February 2001

Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC.

Review

It Was Not a Story to Pass On: Slavery in Film, and a Vision for a New Political Culture

Andrew Millington is a filmmaker and professor at Emerson College.

The production, exhibition, and reception of two films in the 1990s, Beloved and Amistad, reveal much about that decade's malaise in political culture. The theme of slavery reminds us that the legacy of that haunting institution proves so strong an influence in our lives that it plays a major part in hotbed topics of debate like social policy, justice, and human rights. These topics relate directly to the issue of racism in American life, and the influence of film in shaping our thoughts in this area is not to be underestimated. The power of film, and how we confront that power, may define the future we envision for ourselves.

This idea of a conscious marriage of art and politics took shape in my mind after I witnessed firsthand in 1993 the distribution of the independently produced film Sankofa by filmmaker Haile Gerima. I watched with amazement as thousands and thousands of African Americans lined up in over thirty cities across the country to view an independent African American film, that bucked the traditional system of Hollywood with its tale of the African resistance to slavery. Discussions of the film after screenings pointed to the significance of history to people's lives and convinced me that African Americans of the day were eager to undertake a journey of historical reflection to make sense of present community disintegration and seek a remedy for the ills that maintain it.

Yet because the film was denied wider national distribution by major Hollywood studios, mainstream audiences never had the opportunity to see a unique African American historical perspective and engage in a constructive dialogue on race and its legacy. In 1997 a skeptical African American community heard one of the most popular American presidents ever declare that the year would be devoted to a discussion of race and slavery. Mr. Clinton would have done well to read Toni Morrison's novel Beloved which offers a lesson for us all in the reclamation of historical memory. "It was not a story to pass on," Morrison warned.

This line occurs near the end of the novel Beloved, and is also prophetic of the calamitous failure of the book's film adaptation, directed by Jonathan Demme. Critic Richard Alleever felt that the filmmaker clearly did not have a grasp of the material at hand and therefore could not convince the viewer of the ideas he was attempting to communicate about slavery and about the novel Beloved. Another critic, Will Joyner of the New York Times, was disappointed that instead of making Morrison's difficult aesthetic accessible to a whiter audience, the film "stubbornly reinforces a literary way of looking at things whereby allusion counts for more than action or illusion...The film is meant to appeal to serious readers and to seduce non-readers."

Can we ascribe the poor audience response this film received to a director whose artistry was in abeyance when it came to African American subject matter? Would there have been a different aesthetic approach, one that would have made a wide audience embrace the marriage of art and politics, had a more enlightened filmmaker attempted this film? These questions plagued me even after, a year later, Steven Spielberg brought Amistad to the silver screen.

"It took longer for those who had spoken to her, fallen in love with her, to forget, until they realized they couldn't remember or repeat a single thing she said, and began to believe that, other than what they themselves were thinking, she hadn't said anything at all." (Toni Morrison, Beloved)

A Hollywood aesthetic guided Spielberg's focus not to the more human story of a group of Africans who gained their freedom, but instead to how that freedom was gained by the oratory and argument of the American statesman John Quincy Adams. The image of the European giving the Africans freedom seems an obsession of American filmmakers since D.W. Griffith's 1915, Klan-inspired film Birth of a Nation. That we enter the twenty-first century wedded to the idea, bred of a liberal American conscience, that the African Americans' struggle pales in comparison to the rhetoric of the anti-slavery movement, subtly but evenhandedly condemns that group of human beings forever to the wretched of the earth. While audiences for the most part eschew the films and the images of slavery, assuming it too horrid a period to revisit, we are nevertheless wrong to ignore the influence these ideas make on the young and unsuspecting members of American society.

Still giddy with the challenge of a new millennium one cannot but muse on the role of memory in our construction of the future. Perhaps for the filmmaker of African descent, given the history of enslavement and the role of memory in the imagination, the recreating of slavery in film is an attempt to recreate oneself, or more specifically, to engage in a process of rebirth and reaffirmation of life, even where past experience suggested social death. No Hollywood director of African descent has been given the opportunity to explore new views on American historical experience that might challenge productions like Amistad and Beloved which woefully re-inscribe the institution of slavery into our collective psyche. To envision and create new social identities in a "New World" is undoubtedly an ongoing process, utopian in nature. Edward Rothstein says "The significance of utopias is not that they imagine versions of perfection, but that they imagine cures for imperfection." Perhaps Hollywood has no vested interest in a cure for social ills.

"So in the end they forgot her too. Remembering seemed unwise. This is not a story to pass on."

The creative process for a filmmaker involves the very consideration of the human experience at a particular point in history, and inherently demands a critical engagement with one's community, one's history, and with those films that have already become part of a so-called film tradition. Few African American intellectuals or activist organizations including the NAACP have argued against, or even pointed out, the exclusionary tactics wrought on African American filmmakers in the suppression of the critical healing power of their historical vision. Censorship and voluntary silence are strange bedfellows in a capitalist environment. Both become benign concepts as Hollywood commodifies slavery, continuing to perpetuate European domination and social control even in acknowledging the horror of that history.

By our failure to address the double standard practiced by Hollywood, we allow the wounds of slavery to fester in contemporary politics, as the legacy of violence is perpetuated in our nation's thinking on issues like gun control and the death penalty. Our silence delays the pursuit of a more equitable and just society, maintaining a dry political landscape. Films like Sankofa, produced independently by filmmakers of African descent, while not perfect in execution, are unjustly denied national distribution even though they offer the means to heal racial crises across cultures by contributing to the wider debate of the national meditation on legacies.

A new political culture that encourages critical thought through artistic engagement can only offer us stronger agents for positive social change if we are prepared to challenge Hollywood conglomerates to produce and distribute alternative views of our history and everyday existence. Until then Beloved's warning still echoes: "This was not a story to pass on."

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