Celluloid Chains : Slavery in the Americas Through Film

Rudyard Alcocer

ISBN 10: 1621905489 / ISBN 13: 9781621905486

Published by University Of Tennessee Press Aug 2019, 2019

About this Item

Neuware - 'This multiauthor volume seeks to show how slavery in the Transatlantic World has been depicted in a hundred years of film production in the Americas. Rather than emphasizing North American films exclusively, the editors and authors seek to create a dialogic relationship between various filmmakers making movies in and about different countries in the hemisphere. Each contributor concentrates on one film. Among the essays are these: Rudy Alcocer, 'Of Slavery and Humanity: Focus, Metaphor and Truth in Werner Herzog's Cobra Verde'; Mamadou Badiane, 'Mulattoes and the Challenges of the Third Space in Roble do Olor'; Robert Norrell, 'Roots: the Re-making of Africa and Slavery in the American Mind'; Ignacio L.'.

Seller Inventory # 9781621905486

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Celluloid Chains : Slavery in the Americas Through Film
• Publisher: University Of Tennessee Press Aug 2019
• Publication Date: 2019
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1621905489
• ISBN 13: 9781621905486
• Binding: Taschenbuch
• Condition: Neu
• Dimensions: 226W x 152H x 20D millimeters 226 millimeters width by 152 millimeters height by 20 millimeters depth
• Weight: 522 grams

About this title

Synopsis

Featuring a variety of disciplinary perspectives and analytical approaches, Celluloid Chains is the most comprehensive volume to date on films about slavery. This collection examines works from not only the United States but elsewhere in the Americas, and it attests to slavery’s continuing importance as a source of immense fascination for filmmakers and their audiences.

Each of the book’s fifteen original essays focuses on a particular film that directly treats the enslavement of Africans and their descendants in the New World. Beginning with an essay on the Cuban film El otro Francisco (1975), Sergio Giral’s reworking of a nineteenth-century abolitionist novel, the book proceeds to examine such works as the landmark miniseries Roots (1977), which sparked intense controversy over its authenticity; Werner Herzog’s Cobra Verde (1987), which raises questions about what constitutes a slavery film; Guy Deslauriers’s Passage du milieu (1999), a documentary-style reconstruction of what Africans experienced during the Middle Passage; and Steve McQueen’s Oscar-winning 12 Years a Slave (2013), which embodies the tensions between faithfully adapting a nineteenth-century slave narrative and bending it for modern purposes.

Films about slavery have shown a special power to portray the worst and best of humanity, and Celluloid Chains is an essential guide to this important genre.

About the Authors

Rudyard J. Alcocer holds the Forrest and Patsy Shumway Chair of Excellence in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He is the author of Time Travel in the Latin American and Caribbean Imagination: Re-reading History.

Kristen Block is an associate professor of history at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She is the author of Ordinary Lives in the Early Caribbean: Religion, Colonial Competition, and the Politics of Profit.

Dawn Duke is an associate professor of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She is the author of Literary Passion, Ideological Commitment: Toward a Legacy of Afro-Cuban and Afro-Brazilian Women Writers.