Week of February 17th: Viva Zapata!
"If there is not justice for the people, let there be no peace for the government," Emiliano Zapata. This week we watched the movie, Viva Zapata! a historical drama about Zapata becoming a leader of a rebellion against President Diaz's corrupt ruling. For class, I had the task of figuring out the point of view and answering some questions about the point of view. One of the questions was, "Is the point of view from which the story is told is the best choice that the storyteller could have made," and my answer for the class really focused on this question. I find that point of view is a very important piece in life and that a simple different point of view between people can cause miscommunications. In the movie, the point of view was third person limited as we only had Zapatas and the countrymen's viewpoint of the rebellion. This causes us not to know the whole story and not know why Diaz was doing what he was doing. One thing that we mentioned in class about the point of view that I also found interesting was that the movie was made by an AMERICAN director. Due to this, the viewpoint can be skewed as it would be an American interpretation. Not only with it being an American interpretation it was also a drama as mentioned in the beginning. Overall, while the movie was interesting it was probably not all that historically accurate.
Hi there Jayden! I thoroughly enjoyed your thoughts on this week's film. I did not have the Discussion Question about point of view, but I found that portion of class to be especially intriguing. Some parts of these classes all seem to come back to the discussions we started the year within Serrata's portion of the class where it all comes back to perceptions and perspectives. I felt that this was an excellent example of the way that our interpretation had to change based on the source and type of information. I found myself questioning my own view on the movie after considering that it was directed by an American director, especially after the quote that Serrata shared with us from Steinbeck about the movie not intending to be a historical account. Based on all of this, I completely agree with your statement that while the movie was interesting, it is not historically accurate, and therefore should not be a source for a paper later.
ReplyDeleteThank you for your post, Jayden. You make an interesting point about how the fact that Zapata’s story in the movie is being told from the perspective of the Mexican peasants means that we don’t get the whole story. I was left wanting to know more about how the fact that this is an American movie further complicates the film’s historical accuracy. In what way is this “an American interpretation”?
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