Upon the release of Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz’s Antebellum (2020), the film was met with mixed reception. Antebellum follows a young Black woman author, Veronica Henley (Janelle Monaé), who, after leaving her home and family to complete her book tour, “wakes up” to find herself enslaved on what appears to be a cotton plantation in the antebellum south. In the film, viewers watch as Veronica is forced to assume the role of a slave named Eve, navigate the dynamics of the plantation, and find a way to escape her mysterious circumstances. The film’s pre-release trailer framed the film’s narrative as containing all the conventions of an action-packed horror film. In response to the initial announcement trailer for Antebellum, some people expressed excitement for a film that possessed promising similarities to Jordan Peele’s very popular, Academy Award-winning film Get Out (2017). The trailer even highlights Peele as one of the film’s producers. However, there was also a contingent of critics hesitant to show excitement for yet another film depicting Black enslavement. For these critics, films about slavery are an excuse for filmmakers to display and circulate more images of Black trauma. In her article for The Atlantic aptly titled, “Who Wants to Watch Black Pain,” Hannah Giorgis notes the gratuitous onslaught of violence to which Black characters are subject in Antebellum. This include scenes of physical and psychological abuse, beatings, whippings, and sexual assault. Ultimately, the article asks: “Who is this for?”[1]
The mixed response to Antebellum raises a number of questions about the role of contemporary films depicting enslavement. Given the strong resistance to “Black trauma films,” why, then, do we continue to make films about slavery?
Film scholars suggest that the answer to this question is due to more than a simple fascination with slavery. In their book Afterimages of Slavery (2012), Marlene Allen and Seretha Williams write that the “peculiar institution” has always been the subject of American narrative and is itself foundational to our literary tradition. Moreover, they argue that film and the history of enslavement share a unique relationship: “Film has become a powerful medium for representing slavery visually, allowing a viewing audience to connect with the experiences of slave characters onscreen and requiring an emotional investment in these experiences that is harder to present in the pages of a book.”[2] According to film scholar Rudyard Alcocer, part of the appeal of films depicting enslavement is the way in which they respond to a visual absence in the historical record. He writes that “slavery films take us back to the scene of the crime, as it were: a crime that involved to a significant degree of physical, visible transgressions against the enslaved. In other words…slavery films allow viewers to see the crime (or to have the sensation of doing so) in a way that is closer to a real-life experience than reading about the same events in a book.”[3] Slavery films show us what slavery was like in a way that fills a gap in our historical record, and as Alcocer suggests, the films provide viewers visual “evidence” of its utter brutality.
I don’t think it is an exaggeration to claim that the way present day Americans — living nearly 160 years post-emancipation — “imagine” slavery largely through its filmic representations. Think about how one of Hollywood’s first blockbusters, Gone with the Wind (1939), provided its viewers along with future films distinctive imagery of American plantation life. Similarly, we might draw upon films such as Steven Spielberg’s Amistad (1997) to imagine the ships that crossed the middle passage. Biopics like Harriet (2019) invite us to peer into the lives of Black historical figures who experienced the institution themselves. Many of these films, and others like 12 Years A Slave (2013) & Lincoln (2012), have won awards for their depictions of slavery. Given the sheer amount of films that have been made about enslavement and the filmmakers, actors, and actresses who have been recognized for their roles in these films, we could even claim that slavery is foundational not only to American history, but also to American film history.
Film is one of the primary avenues through which viewers attempt to understand what slavery was like, yet, if the relatively recent responses to Antebellum are any indication, the sheer volume of these films have produced a certain level of fatigue – one that is particularly experienced by Black viewers. In a time where viewing audiences are constantly inundated with images of Black death on the news and videos depicting police brutality on social media, I often see the question asked: Do we need even more films depicting slavery?
While I’m not advocating for more films about slavery over anything else, I do think that films about slavery still need to be made. In many ways, American film doesn’t exist without depictions of slavery onscreen. I do agree that films about Black trauma can not only be difficult to stomach but can also run the risk of replicating the very structures of violence they represent. However, I think that the films we do make about enslavement should seek to challenge the assumptions that slavery is long over. Films about slavery have the potential to operate as pedagogical tools, instructing viewers on the ways that slavery’s affects are still felt in the present.
I’m intrigued by the way Christina Sharpe compares Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust (1991) and Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave. She claims that the trace of slavery — in “whip-scarred backs, brands, or other familiar marks” — is perhaps too visible in 12 Years a Slave. The film is notable for its long takes and the camera’s unwillingness to cut away from the brutality it depicts. However, Sharpe recognizes the ways in which those gratuitous, aesthetic representations of enslavement run the risk of offering no relief. In 12 Years a Slave “The long time/the long shot, the residence time of Black life always on the verge of death and in death, goes on.”[4] Instead, Sharpe is interested in films that aesthetically engage with slavery’s “long-time.” Julie Dash’s independent film, Daughters of the Dust, is a film set in 1902 and follows three generations of the Peazant family, direct descendants of enslaved Gullah peoples. The film depicts the family’s final day on St. Helena Island before migrating north to the continent. According to Sharpe, slavery is felt in the film through indigo blue — Dash’s decision to “show the traces of slavery as the indigo blue that remains on the hands of the formerly enslaved people who labored and died over the poisonous indigo pits on the Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina.”[5] Indigo has a presence in the film not only on Nana Peasant’s hands, but in other aspects of the film’s mise-en-scene and cinematography. Indigo extends to accents in the film’s costuming, in the film’s lighting, post-production tinting, and in the color of the Island’s ever present sea and sky. In Daughters of the Dust, slavery is still very much felt and has an undeniable presence throughout the film, but avoids the violent imagery with which our present day representations are overrun.
Perhaps, then, films depicting enslavement could avoid being “trauma films” by finding aesthetic strategies that align with the central thesis of the New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project.[6] That placing slavery at the center of our examinations of American history in some ways allows us to understand the ongoing nature of anti-blackness. While more slavery films could still be hard to stomach, I strongly believe that visual depictions of enslavement have the potential to reorient our understanding of an essential part of our history. They could also provide us strategies for actively resisting the ongoing racial violences of today. Moving forward, we should be wary of how slavery films contribute to the “Black trauma genre,” but continue to look out for and advocate for films that instruct us on the ways slavery has been an integral part of our history and our present, lest we forget.
[1] Giorgis, Hannah. “Who Wants to Watch Black Pain?” The Atlantic, April 17, 2021. https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2021/04/black-horror-racism-them/618632/.
[2] Allen, Marlene and Seretha Williams. Afterimages of Slavery: Essays on Appearances in Recent American Films, Literature, Television and Other Media. Jefferson, N.C: McFarland, 2012. p.2.
[3] Alcocer, Rudyard J, Kristen Block, and Dawn Duke. Celluloid Chains: Slavery in the Americas Through Film. p. xxxix.
[4] Sharpe, Christina Elizabeth. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Book, Whole. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. p.126.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Hannah-Jones, Nikole. Hannah-Jones, Nikole. “America Wasn’t a Democracy, Until Black Americans Made It One (Published 2019).” The New York Times, August 14, 2019, sec. Magazine. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/1619-america-slavery.html