Slaves on Screen: Film and Historical Vision (review)

Slaves on Screen: Film and Historical Vision by Natalie Zemon Davis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000, 160 pp., $22.95 hardcover, $8.95 paper.

Natalie Zemon Davis brings a skillful historian's lens to her analysis of five films—Spartacus, Burn, The Last Supper, Amistad, and Beloved—that explicitly foreground the issues of slavery and resistance to slavery. Davis's scholarship as an historian studies those "outside the traditional centers of power" (ix) who left little in written accounts.

These films span approximately forty years, mirroring the conventional views of their times regarding slavery and political liberty. They complement the historical research occurring roughly during this period that studied slavery both inside and outside the United States. Beyond describing particular historical conditions, such works documented slave resistance or considered why opposition to slavery appeared so late in human history. Slaves on Screen weaves historical accounts (e.g., Plutarch's brief mention of Spartacus) with the events in these films, and Davis does a fine job of articulating the films' strengths without succumbing to the sentimentality to which this subject might lend itself. In comparing historical accounts with film versions of these events, Davis acknowledges the different resources available to the filmmakers; little is known, for example, about the slave revolt of 73-71 B.C.E. that grounds Spartacus's narrative. But she also has high standards for historical films: for Davis, film should be "authentic," by which she seems to mean faithful to its historical sources.

This claim represents both the strength and the weakness of this book. Though Davis insists that she does not seek to privilege either fiction or history, she does seem ultimately to demand that film serve historical accuracy. Sensitive to the fact that such mainstream films must entertain and avoid didacticism, Davis nonetheless believes that audiences do not automatically believe historical films. While such a claim might imply that historical filmmakers should be granted greater license, Davis seems to draw the opposite conclusion, namely that filmmakers have an obligation to adhere to historical truth whenever possible.

That "whenever possible" seems to haunt the text. Given the inevitable incompleteness of history and film, Davis must provide criteria by which inevitable inaccuracies are permitted. This she does, but only obliquely. For example, she forgives some omissions possibly resulting from the constraints of a two-hour time period. Further, she is willing to tolerate what might be a critical divergence between The Last Supper and historical accounts of the slave insurrection in Cuba. Though, in reality, rebel leader Sebastián was killed along with eleven other slaves, director Gutiérrez Alea's decision to end with Sebastián free is described by Davis as a "plausible shift," given that numerous communities of escaped slaves lived on the island (67).

On the other hand, other inaccuracies are less easily tolerated; for example, she accuses Spielberg of omitting details that might explain the behavior of the heroic Cinqué and his fellow rebels to "smooth away the idiosyncratic, the unmodern" for a contemporary film audience (85). Further, she insists that we have enough documentation on this case to provide for dramatic tension without inventing plot twists. "[T]he filmmaker could surely have found drama and microhistorical movement in the events that did occur" (80). Likewise, she criticizes Spartacus for its effort to achieve timelessness at the expense of authenticity.

Authenticity seems itself a troubled term in this text. Davis's occasional use of quotations to frame the term suggests both her ambivalence and skepticism about the strict correspondence between narrative and "reality." Yet, ironically, one of her criticisms of Amistad is that the film errs too far on the side of authenticity by minimizing the extent to which the rebels had assimilated into U.S. culture.

These divergences are frustratingly undertheorized in Slaves on Screen. A cultural analysis of the relationship between those contingencies and the film's narrative inclusions and exclusions would have enriched the text. At one point, for...