The watcher sees the
film begin with a failed act of writing. All through the film, there
are attempts at writing; attempts at getting letters out. Words are
vital in the film.
Texts from the Bible
are read by a benevolent slave-owner as a black woman howls in
desperation. The watcher has seen her separated from her children at
a slave auction. The slave-owner's wife, a white woman in full Sunday
best, says she cannot abide such depression. The black woman is
dragged away.
The watcher senses
that these scenes of normalised and ideologically-ratified acts of
brutality are among the best in the film.
They add to the
sustained sense of the normalisation of slavery, well pictured in the
scene of the man keeping himself alive by tip-tapping his toes in the
mud, as he hangs by the neck from the bough of a tree in a beautiful
pastoral setting.
His fellow slaves
come out of their shacks and go about a range of small domestic
tasks. They are blinded by the terrifying awfulness in front of them.
By its normality. A white overseer, a pistol on his hip, stands on
the verandah of the plantation house and scowls. A young black woman,
frightened yet brave, comes to the hanging man and gives him a drink
of water. The slave owner's wife watches from the house. She does not
read the Bible to the hanging man.
The
watcher has an acute sense of the powerlessness of the slaves and of
their learned helplessness. Their victimhood. It will take more than
a century for Martin Luther King, Malcolm X or Angela Davis to
arrive.
When
Obama was elected president, a prisoner said “one black man in the
White House doesn’t make up for one million black men in the Big
House.”
The watcher sees that the hanging
man is not an agent of his own emancipation. The hanging man is
brutalised, duped, beaten, traduced. He survives by keeping his head
down. The systemic overwhelm that is the slave economy is such that
an individual, even an articulate and educated one such as the
hanging man, can do nothing but acquiesce and collude in his own
debasement. This is authentically shown.
The watcher wonders if this harsh
lesson is the kernel of the film and wonders what hope do the
film-makers offer us.
Two nights later, the traffickers turned up at Abdu’s
house. They dragged him from his bed by his hair, took him out into
the street, and hacked his body to pieces with an axe as he howled.
“The
traffickers told his wife they would kill us too,” Adul says. But
the villagers refused to be cowed. They set up a neighbourhood watch
scheme, to track the traffickers: “We work as a watchdog at night.
Who is trafficking? How many girls are being taken? As soon as
something is spotted, we are alerted.”
The watcher sees one scene of
genuine dramatic conflict. It occurs between the brutal slave owner
and the travelling Canadian wood worker. Something of a
protagonist-antagonist tension is present as two white men foreshadow
the great cataclysm of war that will come to the region in the 1860s,
a war ostensibly about freedom, but actually about re-structuring a major economy.
Salvation, as a manifestation of
power, is in the hands of the whites. The watcher sees
the Canadian wood-worker get a letter through. The watcher sees a
shop-keeper friend take the hanging man away from slavery in a scene
that is brisk and deflating.
The hanging man returns to his
home, where his family welcome him in an emotional final scene. Their
dress and furnishings give the watcher the impression that the
hanging man's absence has not badly affected them materially.
The watcher knows that trafficking
and slavery are as normal in the world today as they were in Georgia
in the 1850s.
In
the US, the average age of trafficked girls is 12–14 years but
growing younger, and boys are 11-13 yrs. (US
Health and Human Services)
An
estimated 300,000 American youths are at risk of commercial sexual
exploitation.(FBI)
The
watcher reads the end notes on the screen, which detail the failed
efforts of
the
hanging man to get justice in the courts. The watcher wonders might
this have made a more telling film.
The watcher leaves the cinema
wondering if Django Unchained, while totally inauthentic, might be a
better - more stirring? - film about slavery and emancipation.
Progressive
art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at
work in the society in which they live, but also about the intense
social character of their interior lives. Ultimately, it can propel
people toward social emancipation.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2024544/?ref_=ttqt_qt_tt
http://slaverytoday.org/slaverybites/
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/inside-the-slave-trade-795307.html
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1853728/?ref_=nv_sr_1
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