Two Takes On Harriet

Abstract

Two Takes On Harriet Andrea Schmidt and Frank Fucile TWO TAKES ON HARRIET 2019 Directed by Kasi Lemmons Distributed by Focus Features https://www.focusfeatures.com/harriet 125 minutes Take 1 Kasi Lemmons, director of the haunting Southern Gothic family drama Eve's Bayou (1997), had spent years trying to bring the story of Harriet Tubman to the big screen. Her resulting film is a fantastic genre-mash up of biographical, super-hero, action, and dramatic film that remains hauntingly relevant to today's political climate in the States. Cynthia Erivo plays Harriet Tubman, born Araminta "Minty" Ross. For Erivo's performance alone, the film is more than worth watching. She so aptly embodies and expresses the emotional evolution from the character, from run-away slave to Civil War hero. (As a British actor, Erivo faced criticism for portraying an "American" hero. No doubt, there lies strong racialized/gendered prejudice here, as trans-Atlantic portrayals remain extremely common. The BFI film magazine, Sight and Sound, had a fantastic cover story a couple of years ago on Black British actors and their relation to the historical film and television industries in the United Kingdom and United States.) The film comes into dialogue with other recent films that focus on slavery, like British director Steve McQueen's Twelve Years a Slave (2013). Like Twelve, Harriet addresses the use of religion to justify slavery. The opening sequence features an unconscious Harriet under one of her "spells" from which she suffered throughout her life due to a cranial injury from a slave overseer. Later, though others write it off as "brain damage," we learn that she views these "spells" and visions as a connection to God and a form of empowerment. The film follows this visionary sequence with a Sunday church service on the plantation where a black preacher lectures the gathered slaves on how God would want them to remain obedient to their slave masters (watching them all from the porch). Harriet's connection to God then bypasses the religion of white supremacy espoused by the enslavers. When Twelve Years was released, many of my students, unaware of the long history of using Biblical stories like that of Noah and his sons to justify slavery, expressed confusion about the sequence where the slave master reads from the Bible. Both of these films call attention to the White evangelical movement's long held connections to white supremacist groups and devotion to segregation. The use of the black preacher also calls attention to the works of the early black American director Oscar Michaux, extremely critical of the use of religion to silence African-Americans' demands for equal rights. (However, we later learn the reverend in Harriet may not indeed practice what he preaches.) Harriet does not shy away from the brutality of slavery nor the violence people of color in the United States faced even in the "Free States." At the same time, it avoids veering off into what some may view as exploitative depictions, wherein the body then becomes spectacle and the film tries to "make the viewer feel" what the experience would have been like. Indeed, one criticism of McQueen's film upon its release was that its graphic whipping and hanging scenes turned into an aestheticization of violence. The haptic and explicit feature in all of McQueen's previous films, but some would argue then the camera and viewers themselves then become complicit in a voyeur-esque depiction of suffering. [End Page 58] The film also manages to avoid the "white savior" complex that plague other films on slavery. In the case of McQueen's film, Solomon's release from slavery as a result of his encounter with sympathetic white man remains true to the source text. At the same time, the scene did have an aura of "white savior," aided by the fact that Brad Pitt served as producer on the film. (The subsequent controversy with the Italian posters featuring white members of the cast also did not help.) In Lemmons's film, Harriet does escape in part with the help of a couple of white sympathizers, but in addition to her own agency and strength, the success of her...