Abstract
In her multi award-winning feature film Silent Waters (2003), Pakistani woman filmmaker Sabiha Sumar connects the socio-political traumas of the Partition of India and creation of Pakistan (1947) with the onset of military dictator General Zia-ul-Haq’s Islamization period (1977-1988) in Pakistan. Presenting a story based on real-life events, the film focuses on the impact of religious fundamentalism and nationalism on women in particular. Examining Silent Waters as an example of “history on film/film on history” (Rosenstone 2013), and film as an “agent, product, and source of history” (Ferro 1983), the discussion identifies and analyzes the filmmaker’s own tacitly embedded location and participation in the filmic narrative as an experiential ‘auto/bio-historiographer’, arguing for the value of this new paradigm in Cinema Studies.
Highlights
Auto/biographical cinema—cinematic personal histories spanning first-person documentaries, features, auto-fictions, diaries, and essay films—remains, despite its generic diversity, a comparatively peripheral arena within Cinema Studies
A meaningful examination of auto/biographical cinemas produced by Muslim women filmmakers must contextualize their filmmaking practices with regard to the specificity of the regional, historical, religious, and socio-political environments from within which their productions originate
A personal, private, political and national history is rolled into the prayer mat; her final journey to the well brings to an end a traumatic past, hostile present, and uncertain future commanded by men, patriarchy, religion, and the ideas of “honour” violently marshalled by others
Summary
Auto/biographical cinema—cinematic personal histories spanning first-person documentaries, features, auto-fictions, diaries, and essay films—remains, despite its generic diversity, a comparatively peripheral arena within Cinema Studies. Films that do address Partition typically project a patriotic picture, and feature male protagonists as saviours of national and religious honour and identity.13 In Silent Waters, Sumar focuses on a fictionalized biographical story of a woman from an historiographical perspective that questions the historical narrative of foregoing cinematic portraits.
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