Historical Story - Parlez Vous?

Artist’s Statement:

This week we discussed the role of history in our lives and in storytelling. Many people consider history to be concrete and unchanging – it happened exactly a certain way, one person wrote it down, and that’s that. But the recollection of  history is actually quite relative. Each person perceives the past differently, and events that occurred embody different meanings to everyone.

The story we chose for our script is from Jessica’s family history. It is based on the story of how my grandparents met. It takes place in 1950, right after the start of the Korean War. But the war does not exactly play a major role in the story. Its inclusion in the form of a newspaper article serves only to establish the historical context wherein the story transpires. The acquaintance of these two people is the big event in the script and in her family’s history.

This script is based on an true story, but we added and omitted some details to improve its fitness to be a screenplay. I feel this falls in line with article we read by Ethan Canin. He wrote about his relationship with an old photo. Throughout the story he thought it was a photo of his mother, hanging up blankets after a family, but later he finds out that it was actually a picture of his grandmother, and what he thought was happening in the photo was not at all what actually happened. In one sense, he fabricated his own history, and it was a big part of him. We discussed this idea in class, and I think this script is a great example of this phenomenon. We did change the story, but it does not necessarily make it less true. We simply shaped history differently.