American Slavery on Film by Caron; Knauer

Author:Caron; Knauer [Knauer, Caron;]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: ABC-CLIO, LLC
Published: 2023-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

Amistad (1997)

Steven Spielberg’s seventeenth feature film, the deeply moving, entertaining, and enlightening historical drama Amistad (1997) tells the epic story of the 1839 insurrection, one of the most notable shipboard rebellions and mutinies in history. It was led by Sengbe Pieh, known in America as Joseph Cinque, and other captured Africans aboard an illegal slave ship, La Amistad; international slave trading had been outlawed in 1808. Three trials ensued, ending in a Supreme Court triumph for the Africans who were allowed to return home. The case strengthened abolitionist fervor, led to “the trial of the 19th century,” and was a catalyst for the Civil War. While celebrated and widely reported in its time as a powerful story of African resistance to slavery, it was according to historians overlooked and understudied in the canon of American history until Spielberg’s film.

Debbie Allen, the African American choreographer, actress (the Fame television series) director, songwriter, and producer, in 1978, read two volumes of essays about the Amistad she found at the Historically Black College (HBC) Howard University’s bookstore (Jeffrey 2001). She was shocked that she had never read or learned about this momentous historical event and wondered why it was erased. In 1984, she optioned the rights to William A. Owens’s novel, Black Mutiny: The Revolt on the Schooner Amistad, which had been originally published in 1953 under the title Slave Mutiny. After she saw Spielberg’s Holocaust drama Schindler’s List (1993), which won the Oscar for Best Picture and earned more than $300 million worldwide, she convinced him he was the right director for the Amistad story and that his telling an essential slavery story would be as impactful and accessible as his film about the Holocaust. He was intrigued by the story and felt compelled to film it for his two adopted African American children.

David Franzoni, who wrote Gladiator (2000), gets single credit for the screenplay, although Steven Zaillian, whose credits include the film adaptation of Thomas Keneally’s novel Schindler’s List, did a revision. The film acknowledges Owens’s novel Black Mutiny as source material. Howard Jones, author of Mutiny on the Amistad: The Saga of a Slave Revolt and Its Impact on American Abolition, Law, and Diplomacy (1987), was one of the film’s consultants, which included titans of African American studies Henry Louis Gates Jr., John Hope Franklin, and Lerone Bennett as well as Clifton Johnson, emeritus head of the Amistad Research Center in New Orleans. The late Dr. Arthur Abraham (1945–2020), a prominent University of Sierra Leone scholar in African studies specializing in Mende history and language, was on the set coaching Djimon Hounsou on Mende for the shoot.

There was immediate controversy when the novelist Barbara Chase-Riboud initiated a $10 million plagiarism lawsuit against Spielberg two weeks before the film’s opening trying to prevent it from being released, claiming he “brazenly” stole from her up to that point overlooked novel Echo of Lions (William Morrow, 1989). A copy of her novel was, in fact, in 1988 sent to Spielberg’s company, Amblin, by the author’s friend, Jacqueline Onassis, a book editor at the time.

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