Celluloid Chains: Slavery in the Americas through Film ed. by Rudyard J. Alcocer, Kristen Block, and Dawn Duke

Abstract

Reviewed by: Celluloid Chains: Slavery in the Americas through Film ed. by Rudyard J. Alcocer, Kristen Block, and Dawn Duke Christopher D. Stone Celluloid Chains: Slavery in the Americas through Film Rudyard J. Alcocer, Kristen Block, and Dawn Duke, eds. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2018 Scholarship on slavery's cinematic presence has been surprisingly sparse. Before 2018, the only book-length analysis came from Natalie Zemon Davis's Slaves on Screen (2002), a brief but perceptive study of five films. Celluloid Chains ups the ante. Fifteen essays conceived from a range of academic disciplines tackle fifteen films released between 1975 and 2015. In short, this anthology is, as the introduction boasts, "the most complete collection of critical essays" for this cinematic genre to date (x). After Rudyard J. Alcocer's introduction, the collection opens with El otro Francisco (1975). Julia C. Paulk explains how director Sergio Giral radically reworked a landmark novel under the watchful eye of Cuba's ICAIC. Giral recasts the novel's suffering, but docile slaves into righteous, rebellious revolutionaries. Although the rebels fail, the film's list of subsequent revolts (mostly anticolonial uprisings led by whites) as well as the image of surviving rebels ensconced in the mountains, an obvious allusion to Castro's 26th of July Movement, positions this slave uprising (and other rebellions) as precursors to 1959 and the supposed eradication of inequality and prejudice. Robert J. Norrell offers the anthology's second and final foray into the 1970s with his discussion of Roots (1977). Norrell largely abstains from original in-depth textual analysis, relying instead on Leslie Fiedler. Most of Norrell's essay functions as a useful introduction to the production and reception of Roots as well as an overview of the accusations of plagiarism and historical inaccuracy that dogged Alex Haley. If Norrell takes a greater interest in the big picture, Haley Osborn offers a close reading of Cecilia (1981), Humberto Solás's lavish adaptation of Cirilo Villaverde's seminal novel. In particular, she examines the film's use of lighting, which, to cite one example, repeatedly marks the film's heels, both strong, ambitious women, as manipulative, malevolent, and even inhuman. Unlike the big-budgeted Cecilia, Cimarrones (1982) is a low-budget short about fugitive slaves. As Rachel Sarah O'Toole notes, the film offers a counter-memory to the one enshrined in Peruvian archives, dominated as they are by filings from imperial officials and slaveholders. Instead of the lawless marauders imagined by the colonial elite, maroons appear as champions of justice who live in a sustainable, orderly community. Here O'Toole expresses envy. Untethered by archives that reveal little about what fugitives said or felt or how they interacted, the filmmakers could use their imaginations to create a "vision that historians like me suspect but have been unable either to prove or disprove" (63). Quilombo (1984) shares some similarities to Cimarrones. Both are set in the 1600s. Both are about fugitive slaves. Both seek to integrate a historically marginalized group within their nation's imagined past. However, compared to O'Toole, Ignacio López-Calvo adopts a more critical tone, He charges the filmmakers with caricaturing the Portuguese, exoticizing Afro-Brazilians, and romanticizing Quilombo, Brazil's most famous maroon settlement, by depicting it as a perfectly harmonious, always festive realm. Alcocer's essay on Cobra Verde (1987), written and directed by Werner Herzog, returns the collection to the 1800s, its favored century. Cobra Verde is the collection's only film that does not foreground the experience of slaves, focusing instead on the titular character, a Brazilian slave trader. Alcocer spends much of his essay debating about whether this film, which, as he concedes, renders the enslaved voiceless, fits within the current study. The stylized documentary Passage du milieu (1999) illuminates the experiences of those souls captured and transported by the likes of Cobra Verde. While this film, which juxtaposes slow-motion images of slaves [End Page 57] against poetic narration, divided critics, Anny Dominique Curtius deems it compelling and more effective than the Walter Mosley-revised script aired by HBO in 2001. In her analysis, the film's tidalectic nature embodies "an ecopoetic counter-epistemology to a...