Anil´s Ghost
Note: Submitted as an assignment for Indepth Course in Political and Social Changes in South Asia/ Scientific Methods
Depiction of History, Religion and Political Conflict in Contemporary Fiction:
‘Distance’ in Anil’s Ghost by Michael Ondaatje
Anil’s Ghost by Michael Ondaatje: Summery.
Anil’s Ghost transports us to Sri Lanka, a country steeped in centuries of tradition, now forced into the late twentieth century by the ravages of civil war. Into this maelstrom steps Anil Tissera, a young woman born in Sri Lanka, educated in England and America, who returns to her homeland as a forensic anthropologist sent by an international human rights group to discover the source of the organized campaigns of murder engulfing the island. The government agrees reluctantly to the mission and keeps a grim eye on it. Sarath Diyasena, whose specialty is sixth-century archaeology, is officially designated to accompany her. Investigating an archaeological site, they find a burned skeleton, which they name Sailor, among the remains. The evidence points to violent death and to the body having been moved from somewhere else. Since the site is closed and guarded by the army, this would be the first specific evidence of the government’s long-rumoured black operations. How can they identify the dead man? They visit Sarath’s old mentor, Palipana, a once-eminent archaeologist fallen out of grace, now retired to an abandoned monastery and close to death. He knows of someone who might construct from the skull a representation of the face:
Ananda is last in a line of craftsmen appointed to paint eyes on statues of the Buddha, an ancient ceremonial tradition. Ananda fashions a face that would be recognizable and usable for identification - except that it wears the generic Buddha’s expression of serenity. Ananda’s wife disappeared in the terror; the painter cannot bear to configure death as anything but a state of peace.
Through Sarath’s brother Gamini, whose punishing non-stop work as a doctor in the emergency ward of Colombo’s main hospital after many years in hospitals on the borderlines of war in North Central Sri Lanka, the human carnage of the civil conflict is described with force and detail. Gamini has given up everything (his wife has left him) for sleepless vigils treating the unending victims of bombings, shootings and maimings.
Anil’s quest for truth and her exposition about Sailor to the government-bodies places her life in danger. Sarath manages to take her away to safety and arranges her to leave the country. She escapes. Later, Gamini finds the tortured body of Sarath brought in to the hospital. A description of the assassination of the country’s president precedes the final chapter ‘Distance’ which describes Ananda performing the eye-ceremony on a new statue of Buddha, replacing one plundered by brigands.
Fusing Facts and Fiction
In the author’s note at the beginning of the novel, Ondaatje explains the setting for his narrative as Sri Lanka from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, steeped in a crisis that involved the government, the separatist guerrillas in the north and the antigovernment insurgents in the south. He claims that while there existed similar organisations, the characters and the incidents in the novel are fictional. Then, it becomes extremely significant from both epistemological and ontological positions, that he draws the names of the disappeared from an actual list in Amnesty International reports. Similarly, the description of the assassination of the president is based on true events, though the president’s name has been changed. Ontologically, it portrays the reality as a political and a historical moment of a country’s and its peoples’ being. Simultaneously, it leads to an epistemological discussion on the line between facts and fiction, and the process of validating fiction. My point of departure here would be to analyse how a novel can illuminate aspects of political and social issues recorded in reportage – a Newsweek cover story, a BBC headline, or meticulous research papers.
I will discuss the last section in the novel named ‘Distance’ from an interpretivist position, but will refer to the total text when necessary, to establish certain points. On the outset it must be mentioned that the novel presents an interesting case of positivist and interpretivist analysis through the characters of Anil, the forensic anthropologist espousing western values of objectivity and rationalism and Sarath, the archaeologist arguing for a truth that is enriched by subjective perception: “I want you to understand the archaeological surround of a fact. Or you'll be like one of those journalists who file reports about flies and scabs while staying at the Galle Face Hotel. That false empathy and blame…” For Sarath knowledge is not to be ‘acquired in the usual, reasoning and rational discursive way’ but, as Alvesson and Sköldberg put it, by illumination on the patterns of complex wholes giving a complete overview. Both characters are equally involved in the quest for truth and knowledge, and distinctively represent the two famous empirical traditions.
‘Distance’ is the grand finale that interlocks history, religion and politics of the country in a fascinating fusion of facts and fiction, providing the contextuality for the forensic investigation, unfurled in a manner somewhat similar to mystery writing. It lifts the narrative from typical mystery/science fiction genre to a dialogue on socio-political issues that cannot be understood without relating to the historical processes. Thus, Hermeneutics, with its insistence on the inability to understand the meaning of the part without relating it to the whole, becomes my first tool for analysing the text of Distance. The chapter begins with three brigands pillaging an ancient statue of Buddha. However, this crime is portrayed as negligible compared to the political atrocities committed during this time of terror. “Still this was broken stone. It was not a human life…” The uninhabited land around this historical monument is a burial ground for victims of political murder. The author portrays the destruction of the statue as an action politically neutral, though a year after the publication of the novel saw the destruction of Bamian Buddhas in Afghanistan by the religious fundamentalists, which would invent new connotations to the image of destroying religious symbolisms within Sri Lanka as well as internationally. Just as much as the meaning of action could not be understood without referring to what was happening in the whole island, Ondaatje’s text on Sri Lanka can only be understood when you relate it to the world scenario.
Empathy is a key feature of hermeneutics that can be applied to the text of Distance through narrative analysis. The artisan Ananda is a character that belongs to a different milieu than that of the writer. According to Alvesson & Sköldberg ‘understanding calls for living (thinking, feeling)’ the other person’s ‘universe’ by creative and imaginative means to interpret the meaning of action. Through the use of metaphor and poetic language Ondaatje is able to penetrate the mental universe of Ananda, a rural artisan, and locate him in his ontological narrative: ‘you slipped into the old bed of art, where they had slept. There was comfort there’. Observe how Ondaatje captures Ananda’s relationship to his work: ‘as an artificer now he did not celebrate the greatness of a faith. But he knew if he didn’t remain an artificer he would become a demon. The war around him was to do with demons, spectres of retaliation.’ The writer integrates the knowledge of myth and tradition of the country that links with a public narrative at another level. Thus the religious history of the country becomes the telescope that allows us to observe the present conditions, with the ‘distance’ providing the necessary detachment.
I choose Postmodernism as my second tool for analysis as it enables contrasting vistas within the text than that brought forth by using hermeneutics. The content of Distance involves deconstruction and reconstruction of a historical monument by its inheritors ‘trying to find a solution for hunger or a way out of their disintegrating lives’: these ancient Buddha statues are potent symbols of the nexus between religion and the political economy of the ancient Sinhalese civilisation that flourished in the north central province about 2000 years ago. They are prominent part of the iconography evoked by Sinhala Buddhist nationalists by referring to the ‘Glory Days’ to reinforce Sinhalese identity. By using this image in the present context – the Buddha in the middle of a graveyard of political murders, Ondaatje captures the paradoxes unique to the island - its political and social violence in recent history given the long, deeply engrained tradition of Buddhism that seem to connect its past and present: “the fields where Buddhism and its values met the harsh political events of the twentieth century”.
A second important aspect is that the actors in the Distance are not the protagonists of the novel. Nor are they the protagonists of their society: the thieves who destroyed the statue, Ananda, the artisan who reconstructs it, and the villagers, who assist him, represent the common people of the country. It is not the ‘grand narrative’ of the political elite in the lap of Colombo luxury and power, or ‘the dominant discourse that should be replaced by micro histories – local, always provisory and limited stories’. Thus, Distance becomes the narrative of the subaltern and the ‘marginal is transformed into the principal’. The aspect of reconstruction is as significant as the process of deconstruction in post-modern analysis. Ananda fuses the face of the Buddha out of the broken splinters but instead of trying to homogenise it into a unit, he decides to leave it ‘quilted’, with its ‘eyes [that] would always look north’. The wounded face of the Buddha becomes a powerful metaphor for the island wrought by the conflict in the north. On the other hand, the un-homogenised quilted face could also be a metaphor for pluralism. For example, the same post modernist question could be raised for the text as, whether ‘properties such as unity, identity, permanence, structure and essence are privileged over dissonance, disparity, plurality, transience and change’.
Conflict and Cinema
The purpose of the analysis of Distance in Anil’s Ghost so far has been to unearth how contemporary fiction could portray socio-political issues in a more meaningful manner than how it would be exposed in the mainstream media. Novels such as Anil’s Ghost, Funny Boy, July and Cinnamon Gardens have recorded the political conflict in Sri Lanka, through narratives that place these situations in historical and social perspectives, elucidating deep insights and understanding. If literary fiction, in the form of prose or poetry can be regarded as a cultural product of its society, it could also be read as creation of culture.
Cinema is another form of cultural product, which in turn creates culture. Håkan Durmaz sees cinema as a surface for recording social realities. Though cinema could be seen as a modern commercial operation and a mode of popular entertainment, for some social researchers, it can be an invaluable field for producing insights into changing social relations. He argues that film has been a medium for depicting conflict, for example, in the Cannes Film Festival 1995, two films on the Balkan Wars won the best film, Palme d’Or and Grand Prix. Similarly, in Cannes Film Festival 2005, a Sri Lankan film depicting the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka won the Camera d’Or.
I want to gear my thesis towards discovering how cinema has portrayed the socio-political situation in Sri Lanka. Thus my research question could be ‘how the Sri Lankan and/or South Indian Cinema have portrayed the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka?’ A number of sub questions can be brought forth in this regard. How has cinema depicted Sinhalese or Tamil identity? What are the dominant discourses subscribed to/refuted in the movies? How has the state and the civil society reacted to the movies? Has the movie had an impact on inter group relationships? Does the movie propose creative and alternative solutions to end the conflict? How sensitive have the movies been to depicting the life of the minority? What was the motivation of the filmmaker? How has his or her background affected the content of the movie? Why did he choose to depict the situation in that particular way?
The ambition or the goal of this research springs from a personal observation and assumption that a communications issue (also) lies at the heart of the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka. Once you exclude the government and the LTTE from the set, the main predicament that the people face is their inability to communicate with each other due to language difference - the greatest setback for strengthening of inter-group relations. This is by no means an effort to give a simplistic interpretation to the sources of the ethnic conflict, which has a number of complex processes converging and leading to the current state of affairs. My interest is finding alternative points of departure to search for peace from the perspective of the civil society. Agreeing with Durmaz, I will not go as far as to find a ‘cure’ in cinema, but definitely some clues.
In making methodological choices I will first aspire the research to be comparative, drawing a case from Tamil, South Indian Cinema to be compared with a case/cases from Sinhala Cinema. I make this choice especially as there are no movies made in Tamil or by Tamil directors in Sri Lankan cinema. Thus, Sri Lankan cinema or ‘Sinhala Cinema’ as it is often called may naturally tend to be the ‘majority view’ where as South Indian cinema, can (hopefully) provide an alterative approach in portraying the conflict.
Secondly, I wish to analyse these films from an interpretivist position, drawing from the nine different types of hermeneutics, discourse analysis and post-modern analysis. Kvale points out that traditional media research employ qualitative method through content analysis to find he content and the form of communication. This textual analysis is to identify the discourses the movies relate to and establish their relationship with the prevalent ideologies regarding the ethnic conflict. I believe the step to be necessary as it will be instrumental in recognising the reaction of the state and the civil society towards the ideologies these movies put forth. However, it is important to note that my ambition is not to make a movie review. The focus of the research is the ethnic conflict and identifying the key aspects of the contemporary discourse revolving around it, and how cinema becomes a medium, which reflects the reactions of the civil society and the state to the ethnic conflict.
My third step will be a field study to investigate the creators and the audience of this cinema as the representatives of the civil society. Interviews will be the main method of gathering information. I believe this is the best method since the nature of the information sought is qualitative rather than quantitative. Kvale points out that the sensitivity of the interview and the closeness to the subjects lived world can lead to knowledge that can be used to enhance the human condition. The interviews could be in the form of individual interviews (i.e. with the directors/scriptwriters of the movies or the member of the Film Development Board) to focus group interviews (i.e. university students, NGO professionals and peace workers, researchers, artists, journalists, critics representing civil society groups). The interviews will be directed towards finding out the opinions, especially with the audience where as the interviews with the filmmakers will be geared towards finding out his experience (in the form of a narrative) of making the movie as much as his attitudes and opinions towards the subject discussed.
Field observations will be a primary way of finding out the impact and the reaction of the films, supported by some research into newspapers and media, for example, some movies were, first banned by the government for a long time before finally being able to be shown on the cinemas.
Finally, it would be important to carry out the research with an open mind. I believe the fruit of my research to be unearthing some insights about the formation of certain attitudes towards the current political situation as much as about how the portrayal of the ethnic conflict in cinema leads to a social discourse on war and peace.
Bibliography
Ondaatje, Michael (2000) Anil’s Ghost, Picador
Kvale, Steinar, (1996), Inter Views, Sage Publications
Parker, Ian and the Bolton Discourse Network, (1999), Open University Press, Buckingham, Philadelphia
Alvesson and Sköldberg (2000) Reflexive Methodology, Sage Publications
www.festival-cannes.fr
Depiction of History, Religion and Political Conflict in Contemporary Fiction:
‘Distance’ in Anil’s Ghost by Michael Ondaatje
Anil’s Ghost by Michael Ondaatje: Summery.
Anil’s Ghost transports us to Sri Lanka, a country steeped in centuries of tradition, now forced into the late twentieth century by the ravages of civil war. Into this maelstrom steps Anil Tissera, a young woman born in Sri Lanka, educated in England and America, who returns to her homeland as a forensic anthropologist sent by an international human rights group to discover the source of the organized campaigns of murder engulfing the island. The government agrees reluctantly to the mission and keeps a grim eye on it. Sarath Diyasena, whose specialty is sixth-century archaeology, is officially designated to accompany her. Investigating an archaeological site, they find a burned skeleton, which they name Sailor, among the remains. The evidence points to violent death and to the body having been moved from somewhere else. Since the site is closed and guarded by the army, this would be the first specific evidence of the government’s long-rumoured black operations. How can they identify the dead man? They visit Sarath’s old mentor, Palipana, a once-eminent archaeologist fallen out of grace, now retired to an abandoned monastery and close to death. He knows of someone who might construct from the skull a representation of the face:
Ananda is last in a line of craftsmen appointed to paint eyes on statues of the Buddha, an ancient ceremonial tradition. Ananda fashions a face that would be recognizable and usable for identification - except that it wears the generic Buddha’s expression of serenity. Ananda’s wife disappeared in the terror; the painter cannot bear to configure death as anything but a state of peace.
Through Sarath’s brother Gamini, whose punishing non-stop work as a doctor in the emergency ward of Colombo’s main hospital after many years in hospitals on the borderlines of war in North Central Sri Lanka, the human carnage of the civil conflict is described with force and detail. Gamini has given up everything (his wife has left him) for sleepless vigils treating the unending victims of bombings, shootings and maimings.
Anil’s quest for truth and her exposition about Sailor to the government-bodies places her life in danger. Sarath manages to take her away to safety and arranges her to leave the country. She escapes. Later, Gamini finds the tortured body of Sarath brought in to the hospital. A description of the assassination of the country’s president precedes the final chapter ‘Distance’ which describes Ananda performing the eye-ceremony on a new statue of Buddha, replacing one plundered by brigands.
Fusing Facts and Fiction
In the author’s note at the beginning of the novel, Ondaatje explains the setting for his narrative as Sri Lanka from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, steeped in a crisis that involved the government, the separatist guerrillas in the north and the antigovernment insurgents in the south. He claims that while there existed similar organisations, the characters and the incidents in the novel are fictional. Then, it becomes extremely significant from both epistemological and ontological positions, that he draws the names of the disappeared from an actual list in Amnesty International reports. Similarly, the description of the assassination of the president is based on true events, though the president’s name has been changed. Ontologically, it portrays the reality as a political and a historical moment of a country’s and its peoples’ being. Simultaneously, it leads to an epistemological discussion on the line between facts and fiction, and the process of validating fiction. My point of departure here would be to analyse how a novel can illuminate aspects of political and social issues recorded in reportage – a Newsweek cover story, a BBC headline, or meticulous research papers.
I will discuss the last section in the novel named ‘Distance’ from an interpretivist position, but will refer to the total text when necessary, to establish certain points. On the outset it must be mentioned that the novel presents an interesting case of positivist and interpretivist analysis through the characters of Anil, the forensic anthropologist espousing western values of objectivity and rationalism and Sarath, the archaeologist arguing for a truth that is enriched by subjective perception: “I want you to understand the archaeological surround of a fact. Or you'll be like one of those journalists who file reports about flies and scabs while staying at the Galle Face Hotel. That false empathy and blame…” For Sarath knowledge is not to be ‘acquired in the usual, reasoning and rational discursive way’ but, as Alvesson and Sköldberg put it, by illumination on the patterns of complex wholes giving a complete overview. Both characters are equally involved in the quest for truth and knowledge, and distinctively represent the two famous empirical traditions.
‘Distance’ is the grand finale that interlocks history, religion and politics of the country in a fascinating fusion of facts and fiction, providing the contextuality for the forensic investigation, unfurled in a manner somewhat similar to mystery writing. It lifts the narrative from typical mystery/science fiction genre to a dialogue on socio-political issues that cannot be understood without relating to the historical processes. Thus, Hermeneutics, with its insistence on the inability to understand the meaning of the part without relating it to the whole, becomes my first tool for analysing the text of Distance. The chapter begins with three brigands pillaging an ancient statue of Buddha. However, this crime is portrayed as negligible compared to the political atrocities committed during this time of terror. “Still this was broken stone. It was not a human life…” The uninhabited land around this historical monument is a burial ground for victims of political murder. The author portrays the destruction of the statue as an action politically neutral, though a year after the publication of the novel saw the destruction of Bamian Buddhas in Afghanistan by the religious fundamentalists, which would invent new connotations to the image of destroying religious symbolisms within Sri Lanka as well as internationally. Just as much as the meaning of action could not be understood without referring to what was happening in the whole island, Ondaatje’s text on Sri Lanka can only be understood when you relate it to the world scenario.
Empathy is a key feature of hermeneutics that can be applied to the text of Distance through narrative analysis. The artisan Ananda is a character that belongs to a different milieu than that of the writer. According to Alvesson & Sköldberg ‘understanding calls for living (thinking, feeling)’ the other person’s ‘universe’ by creative and imaginative means to interpret the meaning of action. Through the use of metaphor and poetic language Ondaatje is able to penetrate the mental universe of Ananda, a rural artisan, and locate him in his ontological narrative: ‘you slipped into the old bed of art, where they had slept. There was comfort there’. Observe how Ondaatje captures Ananda’s relationship to his work: ‘as an artificer now he did not celebrate the greatness of a faith. But he knew if he didn’t remain an artificer he would become a demon. The war around him was to do with demons, spectres of retaliation.’ The writer integrates the knowledge of myth and tradition of the country that links with a public narrative at another level. Thus the religious history of the country becomes the telescope that allows us to observe the present conditions, with the ‘distance’ providing the necessary detachment.
I choose Postmodernism as my second tool for analysis as it enables contrasting vistas within the text than that brought forth by using hermeneutics. The content of Distance involves deconstruction and reconstruction of a historical monument by its inheritors ‘trying to find a solution for hunger or a way out of their disintegrating lives’: these ancient Buddha statues are potent symbols of the nexus between religion and the political economy of the ancient Sinhalese civilisation that flourished in the north central province about 2000 years ago. They are prominent part of the iconography evoked by Sinhala Buddhist nationalists by referring to the ‘Glory Days’ to reinforce Sinhalese identity. By using this image in the present context – the Buddha in the middle of a graveyard of political murders, Ondaatje captures the paradoxes unique to the island - its political and social violence in recent history given the long, deeply engrained tradition of Buddhism that seem to connect its past and present: “the fields where Buddhism and its values met the harsh political events of the twentieth century”.
A second important aspect is that the actors in the Distance are not the protagonists of the novel. Nor are they the protagonists of their society: the thieves who destroyed the statue, Ananda, the artisan who reconstructs it, and the villagers, who assist him, represent the common people of the country. It is not the ‘grand narrative’ of the political elite in the lap of Colombo luxury and power, or ‘the dominant discourse that should be replaced by micro histories – local, always provisory and limited stories’. Thus, Distance becomes the narrative of the subaltern and the ‘marginal is transformed into the principal’. The aspect of reconstruction is as significant as the process of deconstruction in post-modern analysis. Ananda fuses the face of the Buddha out of the broken splinters but instead of trying to homogenise it into a unit, he decides to leave it ‘quilted’, with its ‘eyes [that] would always look north’. The wounded face of the Buddha becomes a powerful metaphor for the island wrought by the conflict in the north. On the other hand, the un-homogenised quilted face could also be a metaphor for pluralism. For example, the same post modernist question could be raised for the text as, whether ‘properties such as unity, identity, permanence, structure and essence are privileged over dissonance, disparity, plurality, transience and change’.
Conflict and Cinema
The purpose of the analysis of Distance in Anil’s Ghost so far has been to unearth how contemporary fiction could portray socio-political issues in a more meaningful manner than how it would be exposed in the mainstream media. Novels such as Anil’s Ghost, Funny Boy, July and Cinnamon Gardens have recorded the political conflict in Sri Lanka, through narratives that place these situations in historical and social perspectives, elucidating deep insights and understanding. If literary fiction, in the form of prose or poetry can be regarded as a cultural product of its society, it could also be read as creation of culture.
Cinema is another form of cultural product, which in turn creates culture. Håkan Durmaz sees cinema as a surface for recording social realities. Though cinema could be seen as a modern commercial operation and a mode of popular entertainment, for some social researchers, it can be an invaluable field for producing insights into changing social relations. He argues that film has been a medium for depicting conflict, for example, in the Cannes Film Festival 1995, two films on the Balkan Wars won the best film, Palme d’Or and Grand Prix. Similarly, in Cannes Film Festival 2005, a Sri Lankan film depicting the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka won the Camera d’Or.
I want to gear my thesis towards discovering how cinema has portrayed the socio-political situation in Sri Lanka. Thus my research question could be ‘how the Sri Lankan and/or South Indian Cinema have portrayed the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka?’ A number of sub questions can be brought forth in this regard. How has cinema depicted Sinhalese or Tamil identity? What are the dominant discourses subscribed to/refuted in the movies? How has the state and the civil society reacted to the movies? Has the movie had an impact on inter group relationships? Does the movie propose creative and alternative solutions to end the conflict? How sensitive have the movies been to depicting the life of the minority? What was the motivation of the filmmaker? How has his or her background affected the content of the movie? Why did he choose to depict the situation in that particular way?
The ambition or the goal of this research springs from a personal observation and assumption that a communications issue (also) lies at the heart of the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka. Once you exclude the government and the LTTE from the set, the main predicament that the people face is their inability to communicate with each other due to language difference - the greatest setback for strengthening of inter-group relations. This is by no means an effort to give a simplistic interpretation to the sources of the ethnic conflict, which has a number of complex processes converging and leading to the current state of affairs. My interest is finding alternative points of departure to search for peace from the perspective of the civil society. Agreeing with Durmaz, I will not go as far as to find a ‘cure’ in cinema, but definitely some clues.
In making methodological choices I will first aspire the research to be comparative, drawing a case from Tamil, South Indian Cinema to be compared with a case/cases from Sinhala Cinema. I make this choice especially as there are no movies made in Tamil or by Tamil directors in Sri Lankan cinema. Thus, Sri Lankan cinema or ‘Sinhala Cinema’ as it is often called may naturally tend to be the ‘majority view’ where as South Indian cinema, can (hopefully) provide an alterative approach in portraying the conflict.
Secondly, I wish to analyse these films from an interpretivist position, drawing from the nine different types of hermeneutics, discourse analysis and post-modern analysis. Kvale points out that traditional media research employ qualitative method through content analysis to find he content and the form of communication. This textual analysis is to identify the discourses the movies relate to and establish their relationship with the prevalent ideologies regarding the ethnic conflict. I believe the step to be necessary as it will be instrumental in recognising the reaction of the state and the civil society towards the ideologies these movies put forth. However, it is important to note that my ambition is not to make a movie review. The focus of the research is the ethnic conflict and identifying the key aspects of the contemporary discourse revolving around it, and how cinema becomes a medium, which reflects the reactions of the civil society and the state to the ethnic conflict.
My third step will be a field study to investigate the creators and the audience of this cinema as the representatives of the civil society. Interviews will be the main method of gathering information. I believe this is the best method since the nature of the information sought is qualitative rather than quantitative. Kvale points out that the sensitivity of the interview and the closeness to the subjects lived world can lead to knowledge that can be used to enhance the human condition. The interviews could be in the form of individual interviews (i.e. with the directors/scriptwriters of the movies or the member of the Film Development Board) to focus group interviews (i.e. university students, NGO professionals and peace workers, researchers, artists, journalists, critics representing civil society groups). The interviews will be directed towards finding out the opinions, especially with the audience where as the interviews with the filmmakers will be geared towards finding out his experience (in the form of a narrative) of making the movie as much as his attitudes and opinions towards the subject discussed.
Field observations will be a primary way of finding out the impact and the reaction of the films, supported by some research into newspapers and media, for example, some movies were, first banned by the government for a long time before finally being able to be shown on the cinemas.
Finally, it would be important to carry out the research with an open mind. I believe the fruit of my research to be unearthing some insights about the formation of certain attitudes towards the current political situation as much as about how the portrayal of the ethnic conflict in cinema leads to a social discourse on war and peace.
Bibliography
Ondaatje, Michael (2000) Anil’s Ghost, Picador
Kvale, Steinar, (1996), Inter Views, Sage Publications
Parker, Ian and the Bolton Discourse Network, (1999), Open University Press, Buckingham, Philadelphia
Alvesson and Sköldberg (2000) Reflexive Methodology, Sage Publications
www.festival-cannes.fr
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