WHEN FILM CRITICS and moviemakers classify films, they often use genre terms: westerns, gangster movies, film noir, police stories, romantic comedies, and the like. History movies, when not classified as “epics,” are called “period films” or “costume dramas,” terms that grate on historians’ nerves. It would be possible to cram the films we have been considering into these categories. Spartacus, Burn!, and Amistad could be thought of as “epics,” though they stretch the genre with their complexity (especially the last two) and their mixed endings.1 Burn! might also be named a “war film.” From some points of view Beloved is a “horror movie,” and one could quite reasonably say, in thinking of the development of Denver, that it is a “coming of age” film.
Let us change the grid for a moment and ask, What kind of historical inquiry do these films make? From Spartacus to Beloved we see quite a range. Spartacus is primarily a film about politics—about political struggles among Romans and a major political/social revolt against Roman power. It depicts the social distance between free and slave, rich and poor. It also introduces interesting erotic and tender elements into the story through both the sexual excitement that masters find in slaves and the desire for progeny among the slaves.
Burn! and The Last Supper are infused with the concepts of political economy and the theories of historical materialism, but with different time frames and emphases. Pontecorvo treats his subject on a grand scale over a number of years, while Gutiérrez Alea settles his story elegantly within the five days of Holy Week. Burn! portrays economic interest in terms of political control, foreign investment, trade, and labor, whereas The Last Supper does so in terms of technological advance, production, and labor.
But these are feature films with absorbing personal stories, not analytical tracts. Burn! leads us through the changing characters of and relations between Sir William Walker and José Dolores. The Last Supper explores the interior conflicts of the count and the varied loyalties of the slaves, which finally converge around Sebastián. Both these films replace the ahistorical Spartacus, Varinia, and their companions, who could just as well be speaking at American political meetings of the late 1950s as in the Mediterranean and Germanic world of 73–71 BCE, with persons, customs, tales, and songs that have some pointed specificity, African or Afro-Caribbean. With the carnival and dances of Burn! and the Christian ceremony and Yoruba gods of The Last Supper, cultural history is merged with political economy.
Amistad and Beloved concentrate their stories within a few years, but expand their time perspective through flashbacks—and, for Amistad, flash-forwards. Amistad, like Spartacus and Burn!, is centered around political struggles, national and international, a revolt against wrongfully held power, and the claims of property. Its attention to political and legal thought, though flawed in realization, is stronger than in Spartacus and matches that of Burn!. In Burn!, Walker makes ironic reductionist arguments against slavery (as a prostitute is cheaper than a wife, so a paid worker is cheaper than a slave), while President Sanchez makes only a brief affirmation of liberty. Amistad draws more fully on the rhetoric of antebellum America.
Amistad also has a cultural nuance. The love of freedom is assumed by Baldwin and Adams to burn automatically in every human breast, but the film suggests a linkage of that desire in Cinqué and his fellows to certain features of Mende life and tradition and to the horrendous Middle Passage. The scenes on the slaver add a psycho-cultural approach to the past, depicting the degrading wound of that experience as lived, repressed, and remembered.
The film Beloved is a cultural and psycho-social exploration par excellence of the traumas of slavery and the struggle to resist it. Finally, the women’s experience comes into its own. The story suggested in the vignettes of Varinia showing her son to Spartacus; of mothers holding their little sons up to José Dolores and of boys screaming in burned villages; of Cinqué’s wife, doubly lost to him, walking with their son—that story is fully told in Beloved in a tragic version. Perhaps we could better say “tragicomic,” since the film ends with a couple restored and a daughter coming into her own. Tragicomic, but not timeless. The shape of family life, the patterns of cruelty, the forms of resistance, the haunting pangs of guilt, and the processes of curing in Beloved all grow out of the relations of slavery at Sweet Home plantation and the cultural practices of the African Americans.
In the course of this book, I have noted that some of the shifts in cinematic treatment of slave resistance over the decades were parallel to or followed on similar changes in the work of historians. In some instances, the cinematic treatment was independent and even in advance of that by historians. For example, filmmakers, whose medium is visual and performative, were ready to see how carnival and religious ritual—the washing of the slaves’ feet and the supper for the slaves—were not just coincidental to revolt but became preludes or avenues to it. They were drawn to the filming of ceremony, and this fascination helped them take ceremony seriously.2
Along the way, I have also asked about balance in these films, whether they make an effort to understand and depict the pressures on and motivations of the different parties involved. The filmmakers were not initially attracted to their projects by mere curiosity. History mattered to them because they identified with some injustice, or felt passion for human suffering, or sensed the horror of war and violence, or saw a hidden story of their own people that must be made known. There is nothing wrong with this motivation. Professional historians may also have such impulses or other critical intentions when they choose a project, but they are supposed to find ways to achieve balance and detachment before they are done.
The films have unequal success on this count, but none is so one-sided as to be dismissed as mere apologia. None of them depicts a kind slave master or mistress: only in Beloved is there a brief flashback of a good mistress, who gave Sethe the crystal earrings when she married and listened with indignation to her report of her milk being taken. None of the films investigates slaves contented with their lot: in The Last Supper the count’s personal slave, dressed in livery, appears devoted to his master and eager to separate himself from the others; in Spartacus, Marcellus, the cruel trainer in Batiatus’s gladiator school, is an ex-slave loyal to his employer. Yet because all these films are about resistance to slavery, rather than slavery in general, this scanty treatment is defensible.
All the films show a range in attitude among slave owners, ruling groups, or white people, as the case may be. Even in The Last Supper, much is extracted from the small world of the single plantation by the economical development of characters: the count, the mulatto technician Duclé, and the priest, each with his own inner conflicts.
As for the slaves and working people more generally, Spartacus goes farthest in the direction of treating them as heroic brothers and sisters: the infighting between Spartacus and Crixus, referred to in the sparse historical sources on the revolt, is muted in the film; Spartacus’s troops are presented as fighting only when attacked first by the Romans and are never shown provoking battle or simply pillaging estates. In Burn! and Amistad there is unity among the Queimada rebels and the Amistad Africans, but black people are pictured as diverse, from the black soldiers, themselves ex-slaves, fighting against Dolores’s men, if only for the money, to the Africans who seize their fellows for the slave trade. In The Last Supper the execution of the count’s orders against the rebellious slaves is carried out by hired mestizos, without a drop of pity.
Relations among blacks are shown most richly in Beloved. In the film the white people range from the atrocious Schoolteacher and his vicious sons to the “good whitefolks,” the Bodwins, who are abolitionists. Mr. Bodwin makes a momentary appearance, but the others are shown only in memory, and then, except for Amy Denver, very briefly. Even more than Toni Morrison’s novel, the film concentrates on black people; and like the novel (and all of Toni Morrison’s writing), the film portrays black people as human beings with their fears and loves, anger, guilt, jealousy, and affection. After playing his role as Paul D, Danny Glover explained why he saw the film as a breakthrough: “Beloved … is a story about how people make the adjustment into being full-fledged human beings, how they take their own freedom, entitlement to themselves as human beings, their own dysfunctionalism, neurosis, not seen in relation to white people.”3 Out of this intensely explored universe comes the convincing power of Beloved.
In a book published at the time that Amistad premiered, Debbie Allen, Steven Spielberg, and others from DreamWorks talked about the making of the film and, more generally, about history and its uses. Meredith Maran and Anne McGrath remarked on uncertainties in knowledge of the past:
The Amistad events actually happened. The images were there; the narrative occurred. Yet we cannot see the scene as it really was. Our eyes and our hearts are different. Even among people who were there, no single view holds “the truth.” To see is to know—but only in glimpses, small fragments of an incomplete and always changing picture.
Spielberg echoed this sense of final unknowability in his comment about Cinqué: “No matter how earnest the artist’s effort, he or she can never really capture, ‘pin down,’ or fully re-create the lives of great men and women.” Amistad, the DreamWorks book concludes, is “a movie that blends fiction with true events.”4
These quotations invite us to a final look at “fictionalizing” through the lens of the historian’s rules about evidence. In Spartacus, “true events” were not a major concern, and some exciting historical possibilities were lost through indifference to evidence. The Last Supper, a film with narrow focus and a close collaboration between the filmmaker and the historian, had only two departures from the record (postdating the events a few years and letting one of the rebels survive), neither of them out of keeping with possibilities in late eighteenth-century Cuba. Amistad will be our case for examination, because we have been told so much about its making and because its quality as a historical film is in some ways so very good and in others disappointing.
Are the fictional elements in Amistad used to fill in the inevitable gaps in the historical record? Are they historically plausible, so they can effectively serve as “approximate truths” and “thought experiments”? Or do they override perfectly good historical evidence in a way that risks misleading?
As for the “look” of the past, Rick Carter, the production designer, found locations that would be appropriate settings for the action: El Morro, Puerto Rico, for the African and Cuban events; and Newport, Rhode Island, for New Haven street scenes, the court, and the exterior of the prison. Considerable artistry, ingenuity, and money went into giving “an overall impression of what it really would be like to be transported back into that time.”5
Still, the historical significance of a film will hinge on the people and what happens to them. From this point of view, the most telling sets in the film are Cinqué’s village, the holds in the Teçora and the Amistad, and the prison yard in New Haven. Filling in the gaps around Cinqué and the Africans is, on the whole, convincing and effective, as we have seen; and the composite characters of the black abolitionist, Joadson, and the English naval officer, Captain Fitzgerald, are plausible, though Joadson is a blander figure than the enterprising and militant James Pennington.
In contrast, there are inventions in the film that do not fill in gaps in the evidence or bring undervalued people and processes to the fore, but supplant clear evidence with an erroneous picture of antebellum politics and sensibility. The filmmakers invented the Catholic Judge Coglin for the second trial, a man whose religious conscience as an outsider leads him to a verdict in favor of the Africans. They invented an untried young property lawyer, “Roger Baldwin,” who grows into a more principled person through his defense of and later egalitarian relation with Cinqué. The real Roger Baldwin, in contrast, was a middle-aged, experienced, and fighting abolitionist from the start. And they invented the ending of the speech by John Quincy Adams, in which he gives a sentimental and romantic version of his attitude toward Cinqué. None of these inventions can be justified in terms of a needed simplification of the story: indeed, the first two make the story more complicated. None of them can be justified in terms of required drama, for there is dramatic potential in the actual lives of Judge Judson and Roger Baldwin, and in the oratory of John Quincy Adams, which research and imagination could have teased out.
All three fabrications come from a wish to make patterns of alliance and friendship in New England in 1839—40 resemble egalitarian hopes in late twentieth-century America.6 Wish fulfillment is a fine goal for certain genres of films (as for certain genres of writing), but it should not steer the imagination in a historical film. Adams expressed his empathy for the Africans in his Memoirs by the words “unfortunate” and “wretched.” In his speech to the Supreme Court he genuinely applauded the actions of Cinqué and his fellows to free themselves, but in comparing their heroism with the “Lilliputian trickery” of the American rulers of a great Christian nation, he said, “Contrast it [the Lilliputian trickery of the U.S. secretary of state] with that act of self emancipation by which the savage, heathen barbarians Cinque and Grabeau liberated themselves and their fellow suffering countrymen from Spanish slave traders … Cinque and Grabeau are uncouth and barbarous names. Call them Harmodius and Aristogiton.…”7
Adams is caustic about “civilized” morality here, but the kind of appreciation he offers of the Africans is not consonant with Spielberg’s idea of “my friend Cinqué, who was over at my place the other night,” to quote Adams’s Supreme Court speech in the film. Nor is that friendship ideal consonant even with the attitudes of Martin Delany, the son of a slave father in Virginia and a free black mother. Journalist, abolitionist, healer, and writer, Delany visited Liberia about fifteen years after Cinqué had returned to Sierra Leone. Delany wrote not about establishing friendship with the Africans he met, but about giving them garments, furniture, and missionaries.8
As it happened, sources were available to the filmmakers to create scenes of amity and feeling between these Africans and Americans. I cite two here, not to suggest that Spielberg was obliged to use them as such, but to insist that they should have provided the pattern for imagining relationship in the film, rather than transferring a model from our own time. One of the Amistad Africans, either Kale or the young lad Kali, sent a letter to Adams in the late winter of 1841, which was printed in the Emancipator. The letter speaks of friendship and makes claims for likeness between the Mende and Americans:
Dear Friend Mr. Adams:
I want to write a letter to you because you love Mendi [sic] people, and you talk to the grand court … We want you to ask the Court what we have done wrong. What for Americans keep us in prison? Some people say Mendi people crazy; Mendi people dolt because we no talk American language. Merica people no talk Mendi language; Merica people dolt? …
Dear friend Mr. Adams, you have friends, you love them, you feel sorry if Mendi people come and carry them all to Africa. We feel bad for our friends and our friends all feel bad for us … If American people give us free we glad, if they no give us free we sorry—we sorry for Mendi people little, we sorry for American people great deal, because God punish liars …
Dear friend, we want you to know how we feel. Mendi people think, think, think. Nobody know what we think; teacher he know, we tell him some. Mendi people have got souls. We think we know God punish us if we tell lie. We never tell lie; we speak truth … All we want is make us free.9
The other source is a description of the final goodbyes in a New York church between the Africans and the abolitionists who had been their support, including two African-American lay readers. Simon Jocelyn of the Amistad committee told once again of the tribulations of the Africans and how their story would help end the bondage of Africans in the United States. Margru, one of the three African girls, read Psalm 130; the Mende sang a song in their own tongue “with an energy of manner, a wildness of music and at times a sweetness of melody, which were altogether peculiar,” and then concluded with an abolitionist hymn. The listeners wept.10
Neither source evokes a picture of Roger Baldwin and Cinqué exchanging hand and arm clasps in warm man-to-man bonding, as in their final goodbye in the film Amistad. Yet the pictures these sources call forth are at least as dramatic: tension and opacity on both sides, Americans sentimental and patronizing, Africans assertive and expressive, both reaching out across a considerable divide.
Why should a film with serious, even passionate, intention behind it, with much of value in it, both historically and ethically, with a stellar list of historical consultants and a $40 million budget go off track in this way? It is due, I think, to two habits of thought that we simply must shake. The first is too cavalier an attitude toward the evidence about lives and attitudes in the past. This evidence is all we have to go on, and it is where we begin in dramatizing a story. We must respect that evidence, accepting it as a given, and let the imagination work from there. If, after such an effort, we still decide to depart from the evidence—say, in creating a composite character or changing a time frame—then it should be in the spirit of the evidence and plausible, not misleading. Exceptionally, a historical film might move significantly away from the evidence out of playfulness or an experiment with counter-factuality, but then the audience should be let in on the game and not be given the false impression of “a true story.”11
The second is a bad habit of underestimating film audiences. To be moved, entertained, instructed, and engaged by a historical film, spectators do not need to have the past remade to seem exactly like the present. According to a recent book on Steven Spielberg, he used “considerable dramatic license” in Amistad in order to make it “symbolic of a struggle that continues to this day” in the form of immigrants brought in illegally to work in sweatshops.12 But the “dramatic license” in Amistad does not call to the viewer’s mind the appalling exploitation of immigrant labor in the present day. Spectators are more likely to think of possible parallels between the past and the present if the strangeness in history is sustained along with the familiar. The Middle Passage and twentieth-century Holocaust reflect on each other effectively through the film because the scenes on the Teçora and the Amistad are left in their own time.
By the end of the twentieth century, no producer is likely to brag, as Darryl Zanuck did in 1936, that he had made Rothschild an English baron and nobody even noticed. When Oliver Stone presented grainy black-and-white scenes in JFK so that they seemed actual footage from 1963, there was a public outcry. Much still remains to be done in finding ways to indicate the truth status of a historical film, not just in books and reviews afterward, but in the movie itself. Can there be lively cinematic equivalents to what prose histories try to accomplish in prefaces, bibliographies, and notes and through their modifying and qualifying words “perhaps,” “maybe,” and “we are uncertain about”?
To start with, makers of historical films should be willing to tell audiences, if only briefly, what they have done to shape a story. The old options—opening with “this is a true story” and/or ending with “any resemblance to persons living or dead”—are no longer acceptable.13 Increasingly, though not in the films we have looked at in this book, filmmakers place a legend along with the final credits where they state they have followed an actual story, but have changed certain names or events in such and such a way. Filmmakers can surely invent fresh images and sequences to let their viewers in on the secrets of what they have done with the past.
Where does a historical account come from? Some of our filmmakers announce an immediate source in the credits: Howard Fast’s novel in Spartacus, Toni Morrison’s novel in Beloved, and William Owens’s Black Mutiny in Amistad; the name of Manuel Moreno Fraginals, if not his Sugarmill, in The Last Supper. Other than that, these films provide viewers with only a few clues as to how their story has come down to us. None are explicit in Spartacus, Burn!, or The Last Supper, though, for Burn! (a composite tale) viewers would expect a story initially set down in confidential governmental reports. In Amistad, news of the seizure of the Africans is seen on the front page of two newspapers, each with different headlines—The New Haven Register and the Emancipator—and a listener in court is shown sketching the prisoners. It is also evident, as we watch, that an abundance of judicial and government documents were produced by the case. In Beloved, Paul D learns first of Sethe’s slaying of her daughter through a crumpled newspaper clipping, and the help given to Sethe by the abolitionist Bodwin suggests that here, too, there would be abolitionist memoirs.
Other possibilities exist or could be developed. James Ivory’s Jefferson in Paris has opening credits over Thomas Jefferson’s writing machine, but then moves to 1873 in Ohio, where a reporter from the Pike County Republican is ferreting out a story from Madison Hemings, the son of Thomas Jefferson by his sister-in-law, the slave Sally Hemings. Madison Hemings says that the Jefferson side of the family never discusses the Hemings, so we learn of an oral tradition and a silence before we go back to what happened in the 1780s.
Might one have had in Spartacus, at least for a moment, Plutarch musing over the pages he wrote on “Spartacus’s war”? or the red-shirted republican liberator Garibaldi savoring a novel about Spartacus’s feats, as he did in 1874? Might The Last Supper have opened not with the legend “The events shown in this film took place in a Havana sugar mill during Holy Week at the end of the eighteenth century,” but with a member of the Royal Council reading the account of the uprising? Could the ex-slave Daniel Godard have appeared for a moment in Amistad, telling (as he did to the Federal Writers’ Project interviewer) how he had heard as a boy about the “slave revolt, where that African prince, one of a large number of slaves that were kidnaped, took over the Spanish ship L’Amistad, killing two of the officers”?14 His words evoke an actual living tradition, unlike John Quincy Adams’s fictional nonstarter about schoolchildren and Patrick Henry.
Historical writers are supposed to let their readers know when their evidence is uncertain or when different views of the same episode exist. History is not a closed venture, fixed and still, but open to new discovery. In searching for cinematic equivalents to prose expression on these matters, we can be helped by the distinction made by theorists between “classical” film narrative and “art-cinema” narrative. Here we might consider pairs such as objectivity versus subjectivity, omniscience versus nonomniscience, and transparency versus reflexivity.
On the one side there is classical film narrative (traditionally used for many history films), in which spectators are invited to believe that they are looking right in at events and, through the camera’s movement, are all-knowing about them. Here spectators are also encouraged to find a satisfactory explanation from the coherent and seamless unfolding of events. The classical film is “realistic,” with shots often at eye level in the middle distance. On the other side there is a more subjective or “art-cinema” narration, in which spectators are not omniscient, but may be invited to see the action for a considerable time from the point of view of one character or simply denied information by the camera. Here spectators may also be distanced from the events, either because episodes do not flow smoothly into each other or because they are interrupted by a comment from outside, including reference to the representational status of the film itself. In the art-cinema narration, high and low angles, sudden shifts in lighting or sound, and other “unrealistic” effects can be frequent.15
These are useful but arbitrary distinctions, for classical narrative films can make good, if limited, use of the subjective and/or distancing effects. The five history films considered in this book are all of this composite type. Do they remind viewers at any point of the moments of uncertainty in the historical record? Do they distance the viewer from immersion in the events of resistance to slavery in a way that widens perspectives? Although these are not the central concern in any of the films, there are some such elements nonetheless. Spartacus and Amistad have the most consistently classical narratives, though the astonishing longshot of the Roman legions in Spartacus’s last battle and the intense close-up of Cinqué’s face and bloody fingers as he works out the spike can remind viewers that they are both in and outside the action. We spectators are cast as omniscient through all of Spartacus and Amistad, and through much of The Last Supper and Beloved—we see events now from Sethe’s or Paul D’s or Denver’s or Beloved’s point of view—yet we are on the whole privy to them all.
Burn! is more experimental: much of the time we see what is going on in Queimada through Sir William Walker’s eyes or through his telescope. The widow of the executed rebel Santiago is opaque to him, and does not reveal anything to us either, though we can make a guess about what she and her villagers think through the funeral ritual. Once José Dolores has emerged as a leader, we see him for a time outside Walker’s vision—joyous, troubled, determined—but after Walker’s return to the island ten years later, Dolores is hidden from Walker and from us until his capture. Only at the very end of the film do we learn directly what Dolores thinks, when we hear him speak, out of Walker’s hearing, to the soldiers about the future, and finally to Walker himself: “But what civilization? Till when?”
Burn! also has moments of metacommentary. Walker’s stylized and choruslike observations about history—its sudden transformations and ironies—encourage spectators to think beyond the action on Queimada. Perhaps Sir William Walker, who tries to make history follow his rules and is undone when its carnivalesque and recalcitrant elements get beyond his control, serves also as a figure for the unpredictable elements (like Brando himself) in making a film about the past. Characters in some of the other films, too, might recall to us the powers of storytellers to make things happen: the haunt Beloved, who is finally undone, and the Yoruba Sebastián, who blows magic powder on his master’s face and survives.
There are also unsettled questions in all five films which can leave viewers with a sense that history is open, not congealed. Spartacus, Burn!, The Last Supper, and Amistad have in them slaves who serve their masters (there are almost no mistresses in these films) in silence. A doorman at the presidential palace offers his blessings to José Dolores, but mostly these people go about their business. What are they thinking? Beloved, with its light-skinned ghost, leaves unresolved the question of whether memories conceal as well as reveal, a question that is put more sharply in Morrison’s novel and in Weisenburger’s Modern Medea. And, finally, viewers may well ponder what happens to the eloquent and energetic Cinqué when he returned to Africa. Some said he became a Mende chief, a slave-trader, and a polygamist in Sierra Leone before returning in his last days to the Christian mission.16
Films can do much more to pose questions to their viewers about history-making and history-knowing. Readers may recall Kurosawa’s Rashomon of 1950, where four different persons implicated in a rape give four different accounts of what happened; or Karel Reisz’s French Lieutenant’s Woman, where a Victorian love affair is pictured in parallel with an affair between the actors playing these roles in film. Danny Glover, the actor who played Paul D in Beloved, has been trying to find a producer for a film about Toussaint L’Overture and the revolution on Saint-Domingue.17 Perhaps that story could be told in parallel with the fascinating life of the premier historian of that revolution, the cricket player, writer, and social critic C.L.R. James.
Historical films should let the past be the past. The play of imagination in picturing resistance to slavery can follow the rules of evidence when possible, and the spirit of the evidence when details are lacking. Wishing away the harsh and strange spots in the past, softening or remodeling them like the familiar present, will only make it harder for us to conceive good wishes for the future.
But putting aside historical films as wish fulfillment does not mean putting aside historical films as a source for hope. I end with a figure of hope, a perfect example of how film can bring to life a person on the boundaries of historical possibility: Baby Suggs, stretching out her arms in the green and golden woods of free Ohio, calling children to laugh, preaching of the redeemed heart at the human core, bringing the magic of her old hands, her voice, and smile to the young who encircle her. “Hallelujah!” she cries as she touches them and kisses them. “Hallelujah!”