While browsing through my DVD shelves, I came across a gem from 1997 — Egyptian master Youssef Chahine’s Destiny . I had wandered into the screening on a whim at a film festival, and was taken aback by the sheer power of the film, and was further surprised when the narrative periodically broke into song and dance like Indian films. Destiny opens with a harrowing scene — especially if you are a book lover — where a disciple of the 12th Century Andalusian philosopher Averroes is being burnt alive and the flames are being fed by Averroes’ books.
Averroes’ crime, in the eyes of his rivals, is that he believes that the book of God is open to interpretation. Averroes is forced into exile and his books are burnt. However, an enterprising bunch of his students clandestinely transcribe his ideas on paper and others simply pass on these ideas orally. The central conceit of Destiny is that books can be burnt, but not ideas.
The most celebrated book-burning film is, of course, François Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 (1966), based on Ray Bradbury’s novel. Again, the central concern is the suppression of ideas. The book was published in 1953, during the McCarthy era in the U.S., where there was a witch-hunt on for those suspected of having Communist leanings. They were said to be a malignant influence on the country, due to possible links with the other major player in the Cold War, the Soviet Union.
On a similarly literary note, Sam Hobkinson’s excellent documentary The Love of Books: A Sarajevo Story (2011) follows a bunch of book lovers, as they fight to save the destruction of the Gazi Husrav-Beg Library during the conflict in Sarajevo. The activists’ philosophy is simple — libraries, and the books and manuscripts therein, are physical examples of our culture, identity and history, and their destruction could result in many aspects of these being erased from the collective conscious.
Incidents of burning books contrary to Nazi ideology were common in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s. In film, Hans Steinhoff’s Nazi propaganda historical The Old and the Young King (1935) depicts King Friedrich Wilhelm I of Prussia burning his son Prince Friedrich’s French books. The film sees the consumption of French literature as an act of softness not befitting the future king.
In Brian Percival’s The Book Thief (2013), based on Markus Zusak’s 2005 novel, a young girl in Nazi Germany, a recent convert to the reading habit, is traumatised when forced to burn books at a bonfire, but manages to save one. When an authority figure catches her at it, it could have been curtains for her, but instead she gains access to a fabulous library.
On a lighter note, one of my favourite scenes from Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) is when Indy goes to Berlin to get his father’s diary that has instructions on how to get to the Holy Grail. He gets the diary, but Indy finds himself in the middle of a book-burning rally, with the added bonus of getting the diary autographed by Hitler himself.
