Analysis of "The Black Robe"

450 Words2 Pages
A: Historical inaccuracies are often not by accident, and they are not without purpose.The reasons behind them vary from lack of time to fully touch on themes, leaving out information to gain a particular audience, to not having enough documented historical facts for a better understanding. In “The Black Robe” all of the information used for this novel and movie are historical accounts, but only from the Jesuit missionaries. The true reasoning behind the behavior of the Tribe is unknown, because the Jesuits were not there to understand them, but to convert them to Christianity. To be entirely historically accurate, the movie would have to be a one sided look into the accounts. The director worked very hard to be as accurate as possible in his story, to clothe the characters correctly, to depict the scenes as they would have been, but there were times that the director and screenwriters were forced to come up with their own attitudes and reasoning of the Tribe, to show that they were not inhumane, that they also understood love and compassion, and they had to show that the Jesuits, though they believed they were right, were a self-righteous, and unfaltering in own beliefs, would stop at nothing to convert these people. B. A filmmaker has a short amount of time to captivate audiences with a story, and in that time, if there needs to be adjustments to the story to make it shorter, or add emphasis on a character or event, it most often will be done. History is not a black-and-white subject that can easily be told within an hour and thirty minutes without falter. There will be details cut, scenes added, and truths bent to get a directors point across. A fictional character in the story could help the viewer to see the whole plot from a perspective that wasn’t present at the time. Facts about certain characters and events might be changed, not
Open Document