Amistad d. Steven Spielberg (1997) Credit: Dreamworks Llc/The Kobal Collection;
Image.net for images from Schindler’s List
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slow, plodding, like the thoughtful ruminations of a juror taking in all the evidence. But it’s the wrong set. The real set should have been the Tecura. When the Tecura is mentioned in court, the slaves all groan in fear and this moment is one of the most telling in the film, and introduces one of the most effective sequences. Exciting – as in exciting of pity – and harrowing. It’s the real story of what happened to Africans on such ships. In the same year Amistad came out, another
Realist mise-en-scène A major indicator of any film’s realism (or not)
Spielberg quirkiness – rich colour, wild camera movements, tracking, dolly shots, very swift cutaways from blood and guts – is reserved for flashbacks and other scenes involving Africa or Africans in chains or behind bars. Language, including the language of seeing,
is portrayed as a mystifier: we see the worthy hymn-singing Quakers – the first slavers, but also the first abolitionists – through African eyes: ‘Are they entertainers? If so, why are they so miserable?’ This is a wonderful comment on the way sober Quakerdom is contrasted to the proto-Christian mysticism and joyousness of the Africans. ‘Everywhere [Jesus] goes the sun follows him.’ We also see the Africans through American
eyes at the time – shouting, raging in a language we can’t understand, frightening and alien. At first, they don’t even have subtitles; the Portuguese slavers – white/Europeans like ‘us’? – do. The Africans howl and growl in righteous fury at enslavement – we have to work this out for ourselves, overcoming the barrier and suspicion of difference. The learning of communication comes before language – both for the characters and for us as viewers – but it is swiftly followed by it. The slaves in court (in contrast to the rest) are shown twitching and gradually overcome with passion – fearful close-ups of chained legs and wrists, increasingly hammered and clanged in a powerful chained rhythm, into an irrefutable chant: Give us us free! Give us us free! Give us us free!
42 MediaMagazine | December 2009 | english and media centre
is its sets. The courtroom sets of Amistad, like its characters, are very ‘dressed’ – ‘realistic’ in terms of period, but with much of the costume drama about them. By contrast, the shipped Africans are bronzed beauties to a man and woman. The real slaves on those ships were typically so sick that before sale they needed to be painted and their hair blacked if and when they reached port. This is not necessarily unrealistic – Spielberg is depicting the beauty and power of Africa that slavery took away – but it is not realism. To depict the truth below the surface is the opposite of realism. It is allegory or perhaps expressionism, a technique used in Schindler’s List where the colour red is symbolically woven into a black and white narrative. Amistad is better when it shows this inner story rather than the costume realism of the courtroom. On the other hand, the powerful impact in Holocaust movies of the ‘musselmen’ – starved sick skeletal victims – is sacrificed in Amistad to showing beautiful African bodies rather than their destruction. Spielberg does show dehumanisation in brief shocking frames – and in his trademark use of colour in the bloodshed – but he seems reluctant to linger. It is as if he doesn’t want to look – or fears his audience won’t want to. In Schindler’s List, Spielberg uses
black and white. This allows us to look. It removes us one degree from the tragedy, makes it look a bit less like modern ‘real life’, while at the same time giving it the hard reality of that period. It says, this was very real indeed, all too real then, but (thank God) it is not now. The full colour of Amistad,
when used, is usually associated with Africa and the Africans, not the ‘dull’ New England they are taken to. It is the brilliant colour of sunshine and blood and passion – as seen in Africa and on the sea. But most of the film (especially the dominant courtroom) is in muted and/or cloudy tints. David Franzoni (the writer)
and Spielberg’s use of the courtroom as the main set is the real error: realism without truth. It is authentic in terms of period properties, woodenness, gravitas, and costume, drably coloured, very ‘real’ in terms of camera work:
ship movie broke all box office records and remains the biggest selling – and quite possibly the wettest – movie of all time: Titanic (1997). Eleven Academy awards, $1,835,300,000 box office receipts worldwide and a more Irish- American view of the English – the arrogant aristocrats America was founded to dispossess – Titanic set the movie where the real action was: on the ship. Maybe Spielberg, like many of us, was too scared to look hard and long at the slaver rather than the courtroom – though he deserves real credit for looking at all. That slave ship remains the skeleton – or millions of skeletons – in our cupboard. And the biggest black hole in our shared history.
Gareth Calway is a NATE consultant and a former Head of English and Media. He is currently writing a novel for children about the Bristol-Jamaica slave trade.
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