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Has Texas Seen its Last Liberal?

A new HBO documentary, “All About Ann: Governor Richards of the Lone Star State,” takes a look back at the life of the political icon.

by Zachary Montz

“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Buenas noches, mis amigos! I am delighted to be here with you this evening, because after listening to George Bush all these years, I figured you needed to know what a real Texas accent sounds like.” This is how America first met Ann Richards, her trademark white hair lit by the spotlight as she delivered the keynote address at the 1988 Democratic National Convention in her distinctive Central Texas twang. Richards, then the state treasurer, poured it on that night, mixing a stalwart defense of activist government with swipes at the Republican nominee, fellow Texan George H.W. Bush, including her perfectly landed mocking line, “Poor George, he can’t help it – he was born with a silver foot in his mouth,” that brought the audience to its feet. Along with the jabs, Richards gave delegates the country wit and big personality they might have expected from a rising Texas politician. But here, too, was something new from a state famous for its macho self-image: a woman, and a proud, sharp-tongued liberal at that. The fiery speech won the hearts of delegates, prompting some to wonder if the Democrats had nominated the wrong person. Ann Richards had become a national star.

Texas Governor Ann Richards in 1992 (Kenneth C. Zirkel/Wikimedia Commons)

Richards’s keynote provides the opening for HBO’s recently-premiered documentary “All About Ann: Governor Richards of the Lone Star State,” which airs on the cable network throughout May, as well as on HBOGo. An opportunity for longer-settled Texans (and non-citizens too) to revisit the life and career of the woman who rose to the top of the state’s conservative and male-dominated political scene, this excellent documentary also serves to introduce Richards to a new generation, who know a Texas where the politics have gone from conservative to right-wing and are almost as single-gender as they were when Richards was elected governor in 1990.

Originally released in 2012, this product of first-time documentarians Jack Lofton and Keith Patterson, was subsequently acquired by HBO’s documentary division, which recut the film to tighten its focus on Richards’ career in statewide office, from her election as State Treasurer in 1982 to her gubernatorial loss to George W. Bush in 1994. While “All About Ann” features commentary from Bill Clinton, Michael Dukakis, Dan Rather and other national figures, some of the best insights come from interviews with Richards’ inner circle of advisors, namely long-time chief of staff Mary Beth Rogers and speechwriter Suzanne Coleman. Contributions from Richards’ former husband David and from her children, including daughter Cecile, now a Democratic political player and Planned Parenthood president, give viewers a look at Richards’ time both before and after her stint in big-league politics and provide a sense of how the many sides of her well-known personal life – as a mother, grandmother, teacher, divorcee, and recovering alcoholic – helped shape her political outlook and public persona.

Of course, there is no substitute for the woman herself, and the film is wise to let Richards, who died in 2006, tell much of her own story. The directors take advantage of archival newsreel, interviews, and televised debates and speeches to show the full depth of Richards’ character, her knack for language, and the prodigious communication skills (one thing we learn is that Richards’ mother enrolled her in “expression lessons” as a child) that took her to the Governor’s Mansion.

Ann Richards poses on a motorcycle (Texas State Library and Archives Commission)

Viewers get only a quick run through Richards’ life before elected office: her upbringing in Waco and high school debating triumphs, her marriage in college to David Richards, who would become a prominent labor and voting rights lawyer, and her time raising four children in Dallas and later Austin. As she explains it, a career in politics was not something she had initially considered. “I was exactly what the magazines said I ought to be,” Richards recalled, “I was a hostess, a fabulous cook, a chauffer, [and] I was very involved with my kids.” Richards had been involved on the outside of politics, doing the “women’s jobs” of social planner and campaign volunteer, but when David passed on a chance to run for a seat on the Travis County Commissioners court in 1976, Ann jumped into the game, winning election in her first race. Richard worried that the dramatic shift in her life and the new role she would play in her family would spell trouble for her marriage. She was right. Although they remained on generally good terms, the couple split in 1980 and divorced in 1984.

It was around the same time that Richards went through treatment for alcohol addiction. Richards’ personal life was the subject of many a dirty political attack during her career, the most common of which were that she had fallen off the wagon or that she was bisexual. In the 1990 Democratic gubernatorial primary Richards was dogged by Attorney General Jim Maddox’s frequent allegations of past cocaine use. Richards skillfully dodged the question, turning it into an opportunity to talk frankly with voters about overcoming her alcohol problem. Not that Richards couldn’t play rough too. In the same race she put away former Governor Mark White with ads that implied – with no real proof – that he had been paid to steer state business to a Houston bond firm.

Watching Richards counterpunch her way to victory in a good, old fashioned Texas melee like the ’90 primary is a delight for the political junkie, but it would be a mistake to let Richards’ campaigning talents distract from what was at the heart of Richard’s political story: her desire, as she put it, to create a “new Texas,” one where the “doors of government” would “swing open” to “let the people in.” As the documentary makes clear, this purpose was present from the beginning of Richards’ entry into public service, and the film gives considerable attention to her tenure as State Treasurer, where Richards earned acclaim for reforming an office that was a bastion of good-old-boy inefficiency when she took over in 1983. Richards modernized the Treasury, both by computerizing its workings and by emphasizing the hiring of minorities and women in an effort to make the government of Texas better reflect the state’s diverse population.

Ann Richards speaking at the 1988 Democratic Convention (Associated Press)

In the debates over hiring and affirmative action in the 1980s, many conservatives argued that measures to create diverse workforces would come at the expense of job performance. Excellence and diversity were counterpoised values. Richards had no need to play that game. “They told me that I was asking the impossible, that I simply could not find Hispanics and blacks and women who were capable… of really high-class financial management,” Richards recalled in 1991. But her success in the Treasury, she argued, “has been directly the result of opening the door and giving an opportunity to people who were dying to prove themselves.” In Ann Richards’ new Texas, diversity and excellence went hand in hand. And one only had to look at other areas of Texas government to know that the opposite was also true: a closed door, and the old boys network that thrived behind it, could be a recipe for incompetence and corruption.

Richards’ commitment to diversity and her vision of an open government, among other convictions, put her in the left-liberal wing of the Texas Democratic Party, an outsider compared to the so-called pragmatic or conservative Democrats who continued in the tradition of LBJ and John Connally.Texas liberals had rarely been in the driver’s seat of their own party, never mind in the Governor’s Mansion, and given the state’s current domination by Republicans, it is worth asking how Richards ever managed her upset victory in 1990. Certainly her opponent had something to do with it. That year, the Republicans nominated Clayton Williams, a man who seemed to be made in their own self-image: a wealthy businessman, a rancher, and a straight-shooter. What they got was a political fool who shot himself in the foot enough times to blow an early double digit lead. The documentary airs the full “Claytie” blooper reel. It would be pure comedy if Williams’s attitude towards women didn’t seem so out of our present political moment: a disgusting rape “joke,” a comment about Richards that he would “head her and hoof her and drag her through the dirt,” and a decision (a premeditated one, as the film reveals) to refuse to shake his opponent’s hand after a televised debate.

Ironically, it is the clownish version of Williams that conservatives like to remember, for it allows them to write off Richards as an accidental governor, one who won only by dint of her pitiful opponent. But as several of Richard’s former staffers point out in “All About Ann,” it wasn’t only the misogyny that undid Williams. The margin of victory came from working class voters, especially in East Texas – a generally-conservative group, but one with a populist streak. Richards could out-good-ole-boy the good-ole-boys and could poke fun at Texas’s bubbas while winning their vote, and her campaign coupled her personal touch with a concerted effort to portray Williams as a big businessman unconcerned with working Texans. Williams’ steadfast refusal to release his tax returns, and his out-of-the-blue admission in the campaign’s final week that he had paid no taxes during the crash year of 1986, helped Richards rack up votes in East Texas, sealing the election for her.

From left: Texas Governor Ann Richards, Nelson Mandela, Dominique de Menil, And Texas State Senator Rodney Ellis (Senator Rodney Ellis/Wikipedia)

From left: Texas Governor Ann Richards, Nelson Mandela, Dominique de Menil, and Texas State Senator Rodney Ellis, 1991 (Senator Rodney Ellis/Wikipedia)

Richards began her governorship ready to “make changes that should have been made a long time ago.” Continuing her record as treasurer, she appointed an even split of men and women in her first 100 days. The officials reflected the diverse state: 54% were white, 25% Hispanic, and 21% black. The film provides a laudatory overview of Richards’ term. She threw out rubber-stamp regulators in the insurance department, passed a new ethics law, put teeth into seldom-enforced environmental rules, and implemented an addiction treatment program in state prisons to reduce recidivism, all broadly popular moves that kept her personal approval ratings high and grew her national profile.

This approving account of Richards’ time in office provides little sense of her shortcomings, and notably excludes mention of struggles involving the budget and school finance. The oversight is compounded by the directors’ failure to include any interviews with either critics or opponents of the former Governor. As a result, “All About Ann” is hard pressed to explain just how Richards, despite her personal popularity, lost decisively to George W. Bush in 1994. The film provides two culprits: Karl Rove, a political consultant made uniquely powerful by a lack of scruples, and an election cycle unusually hostile to Democrats. The film puts Rove behind rumors that Richards’ supposed legions of gay supporters were poised to spread their “lifestyle” through the public schools, and a whisper campaign about gun confiscation, an effective, if unoriginal, charge that was bolstered by Richards’ veto of concealed carry legislation. Meanwhile, Bush – a likeable, attractive, and disciplined campaigner – could play it straight, avoiding the personal attacks and mistakes that destroyed his Republican predecessor. Although he criticized Richards for being soft on crime and presented his own ideas about education reform, Bush ran against Bill Clinton as much as the sitting Governor, attacking an unpopular president in a midterm year that would give Republicans control of Congress.

Just as the idea of Richards as an accidental governor denies her ground-breaking victory, the story presented by her allies that she was felled by forces beyond her control denies Richards’ role in her own defeat. As Jan Reid argues in his sympathetic, but by no means uncritical, 2012 biography of Richards, the Governor’s term can be seen as a parabola: real successes in the first two years were followed by a decline in the latter two. Richards divided her time and energy between governing in Austin and involvement in the national scene, leaving her without a clear program and on the defensive against a rising tide of Republican attacks. In 1990 Richards had been the brassy outsider. Four years later, lacking a bold policy agenda to match her personality, she was open to being defined by her enemies and vulnerable to the sorts of attacks – guns, God and gays – that Rove and Co. used to great effect. Her campaign centered on the complaint that Bush was a spoiled novice whose only qualification for the Governorship was that he thought he was entitled to it. She couldn’t convince enough Texas voters that he was not.

Image of Ann Richards firing a gun from the film, “Backwards and In High Heels” (Texas Democrats)

Richards would find plenty to do after leaving the Governor’s Mansion. She had no interest in running for another elected office, telling the public after her loss that “I’ve been doing this for 18 years – not as long as I was a housewife – and now I look forward to something new.” The documentary shows the many roles she played: as a lobbyist and strategist, lecturer, stump speaker for female Democratic candidates, and as a fantastic talk show guest. All throughout she continued her fight on behalf of the causes she had advanced during her political career, especially the rights of women to control their own bodies, right up until her death from esophageal cancer in 2006.

The release of “All About Ann” comes as another Texas woman, the first, in fact, since Richards, has received the Democratic gubernatorial nod, and comparisons between the two are inevitable. Like Ann Richards, Wendy Davis has captured national attention and built a dedicated base among Texas women at a time when reproductive rights are at the forefront of political conversation. Unlike Richards, however, Davis faces a Republican Party that is much more dug in, and her opponent, Greg Abbott, while perhaps not having the personal likability of George W. Bush or Rick Perry’s deep understanding of the right wing id, is no Clayton Williams. And outside of her core supporters, Davis has yet to show that she can connect with Texas voters in the way that Richards did in 1990.

But “All About Ann” reminds viewers that Richards too faced an uphill battle when she declared her candidacy for the governorship. It was against these long odds when she was at her fighting best. The documentary closes with a poignant clip of Richards speaking at a LGBT fundraiser in 2003, coughing her way through a powerful address, already suffering from failing health. Recalling the many barriers to women and minorities that had fallen in her lifetime, Richards encouraged her audience to continue the effort to create the sort of “pluralistic society where human dignity is cherished” that had been at the heart of her political life. “We have got to remember that we have the power… that dreams can come true if we are willing to work for them.” It has been the mantra of Texas liberals in the many fights they lost in Ann Richards’ lifetime, and in the few that were won.

Zachary Montz received his PhD in History from UT Austin in 2014

Sources:

Some background information on Richards’ term as Governor, as well as demographic information on her appointees, is drawn from Jan Reid’s excellent biography, Let the People In: The Life and Times of Ann Richards (University of Texas Press, 2012)

“12 Years a Slave” and the Difficulty of Dramatizing the “Peculiar Institution”

by Jermaine Thibodeaux

Historian Annette Gordon-Reed often describes slavery studies as the “crown jewel of American historiography.” For Gordon-Reed and others, the historical scholarship on slavery that has emerged over the past sixty years has provided a far more nuanced and complex understanding of America’s “peculiar institution” and of American history as a whole. Much of what we now understand about slavery and its central characters has largely resulted from the diligence, resourcefulness, and dedication of historians determined to demystify perhaps the central episode in this nation’s history. Yet, historians have not labored alone.

The challenge of informing an inquisitive American public about the nation’s own two-hundred year old tragedy—slavery—has not fallen squarely on the shoulders of historians and other scholars. Artists, and particularly filmmakers, have played a central role in helping the larger public grapple with the horrors and indeed, aftershocks of human bondage. The Blaxpoitation-tinged slavery films of the early and mid-1970s unquestionably paved the way for the groundbreaking 1977 television mini-series Roots: The Saga of an American Family and a handful of subsequent slavery dramas. Roots author, Alex Haley, treated millions of American television viewers to a seven-day run of an emotionally raw and mostly well-researched dramatization of one family’s experience in slavery and freedom. It was through Roots that many Americans of all races first confronted slavery in a meaningful way. As a testament to its growing power, television, and not books, history classrooms, or even scholarly conferences, then served as the most effective medium for educating Americans about slavery. Undoubtedly, the Roots miniseries and subsequent television spinoffs not only whetted the appetites of curious publics, but these visual, dramatic renderings of slavery also generated much needed conversations about race and inequality in America. Those conversations were central to the embrace of multiculturalism in the 1970s-80s. And at the same time, the public’s response to these slavery dramas compelled many trained historians to ask even bolder and more sophisticated questions about the institution of slavery in their own work. By the 1980s, a flurry of influential and field-defining slavery studies emerged. Jacqueline Jones and Deborah Gray White, for example, exposed slavery’s sweeping impact on black women, their families, and their labor in their respective works Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow (1985) and Ar’n’t I a Woman (1985). Explorations of so-called slave culture, questions about slave agency, and even interrogations of slavery’s connections to other age-old American institutions and values soon filled library bookshelves. The rush to know could not be stopped, and again, media was there to assist.

Television and cinematic portrayals of slavery often seem to thrust that sensitive topic to the fore of the public’s consciousness and in so doing, expose contemporary (mis)understandings of the institution and the era not too long past. Within the last two years, Hollywood has risked potential revenue slumps and produced two major films about slavery. Quentin Tarantino’s fictional Django Unchained exploded onto movie screens on Christmas Day 2012 with its characteristic Tarantino stamp. Though not an historical adaptation of slavery, the film garnered praise for its daring vision and originality, and on the other hand, it invited well-deserved criticism for its highly graphic display of wonton violence and its borderline comedic portrayal of the day-to-day brutality endemic to the Slave South. Django managed to get some things right about slavery, and the public devoured the so-called “spaghetti western” slavery film, but its very premise pushed the historical envelope a bit too far for many historians. In what U.S. South would one find an enslaved bounty hunter working alongside a German immigrant to capture fugitive criminals? But despite its historical absurdity, Django seems to have paved the way for what was to follow in slave genre films.

This year’s critically acclaimed Twelve Years a Slave stands in stark contrast to Django Unchained. Shaped primarily by the non-fictional 1853 memoir by Solomon Northup—a freed black man from upstate New York who falls prey to money-hungry kidnappers and is eventually enslaved for twelve years in the Deep South—this film attempts to transport viewers back into the dark and cruel world of American slavery and expose the perilous experience of quasi-freedom for freed blacks. British film director Steve McQueen brilliantly achieves this most fundamental task within minutes of the film’s opening. As Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor) peers up and out of his dank holding cell, the viewer is immediately reminded of slavery’s most defining element—its barbarism. Not only is Northup beaten until blood stains his once crisp white shirt, he has his fundamental identity—the one thing that he truly owns, his name –beaten out of him. From this point on in the film, Northup loses his familiar and free self and becomes an enslaved man, renamed Platt. Gone, too, are his respectable black family and all of the trappings of success and respectability that his life in upstate New York afforded him. After a torturous boat ride down river, his previous free life gradually disappears into his past and a new, darker future awaits him. Furthermore, any hope that Northup had of slavery’s abolition seems crushed by his now unfortunate, spirit-crushing predicament. The former “slave without a master,” to invoke Ira Berlin’s characterization of antebellum freedmen, would now experience a similar fate endured by millions of blacks in the Slave South. Branded a slave, Platt must adapt to a brave new world. Ultimately, it is the uniqueness of Northup’s story and his liminal status that makes Twelve Years a Slave a gem of a film. And for historians, the original source material provided in Northup’s memoir remains an amazing historical find, especially for scholars of Louisiana slavery.

Using smart camera work, McQueen again capitalizes on the early minutes of the film to indict slavery as a national institution and not merely as a distinct southern problem. Herein lies the beauty and power of the film. The cinematography and imagery tell the story of American slavery and human suffering in ways that enhance the script. A whipped-slashed back, a blood-stained eye, an inconsolable mother and even Northup’s own defeated hanging body collectively provide viewers with a rudimentary, visceral education about the role of violence—both physical and psychic—in maintaining a system of human bondage and entrenching a hardened racial caste order, particularly in the American South. While screaming for help after his kidnapping, Northup gazes coldly into the gloomy Washington streets. And there, on the immediate horizon, sits an unfinished U.S. Capitol building. The now iconic statue “Freedom” had not yet found its way to the top of the Capitol dome. The irony and the symbolism of that shot, however, are profound. For right under the noses of the nation’s elite and powerful, were black men and women—entire families, or “lots”—ready to be bought, sold, or even stolen, all to fulfill the capitalist dreams of some and to assuage the racist fears of others. It is not until the Compromise of 1850 that embarrassed American politicians prohibit the domestic slave trade within the nation’s capital while simultaneously reinvigorating the system of slavery throughout the rest of the Union with the passage of a stronger Fugitive Slave Law. By this time, being a freed black in the North could have potentially posed problems for men and women like Solomon Northup, as it was not uncommon for unscrupulous slave catchers to circumvent personal liberty laws and round-up freed blacks in the North and attempt to sell them into southern slavery. Thus, the threat of enslavement for blacks knew no regional bounds; being black alone was enough. Social standing, personal connections, or even highly regarded talents were rarely sufficient protections, and certainly none of these factors mattered for Northup.

To its credit, McQueen’s Twelve Years a Slave does not shy away from the ugliness of slavery. And unlike Tarantino, he captures the disturbing physical and emotional violence inflicted on blacks by sticking to documented history rather than resorting to fantastical exaggeration. One can hardly describe the violent scenes in Twelve Years a Slave as gratuitous Most prominently, McQueen foregrounds the very real and pervasive pattern of female sexual exploitation on southern plantations. Patsey (Lupita Nyong’o), perhaps the real breakout star of this film, endures years of rape and humiliation at the hands of the drunken Louisiana slaveholder, Mr. Epps (Michael Fassbender) and his diabolically jealous wife. Mrs. Epps (Sarah Paulson) is by far one of least likeable characters in this drama: outspoken, uncaring, self-righteous, and ruthless in her treatment of Patsey and the other slaves. The southern belle stereotype of the plantation mistress seen in so many films is thrown out the window the minute Mrs. Epps reveals her knowledge of her husband’s ongoing sexual relationship with Patsey. Though she faults her husband for this marital transgression, reminding him at one point that he is too filthy to sleep in her “holy bed,” she harbors most of her resentment and venom for the slave woman. She foolishly believes that Patsey, like so many bondwomen, had the authority to resist the illicit and unwelcomed advances of powerful white men. In one of the film’s most poignant scenes, Mrs. Epps strikes the slave woman on the side of her head with a heavy crystal decanter after she is convinced that Patsey has glared at her with contempt while she is being forced to dance in Mrs. Epps’s parlor. And it is Mrs. Epps who ultimately demands that her husband publicly punish Patsey after she wanders off without permission to a neighboring plantation, seeking soap and communion with another black woman, who is also in an equally problematic interracial ‘relationship.’ That woman, Mistress Shaw (Alfre Woodward), reveals to a much younger Patsey that she must resign herself to the unavoidable sexual predations on southern plantations. In fact, Mistress Shaw speaks candidly about her “rise” to common-law-wife status with her white husband. She tells the curious Patsey that her new position has afforded her a life far removed from the fields and the whip. Now, she lives in relative leisure and luxury, though it is clear that she has been emotionally, if not physically scarred by her messy experience with Mr. Shaw. To the filmmaker’s credit, portraying such a wide range of human relationships—across the colorline and of varying degrees of complexity—makes this film a certifiably American story, no matter how troubling.

The film’s emphasis on Patsey’s tumultuous relationship with Mr. Epps indicates McQueen’s dedication to the veracity of Northup’s memoir, and at the same time, it attests to his knowledge of scholarly studies of southern women — enslaved women and to some extent, plantation mistresses. Following the lead of historians Daina Ramey Berry, Thavolia Glymph, and Elizabeth Fox Genovese, misconceptions about southern white women in general and in particular, bondwomen’s abilities to negotiate sexual advances and handle rigorous field labor are put to rest. It is Patsey who emerges as the “queen of the fields” both in Northup’s memoir and in the film. Patsey picks more cotton than any other man or woman on the plantation, despite her rather thin frame and sex. Her skill and expertise set the standard for work on the plantation. When Patsey outpicks Northup and others, they suffer daily lashings for their inability to meet such a lofty picking goal. Thus, Patsey’s performance in the fields challenges conventional notions of skilled and unskilled labor and at the same time, forces viewers to rethink the stale, male-centered iconography of slavery. Not only were women omnipresent in slavery, they also proved to be ferocious workers right alongside some of the men.

With its adherence to Solomon Northup’s words and its obvious attention to slavery scholarship, Twelve Years a Slave succeeds in bringing the ruthlessness of slavery to film. Still, one can always ask if film has the power to present such human trauma in a most authentic and respectful manner. Or, one can ask if film is the appropriate medium for presenting slavery. Many viewers will continue to grapple with this dilemma, just as historians themselves will continue to question if their works most accurately and respectfully get at the hearts of the people, places, and times they study and the questions they ask. Just as no piece of historical scholarship is without fault, no historical film will ever “tell it like it was” or be able to convey completely what it felt like to be Solomon Northrup.

In Twelve Years a Slave, the faults are few but still worth noting. Those viewers unfamiliar with Northup’s story would be surprised to know that Northup was enslaved for twelve years. Save for the film’s name, the movie does not adequately reflect a clear linear progression of time. In fact, Northup’s agonizing twelve years on various Louisiana plantations are compressed into one long, single-note experience. Only graying hairs and a few visible wrinkles indicate the passage of time. The viewer is carried from 1841 to 1853 with very little historical context along the way; the growing abolitionist movement and raucous national political debates over slavery do not make an appearance in the film. Likewise, even the bustling city of New Orleans, with its large free black population, appeared to be an afterthought.

Additionally, the film could have taken more pains to recognize or even highlight the distinctive nature of sugar planting versus cotton cultivation. Historians continue to emphasize that there were many slaveries existing side-by-side throughout the South, but cotton has maintained its hold as the singular, dominant symbol of southern slavery. All southern slaves did not labor exclusively in the cotton fields. Sugar most certainly dominated the world of southern Louisiana slavery. Its unique growing conditions and labor demands unquestionably affected the nature and rhythm of slavery in that region. Men typically outnumbered women on most sugar plantations and, therefore, both labor and leisure looked markedly different from slave life on cotton plantations. The work Northup did on sugar plantations and the people he met along the way deserved more attention in the film. For example, Northup served as driver, or manager of other slaves on a sugar plantation. As a driver, he wielded the whip and capitalized on his intellect and skill to vie for greater privileges and status among the other slaves. It was also here in sugar country that Northup developed many of his closest relationships with other bondsmen and earned his Sunday money. Though he writes at length about numerous interactions and friendships with blacks and whites during his stint in slavery, in the film Northup is strangely isolated from the other slaves except Patsey,. His friendship with Mr. Bass (Brad Pitt), however, stands out, as it proves instrumental to his ultimate freedom. Surprisingly absent, though, are those homosocial bonds (close interactions between men, in this case) Northup formed with an interesting and diverse cast of male characters in sugar country. A sharper focus on this aspect of Northup’s slave experience would have added more depth to his rather flat portrayal. One thing about Northup that was abundantly clear in his memoir was his ability to adapt and make do. If anything, viewers are left wanting to know more about this side of Northup. More attention to his associations during slavery, and certainly, his life as an abolitionist once freed would have certainly rounded out the picture of this exceptional character. That story definitely warrants more attention. Yet, as is typical in some social histories of slavery, a fully developed portrait of the bondsman never truly emerges.

Ultimately, Twelve Years a Slave marks a watershed moment in slavery studies and film history in this country. While the film falls short in developing Northrup’s individual complexity, its boldness and vivid imagery in depicting fundamental experiences of slavery definitely suffice. Making historical films is a tough business and bringing a thoughtful portrayal of American slavery to big screens is especially tough. The stakes are high and the expectations are often beyond standard filmmaking requirements. Still, there is so much to learn about America’s “peculiar institution” from this film. Its warm reception might just encourage other filmmakers to continue tackling slavery and other controversial historical topics—with empathy and accuracy.

Photo Credits:

Promotional poster for Twelve Years a Slave

A scene from the 1977 miniseries, Roots: The Saga of an American Family (Image courtesy of Warner Bros. International TV)

Jamie Foxx in Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained (Image courtesy of Salon)

Actors Michael Fassbender and Chiwetel Ejiofor in a scene from Twelve Years a Slave (Image courtesy of Slate)

Illustration from the 1855 edition of Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Lupita Nyong’o portraying the enslaved Patsey in a still from Twelve Years a Slave (Image courtesy of The Artsy Film Blog)

Enslaved African Americans hoe and plow the earth and cut piles of sweet potatoes on a South Carolina plantation, circa 1862-3 (Image courtesy of Library of Congress)

An enslaved family in Beaufort, South Carolina, 1862 (Image courtesy of Library of Congress)

Chiwetel Ejiofor and Lupita Nyong’o in a scene from Twelve Years a Slave (Image courtesy of The Artsy Film Blog)

Images used under Fair Use Guidelines

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Further Reading:

Historical reviews of the films Lincoln and Django Unchained

UT historians reflect on the many meanings of the Emancipation Proclamation

Solomon Northup’s memoir in its entirety

An 1853 New York Times article on Northup’s remarkable life

I am Cuba, for Sale (1964)

by Blake Scott

Our eyes travel from the sea’s surface to a palm-tree shore. A female voice can be heard. “I am Cuba,” she tells us. “Once Christopher Columbus landed here. He wrote in his diary: ‘This is the most beautiful land ever seen by human eyes.’ Thank you, Señor Columbus.”

An extravagant party on the rooftop of a Havana hotel. It’s the late 1950s; hedonistic tourism is booming in the City. A band plays loud. Drinks. Laughter. Our line of vision moves from the hotel’s rooftop to a crowd of tourists below, where we see a woman and follow her into the pool. Underwater.

Three male tourists from the U.S. sit at a table in one of Havana’s decadent clubs. They order drinks:
“Another daiquiri.”
“Give me a scotch, make it a double.”
“Vodka dragon.”
The waiter asks, “something on the side maybe?”
One of the men lowers his dark sunglasses. “I’ll take that tasty morsel.” And his friend, “And I’ll take that dish.” The men embrace as two beautiful yet sad-faced women walk over from the bar to their table. “Nothing is indecent in Cuba if you’ve got enough dough,” he tells his friend.

These deeply metaphorical scenes open the first of four episodes that make up the 1964 film, Soy Cuba (I am Cuba). Hailed today a classic for its inventive cinematography, I am Cuba was virtually forgotten for three decades. After a week in theaters in Cuba and the Soviet Union, the film went into the archives: one copy in Moscow and another in Havana. This essay reviews I am Cuba’s production and revival.

The Art of Cold War

The exchange of weapons, sugar, and communist dogma has traditionally dominated U.S. understandings of the Soviet-Cuban alliance. I am Cuba represents another aspect to this relationship. During the Cold War, Cuba was much more than a strategic island 90 miles from the U.S. border. For idealists in the Soviet Union, the Cuban Revolution offered hope for progressive socialism. The young bearded revolutionaries in the Sierra Maestra Mountains reenergized intellectuals who were tired of the old guard politics in their own country. Soviet poet and co-writer of I am Cuba, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, says he was “childishly happy” when the Cuban Revolution triumphed. He remembers, fondly, Russian parents naming their sons “Fidel.”

During this early moment of optimism, the Soviet Union sent a film commission to meet representatives from the newly formed Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry (ICAIC). The rebels founded ICAIC just three months after entering Havana. Film and art were to become key components in Cuba’s effort to create a new revolutionary culture. The Institute’s first director, Alfredo Guevara, explains that during the Soviet commission’s visit, “They proposed to make a movie… about its solidarity and friendship with Cuba, expressing how they sympathized with the Cuban Revolution.” ICAIC and the Soviet Union’s Mosfilm Studios agreed to collaborate on a film about the island’s dramatic transition from corrupt republic to revolutionary state.

The Soviet commission recommended Mikhail Kalatozov to direct the project. At the time, Kalatozov was one of the most famous filmmakers in the Soviet Union. His film, The Cranes are Flying, won the Palme d’Or at the 1958 Cannes Film Festival. He was one of the few Soviet directors whose work had been widely viewed by audiences in the West. For the Cuban project, Kalatozov invited Sergey Urusevsky, his cinematographer from The Cranes are Flying and also The Letter Never Sent (1959), to be Director of Photography. Young Soviet poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Cuban author Enrique Pineda Barnet were selected to write the script. I am Cuba was the first film produced by this Soviet-Cuban partnership. During production on the island the film crew received the full support of the Cuban revolutionary government. When Kalatozov needed 5,000 extras for a battle scene – to offer just one example – 5,000 Cuban soldiers were mobilized to play the part.

The Cuban Revolution had sparked hope, but also tension with the U.S. In 1961, the CIA sponsored an invasion at the Bay of Pigs. The following year, President Kennedy ordered a naval blockade after U-2 surveillance planes discovered nuclear missile sites. It was the closest the U.S. and the Soviet Union ever came to nuclear war. Cuba was right in the middle of it and so was the film crew of I am Cuba. The production team had become part of the Cold War. Kalatozov announced to the press: “I’ll make a movie in Cuba that will be my answer, and that of the whole Soviet people, against the naval blockade, this cruel aggression of American imperialism!”

The resulting film is an epic poem; a surreal critique of realities suffered before and confronted during the revolution. Kalatozov and his team sought to capture events as they unfolded, from social injustice to glorious revolt. Produced over a fourteen-month period, from 1962 to 1964, the film embodies the creativity, the militant optimism, and also the naiveté of the era. It is both Cold War history and revolutionary art.

Storyline and Reception

After the opening vignette of Havana’s immoral tourist scene, the film transitions to the story of a poor farmer. He works his entire life in the fields. He is old and tired, but the rich Cuban soil provides. He is happy enough, until a greedy landowner arrives with two armed guards and informs him that the land has been sold to United Fruit. “Now you’ll be able to rest,” the owner tells him. The landowner is a vendepatria elite (someone who sells out his country to foreign interests). The farmer is dispossessed and heartbroken. At the end of the episode, the female narrator asks, “Who will answer for this blood?”

The third and fourth parts of I am Cuba move away from the forms of capitalist exploitation (hedonist tourist parties and land-grabbing) to revolutionary mobilization.
Students and young people organize against the dictatorship and U.S. imperialism. When U.S. sailors chase a frightened woman, Gloria, a young student stands up against their belligerence. Other acts of defiance follow. The once passive student becomes a martyr, and more students take to the streets.

In the final part of the film, the nonviolent hands of a peasant turn to revolutionary action. He is left with no choice but to join Fidel and the revolutionaries in the Sierra Maestra. They charge heroically into battle.“To die for your motherland is to live.”

Kalatozov and Urusevsky thought they had made a classic, but the audience didn’t agree. The film premiered simultaneously in Moscow and Santiago de Cuba, and then disappeared. Brazilian filmmaker Vicente Ferraz offers some possible answers for this short theatrical run in his 2005 documentary I am Cuba, the Siberian Mammoth. Ferraz interviewed crewmembers about their experiences making the film. They explained, in short, that the Cuban audience “felt insulted.” The characters seemed to react mechanically to structural circumstances, like pawns in a revolutionary chess game.

Sergio Corrieri, who played a student-revolutionary in the film, recalled people saying, “This really isn’t our reality. This character doesn’t exist, it isn’t Cuban…it was the Cuban reality seen through a Slavic prism.”

The film’s poetic tone and surreal mood, conveyed by highly mobile camera movement, connected poorly with Cubans who faced dangerous realities. In the middle of food shortages, and with U.S. military planes flying overhead, the Russians presented them with an unrealistic film. Enrique Pineda Barnet, Cuban co-writer, remembered the premiere with regret. “It was terrible. The first thing that bothered me was that voice, that text: ‘I am Cuba.’” The true story of the revolution, in the minds of many Cubans, had been subordinated to the cinematographic ambitions of the Soviet filmmakers.

The film was also unfavorably received in the Soviet Union, but for different reasons. The U.S. presence in Cuba was considered too glamorous for Soviet sensibilities. Pre-revolutionary Cuba looked like too much fun. Meanwhile, in the U.S., the film was never allowed to reach an audience because of its communist ties. I am Cuba was boxed-in by the polemics of the Cold War.

Revival

Only with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War, some thirty years later, did I am Cuba reemerge. It was U.S. filmmakers, ironically, who first came to love and promote the Soviet-Cuban production, which so bitingly critiqued U.S. culture. The film’s path from obscurity to classic is not entirely clear. But, in brief, social status and money pushed the film into public light. Directors Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola saw I am Cuba and became the film’s biggest supporters. Distribution rights were acquired from Mosfilm Studios, and in 1995 the film was formally released in the U.S.

Scorsese and Coppola, along with other filmmakers, admired I am Cuba for the very reason it was initially discarded: the radical form and cinematic style, which seemed to overshadow its revolutionary content. Contemporary film critics have praised I am Cuba as a masterpiece in cinematography. In several key scenes, the camera travels vertically from ground level, or from a rooftop, to another space of events (below or above), and then moves horizontally through windows and interior rooms, all in a single take. “There is a shot near the beginning of I Am Cuba,” explains Roger Ebert, “that is one of the most astonishing I have ever seen.” Every image is like a piece of art inside a larger work.

With this post-Cold War revival, the film’s original “flaws” are still acknowledged, but the value system is inverted. The script is still considered weak – “propaganda” – but that is now seen as acceptable because the cinematography is so beautiful. But is the quality of I am Cuba’s story really so secondary to its style? Does the film not capture aspects of truth despite, or even because of, its surreal presentation? Sometimes the “imaginary,” as writer André Breton once put it, can be the most “real.” While it’s true that the film offers subjective and often exoticized representations of reality, there is still something real in them. I am Cuba’s content cannot be dismissed as mere propaganda. The film is a window, among other things, into Cuba’s revolt, Cold War militancy, and also Soviet views of the American tropics.

For those of us interested in the relationship between history and cinema, I am Cuba’s plot and its story of production merit further analysis. How might the film change, for example, our understandings of the tenuous relationship between Cuba, the Soviet Union and the U.S.? Why was the film rejected so abruptly in the mid-1960s, and beloved so quickly in the 1990s? Narrow visions of acceptable revolutionary art? Capitalist society’s infatuation with the cultural ruins of communism? I am Cuba has as much to say about history as it does about film technique.

In the current moment of state-promoted luxury tourism, I am Cuba may also help us understand the complicated relationship between the Cuban Revolution’s past and present. Most Cubans living on the island have never seen I am Cuba. The film’s depiction of pre-revolutionary tourism, however, looks a lot like the bar and club scene of Havana today.

To learn more about the film I am Cuba, and the historical context in which it was produced:

• I am Cuba, The Siberian Mammoth. A documentary by Vicente Ferraz about the making of I am Cuba. Ferraz returns to Havana after the film’s revival to interview cast and crew about their experiences on set. The interviews are fascinating. A must see. Here’s the trailer.

• Week-end in Havana. An exotic, carefree view of pre-revolutionary Cuba by U.S. filmmaker Walter Lang. To watch this film alongside I am Cuba is to see Havana from two dramatically different viewpoints. Here’s the trailer.

• History Will Absolve Me. Fidel Castro’s powerful speech against the Batista dictatorship in 1953. The speech outlines the justifications for the July 26th Movement. It marks the beginning of a long drawn-out rebellion.

• On Becoming Cuban: Identity, Nationality, and Culture. Professor Louis A. Pérez Jr.’s book highlights the historical relationship between Cuba and United States. He meticulously explains the cross-cultural context that directly led up to the Cuban Revolution.

• The Cuban Revolution: Origins, Course, and Legacy. Professor Marifeli Pérez-Stable’s book provides an in depth analysis of the socio-economic causes and effects of the Cuban Revolution.

More films about life in Cuba’s revolution:

• Memories of Underdevelopment. The story of Sergio, a bourgeois writer who decides to stay in revolutionary Havana, even though his wife and friends flee to Miami.

• Lucía. The film traces the lives of three Cuban women, each named Lucía from three different historical periods: the Cuban war of independence (with Spain), the 1930’s, and the 1960’s.

• Strawberry and Chocolate. The story of a complicated friendship between a young communist student and a gay artist in 1979 Havana. The film offers a powerful critique of authoritarianism and homophobia in the revolution.

• Suite Havana. In this documentary, we follow the lives of ten Cubans as they go about their daily routine. The film has no dialogue, using only sound and image.

Photo Credits:

Scenes from the film I am Cuba

Images used under Fair Use Guidelines

Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained (2012)

by Daina Ramey Berry

I was ’bout fourteen years old when President Lincoln set us all free in 1863. The war was still goin’ on and I’m tellin’ you right when I say that my folks and friends round me did not regard freedom as a unmixed blessin’.
Daniel Waring, enslaved in South Carolina, interviewed in South Carolina, ca. 1937.

Today marks the 150-year anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. While I’m delighted that a national discussion on slavery is taking place, it appears that Quentin Tarantino’s latest film, Django Unchained, is overshadowing church “watch night” services all over the United States and events hosted by the National Archives, including a rare public viewing of the original Proclamation. To many, the connection between a contemporary spaghetti-western film and the anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation is offensive, inappropriate, oxymoronic, and just down right wrong. Perhaps understanding the significance of this legislation in context can elevate the public dialogue and aid in our national healing.

We all know that films on historical subjects distort events for the sake of entertainment. The goal of this review is to examine this latest rendition of slavery in popular culture from a historian’s point of view to see how those distortions are used and what affect they may have on popular ideas about slavery. I am not a historian “having a hissy fit” to quote Tarantino, but I believe that using one dimensional, anachronistic characters and the preposterous plot line of an ex-slave bounty hunter, while satisfying Hollywood entertainment formulas, detract from any understanding of the actual, lived experience of bondage in US history. Whatever satisfactions may be had from Tarantino’s depiction of revenge and the reunification of loved-ones, and however violent the depiction of master-slave relations in the film, its absurdities trivialize the real violence of the slave system and everyday lives of the enslaved. And turning away from the actual history of oppression obliterates the significance of those who sacrificed their lives for African American freedom. What does this say about our sensibilities? How does one reconcile a deliberately over-simplistic impulse to satirize the nearly 300-year history of slavery, for the sake of entertainment? American slavery was full of complexity, hypocrisy, and diversity. Emancipation itself was not a straightforward process, but followed all sorts of contours, twists, and turns evident in the creative ways American slaves sought to secure their freedom.

The past few months have been interesting for historians of the nineteenth century because the subjects we study are part of a contemporary dialogue. Rather than playing “script doctor” to Hollywood (to borrow from Jim Downs’ blog on Lincoln,) this is an important moment for scholars who wish to comment and participate in discussions about films based on historical topics. Yet I regard this as a mixed blessing given the thought of students entering the classroom with images of enslaved men as nineteenth-century gun slinging gangstas and black women as voiceless damsels in distress.

On September 22, 1862 President Lincoln issued the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation which declared that “on the first day of January [1863] . . . all persons held as slaves within any State, or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.” For the next 100 days northern and southerners alike anticipated the changes our nation would undergo after the pending deadline. Frederick Douglass recalls anxiously awaiting the news with a large crowd at Tremont Temple in Boston, MA:

Every moment of waiting chilled our hopes, and strengthened our fears. . . We were waiting and listening as for a bolt from the sky, which should rend the fetters of four millions of slaves; we were watching, as it were, by the dim light of the stars, for the dawn of a new day; we were longing for the answer to the agonizing prayers of centuries. Remembering those in bonds as bound with them, we wanted to join in the shout for freedom, and in the anthem of the redeemed.

In 1862 news did not travel as fast as a 140-character tweet nor could it instantly appear in the blogosphere. Instead, Douglass and his constituents waited at the church from 8 pm until after midnight and they were elated to learn from the flicker of the wires in the form of a telegraph that “. . . on this day of January 1st, 1863, the formal and solemn announcement was made that thereafter the government would be found on the side of emancipation.”

This fall, similar to the days leading to the issuing of the Emancipation Proclamation, the buzz about Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained filled the media anticipating its Christmas release. Spike Lee went on record noting that he did not want to disrespect his ancestors by supporting the film, perhaps thinking about Tarantino’s sensationalist treatment of the Holocaust in his previous film, Inglorious Basterds, and anticipating the same treatment of “the peculiar institution.” In fact, the press has spent more time discussing Lee’s brief remarks than they have Tarantino’s habitual and pornographic use of the N-word (even though it was used in 1858 Mississippi—we all get that!). Oprah Winfrey, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Michael Eric Dyson, Jay Leno, David Letterman, Howard Stern, and others interviewed members of the cast and the director, to promote and perhaps understand the film. They wanted to know from Jamie Foxx what it felt like to play a newly freed slave. His answer was disheartening to say the least. Rather than draw upon the eloquent statements or heroic acts of historical figures who radically tried to uproot slavery like David Walker, Gabriel Prosser, Charles Deslondes, Nat Turner, or Denmark Vesey, Foxx “wanted this s—t to be fly” so he channeled the fictitious, gun-slinging, crack dealer, Nino Brown from New Jack City (1991). The actor shared these thoughts in an interview with Brett Johnson on The Root, openly admitting that “I want to be Nino Brown” and that “we got to take some responsibility now that the movie is out, to spark education; we gotta know our history.”

Can we learn the history of slavery from a Tarantino film? The director readily admitted that he used his artistic license to create a movie that Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., labeled “a postmodern slave narrative Western.” To this Tarantino responded, “I’ll buy that,” but he added that the film contains “more of an entertainment value” and it is also “a thrilling adventure” in which he is committed to showing some of the brutalities of slavery.

Described by critics and supporters as a Western romance set against the backdrop of slavery, the director claims that Hollywood has virtually left the antebellum south and films about slavery untouched with the exception this not so short list including: Birth of a Nation (1915), Gone With the Wind (1933), The Legend of Nigger Charley (1972), Mandingo (1975) and more recent films such as Glory (1989), Amistad (1997), Beloved (1998), and Lincoln (2012). Beyond these Hollywood canons are independent and television films such as Roots (1977), Ganga Zumba (1963), Burn! (1969), Quilumbo (1986) and Sankofa (1993). Tarantino enters this body of work casting familiar faces such as Academy Award Winners Jamie Foxx and Christoph Waltz, as well as Leonardo DiCaprio, Samuel Jackson, and Kerry Washington. Thus, it is no surprise that Django Unchained would draw a large viewership and without these specific actors, Tarantino himself has a large following.

As a result of Tarantino’s popularity, the discussions of slavery at this historic moment are not about the impact of the Emancipation Proclamation or the meaning of freedom. Instead, the current buzz centers on Tarantino’s fanatical love story of a black superhero who channels a crack dealer to get his girl . . . “It’s me baby,” says Django upon his “heroic” rescue. This romanticized framing of gender roles flies in the face of scholarship by historians such as Deborah Gray White. From White and others, we learn that slavery created a different set of gender roles where strength is evident in both men and women. One might even argue that a more accurate portrayal of this western slave romance would involve an enslaved woman going to great lengths to help her man out of slavery. One such historical woman had a Biblical male nickname (Moses), carried a gun, and her “husband” refused to join her. The true story of Celia, another enslaved woman who took matters into her own hands, clubbed her enslaver after years of sexual abuse, burned his corpse, and then buried his remains on the plantation. Do not mistake these examples as endorsement for emasculating black men; instead, consider them as incentives for moviegoers to travel beyond the one-dimensional characters reflected in this film. Enslaved women were not props on a stage, swinging on swings, idly watching another sister being whipped, nor were they damsels in distress waiting for men to save them.

Ironically, the film opens in Texas in 1858 “two years before the Civil War,” (the war began in 1861), with Dr. King Shultz (Waltz), a “bounty hunter,” interrupting a slave coffle to “purchase” Django (Foxx). Given the history of Texas emancipation, this is indeed an interesting starting point. Texas bond people did not know they were free until June 1865 nearly two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation, a date still commemorated in Texas in annual Juneteenth celebrations. Shultz needed Django to help him find a family of slave traders for his next job. Since Django knew the notorious men and wanted to locate his “wife,” (in bondage, enslaved people’s marital relationships were not legally sanctioned,) he agreed to partner with Schultz in exchange for freedom and a portion of the bounty. The majority of the film documents the duo’s killing spree throughout Texas and into Mississippi leading them to Candyland, a plantation owned by Calvin Candie (DiCaprio). This is where we meet Broomhilda, Django’s “wife” (Washington), because up to this point viewers only know her through a series of Django’s flashbacks. We also meet Stephen (Jackson) at Candyland, who resurrects the most despised “Uncle Tom” character on screen or stage today. Stephen is the quintessential snitch who unravels Django and Shultz’s plan. Some reviewers embrace Django’s “justice” reveling that, in the end, the guy gets the girl and that “bad” men and women are blown to pieces. Yes, enslaved men and women tried to reunite upon separation, but the killing sprees depicted in this film would have been met with physical, legal, and psychological sanctions. One only has to turn to the enslaved experiences of Celia, Margaret Garner, Nat Turner, and Dred Scott to illustrate this point.

Former slaves such as Daniel Waring experienced freedom as a mixed blessing. People like Douglass, Waring, Elizabeth Keckley, Harriet Jacobs and countless and nameless others witnessed horrific scenes: nursing babes being torn from mothers’ breast; fathers burned alive; mothers gang raped or having their pregnant bellies placed in shallow trenches to protect their fetus during beatings. Yes, these scenes are difficult to imagine and even more difficult to convey using the historian’s pen or the filmmaker’s lens, but they occurred in our history. The horrors of slavery do appear in Django Unchained — whippings, auctions, and family separation — yet most are depicted in the form of “flashbacks” from a freed slave. In many ways, this creates an even greater space between the audience and the reality serving as a way for the director to regain his viewers after difficult imagery.

In addition to the visual representations, Tarantino’s selection of music undermines the realities of nineteenth-century culture, which at that time would have included spirituals–a genre that attempted to capture the sorrow, sadness, and pain of the antebellum era. Instead, Tarantino creates an anachronistic moment with the soundtrack by allowing the audience to escape the past and experience the film through the eyes of the present. This tactic lightens the mood to the entertaining flair he falls back upon and blurs the line between past and present. The music also facilitated Foxx’s character as a gangsta while at the same time highlighted his modern verbal swagger in an effort to appeal to members of the Hip Hop, X and Y generations.

Like the Emancipation Proclamation, the appearance of this film at this time is also a mixed blessing. On the one hand, we have a major motion picture that touches on slavery, but by prioritizing entertainment over education it trivializes the suffering of four million slaves who became legally free in 1865 with the passage of the 13^th Amendment. One hundred and fifty years ago today, enslaved people in Confederate occupied regions were supposed to receive their freedom. But we know that this did not happen. Frederick Douglass described the period following the Emancipation Proclamation as “one marked by discriminations and reservations” against blacks. He believed that this five-page document was “moderate, cautious, and guarded” even if, “it created a howl of indignation and wrath amongst the rebels and their allies.” Looking at those affected by the Emancipation Proclamation, we have few stories if any, of lone enslaved men teaming up with white “bounty hunters” to reunite with their enslaved wives. The public interest in a wildly popular director’s well-known penchant for depicting violence and revenge, and applying his formulas to the historical subject of slavery, inevitably effects the popular memory of slavery and begs the question: Should Tarantino’s exercise in counterfactual history make us feel good? Who wouldn’t want to see victims of enslavement embrace their power? Yet how do we rectify the “Mandingo” fighting and dog-mauling scenes with the blessing(s) of freedom? Tarantino’s uses fiction, humor, and exaggeration to rectify this contrast.

Tarantino clearly acknowledges that a film on slavery will not generate a comfortable dialogue—it’s not supposed to. But in an effort to redirect our conversation and reflect on the current historic moment, I encourage filmgoers to shift their gaze back to the history of slavery and the Emancipation Proclamation, a document written as a decree to force the Confederate States to return to the Union. Take a moment to learn about Lincoln, the “Great Emancipator,” whose primary goal was to preserve the Union. Imagine the antebellum south and the diversity of slavery from the recollections of former slaves, fugitive slave narratives, and plantation records. Although it’s not a “fun history” full of triumphs like Django Unchained depicts, hearing the words of actual slaves may help a twenty-first-century audience imagine the experiences of life in bondage.

More on the Emancipation Proclamation on Not Even Past:
George Forgie, “Work Left Undone: Emancipation was not Abolition”
Jacqueline Jones, “The Emancipation Proclamation reaches Savannah”
Laurie Green, “1863 in 1963”
Nicholas Roland on Spielberg’s Lincoln
Daina Ramey Berry “Let the Enslaved Testify“

Further Reading:

John Blassingame, Slave Testimony: Two Century of Letters, Speeches, Interviews and Autobiographies (1977).

William L. Andrews, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Slave Narratives (2000).

Deborah Gray White, Ar’n’t I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South (1999, 1985).

Deborah Willis and Barbara Krauthamer, Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans and the End of Slavery (2012).

Heather Williams, Help Me to Find My People: The African American Search for Family Lost in Slavery (2012).

James Downs, “Our Lincoln Our Selves: Rethinking Slavery and Abolition” Huffington Post Blog (12/12/12)

Selected Links:

Celia a Slave, The Trial (1855)

David Walker’s Appeal

Digital Library of American Slavery

Documenting the American South

Frederick Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass
Born in Slavery: Library of Congress

Voices from the Days of Slavery: Library of Congress

Theodore Dwight Weld, American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses

Film Review – Baseball by the Numbers: Moneyball (2011)

by Tolga Ozyurtcu

Although its subject is one of the more interesting moments in recent sports history, Moneyball offers surprisingly little of that history. The film opens with the disappointing end of the Oakland Athletics’ 2001 season, followed by General Manager Billy Beane’s (Brad Pitt) novel offseason rebuilding efforts and the team’s unexpected success in the 2002 season. The novelty at hand was Beane’s decision to abandon most of the traditional measures by which baseball scouts evaluated talent, replacing an old-guard of “lifer” baseball scouts and their obsession with traditional statistics, with economics-inspired, statistical models designed to find hidden value in baseball’s talent market. Beane’s shift to the new approach was driven by the inability of his small media market franchise to offer salaries to ballplayers that could compete with the big money, large market teams, like the New York Yankees.

While all of this is communicated reasonably well in Bennett Miller’s film, the casual viewer may be misled to think that Beane’s number-crunching approach was a twenty-first century innovation. What the film does not adequately address is the history of Sabermetrics, the name given to the general approach to baseball statistics that Beane and Paul DePodesta (or Peter Brand, as he was rechristened in the film, played by Jonah Hill) employed in revolutionizing the Oakland team and all of baseball. Sabermetrics are the brainchild of Bill James, a baseball historian, writer, and statistician who has been publishing on the subject since 1977. Through the late 1980s, James published the annual Bill James Baseball Abstract, focusing his efforts on the objective analysis of the sport through unique metrics like “runs created,” “range factor,” and “value over replacement player.” For James and other Sabermetricians, such measures allow for a level of quantitative analysis that links player performance with the production of wins for a team. From the Sabermetric perspective, traditional measures, such as batting average, are limited in that they only describe what a player does, without a useful measure of that player’s impact on the team. For example, while batting average is a traditional measure of the frequency of a player’s hits, James’ category of “runs created” factors in all of the ways a player can produce runs from an at-bat. For a team like Beane’s A’s, value could be found in passing on broadly appealing players with high batting averages, and focusing instead on players with high “runs created” ratings.

The Abstracts were popular with stat-obsessed fans and fantasy baseball aficionados, but James’ ideas failed to gain serious traction in mainstream baseball until the late 1990s, when Sandy Alderson, Beane’s predecessor as the Athletics General Manager began applying Sabermetric principles to identify undervalued players. Beane’s ascension saw the first significant deployment of the methods in the major leagues, with other teams embracing the approach following the Athletics’ success. The ultimate validation for James would arrive in 2003, when he was hired as a consultant by the Boston Red Sox, a position he still holds. Some fans and commentators credit James for some of the organizational and tactical decisions that led to the Red Sox winning their first World Series in 86 years, breaking the “Curse of the Bambino” in the process.

The James approach, especially as applied by Beane, is predicated on a simple idea: the talent market in baseball operates inefficiently due to poor evaluation criteria, resulting in the under-valuation of potentially productive players who can help teams win games. While the innovative exploitation of market conditions is a common capitalist endeavor, the insular, old world, and oligarchical nature of the professional sports business under-incentivizes the type of innovation Beane and DePodesta employed. American professional sports, perhaps more so than any other industry, revels in stable isomorphic practices and employs “tradition” as a bulwark against new approaches to management.

Beyond the standard limitations of the feature film format, Miller’s decision to gloss over this history underscores the point that the concept of “moneyball” is essentially a managerial perspective on resource allocation, while the film Moneyball is baseball movie. In other words, Miller’s film is about the reception of new ideas in the stubborn world of baseball, and less about the ideas themselves. This is probably a blessing for most viewers, who will be thankful to avoid the minutiae of Sabermetric analysis, but those interested in more detail on the subject can read Michael Lewis’ original book, Moneyball or take a look at the Society for American Baseball Research

What does make it to the screen is the rare sports film that is restrained in its use of genre stereotypes and still compels viewers to root for the underdog. Pitt plays Beane well, and Miller is mostly successful in portraying his protagonist as a contrary, but calculating risk taker, only occasionally slipping into sportsman-as-solitary-brooding-hero mode. Opposite Pitt, Phillip Seymour Hoffman plays beleaguered Athletics manager Art Howe, and it is a testament to Hoffman’s talent he somehow manages to elicit sympathy from the viewer while embodying the entire baseball establishment that Beane was up against.

In all, these performances and Miller’s subtle approach combine for a pleasurable film that is likely to have some appeal to viewers who do not normally enjoy sports films. Inevitably, some baseball aficionados will be disappointed with what was left out of the film, but most sports fans will appreciate the film and its celebration of a canny underdog.

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