Celluloid Chains

Slavery in the Americas through Film

Rudyard Alcocer, Kristen Block, Dawn Duke

• Publisher: University of Tennessee Press
• Year: 2024
• eBook ISBN: 9781621903284
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Featuring a variety of disciplinary perspectives and analytical approaches, Celluloid Chains is the most comprehensive volume to date on films about slavery. This collection examines works from not only the United States but elsewhere in the Americas, and it attests to slavery’s continuing importance as a source of immense fascination for filmmakers and their audiences.

Each of the book’s fifteen original essays focuses on a particular film that directly treats the enslavement of Africans and their descendants in the New World. Beginning with an essay on the Cuban film El otro Francisco (1975), Sergio Giral’s reworking of a nineteenth-century abolitionist novel, the book proceeds to examine such works as the landmark miniseries Roots (1977), which sparked intense controversy over its authenticity; Werner Herzog’s Cobra Verde (1987), which raises questions about what constitutes a slavery film; Guy Deslauriers’s Passage du milieu (1999), a documentary-style reconstruction of what Africans experienced during the Middle Passage; and Steve McQueen’s Oscar-winning 12 Years a Slave (2013), which embodies the tensions between faithfully adapting a nineteenth-century slave narrative and bending it for modern purposes.

Films about slavery have shown a special power to portray the worst and best of humanity, and Celluloid Chains is an essential guide to this important genre.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction. The Broken Mirror of Memory: Reflections on the Power of Slavery Films, Rudyard J. Alcocer
• Slavery in Service of the Revolution in Sergio Giral’s El otro Francisco, Julia C. Paulk
• Roots: The Re-making of Africa and Slavery in the American Mind, Robert J. Norrell
• Inheriting Chains: Lighting Effects in Humberto Solás’s Cecilia, Haley Osborn
• Afro-Peruvian Cimarrones: Raiding the Archives and Articulating Race, Rachel Sarah O’Toole
• Exoticization, Mestiçagem, and Brazilian National Consciousness in Carlos Diegues’s Quilombo, Ignacio López-Calvo
• Of Slavery and Humanity: Focus, Metaphor, and Truth in Werner Herzog’s Cobra Verde, Rudyard J. Alcocer
• Unshackling the Ocean: Screening Trauma and Memory in Guy Deslauriers’s Passage du milieu ~The Middle Passage, Anny Dominique Curtis
• Mulattos and the Challenges of the Third Space in Roble de Olor / Scent of Oak, Mamadou Badiane
• (Dis)Figuring the Plantation: Discourses of Slave Space in Lars von Trier’s Manderlay, Edward R. Piñuelas
• Exploring the Ugly Truth: Cinema of Integration, Slavery, and the Poetics of Beauty in El cimarrón, Nemesio nd Mirerza González-Vélez
• Case départ: Slavery in Martinique through the Lens of Comedy, Gladys M. Francis
• Django Unchained: Slavery and Corrective Authenticity in the Southern, Dexter Gabriel
• Telling the Tula Slave Revolt: A Creolizing Affair with Neo-Colonial Implications, Daniel Arbino
• This Film Called My Back: Black Pain and Painful History in 12 Years a Slave. Janell Hobson
• Exposed on Film: The (Un) Promised Land of Nova Scotia in the Miniseries The Book of Negroes, Emily Allen Williams
• Conclusion. On Film, Historiography, and Teaching the “Experience” of Slavery, Kristen Block
• Appendix. Additional Films about Slavery
• Contributors
• Index