images" and its critics, along with a strong chance that the debates will not slide
from firm circular tracks. A few film historians, whose work I cannot but see as cou
rageous and pioneering, have been and are still trying to tell their colleagues that
judging or evaluating a historical film by the standards of written scientific works i
not only wrong but useless. I would add that by applying those standards to a work
shaped by dramaturgical, aesthetic, and commercial concerns, they reinforce the
increasingly outdated image of the professional historian as the appointed mediato
between a society and its past.23
However, if narration is viewed as inherent in the historic mode of communica-
tion, then the issue becomes how best to use available narrative techniques to make
the communication of past events as efficacious and meaningful as possible.
21 For a discussion of successful historical docudramas, see Robert Brent Toplin, "The Filmmaker as Histo
rian," American Historical Review, 93 (Dec. 1988), 1210-27.
22John Tibbetts, review of L.A. Confidential, dir. by Curtis Hanson, American Historical Review, 102 (Dec.
1997), 1599.
23 Robert A. Rosenstone, "History in Images/History in Words: Reflections on the Possibility of Really Put-
ting History into Film," American Historical Review, 93 (Dec. 1988), 1173. See especially Daniel J. Walkowitz,
"Visual History: The Craft of the Historian-Filmmaker," Public Historian, 7 (Winter 1985), 53-63; Robert Brent
Toplin, History by Hollywood: The Use andAbuse of the American Past (Urbana, 1996); and Robert A. Rosenstone
Visions of the Past: The Challenge of Film to Our Idea of History (Cambridge, Mass., 1995).

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It is a well-known fact that, both as a medium and as

sophisticated techniques of narration. Through the use of moving images, sound,
and procedures to manipulate time and space (such as ellipses, flashbacks, slow
motion, close-ups, long views, moving and multiple cameras, and montages), film
can re-create as closely as possible the complex structure of temporality and spatial-
ity that is inherent in most human events.
But the power of film is also due to its language, a delicate mixture of the drama-
turgical and visual, as opposed to the conceptual and explicatory written language of
the historiographical text. Writing a screenplay, whether its subject is historical or
not, entails communicating a story by operating at a pretheoretical level. As I con-
ceive the plot, the characters, and the events that carry the story, I am keenly aware
that I have to engage viewers by using the stuff of ordinary life-sentiments, emo-
tions, common verbal expressions, seemingly insignificant objects-and embed them
in a quotidianity most viewers can identify with. A basic rule is constantly to solicit a
response from viewers as one scene or sequence shifts to the next. The expression
currently used by producers and directors, "hooking the viewers," comes immedi-
ately to mind, but I prefer "making viewers reflect," which not only has a more inter-
active connotation but also endows the viewers with a basic intelligence and
autonomy of judgment.24
Although the ongoing interaction between author and spectator is central to
other performing arts (and, to some extent, in literature), it is most intense in fil
because film's multidimensionality, enhanced by the techniques mentioned above,
permits a fuller treatment of the complexity of human life and allows filmmakers
communicate a large quantity of information in a relatively short screening time.
Critics who claim that the treatment of the past by film can only be superficia
and limited on account of film's short duration are probably unfamiliar with the
nature of dramaturgical and visual language. They might not be aware that, throug
the use of narrative techniques such as metaphors, symbols, allusions, ellipses, and
carefully constructed dialogue, actions and events that are not shown on the screen
are "seen" in the viewer's imagination. (To achieve that is, by the way, one of the
most important challenges in screenwriting.) I leave to critics the instructive exerc
of transcribing into standard written form the amount of information and detail t
is conveyed (seen and not seen) by an average-length feature film. In Caffd Itali
MontreaI one sequence shows, in medium shot and in sepia, two pairs of hands at
dining table with food leftovers. Two hands, clearly those of a laborer, gesticulate
accompany the person's words; the other two hands, smaller and more refined, are
writing a letter. While the camera moves slowly to show objects and details sugges
ing a past period, we hear in voice-over the words of the letter. The viewer learns
1) that an illiterate man has resorted to a literate one to whom he is dictating a let
ter; 2) that the dictating occurs in Montreal, in a winter in the early 1900s (by the
sepia color and by the link with a previous and a following scene); 3) that the perso
24 The question of how viewers respond to, or read, a film or television narrative has given rise to a new field
inquiry, reception studies. See David Thelen, Becoming Citizens in the Age of Television (Chicago, 1996); and Rob
Kroes, "America and the European Sense of History," Journal of American History, 86 (Dec. 1999), 1135-55.

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On the set of Caffe Italia, Montrtial, extras are getting r

immigrants recruited to work in railroad construc
Photograph by Bruno Ramirez.
writing the letter, Santino, is the nephew of the villa

skills at the disposal of other paesani who want to s
4) the man dictating the letter is a sojourner, is mar
earnings to his wife Rosa back in Italy; 5) how much
ing the railroad construction season; 6) that he is now
he will get a job when the new season starts; 7) that
laborers recruited by the local padrone, one Antonio
house where he stays houses thirty other men, man
they speak neither French nor English and keep to
only forty-six seconds, but all this information is mu
with preceding and following sequences. Thus the vi
seven minutes how the padrone system worked in M
of details, all carefully thought out, about Antonio C
orali, or gang leaders, with the recruited workers,
Railway. Readers may find, I am sure, comparable exa
Much of the above already may have been the obje
readers. Still it is important to stress that communic
25 Ca ffd ltalia, Montr&aI.

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genres of storytelling and filmic narration, in particular, do, engages viewers both
emotionally and intellectually. It does not communicate knowledge in the pedagogi-
cal sense of the term. It produces a "narrative understanding" that many thinkers
from Aristotle to Paul Ricoeur have considered to be "much closer to the practical
wisdom of moral judgment than to science, or, more generally, to the theoretical use of
reason." When turned to the past, filmic language has the power to bring the viewer
as close as possible to experiencing the lost universe of the past. But it also carries
with it a power to manipulate that, as I shall argue later, can have disastrous conse-
quences on viewers and on historical culture in general.26
The issue as I see it, then, is not merely the astonishing power of film for narrat-
ing historical events but also the degree to which it has to resort to fiction to achieve
as rich a rendering of the past as possible. By "fiction" I do not refer simply to the
dramatization of historical personalities and officially ascertained human events, I
also refer to the invention of characters and events that become part of the story's plot.
Hence, the taboo referred to by Tibbetts can translate to a challenge for historians
who acknowledge, at least in principle, the crucial role that fiction can play in nar-
rating past human events.
The question I constantly grapple with as I adopt a mode of narration involving
the interweaving of facts and fiction may be put as follows: How can I produce an
artistic work, benefiting from the most efficacious dramaturgical and visual tech-
niques, as well as one that brings the past to life and makes it meaningful and instruc-
tive to the viewer? In trying to find the proper approach, my guiding motto has
become to put fiction to the service of history and history (meaning historical knowl-
edge and sensitivity) to the service of fiction.
Of those two interrelated goals, the first has been tried most frequently. As most
moviegoers know, the fictionalization of significant past events and personalities has
been and still is a widespread practice in filmmaking. Whether the reasons are ideo-
logical, dramaturgical, or dictated by box office considerations, historical subjects
have attracted the interest of the film industry to such an extent that some of the most
celebrated movies in the history of cinema (from The Birth of a Nation and Gone
with the Wind to the recent Saving Private Ryan) belong to the genre. The results
more often than not have irritated professional historians. And one cannot but sym-
pathize, especially when they have put aside reading a good history article in the
comfort of their homes or offices only to see on the big screen strands of a familiar
expected past used to enhance the romantic qualities of a story or deliberately dis-
torted to render as clearly and forcefully as possible the authors' message.27
Of course, we professional historians contribute to our own frustration and disap-
pointment if we impute to that genre of films an educational purpose when its
raison d'etre is first and foremost to entertain viewers by telling a story. And it is
unlikely that this will change. If a filmmaker wants to educate viewers about histori-
26 Paul Ricoeur, "Life in Quest of Narrative," in On Paul Ricoeur. Narrative and Interpretation, ed. David Wood
(New York, 1991), 23.
27 The Birth of a Nation, dir. David W Griffith (Epoch Producing Corporation, 1915); Gone with the Wind,
dir. Victor Fleming (Selznick International Pictures, 1939); Saving Private Ryan.

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In CaffcY Italia, Montrdal, Pierre Curzi (right) plays th

Montreal padrone, Antonio Cordasco, who in 190
crowned "king of Italian laborers."
Courtesy Association Cooperative Productions Audio-
cal events and personalities, he or she will turn t

have done with astonishing results. Thus, approach
the wrong premises cannot but add to one's own f
Historical films are not unlike other genres of featu
torical novels) in that dramaturgical and aesthetic e
and rightly so. If the film's plot is built around
because of its dramatic potential and frequently on ac
a leading personality or event holds in a country's
ation in projecting the commercial potential of a p
feature films is not to impart history lessons to view
rate in their narrative a usage of the past that reflec
that particular historical subject, thus enhancing
answer is obviously yes, and the relatively few m
witness to the possibility.
One of the best illustrations I can think of is D
Return of Martin Guerre. It is far from coincide
fessional historian Nathalie Zemon Davis and, mor
director allowed her to bring to the project had a d

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proper blend of facts and fiction and in making the ren

central concern of the film. In other cases, a filmmaker
sensitive to the historical content of a story and mak
dimensions and subtleties be properly rendered in th
the great Italian film director, could hardly be categorized as a professional historian.
But as a man of great culture and sensitivity, he saw in Giuseppe di Lampedusa's his-
torical novel The Leopard a work of great literary and historical value. In applying to it
his own cinematic language, he produced a blend of fiction and history that reveals
powerfully the ways in which people belonging to different social classes and regions
perceived, and were affected by, the unification of Italy.28
Even assuming the best intentions and the most accurate historical knowledge,
fiction still involves taking liberties with factual accuracy and details, or reordering
complex chains of causality, or putting words in the mouths of historical as well as
invented characters. The issue, as I see it, becomes one of plausibility versus ascertained
factuality. Asked to critique Nicholas Hytner's recent film on the 1692 Salem witch-
hunt, The Crucible (written by Arthur Miller), historian Edmund S. Morgan very
skillfully confronted the issue when he raised the question of "how closely a play-
wright [or screenwriter] must be tied to what is known, for he cannot be tied too
closely that his play or film becomes merely a documentary." His answer goes a long
way in undermining the taboo mentioned by Tibbetts, especially since it comes from
the leading living authority on Puritan society and colonial Massachusetts. "He is
surely entitled to make up things that did not happen. Indeed he must make them
up if he is to give us more understanding of what did happen than historians have
been able to do in confining themselves to proven facts."29
From the other side of the fence, the independent and engage United States film-
maker John Sayles, when questioned on how he dealt with the same issue in mak-
ing Matewan, explained how necessary it was to resort to fiction to "be true to the
larger picture":
To make it even more representative, I incorporated things that weren't literally

true of the Matewan Massacre-such as the percentage of miners who were black-
but were true of that general fifteen-year period . . . so I crammed a certain
amount of related but not strictly factual stuff into that particular history.30
To offer a personal example drawn from the film La Sarrasine, we invented a situ-
ation involving several scenes and sequences in which the leading female character,
Ninetta, uses an exercise book as her artisan husband teaches her how to write. Once
28 The Return of Martin Guerre, dir. Daniel Vigne (CCFC, 1982). See also Ed Benson, "Martin Guerre: The His-
torian and the Filmmaker: An Interview with Nathalie Zemon Davis," Film and History, 13 (Sept. 1983), 55-58;
and Nathalie Zemon Davis, "Any Resemblance to Persons Living or Dead: Film and the Challenge of Authentic-
ity," Yale Review, 76 (Sept. 1987), 461-77. Giuseppe di Lampedusa, The Leopard, trans. Archibald Colqhoun
(New York, 1960); The Leopard, dir. Luchino Visconti (sGc and Titanus, 1963).
29 The Crucible, dir. Nicholas Hytner (20th Century Fox, 1996); Edmund S. Morgan, "Bewitched," New York
Review of Books, Jan. 9, 1997, p. 4.
30Matewan, dir. John Sayles (Goldcrest Films, Ltd., 1987); "A Conversation between Eric Foner and John
Sayles," in Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies, ed. Ted Mico, John Miller-Monzon, and David Rubel
(NewYork, 1995), 13.

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In La Sarrasine, Giuseppe Moschella (Tony Nardi)

Ninetta (Enrica-Maria Modugno) how to wri
Courtesy Association Cooperative Productions Audio
tragedy befalls the immigrant couple, and the hu

for having killed a native-born Canadian man
becomes Ninetta's intimate diary in which she re
guage her anguish and fear as the trial proceeds. The
a central narrative device throughout the story; m
the film, the exercise book plays a crucial role in
a widow) and the widow of the murdered man. If
Italian immigrants living in Montreal in 1905, it is
set aside time at night so that the husband could
have been found. Yet it is plausible that a young i
motivation and resources. Factually invented (fic
that situation proved crucial in the developme
to penetrate the emotional life of a Sicilian co
Montreal. Based on true events (the murder and t
by creating around it a historical context emb
situations 3
3 _La Sarrasine.

158.251.246.225 on Thu, 18 Jul 2024 14:40:52 UTC
... .,,'..',, .. .. ..' ."-' ...--: ..... . .. ;' ..... '. ', ,, ... ... ... '..;.
In La Sarrasine) Ninetta (Enrica Maria Modugno) wan

as she ponders her future after the death of her h
Courtesy Association Cooperative Productions Audio
In most cases, the invention of secondary char

re-create a specific historical context, unless one wants to reproduce cinematically a
story "just as it happened," something that most assuredly would be as boring, if at
all possible, as if done in a history book. In fact, invented characters and subplots
constitute a narrative layer that is indispensable to the development of dramatic effects.
Most important, it is at that level that the historian-writer makes the utmost use of
his or her historical imagination and knowledge. For not only must the inventions
be credible as part of the overall plot, they must also be rooted in a specific past,
which cannot be done properly without researching the particular historic context.
And then comes the most radical shift I have to make in confronting the past.
The internal dialogue that had gone on as I researched the subject, gathered the nar-
rative elements, and designed the story comes to an end. The two rationalities coex-
isting in my intellectual persona have to part ways. For here I have to deal with an
order of temporality that, as already mentioned, is quite different from the one I adopt
when writing a scholarly essay or a monograph. I have to detach myself as much as I
can from the linear temporality associated with proving a fact and from the argu-
mentative language required in interpreting it. Rather, time must reflect the multi-
temporality inherent in human actions, as I seek to render the complexity of men's
and women's motivations, aspirations, and their interactions within a time- and space-
bound universe.

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Less frequent, and in my view more challenging, is

weaving fact and fiction, putting history to the service
tion. This occurs when an entirely fictional story is
grows out of the adaptation of a well-known historic
quent because producers cannot capitalize on the int
events and personalities hold for potential viewers, n
basic documentation that usually accompanies a "real stor
constitutes a major difficulty later becomes a terrain
Here, within a selected genre, such as social drama, co
thing is invented: characters, the main story, and su
dramaturgy and visual language, the lives of the cha
them embody the specific historical (material and cu
The initial creative process is not unlike that of nove
past peopled by ordinary men, women, and children.
historian-writer can exploit all his or her knowledge
acters in a specific context and to re-create a past in a
We followed that route in the recently released La de'r
businessman from humble origins who embodies bo
from his youth in southern Italy and modern values
business activities in Montreal. Although much of the
the past is a crucial dimension of the story because i
ter. More important, it is the past as he reconstructs
film he orders from an amateur filmmaker to leave
The delicate balance between archaic and modern va
confronted by a major family crisis. Ultimately, his i
values and in his manliness, lead him to tragedy. De
crossed in his life, one proved fatal.32
Although the story is totally invented, a great de
research went into recreating the social and emotio
who wants to pass on to his Canadian-born children h
to him. Obviously, trying to ascertain the factualit
exercise; what counts most is whether the character
the viewers, thus becoming vehicles of universal tru
tribute to the dramaturgical quality of the narrative, wh
the viewers' understanding of the world the film seek
The historicization of fiction has offered me anothe
ing an original subject frees me from those temporal an
known historical event or personality imposes on a s
of plots and characters I can bring out more easily t
the story a transnational character. Of course, this
story may be written to occur within a restricted spatia
town, a neighborhood, or a penitentiary. But when
32 La d6route, dir. Paul Tana (ACPAV, 1998).

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ramifications that extend beyond a single country, o

tures, historian-writers have a rare opportunity to e
that afflicts so many historical narratives. In conceiv
and La ddroute and in writing the screenplays, writing
a conscious dimension of our narrative agenda. Yet i
chose, and it imposed itself on us as we developed the screenplays. Although both
stories are rooted in Montreal, southern Italy (and at times the United States) is con-
stantly present in the narrative, not merely as a symbolic reference but as a part of the
characters' mental universe that influences their behavior and choices.
Obviously, dividing historical films between those that fictionalize history and those
that historicize fiction is arbitrary, employed here to facilitate a discussion of my prac-
tice. I could shift perspective and ask what is meant by "historical film" and probably
get a variety of answers. Most commonly, we think of them as films whose stories occur
in the past and often involve episodes or personalities of national and world fame.
The French use the expression film d'epoque to refer to the detailed tableaux and
elaborate costume arrays that can be the joy or the affliction of artistic departments.
But do all those elements in themselves justify the appellation "historical"? My
experience as both a screenwriter and a viewer has led me to embrace a more restricted
usage. I am not satisfied with including in that category a film whose historicity is
merely expressed in costumes and artistic decors, and by the distance in time between
the story it recounts and our own time. Although those elements are important, if
not essential, my yardstick for assessing the historicity of a film is its ability to make
the past, a specific past, speak with its own voice: a voice that is embodied in each
character's behavior and world view, in each's ceremonial appearances or most pri-
vate vices; a voice that is heard as characters interact among themselves and with
their own environment; and one we can hear scream, exalt, or moan as the human
drama unfolds. If that is achieved, the past cannot but become a protagonist of the
narrative, to the advantage of both the artist and the audience.
IV
Many of the issues raised above converge on the all-important question of "histori-
cal culture," an expression employed here to mean the awareness we have of the past
as an inherent dimension of our human condition. Whether such an awareness grows
out of a contemplative desire (what Simon Schama, referring to Herodotus, called
"the poetic stance toward the past") or out of the acknowledgment that the past helps
explain the present ("where we come from"), historical culture is part of the wider
cultural universe of all societies. It may be stronger in some societies than in others;
it may be nourished by religious traditions, by founding myths, or by scientifically pro-
duced knowledge, but as professional historians we can hardly take it for granted.33
Much of my discussion is in fact premised on the belief that-whether we like it
or not-historical culture is a component of the civic culture inherent in societies, a
33 Simon Schama, "Clio at the Multiplex: What Hollywood and Herodotus Have in Common," New Yorker,
Jan. 19, 1998, pp. 38-45.

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.m . A . . | 0 W t g :;li: | | B>B,,~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~. ........
In an illustration from the storyboard of La Sarrasine, im

a Sicilian puppet show given by Giuseppe at his Mo
Drawing by Catherine Saouter.
Courtesy Association Cooperative Productions Audi
sort of barometer by which the civic health of a society can be assessed. As such, his-
torical culture must be a major concern of professional historians who no longer can
eschew what David Thelen has called "the dilemma of democracy in our media-made
age."34 If it is true that we are the major producers of historical knowledge, we are
far from being the primary agents in transmuting that knowledge into historical cul-
ture. That is not merely due to the constraints that academia and the discipline of
history impose on us. It is also due to the overwhelming role that the mass media have
played in the production and the diffusion of historical culture since the emergence
of mass culture. Most of us are aware that the subliminal effects of commercial
advertising, national political rhetoric, and Hollywood-produced films constantly
bombard us with messages and narratives whose historical content reinforces visions of
the past, more often than not, based on national myths.
We are all familiar with the place that the history of the American West occupies
in our historical culture. While historians have produced a massive body of knowl-
edge concerning that complex historical process, the film industry has developed its
own version of that story. Westerns celebrate the virtues of the honest settler con-
fronting almost insurmountable physical adversities and such human foes as crimi-
34 Thelen, Becoming Citizens in the Age of Television, 3.

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nals, Indians, or simple but colorful Mexicans. Westerns make the conquest of the
West perhaps the most powerful metaphor for those positive attributes that allegedly
make up the American national character and make it possible for a "Marlboro
country" advertisement to convey its own subtle historical narrative, much like that
conveyed by ads of shining automobiles victoriously reaching the most remote and
seemingly inaccessible mountaintop, to the admiration of surrounding cactus trees.
The power of the film industry in shaping a society's historical culture has been so
overwhelming that one may legitimately ask how much of the knowledge the average
citizen has of World War II or of the protracted Cold War conflict or of the Vietnam
War is derived from movies and how much comes from courses and history books.
Even more important for its insidious impact on historical culture is the fact that
when the film industry has turned to historical movies, it often has treated national sub-
jects, thus injecting powerful doses of national history into our historical culture to
such an extent that the latter is virtually synonymous with "national historical culture."
Despite the positive results brought about by historians who have turned their
practice toward educational media and nonacademic audiences, there are reasons to
be skeptical about our ability and means to counter the impact of such media empires
on a society's historical culture. Skepticism may be all the more justified by consider-
ing the recent release of Steven Spielberg's Amistad. The recruitment of a distinguished
team of professional historians acting as advisers did not prevent the film from being
yet another contribution to myth making. To be sure, it is myth making in its liberal
variant, conveying the message that the craving for human rights and freedom
transcended racial boundaries, when most students of United States history and
most African Americans know painfully well that that racial boundary is one of the
most tragic themes running through their country's history. If one of the objectives
of a work of art is to bring out universal truths, one will not find them in this treat-
ment. Moreover, viewers leave their seats believing that the Amistad trial sparked the
fire of an abolitionism presented more as the forerunner of present-day debates on
race relations (including the lingo) than as the divisive and hate-generating move-
ment it was in the 1830s.35
But Spielberg's Amistad deserves our critical attention because it is one of the most
recent illustrations in filmmaking of how a set of historical events that had clear
transnational dimensions the slave trade on the high seas, the jurisdictional con-
flict between Spain and the United States, the place of Africa in American imagery-
got trimmed of its spatial ramifications and turned into an episode of national history.
Considering the overwhelming impact of the mass media on historical culture and
the lukewarm attitude of much of our profession toward developments in that field,
this discussion could hardly be concluded with a happy ending. Still, my experience
has convinced me that there is much we historians can do if only we acknowledge
the need and the duty to intervene on the terrain of historical culture in an age dom-
35Amistad, dir. Steven Spielberg (Paramount Pictures, 1997).

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inated by mass media. There is no question that acad

making are worlds apart, yet they are not so far apart that historians concerned with
the future of our profession and willing to experiment with other practices can try to
bridge the gap. True, the training most of us have received has downplayed the nar-
rative dimension of historical writing. At the same time, some of us work and write
on historical subjects that have a higher narrative potential than others. We may not
be aware of this, but a storyteller (whether filmmaker or novelist) could point out
the possibilities.
That is how I happened to get involved in filmmaking after my earlier isolated expe-
riences. In my early works on the history of Italian settlements in Montreal I sought
to integrate the analytical and the narrative modes to bring out the multiple daily
experiences of those immigrants, which did not go unnoticed outside academia. After
La storia, one film director, Paul Tana, showed a keen interest in my work, since he
saw in it material that lent itself to both documentary and fictional treatment. The
result was Caffe' Italia, MontreaI, a film that allowed moviegoers and television view-
ers in Canada and abroad to learn about previously unknown aspects of the Italian
presence in Quebec. I was able also to address some central aspects of the migration
process, such as the role of padrones, the importance of the family economy, the
working of chain migrations, the tragedy of having immigrated from a country that
became a war-time enemy and the ways in which individual and group identities
shifted and were reformulated from one generation to the next. Caffek Italia, Montreal
was also the beginning of a collaboration based on mutual trust and respect that has
lasted to this day. An ideal setup, I must admit. Conceiving a subject, developing the
plot, and then writing the screenplay with the person who will direct the film ensures
that much of the historical and dramaturgical research that went into the script will
be preserved in the final product. But it is surprising how many independent pro-
ducers and directors are in search of good subjects and only need to be convinced of
the dramatic potential of a story.
Of course, one does not suddenly acquire the gift of storytelling, and some never
do. Yet I am sure that in many of us this gift or predisposition, though an endan-
gered species, still exists in a latent state, and one may never discover this unless the
first step is taken. Our detailed historical knowledge of specific milieux, of the exploits
and tragedies of real but ordinary men, women, and children, and of little-known
events that reflect target issues is a rich resource that awaits the translation to stories.
That is the initial step toward which many of us can work.
Moreover, our teaching can be reoriented, as some are already doing, to sensitize
students to different approaches to the past. We must be aware that when we teach our
courses we confront students whose historical culture largely has been shaped by the
mass media. No doubt this realization has led a growing number of historians to
treat historical films as an ongoing part of our teaching practice. We use them not
merely to analyze the factuality of their content but also to sensitize students to the
basics of dramaturgical and visual language and to equip them to recognize films that
convey an ethnocentric vision of our collective past or may diffuse national myths.
One of the most rewarding experiences I have had in my teaching has been the

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discovery of narrative talent among some of my st

to the past that combines a rigorous factual contextualization with the encourage-
ment to use as freely as possible one's imagination in an institutional system that
tends to stifle it. For me it has been an exercise in how to mix facts with fiction; for
the students it has been an occasion to enter the past as visitors who, while following
a tourist map, feel free to stray into unmarked back roads and alleys, and enjoy it.
I have chosen to write in this vein because I believe that, as I mentioned at the out-
set, the debate on national history is inevitably bound up with the issue of our his-
torical practices. The hegemony of national history is not only exerted in academia
but also in the historical culture of our society, where professional and civic respon-
sibility should overlap. Perhaps never before in the history of our profession has there
been a greater need for cultural engagement, for questioning our practices, and for
reassessing our position within the discipline and in society.

158.251.246.225 on Thu, 18 Jul 2024 14:40:52 UTC

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Clio in Words and in Motion: Practices of Narrating the Past

Author(s): Bruno Ramirez

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In participating in the debate on national and transnational perspectives on Ameri-

The Journal of American History December 1999 987

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I had something to learn both from the little tru

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its people, its myths, its projections, and its subtle

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understand and feel the thick cultural-political bou

Hugh MacLellan, Two Solitudes (Toronto, 1945).

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cultural blitzes a couple of years later and joined the hi

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occur in a void; it is informed by personal values, shaped by social consciousness,

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perhaps painful, moments of silence as he strove to re

8 La storia, dir. Nick Zavaglia (Tele-Quebec, 1984).

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receiving societies but also to that of the societies t

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We saw that kind of crossing going on all around us, a

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I found it inherent in the discipline of history. Sin

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part of human experience. In Caffd Italia, Montrda

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It is a well-known fact that, both as a medium and as

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On the set of Caffe Italia, Montrtial, extras are getting r

writing the letter, Santino, is the nephew of the villa

25 Ca ffd ltalia, Montr&aI.

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In CaffcY Italia, Montrdal, Pierre Curzi (right) plays th

cal events and personalities, he or she will turn t

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proper blend of facts and fiction and in making the ren

To make it even more representative, I incorporated things that weren't literally

This content downloaded from

In La Sarrasine, Giuseppe Moschella (Tony Nardi)

tragedy befalls the immigrant couple, and the hu

This content downloaded from

In La Sarrasine) Ninetta (Enrica Maria Modugno) wan

In most cases, the invention of secondary char

This content downloaded from

Less frequent, and in my view more challenging, is

32 La d6route, dir. Paul Tana (ACPAV, 1998).

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ramifications that extend beyond a single country, o

This content downloaded from

.m . A . . | 0 W t g :;li: | | B>B,,~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~. ........

In an illustration from the storyboard of La Sarrasine, im

34 Thelen, Becoming Citizens in the Age of Television, 3.

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35Amistad, dir. Steven Spielberg (Paramount Pictures, 1997).

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inated by mass media. There is no question that acad

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