Tilda Swinton, voice of Gertrude Bell
It’s hard to imagine a woman in the early
1900’s forging ahead in a man’s world like Gertrude Bell did. Born in 1868 into a family of means,
Gertrude Bell early on set her sights on places far from her native
England. She was always cheeky,
and when she graduated from Oxford, she was sent to relatives in Tehran with
the hope that a more conservative culture could rein her in. Little did her parents know that she
would fall in love with the Middle East and spend most of the rest of her life
there in an activism they couldn’t imagine.
Bell was an adventurer who was attracted to
daring and risky adventures. She
quickly became interested in the native peoples in the Middle East, fearlessly
traveling for years in a camel caravan on her own with a guide, mapping the
terrain, and collecting a store of information about the tribes, their leaders,
and their lives on the desert. She
was particularly skillful in winning the trust of sheiks, even after one had
kept her prisoner for 11 days. But
after that, he sent her off with a bag of gold.
There seemed to be two sides to Bell; she was
very intelligent and well educated and got along well with people who accepted
her. She also got along well with
the native Arabs, many of whom were desperately poor. Her biggest antagonists were men in the British government
who could not accept a woman being in her position with influence, and one in
particular tried to block her in every way he could. Despite his obstructions, she managed to retain the respect
and admiration from the Arabs and high officials in the British government.
Bell was a conscientious scholar and
researcher. The maps she made, the
information she collected from desert tribes and sheiks, and the photographs
she took were instantly valued and used by the British military and
intelligence services. World War I
was raging at the time, and Middle Eastern oil became a commodity wrestled for
by other countries, particularly Great Britain and the U.S. Bell’s biggest disappointment after the
war was over occurred when Britain did not honor its promises to the Arab
states that they could be self-governing after the war. They continued their occupation,
putting Arabs in advisory roles, rather than the other way around. The man most responsible for this was
Sir Arnold ‘A.T.’ Wilson, the British civil commissioner in Baghdad, who had
tried to thwart Bell’s efforts for years and looked down on the Arabic
people. Nevertheless, she did play
an important role in the establishment of the Iraqi state.
This film is based on letters between Bell and
her correspondents, her diaries, and secret communiqués, and contains a wealth
of information about her life and loves, the history of Iraq and desert tribes,
and the politics of the time for that part of the world. She was an excellent writer of
political communiqués and books, and her letters home to her father and
stepmother were warm and complimentary.
She frequently talked about missing being at home with them, yet even
when her health was failing and her father begged her to return to England, she
declined, saying she had to finish her work as Director of Antiquities, which
was equipping a museum with Middle Eastern artifacts. The museum became the National Museum of Iraq, with one wing
named after her.
But during this time after the war, she was out
of the political arena, which had been so gratifying to her, and in the
following eight years she experienced disillusionment and became seriously
depressed. She died in Iraq on
July 12, 1926, from a drug overdose, where she had chosen to be buried.
In excerpting material verbatim from Katherine
Bell’s correspondence and photographs, Directors Sabine Krayenbühl and Zeva
Oelbaum have achieved a dynamic production with dramatic flair. By their utilization of vintage screen
footage and fine actors voicing the lines of the characters, the film seems
less like a documentary and more like a historical drama. The gifted Tilda Swinton delivers as
the voice of Bell.
A Middle Eastern history lesson
illustrating the critical role played by an astute and talented British woman.
No comments:
Post a Comment