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old British navy blast the slave fort to kingdom come – indicates some audience unease? Only one seat was filled to watch Amistad for
every two who watched Schindler’s List. Was this because its villains are Americans and Europeans: not the Evil Empire, but ‘our’ Empire; not Them but Us? Some say Schindler’s List won seven Oscars
against Amistad’s four nominations because of the relative cultural power of Jewish Americans to African Americans in America, notably in the institution of Hollywood. But this again is an easy way out – it blames someone else. It’s probably more likely to be that being white and watching Amistad is the nearest most of us get to feeling what a modern German might feel watching Schindler’s List: guilty.
Realist or realistic? The technical codes used in Amistad, and
its messages and values, give a further insight into Amistad’s relative failure. Some analysis of these will also help us to distinguish between the technical term ‘realism’ and the value judgement ‘realistic’ with which it is often confused. The main set of Amistad is a courtroom and
the prevailing tone is – like a courtroom – a debate, a weighing of evidence. There are other sets which, in contrast, carry great emotional force – the slave ship Tecora; the African village in which the tribe’s leader Cinque is kidnapped for sale by a rival tribe; the symbolically decaying white slave fort, the Amistad and its brief but bloody mutiny, and so on. But within the context of the whole film these action sequence sets are crime scenes visited from the detached emotional centre of the courtrooms. So Spielberg chooses to ‘try’ the events after visiting them (briefly and compellingly) rather than to thrust them into your face, in your gut, and leave them
there, as he might in his adventure movies. Is it bold of Spielberg to go against his brand
and attempt dispassionate analysis? Or is it a failure of nerve? The kidnapping by Africans of Africans and the horrors of the ‘Middle Passage’ where men and women are brutalised by being fed (or not) like animals, thrown overboard in a chain to drown as a cargo-lightening exercise and so on. All these are well-documented historical facts about the slave trade, and they went on for four centuries. Spielberg does not shirk presenting them, however uncomfortable they are for white American and European audiences; but does he then draw back behind protocol? Both Baldwin and John Quincy Adams, the
two defenders of the slaves, quiet abolitionists, show the same caution. They are reluctant at first even to engage with the case, and insist on doing so as a legal game. Cinque’s passionate African outbursts in New England captivity are of a piece with the violence of the mutiny itself. His language has no word for what ‘should’, only what ‘is’ and we need to hear his howl for freedom, however hard it is to take. Blood still defines the uneasy relationship Europe and America has with Africa and – outside of these African outbursts – too much of Amistad seems strangely bloodless. When Spielberg puts us on the edges of our
seats, as in Indiana Jones, this film is worth every one of Anthony Hopkins’ thousand courtroom words in what must be one of the longest uninterrupted defence speeches in legal history. This speech risks losing its audience; it blurs its own messages and values by arguing Americans cannot be ‘what they are’ without being ‘what they were’ when they wrote the Declaration of Independence, while framing Hopkins in between statues of founding fathers like George Washington, who infamously owned slaves. ‘What they were’ – at least in some cases – was slave
traders owners, even while they wrote this great treatise on ‘equality, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’, as Tom Paine pointed out at the time. But why debate the legal position at all? Our
guts tell us what is wrong here, just as they do when we watch Nazis round up Jews for the camps. Why so much courtroom debate, and no glimpse of slaves worked to death on the plantations? The action scenes – notably that superb dark
ECU opening on the agonised African face, then hand – then the slave in the darkness of the hold scratching away at his chains, fingernails bleeding, prior to leading the mutiny – are Spielberg’s best contributions to the debate. Spielberg the adventure movie-maker had been accused of being all action and no depth; but the depth of this subject – the messages and values being dragged out through a courtroom – is the action. Amistad is based on a true courtroom story
– and more-or-less faithfully reproduces it, with much period and courtroom ‘realism’ or surface realism. But it is least ‘truthful’ in the courtroom. Schindler’s List is based on a novel (itself based on a true story) and its fairy-tale character and narrative are reflected in a cinematic super- realism. In Amistad, without the sifting mediation of a great novel, period ‘realism’ may have replaced ‘truth’.
A realist visual style Much of the photography attempts ‘realism’
– authentic sepia-brown staidness. Cameras are often focused and framed at a modest middle distance, in keeping with the courtroom detachment. They move slowly and linger on long speeches. The spooky-humorous use of Quakers and the powerful use of darkness are exceptions to this ‘realism.’ Much of the trademark
english and media centre | December 2009 | MediaMagazine 41
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