在《敦刻尔克》中，为什么没有印度人和非洲人的镜头？｜英语每天学娛樂頭條網

上海图书馆每天为头条号的读者提供优质的英语阅读

导读

克里斯托弗·诺兰根据二战真实事件改编的史诗巨作《敦刻尔克》在海外上映。影片讲述了1940年英法联军从法国北海岸撤退的故事。但有趣的是，一部英国人拍的英国故事却在遥远的另一个国度——印度引发了不小的争议！

据英国广播公司（BBC）驻印度特约记者苏堤克·比斯瓦斯报道，在印度，很多影评人都对该片导演诺兰表达了不满，因为他对印度士兵在这场战役里扮演的角色只字未提。

印度学者认为，几乎没有人可以否认印度士兵的价值。他们认为，大约500万英联邦公民在二战时期参与大英帝国的兵役，其中几乎一半来自于南亚。而印度士兵在托布鲁克、蒙特卡西诺、科希马、和英帕尔等战役中起到重要作用。他们甚至认为是英国、印度和非洲国家组成的多国军队为盟军收复了缅甸。

#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.