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  • More than Ready for Her Close-Up: Harriet Tubman on Screen
  • Catherine Clinton
Gregory Allen Howard and Kasi Lemmons, Harriet, directed by Kasi Lemmons. Focus Films, 2019. 125 minutes.

The biopic Harriet, directed by Kasi Lemmons with Cynthia Erivo in the title role, was a box office hit in 2019 and earned 35 award nominations, including two in the Oscar categories: best song and best actress. The story of the life of Harriet Tubman, an American hero and legendary conductor on the Underground Railroad, did not become the focus of a feature film well into the twenty-first century.

Kellie Carter Jackson, writing in 2014 about the state of black actors and filmmaking, critiqued the film Glory (1989), commenting, “there is hardly a black woman present in the film—an omission that is all the more peculiar when one considers that Harriet Tubman served as a spy during the war and witnessed the assault on Fort Wagner that is portrayed in the film.”1 She goes on to complain: ‘How is it possible to have one of the most famous black women abolitionists in American history operating in the same space as black soldiers with no mention of her, let alone a cameo? Furthermore, how is it possible that there is no biographical film on Harriet Tubman?”2 Five years later, whether scholars and biographers agree with the liberties taken by this film, a virtuoso cinematic performance has appeared to meet this challenge.

Film projects as well as reflects transformative values. The visual representations of black women have been shaped by diverse dynamics, with racism and sexism as overpowering influences. Thus, the impact of media, and particularly film, seems a significant opportunity to reconfigure unidimensional perspectives on black womanhood within mainstream U.S. culture. Historical epics with black women as lead actors in commercial features are a relatively recent development. The highest-profile movie with the most potential for meaningful impact continues to be the “biopic,” as screen portraits/biographical films are affectionately called.

Many of us have worked long and hard in the archives, and in classrooms, to try to convey a sense of time and place for our readers, for our students—for our own selves. We seek portraits by filmmakers to create compelling visions [End Page 253] of the past for today’s audiences. The concept of “the representation of history and our thought about it in visual images and filmic discourse” was discussed by Hayden White in response to Robert Rosenstone’s notion of “really putting history onto film,” in an American Historical Review forum in 1988.3 As French film scholar Joanny Moulin explains, White coined the concept of “historio-photy,” defined as “‘the representation of history in verbal images and written discourse . . . in contradistinction with ‘historiography’.”4 White went on to ponder whether it was possible to ‘translate’ a given written account of history into a visual-auditory equivalent without [emphasis added] significant loss of content. By the 1980s, scholars heatedly debated the utility of film as “texte.” Rosenstone, among others, bemoaned the failure of the historical profession to engage an audience without visual material. He argued film “could allow narrative history to recapture the power it once had when it was more deeply rooted in the literary imagination.”5 Rosenstone took his own leap of faith when his biography of John Reed (Romantic Revolutionary, 1975) became the basis for the Academy Award winning Reds (1981), a film on which he consulted for years to bring his material to the screen. But still the focus remained on great men, great moments—and above all white, bankable characters.

Joshua Clover suggests: “It is a well-known fact among cinephiles and people of taste that the biopic is an abject sort of entertainment, ruled by clichés and following a narrative arc more rigid than Calvinism.”6 Even if the Hollywood establishment seemed indifferent to black women’s potential as protagonists for commercial film, some consideration remained for their suitability for “biopics.”7

Projects would have to focus on exceptional, emblematic African American women.

The popularity of black music within 1960s American culture, primed an audience for portraits of African American musical performers. In 1972...

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