MUSÉE DAPPER, PARIS, FRANCE, 10 MAY 2007

 

NOTES FOR PRESENTATION FOR THE “JOURNÉE NATIONALE POUR LA MÉMOIRE DE L’ESCLAVAGE,”

BLACK FILMMAKERS ON SLAVERY AND THE SLAVE TRADE:

SETTING THE CINEMATIC RECORD STRAIGHT

 

Dr. Harold (Hal) Weaver, The Black Film Project, Boston

   
INTRODUCTION

Greetings from the Black Film Project. We are happy to be with you in Paris tonight to celebrate this special day, 10 May, as “Journée Nationale pour la Mémoire de l’Esclavage.” We thank the dynamic Catherine Ruelle, RFI, and Musée Dapper for this special occasion and invitation. We are also grateful to Ali Moussa of UNESCO for encouraging us to follow up our planning in Goa in January 2006 with research, publications, and public presentations internationally on the subject of how Black filmmakers have treated and are treating the topic of slavery in the Americas and the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

To begin, let us share some important background information. Dare we imagine the scope of the
trans-Atlantic slave trade? May we remind ourselves of the following facts as observed both by
contemporary, expert historians and by a slave-participant, later turned abolitionist leader, Frederick Douglass?

1.  CHATTEL SLAVERY
             

Eminent U.S. scholar David Brion Davis, in his monumental work INHUMAN BONDAGE: THE RISE AND FALL OF SLAVERY IN THE NEW WORLD, proclaims: “…Chattel slavery is the most EXTREME example we have [of human bondage], not only of domination and oppression but of human attempts to dehumanize other people.” [1]

Formerly enslaved Frederick Douglass remembers his painful days in chattel slavery: “I was broken in body, soul, and spirit. My natural elasticity was crushed, my intellect languished, the disposition to read departed, the cheerful spark that lingered about my eye died; the dark night of slavery closed in upon me; and behold a man transformed into a brute.” [2]
  

ENORMITY OF THE TIME PERIOD: Late 15^th century to early 21st century (over 500 years)

Eminent French historian Jean-Michel Deveau, Université de Nice, summarizes in a recent UNESCO publication the enormous time period of Western domination and exploitation of the world through slavery, colonialism, and neo-colonialism: “In the late fifteenth century the West seized hold of the world [that is: ‘enslaved’ the world] and did not let go until the start of the twenty-first…. We are talking about sustained exploitation. It is clear that over the centuries the borders of the West, which were confined to those of Europe until the eighteenth century, were extended during the nineteenth century to include the USA, and also Russia [which effectively became a member of the dominators’ club by colonizing the Caucasus and the vastness of Siberia]…. Both the West’s successive colonisations and contemporary neo-colonialism have the sole aim of mining the world’s natural, economic, and human resources to use for the comfort [and benefit] of the Western minority.” [3]

 

3.     ENORMITY OF THE GEOGRAPHICAL AREA DEPLETED: The Western African coastal area stretching 3,500 miles from Senegal in the north to Angola in the south

This area extended 500−1,000 miles into the interior of Africa. The area depleted by the slave trade included fifteen current African countries, many colonized by the French, such as Senegal, Guinea, Mali, Mauretania, Niger, Burkina Faso, Cote d’Ivoire, and Cameroon. Others became British colonies: Nigeria, Ghana, Cameroon, Sierra Leone. Still others, Portuguese colonies: Angola and Guinea-Bissau; and finally Belgian: the very mineral-rich Congo. [4]
   
REPRESENTATION OF BLACK PEOPLE IN HOLLYWOOD AND OTHER DOMINANT MEDIA

During most of the 20th century, the tendency of Hollywood and other dominant media around the world was to demean Black men, women, and children through persistently negative stereotypes. Film historian Donald Bogle points out the following types in Hollywood films: Black adult males— never men, only child-like and animal-like—were Uncle Toms (loyal, subservient), Coons (buffoons), or Bucks (big-muscled, over-sexed vultures, rapists). Black women were Mulattos (tragic) or Mammies (loyal, over-sized). Pioneering Black actors in the U.S. and U.K. film industries, like Paul Robeson and Canada Lee, tried to change that representation. However, the Plantation-Genre film, always under-valuing Black humanity, remained the norm.
 

Only after the impact of the freedom movements in the 1950s and 1960s in Africa, the U.S., and the Caribbean (including the Cuban Revolution), did Black filmmakers emerge to use their new, decision-making positions as directors and producers to reverse the cinematic images by beginning to set the record straight. Ousmane Sembene, Melvin Van Peebles, Sara Maldoror, Med Hondo, Sergio Giral, Euzhan Palcy, Spike Lee, Raoul Peck, and Gordon Parks were among the female and male directors leading the precarious way in demonstrating that the liberation and other human aspirations of Black folks around the world could become legitimate cinematic concerns and subjects.
   
PROPOSITIONS

There are several overall propositions to be made before moving on to screening and discussing the films. These propositions undergird this presentation on the filmic treatment of slavery and the slave trade by Black directors.

One. All film is political, either sustaining the status quo or advocating political, social, or economic change. In a more general sense, art and politics are inextricably interwoven.

Two. A good "historical film" might be as revealing about the present as it is about the past with which it is purportedly dealing.

Three. Western, Eurocentric, White-superiority norms are pervasive. Hence, the assumption of the inferiority of others led to justification of the imposition of slavery and colonialism because they provided Christian “uplift” and “civilization.”

Four. As U.S. historian Robert A. Rosenstone concludes, "History need not be done on the written page. It can be a mode of thinking that utilizes elements other than [just] the written word: sound, vision, feeling, montage.” [5]

Five. In commercial Hollywood movies, the silence about slavery was a silence about TRUTH. It was obscured by the shouting once films acquired sound, and even before that by the persistently negative visual images, reinforced by the written word (titling) on the screen even in the silent era. During the latter period, hundreds—yes, hundreds—of feature-length and short films poured out of Hollywood condoning and praising the enslavement of Africans in the Americas, especially in the U.S.
   
SUBVERTING THE PLANTATION-GENRE FILM NORM

We gather here with the aim of breaking the cinematic silence regarding the Truth about slavery and the slave trade. Black directors, including Tony Coco-Viloin, Jean-Claude Flamand Barny, Charles Burnett and Orlando Bagwell, have made considerable contributions to the relatively new genre of Black-Liberation/Black-Resistance films treating African enslavement in the Americas. Our presentation tonight reveals the pioneering, heroic efforts of five Black filmmakers in presenting Black folks with dignity and humanity during the horrific trans-Atlantic slave trade and the ensuing enslavement of Africans in the Americas. These films have been selected from a variety of filmmakers from Africa and the African Diaspora: (1) the penetratingly analytical African American Marlon Riggs (ETHNIC NOTIONS), (2) the creative, innovative Afro-Cuban Sergio Giral (THE OTHER FRANCISCO/EL OTRO FRANCISCO), (3) the poetic documentarian and Martiniquean Guy Deslauriers (THE MIDDLE PASSAGE/LE PASSAGE MILIEU), (4) the pioneering “Life” photographer, composer, film director-producer-scenarist African American Gordon Parks (SOLOMON NORTHUP’S ODYSSEY: TWELVE YEARS A SLAVE), and (5) the Ethiopian-born/U.S.-migrated Haile Gerima (SANKOFA). All these filmmakers sought to subvert the Plantation-genre films denigrating persons from Africa and the African Diaspora.
  

How did these filmmakers from Africa and the African Diaspora subvert the long-term representation of only negative images? What content did they contribute to challenge the Plantation-Genre stereotypes? What styles/cinematic techniques did they use to reinforce new, evolving accurate representation? 

For this presentation we present excerpts from five films in which African and African-Diasporic directors deliberately set out to subvert the Hollywood Plantation-genre norm:
  

Marlon Riggs: ETHNIC NOTIONS (U.S.A. 1987. 57 min.) − documentary analysis of representation 

 

African-American scholar-filmmaker Marlon Riggs analyzes the deliberate, totalitarian mis-representations of images. This dis-information had its specific basis in the justification of the institution of slavery and the follow-up condemnation of the Reconstruction period. Riggs skillfully mixes disturbing, demeaning popular-culture images of African Americans in film and other graphics with the director's personal off-screen essay narrated by actress Esther Rolle and the on-screen scholarly analyses by eminent Black and White historians. His superb editing illustrates the connection between film content and the national political, economic, and social contexts related to race relations, North and South. The evolution of the images depends on the historical-political-economic-social context: from the Loyal Toms (faithful, contented, happy, servile, docile during slavery) to the Carefree Sambos (irresponsible, definitely not ready for participation in the political process during Reconstruction). Other, equally convincing categories of women, men, and children are Faithful Mammies, Grinning Coons (buffoons), Savage Brutes, and Wide-eyed Pickaninnies.

Riggs makes the direct connection between art (cinema et al.) and the historical context of European-American domination of African Americans. The history scholars conclude that it is those negative popular-culture images of Black folks that determined both negative White perceptions and behavior and negative Black self-images and behavior; they also aver that those images were intended to justify that behavior. So the context influenced the film industry, and the films, in turn, influenced the context (human behavior and institutions) for most of the 20th century.

In these clips we will focus on one of the five stereotypes of Riggs: the carefree, irresponsible, non-working, grinning “Sambo.” But we will glimpse others: the faithful Mammy ("A” and “Z”), the loyal
“Tom” [“D” for Daniel], and the grinning Coon.

[Screen Riggs clip here]
  
Clips from these next four films serve to provide a crash course on how four other Black filmmakers have
contributed to the onslaught against cinematic images distorting the Truth for political, economic, social
or psychological reasons.

 

Sergio Giral: THE OTHER FRANCISCO (Cuba. 1974. 96 min.) − romantic novel versus economic realities

 

Cuban filmmaker Sergio Giral draws upon a literal portrayal of the first abolitionist novel in the Americas, “Francisco”—written a few years before the U.S. publication of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”—to reveal the
realities of slavery in a parallel docudrama format.
In contrast to the romantic depiction in the novel, the realities of slave rebellion are graphically and consistently on the minds and in the hearts of enslaved Africans on Cuban plantations. The film shows the cruelty to enslaved Africans, men, women, and children: beatings, dogs to intimidate, and control. Notice how the filmmaker inter-cuts Dorothea’s resistance to rape by the master with the sabotage of the sugar-production equipment by field hands. You will see various kinds of resistance in these clips, including arson, sabotage, vengeful murder, assassination, and, ultimately, escape/fleeing. It is a film that Hollywood dared not make.

 

[Screen Giral clip here]

3.     Guy Deslauriers: THE MIDDLE PASSAGE (Martinique-France/U.S.A. HBO. 2003. 76 min.) − poetic

       historic documentary of the trans-Atlantic crossing

Many of you from the Caribbean, Africa, and France have already seen Deslauriers’ LE PASSAGE MILIEU (THE MIDDLE PASSAGE), so we will be brief in our Introduction.

Martiniquean director Guy Deslauriers draws upon the novel of fellow Martiniquean Patrick Chamoiseau and the written narration of acclaimed African-American novelist Walter Mosley to produce this magnificent example of pan-African-Diasporic collaboration. The filmmaker uses a poetic, voice-over narration, with a dramatic, visual reconstruction, to illustrate the horrors, the suffering, and the inhuman, unsanitary conditions, epitomized by the scavenging rat, faced by captured Africans as they were taken across the Atlantic to the Americas. Despite the harassing life down in the dark, dank hole of the ship, where humans are packed like sardines, the surviving human beings are re-born to form a new humanity: “A new man will emerge into the alien sun of this New World.”

A child is witnessing the dehumanizing process. What does/might this mean? What is the relationship
between the past and the present; the present and the future; the past, the present, and the future?

 

[Screen Deslauriers clip here]

4.     Gordon Parks: SOLOMON NORTHUP’S ODYSSEY: TWELVE YEARS A SLAVE (U.S.A. 1984. 115

       Min.) − a truthful PBS narrative film about slavery

Gordon Parks, pioneering African-American photographer, composer, and film director-producer-script writer, helps break the Hollywood silence about the realities of slavery in the U.S.A. The director draws upon a published autobiography of a northern-born carpenter-musician Solomon Northup, "Twelve Years a Slave" (actual complete title: TWELVE YEARS A SLAVE, NARRATIVE OF SOLOMON NORTHUP, A CITIZEN OF NEW YORK, KIDNAPPED IN WASHINGTON CITY IN 1841, AND RESCUED IN 1853, FROM A COTTON PLANTATION NEAR THE RED RIVER IN LOUISIANA), to present Northrop's life chronologically from “freedom” in the North to slavery in the South and back to “freedom” in the North. A melodramatic narrative, following the usual Hollywood formula, this film, nevertheless, is pioneering: one of the TV films to portray slavery honestly, to portray the trickery of bounty hunters searching for African Americans to return to enslavement or to put into enslavement, and to portray a happy, functional, cohesive African-American family despite economic challenges.

Solomon is a dignified, literate carpenter, who, while moonlighting as an accomplished fiddler, is wooed to
Washington, D.C., for his musical talent, but is instead kidnapped, drugged, and locked in chains in a
slave pen in the U.S. capital. Solomon is then taken by boat to New Orleans (giving us a bird’s eye view of the INTERNAL slave trade in contrast to the external slave trade dealt with in the films of both
Deslauriers and Gerima).

 

[Screen Parks clip here]
 
 5.  Haile Gerima: SANKOFA (Ghana/Burkina Faso/U.S.A. 1993. 124 min.) − magnificent experimental

       poetic film essay by a Pan-African ideologue

Filmmaker-college professor-Ethiopia-born and U.S.-educated Haile Gerima has directed, produced, and
scripted an independent film, SANKOFA, that managed to penetrate the urban, African-American market through non-traditional distribution-exhibition techniques. This politically engaged filmmaker, using a poetic, non-narrative, off-screen voice-over, had a remarkable effect on African-American urban populations when it was released independently in 1993. His highly artistic and anti-slavery/anti-slave trade film, with a contemporary, Pan-African perspective, has become a cult film among African Americans.
 

This is a noteworthy example of Pan-African collaboration. The film is a co-production between an
Ethiopian-born filmmaker living and teaching in the U.S. with major contributions from Burkina Faso
(including acting and technical talent) and Ghana (where the film was shot on location.) The meaning of “Sankofa” is: “One must return to the past in order to move forward.”
 

Gerima uses flashback to take a fashion model on a shoot in the 20th century at the infamous Elmina [“the mine”] Castle in Ghana spiritually back to a plantation in the Caribbean. There she, and thus we, experience first-hand the physical and psychic horrors of chattel slavery. We can see some examples of the impact of the powerful images of Sergio Giral's THE OTHER FRANCISCO.

This clip begins with a reference to “the spirit of the dead,” and ends with a reference to the trans-Atlantic slave trade: “It was genocide.”

[Screen Gerima clip here]
  
LOOKING AHEAD
 

Fueled by their liberation movements following World War II, filmmakers from Africa and the African
Diaspora brought new visions and new insights as they began to subvert the dominant Hollywood model, both in content and in form. In this next phase of using film to continue  breaking the silence about the realities of enslavement and the slave trade, how can Black filmmakers—with their allies—-move ahead to develop strategies and tactics to continue the unfinished business on the long road ahead? What roles can Black filmmakers and their allies play in remembering and purging the human barbarities of the past while providing positive insight into the dysfunctional legacies of the present? What does the future hold?

Collaborating with UNESCO, RFI, Canal 3, Musée Dapper, ZIFF, and other concerned, committed institutions and individuals, what next steps need Black filmmakers take to institutionalize the operation of breaking the silence of truth about slavery and the slave trade? The dream continues....

Thank you for your attention. Let us now begin our dialogue.

© 2007 Dr. Harold (Hal) Weaver/The Black Film Project

 

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 1 Davis, David Brion. (2006). INHUMAN BONDAGE: THE RISE AND FALL OF SLAVERY IN THE NEW WORLD. Oxford University Press. London. p. 2

 

² Douglass, Frederick.(1960). NARRATIVE OF THE LIFE OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS: AN AMERICAN SLAVE. WRITTEN BY HIMSELF, edited by Benjamin Quarles, Harvard University Press. Cambridge, MA, 1960, p. 94-95. Quoted in D. B. Davis, p. 2.

 

³ Deveau, Jean-Michel. (2006). “Science and Reparations”. INTERNATIONAL SOCIAL SCIENCE JOURNAL, 188, June 2006, p. 245-246

 

⁴  Davis, David Brion. (2006). INHUMAN BONDAGE: THE RISE AND FALL OF SLAVERY IN THE NEW WORLD. Oxford University Press. London. p. 100

 

⁵ Rosenstone, Robert A. (1995). VISIONS OF THE PAST: THE CHALLENGE OF FILM TO OUR IDEA OF HISTORY.   Harvard University Press. Cambridge, Mass.