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the Nazi-buster with his trademark cartoon hero replaced by a real historical one. Schindler’s List (1993) was both a commercial triumph and the recipient of seven Academy Awards (among numerous others) including Best Picture and Best Director. In 2007, the American Film Institute ranked Schindler’s List eighth on its list of the 100 best American films of all time. If its worldwide box office rating of 183rd (it grossed $321,200,000, one below The Devil Wears Prada) is relatively high for its ‘serious’ subject matter, its critical reputation is unassailable. Box office is a raw measure of audience keenness but it’s difficult to argue with so many people. For context, the gross earnings to date of the
three best-selling movies of all time are: Titanic (1997) $1,835,300,000, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) $1,129,219,252 and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (2006) $1,060,332,628. Spielberg’s achievement was to make a
Hollywood blockbuster out of a profound and traumatic issue. So when this maker of a critically-acclaimed Holocaust masterpiece turned from Schindler’s List (1993) to the slave trade with Amistad (1997) there was every reason to expect the same seismic impact in the cinemas of America and Europe. Yet Amistad does not appear at all in the box-office chart of 372 films. And it received just four nominations. The USA-only box office figures are equally
striking. The chart, which includes 483 movies, only includes films grossing over $100,000,000. Schindler’s List just misses with $96,065,768. Amistad made $44,229,441 – good, but nowhere near the chart. America didn’t love it like they loved Schindler’s List, and neither did the world. So who watched these films – and who didn’t?
And why not?
Common themes Both films deal with incomprehensible – all
but unwatchable – evil and suffering. The ‘final solution’ represented in Schindler’s List began on
40 MediaMagazine | December 2009 | english and media centre
July 31st 1941 and lasted four years – albeit four years of unprecedented intensity in the history of human evil – sending six million Jews and five million others to the camps. The Atlantic slave trade (‘trade’ meaning the selling and shipping of slaves not just their seizure) was the biggest most notorious slave trade of all. It lasted four centuries. It can be traced as far back as 1444, when the Portuguese invaded Lagos and started sending African slaves back to Europe. It ended in America in 1865. The slave trade kidnapped 24 million Africans and sent about half of these to the Americas to work and/or die on plantations – the other half died en route, mainly at sea and in horrific pain, fear and sickness. Neither subject is exactly Hollywood material;
Spielberg found real Hollywood heroes in both and an uplifting Hollywood narrative in what must be the two most hopeless miseries of human history. But why was Amistad so much less of a success than Schindler’s List?
The meanings of Amistad La Amistad is the ship on which the slaves are
taken from one Cuban port to another. These slaves have already been transported there from Africa on the Portuguese Tecura. Amistad is Spanish for the ‘friendship’ that later grows between the slaves and their white defenders. But it is also the set for the explosive African violence against white slavers. The name is both more ironic, and problematic, in that context. Slavery is a trickier subject than the
concentration camps, on both sides of the pond. At the time the film is set (1839-40) it was still thriving in America. It was abolished by the 13th amendment after the Civil War – partly fought on the slavery issue – in 1865. The British slave trade had been made illegal throughout the British Empire in 1807, though slavery itself remained legal there until 1833 (and effectively until 1838). Slave owners were richly compensated by the British government: slaves were not. Great Britain in 1807 owed its position as the richest nation in the world to its trade, not least to the ‘African’
trade (with the blood of African slaves all over it). The economy of the southern United States, dependent on cotton and tobacco as picked by slaves, would be decisively set back by abolition. Hence the pressure on the President in this film – a Democrat and an Abolitionist but reliant on southern votes – to take the judgement to the Supreme Court of Appeal. Of the twelve million Africans shipped to the
Americas from the 16th to the 19th centuries – and the similar numbers who died in the ships – an estimated 645,000 were brought to what is now the United States. The slave population (overwhelmingly black Africans) there would grow to four million by the 1860 Census. Spielberg’s choice of Amistad in 1839 as his
focus ensures it is the Spanish and their nasty little queen rather than, say, the British who are represented as the bad guys. In fact, more slaves were shipped by the Portuguese (to Brazil) than anyone else; and though both Iberian powers were trading slaves to the Americas centuries earlier than anyone else (Britain had to obtain an asiento – permission – from Spain in 1712 to import them there) all European countries except Switzerland and Russia were engaged in the Atlantic slave trade and, by 1792, in its Prime Minister’s words: no nation in Europe ... plunged so deeply in this guilt as Great Britain The representation of Great Britain in this
film is restricted to her enormously creditable behaviour after abolition, during which the ships of her Royal Navy vigorously policed the world’s oceans arresting slavers and freeing slaves – for both moral as well as economic reasons. The Royal Navy captain who gives evidence with impeccably stiff-lipped moral superiority in this film (Harry from Spooks) is a genuine tribute to Britain’s reversal of her earlier guilt. But Britain’s active slave trading went on for two centuries: her active anti-slavery for about 50 years. Perhaps Spielberg is courting his British audience here? But perhaps the fact that he does so at such length – with another scene later where the good
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