Will Hollywood ever get slavery right?
The release of Steven Spielberg's film "Amistad" will provide audiences with the first significant opportunity in several years to answer the question of whether the film industry, long a purveyor of myths and misconceptions regarding the slave experience, is capable of making any progress in portraying the lives of 19th-century blacks with accuracy and complexity.
And, like the films about slavery that preceded it, "Amistad" will help Americans explore contemporary anxieties and desires about race.
In bringing slavery to the screen, Spielberg has a long, and largely ignominious, legacy to overcome.
Starting with Edwin S. Porter's adaptation of "Uncle Tom's Cabin" in 1903 and coming to a virulent head 12 years later with the release of D. W. Griffith's "The Birth of a Nation," films made during the industry's infancy reflected the stereotypes abroad in the culture and scholarship of the time.
Slaves were portrayed (by white actors in blackface) as a generally happy, clowning lot who were fiercely loyal to their white masters and mistresses. After Reconstruction took hold, as "The Birth of a Nation" told us, they became rapacious savages given to drink and defiling white women.
As the sociologist Charles Woods noted in Gary Null's book "Black Hollywood," "All your stereotyped characters were present in 'The Birth of a Nation.' D. W. Griffith gave us the black buck, the mammy, the coon -- all the images were there." Those images would persist for generations to come.
"The Birth of a Nation," which was widely protested by black groups, including the newly formed NAACP, wasn't just the bilious expression of the prejudices of one writer or director: It directly fed white Americans' anxieties about integration, immigrants and a nascent women's movement that favored suffrage and reproductive freedom. The infamous scene of a white woman jumping to her death rather than submit to the lust of the emancipated slave Gus, played by the white actor Walter Long, could have been just as cautionary for "uppity" women as "uppity" blacks.
Just as the musicals and melodramas of the early 1900s perpetuated useful fictions for turning back a rapidly changing social order, the films of the 1930s reflected the needs of an audience trying to escape the depredations of drought, Depression and poverty.
Escape
