在《敦刻爾克》中，爲什麼沒有印度人和非洲人的鏡頭？｜英語每天學娛樂頭條網

上海圖書館每天為頭條號的讀者提供優質的英語閱讀

導讀

克里斯托弗·諾蘭根據二戰真實事件改編的史詩鉅作《敦刻爾克》在海外上映。影片講述了1940年英法聯軍從法國北海岸撤退的故事。但有趣的是，一部英國人拍的英國故事卻在遙遠的另一個國度——印度引發了不小的爭議！

據英國廣播公司（BBC）駐印度特約記者蘇堤克·比斯瓦斯報道，在印度，很多影評人都對該片導演諾蘭表達了不滿，因為他對印度士兵在這場戰役裡扮演的角色隻字未提。

印度學者認為，幾乎沒有人可以否認印度士兵的價值。他們認為，大約500萬英聯邦公民在二戰時期參與大英帝國的兵役，其中幾乎一半來自於南亞。而印度士兵在託布魯克、蒙特卡西諾、科希馬、和英帕爾等戰役中起到重要作用。他們甚至認為是英國、印度和非洲國家組成的多國軍隊為盟軍收復了緬甸。

#Why the lack of Indian and African faces in Dunkirk matters#

What a surprise that Nigel Farage has endorsed the new fantasy-disguised-as-historical war film, Dunkirk. Christopher Nolan’s movie is an inadvertently timely, thinly veiled Brexiteer fantasy in which plucky Britons heroically retreat from the dangerous shores of Europe. Most importantly, it pushes the narrative that it was Britain as it exists today – and not the one with a global empire – that stood alone against the “European peril”.

To do so, it erases the Royal Indian Army Services Corp companies, which were not only on the beach, but tasked with transporting supplies over terrain that was inaccessible for the British Expeditionary

Force’s motorized transport companies. It also ignores the fact that by 1938, lascars – mostly from South Asia and East Africa – counted for one of four crewmen on British merchant vessels, and thus participated in large numbers in the evacuation.

A vast, all-white production such as Nolan’s Dunkirk is not an accident. Such a big budget film is a product of many hundreds of small and large decisions in casting, production, directing and editing. Perhaps Nolan chose to follow the example of the original allies in the second world war who staged a white-only liberation of Paris even though 65% of the Free French Army troops were from West Africa. Perhaps such a circumscribed, fact-free imagination is a product of rewriting British history over the past decades, not in the least by deliberate policies including Operation Legacy. Knowingly or not, Nolan walks in the footsteps of both film directors and politicians who have chosen to whitewash the past.

All storytellers – and novelists, poets, journalists, and filmmakers are, ultimately, just that – know the power we hold. Stories can dehumanize, demonize and erase. Such stories are essential to pave the way for physical and material violence against those we learn to hate. But stories are also the only means of humanizing those deemed inhuman; to create pity, compassion, sympathy, even love for those who are strange and strangers. Stories decide the difference between life and death. And that is why Dunkirk – and indeed any story – is never just a story.