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Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rsaf20
Historian among Filmmakers Tamara Walker
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Department of History , University of Pennsylvania , Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA Published online: 25 Mar 2011.
To cite this article: Tamara Walker (2011) Historian among Filmmakers, Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies, 12:2, 139-147, DOI: 10.1080/17533171.2011.557189 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17533171.2011.557189
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Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies Vol. 12, No 2, April 2011, 139–147
Historian among Filmmakers
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Tamara Walker
ACT ONE: SETUP ‘‘This is not a work of fiction,’’ writes historian Boubacar Barry of Terry Alford’s Prince Among Slaves: The True Story of an African Sold into Slavery in the South. Instead, he continues, it is an ‘‘historical reconstruction undertaken after painstaking research in the archives.’’1 Originally published in 1977, the book chronicles a remarkable story that—as Alford’s subtitle and Barry’s reminder suggest—tests the boundaries of credulity. While perhaps resonant to scholars familiar with what Moira Ferguson has termed the ‘‘high-born African’’ slave narrative genre,2 Alford’s biography of Ibrahima Abd al-Rahman introduced readers to a man quite unlike more familiar figures such as Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, and Solomon Northrup, who were born in the US, suffered the indignities of enslavement, later escaped, and eventually told their stories both in print and as part of anti-slavery lectures around the country.3 For his part, Abd al-Rahmann was born in 1762 in the kingdom of Futa Jallon (what is today the Republic of Guinea) to Almaami Ibrahima Sori, King of the cattle-raising Fulbe tribe and one of the region’s most important Muslim leaders. In 1788, while leading a military campaign against the neighboring Jalunke people, Abd al-Rahman and his soldiers were defeated, captured, and sold to English slavers. From there, he endured the harrowing journey across the Atlantic, where he was eventually sold to a Natchez, Mississipi cotton farmer named Thomas Foster.4 Aware to some degree of the young man’s provenance, Foster began referring to Abd al-Rahman—perhaps disparagingly—as ‘‘Prince,’’ a name by which he would be known for the rest of his life. Even though he had left behind a wife and child in Futa Jallon, and despite his continued devotion to Islam, six years after his arrival Prince married a fellow slave named Isabella in a Christian ceremony and started Correspondence to: Tamara Walker, Department of History, University of Pennsylvania, 208 College Hall, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA. Email: tamara.walker@gmail.com 1
Barry and Quinn, ‘‘Guinea Journals,’’ 181. Ferguson, The History of Mary Prince, 23. 3 See, for example: Douglass’ Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Brown’s Narrative, and Northrup’s Twelve Years a Slave. 4 Alford, Prince Among Slaves. 2
ISSN 1753-3171 (print)/ISSN 1543-1304 (online) ß 2011 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/17533171.2011.557189
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a new family. His story would likely have ended in Natchez, as it did for countless other slaves, had it not been for a chance encounter on a summer afternoon in 1807. Instead, while selling sweet potatoes at a roadside market in Natchez, Prince came face-to-face with an Irish doctor named John Coates Cox. The two men had met years before when Cox, serving as a surgeon on a ship docked on Futa Jallon’s coast in 1781, had gone ashore to hunt and became lost. Discovered near-death by the Fulbe and brought to Almaami Sori’s home, Cox received medical attention, housing, and, possibly, a wife. During his months-long stay with Sori and his family, Cox developed a friendship with Abd al-Rahmaan, with whom he would take long horseback rides and speak English, and who he would recognize as Prince more than twenty-five years later. What followed was a staggering series of events that eventually brought Abd al-Rahmaan his freedom, catapulted him onto the national stage, cast him as a symbol of the American Colonization Society’s efforts abroad, and culminated in his death in Liberia in 1829. The dramatic story was skillfully pieced together and narrated by Alford, with the kinds of twists and turns that called out for a stage. And it was with a belief in the book’s cinematic potential that, nearly thirty years after its publication, a production company in Washington, DC took on the task of bringing Prince’s story to the small screen. At the time, I was a History PhD student living in the area while writing a dissertation about slavery and dress in colonial Lima, Peru. One day, I came across a job advertisement that seemed a perfect fit for my interests and background: the production company was looking for someone to conduct costume research for the documentary’s dramatic re-enactments. Given that it was based on a scholarly text, funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities, and slated to air on PBS, the film project represented in my mind an ideal bridge between academia and the larger public. As a first-generation college graduate who spent years trying to explain my dissertation topic to my family only to find that it would take their watching a Discovery Channel program on Peru to pique enough interest in my region of study to sustain meaningful discussion, I was especially drawn to the educational potential of this kind of endeavor, and looked forward to participating in any way I could. I began work on the project in January 2006. Historians have had a long and complicated relationship with historical films, defined here as the dramatic features and documentaries that take individuals, movements, conflicts, or practices from the past as their subject. In 1935, for instance, University of Chicago professor Louis Gottschalk took aim at what he perceived as the genre’s lax standards, arguing in a letter to the president of MetroGoldwyn-Mayer that, ‘‘if the cinema art is going to draw its subject so generously from history, it owes its patrons and its own higher ideals to achieve greater accuracy.’’ Moreover, he continued, ‘‘no picture of a historical nature ought to be offered to the public until a reputable historian has had a chance to criticize and revise it.’’5 Fair or not, Gottschalk’s critique and attendant recommendation reflected 5
Rosenstone, Visions of the Past, 46.
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an awareness of the power of the historical film to reach a broad audience, as well as of the roles historians could play in the creation of such films. While not every filmmaker has since heeded Gottschalk’s (perhaps extreme) advice in terms of ensuring accuracy, the intervening years have seen historians come to play increasingly prominent roles in historical film production. One of the most visible participants in this process has been Robert Rosenstone, who has written about his work on two motion pictures—Warren Beatty’s Academy Award-winning Reds (1982), and Noel Bruckner’s critically acclaimed documentary The Good Fight (1984)—both of which were adapted from his own books. For his part, Rosenstone describes each as a ‘‘well-made, emotion-filled work that has exposed a vast number of people to an important but long-buried historical subject, one previously known largely to specialists or to old leftists.’’6 Despite these strengths, however, the author still found cause for concern: where Reds fictionalized certain story elements by placing its protagonist in places he had not been, The Good Fight used unchecked testimony in the form of on-screen interviews with witnesses who were more than forty years removed from the war. Together, the films (not to mention the experience of creating them) led Rosenstone to wonder: ‘‘is it possible to tell historical stories on film without losing our professional or intellectual souls?’’ The preoccupation with accuracy constitutes the backbone of historians’ criticism of historical film. In large part this stems from the extent to which—as Rosenstone suggests—our professional and intellectual credibility as historians relies on getting the facts ‘‘right.’’ As researchers, we have the privilege of working in historical archives that the public rarely has access to (and often, depending on our regions and periods of focus, nor do many of our colleagues), and as such we shoulder tremendous burdens to represent the subjects we study as clearly and honestly as possible. In Rosenstone’s case, that burden was perhaps doubly felt given that the films he worked on were based on his own scholarship. But even those of us who work on films based on other historians’ scholarship recognize our responsibility to accurately render the past. All of which is to say that preserving my professional and intellectual soul was something I took very seriously during my involvement in the film version of Prince Among Slaves. I was in good company. My employers were deeply invested in telling as faithful a story as possible, and from the day of my first interview, I was struck by the team’s familiarity with Alford’s book. The production team had also recently completed interviews with several historians and subject experts who would appear as onscreen ‘‘talking heads,’’ and whose knowledge of US slavery, Islam in America, and other themes prevalent throughout the text had guided the project’s research agenda moving forward. They looked to me in these early stages to answer key questions related to the wardrobe used during on-screen re-enactments. How would Abd-alRahman have dressed as a young man in Futa Jallon? What would he have looked like after his harrowing journey across the Atlantic, and later as Prince, on an eighteenthcentury Mississippi cotton plantation? Would his American wife Isabella have worn 6
Rosenstone, ‘‘History in Images/History in Words.’’
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a special dress on her and Prince’s wedding day? Where did Prince get all the suits he wore for his many public appearances around the US, and when he spoke to delegations of the American Colonization Society? These were the kinds of queries that drove my own dissertation research. I spent the majority of my time working in the Library of Congress and other local repositories, which made the nature and structure of the work perfectly compatible with my obligations as a graduate student, and as such I eagerly took to the task of wading through newspapers, legal documents, and visual ephemera in order to get as complete a picture as possible of our subjects. Of course, throughout my research, I had in mind the kind of narrative I thought would eventually take shape. I was, after all, in the process of crafting my dissertation, and therefore constantly mindful of the relationship between evidence, story structure, and argument. This also meant that I was curious about the narrative strategies deployed by filmmakers in order to draw viewers in, lend dramatic momentum, and to stay on message. What I learned was rather surprising (though perhaps obvious to filmmakers and students of the art): genre conventions often take precedence over contextual considerations, no matter how significant those considerations may be. How, for example, can a filmmaker convey the sense of vulnerability felt by a captive brought to labor against his will in a new and unfamiliar land? The answer, at least on this project, was for the directors to use the planned auction scene to show Prince (and other captives) nearly naked, covered only by a loincloth. It was a choice I somewhat understood from the filmmaker’s point of view but struggled to embrace for its lack of historical accuracy. How could I reconcile the directors’ cinematic vision with the work of such scholars as Walter Johnson, whose description of the antebellum slave market conveyed in rich detail the extent to which slave traders ‘‘packaged’’ their human captives in order to fetch the best price? Indeed, according to Johnson, ‘‘none of the bareness that contributed so powerfully to the historical sexualization of black bodies, was immediately apparent in the slave market. These people were dressed as ideal slaves, exaggerated in the typicality of their appearance, too uniform, too healthy, too clean.’’7 Johnson’s characterization, of the fully dressed slave on the auction block, is borne out in numerous contemporaneous images (see Figures 1–3). And yet, even armed with all the facts, standing as I was on the side of historical accuracy, I failed to convince the filmmakers to change course completely: as a kind of concession, they agreed that they would put the captives in pants but keep their chests bare. Over the course of discussing this one scene, what began as a job that perfectly suited my academic interests and research skills had suddenly become a source of professional (and personal) anxiety. Why, I wondered, did the filmmakers want an historian around if they were not willing to listen to me? Moreover, if they were not going to listen to me, how long was I willing to sacrifice my scholarly integrity at Hollywood’s altar? These were questions I asked myself repeatedly over the following year, as my role as costume researcher evolved to include a range of additional duties as the project 7
Johnson, Soul by Soul, 121.
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Figure 1. A slave auction in Virginia (1861) Source: Schomburg Center for Research on Black Culture. Printed with permission.
Figure 2. Dealers inspecting a negro at a slave auction in Virginia (1861) Source: Schomburg Center for Research on Black Culture. Printed with permission.
and its needs evolved: I shopped for wardrobe materials, assisted a director on casting calls, helped manage the cast and wardrobe during on-set re-enactments, and even appeared in several scenes as an extra myself. ACT TWO: THE DRAMA After months of preparation, a group of nearly one hundred cast- and crew-members finally set out for Maryland’s Eastern Shore to begin eight days of filming during the first balmy days of August, 2006. The ninety-five-acre Sotterley Plantation, a tobacco farm that was once home to one of the largest populations of slaves
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Figure 3. A slave pen at New Orleans, before the auction (1863) Source: Schomburg Center for Research on Black Culture. Printed with permission.
in Southern Maryland, would stand in for multiple locations, including Abd al-Rahman’s home village in Futa Jallon and Thomas Foster’s plantation in Natchez, Mississippi. That we were shooting a film about slavery on an actual plantation during one of the hottest months of the year lent the proceedings a profound sense of verisimilitude. At the same time, the fact that the filming location was serving so many different purposes kept me fully attuned to the challenge of preserving an already fragile (in my view) sense of accuracy. For better or worse, I did not have to concern myself with those issues for long, at least not in my role as a researcher. Owing to a limited casting budget and to what was often the improvisational nature of the filming process, I was asked by the casting directors to serve as an extra in a few scenes. Curious to experience the filming process from as many vantage points as possible, I agreed to form part of the background on Thomas Foster’s cotton plantation as he introduced Prince to his new responsibilities in one scene, and to stand as a witness at Prince and Isabella’s wedding in another. Prior to changing out of my own clothes and into my first costume, I had considered myself part of the ‘‘brain-trust’’ of the operation, separate from the dozens of young people tasked with heavy lifting and other kinds of grunt work familiar to entry-level production assistants. But by the time the director and producers rounded up those of us who fit the ‘‘look’’ of the film’s scenes and put us in costume, my sense of place had shifted completely. Regardless of what any of us had been doing on the other side of the camera, on this side we were all slaves. In the first scene, I and about twelve other extras were supposed to be planting cotton. That this is what we were supposed to be doing instead of haphazardly playing in the dirt may well come as a surprise to anyone who has both seen the film and is familiar with the neatly ordered rows that constitute the average southern
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cotton field. Fortunately, I did not have enough time to think about the implications of this, as I was occupied with a more profound concern: nearly everyone left on the other side of the camera was white. Just as it seemed that all hierarchical distinctions had been erased among the black extras, so too had those among the film’s white producers, cast, and crew. In an ironic twist (which came about in a most inadvertent fashion), we had actually managed to get something historically ‘‘right’’: there we all were, each in the positions history had assigned us, with the slaves doing the work that was asked of them while the whites looked on. The other scene I would appear in took place shortly thereafter. After the jarring emotional experience of filming the previous scene, in which the past still had some bearing on the present (at least to the extent that it dictated who most looked like a slave and who did not), it was time to celebrate: Prince and Isabella were getting married. It was a fraught experience for all of us, as actors and as people. As actors, we were aware of the weight the moment carried given how rarely masters consented to slave marriages, as well as of Prince’s own inner turmoil due to his having left a wife and child behind in his native Futa Jallon; and as people who had been filming in the heat for nearly eight hours, we were aware of just how heavy our woolen dresses and pants had become, how hungry we were, how near we were to the end of the day’s filming, and, more importantly, of how psychologically and physically close we had become to the characters we were playing. In the end, these realizations came together to produce a compelling scene. We might have gotten a few things wrong, like the words Prince and Isabella exchanged (which we may never know), or even the cut of the groom’s suit, but we got what might have mattered most: that a group of slaves was finally being granted a few moments out of their day to honor their humanity.
ACT THREE: CONCLUSION Lately, with the benefit of time and distance (writing as I am, nearly four years and more than one hundred miles later, in 2010 Philadelphia), I have come to wonder if I was perhaps being too dramatic in my concerns over losing my professional and intellectual soul. Were the filmmakers necessarily wrong in their choices? If not, what do their choices have to teach historians, if anything, about storytelling? And if they were ‘‘wrong,’’ does that make the final product a failure? In worrying so much over my own role as an historian and my relationship to the craft of filmmaking, was I privileging professional legitimacy in a way that denied the film’s educational potential? I am not the first historian to ask such questions. Hayden White, for example, has argued against privileging historiography (‘‘the representation of history in verbal images or written discourse’’) over what he calls historiophoty, or ‘‘the representation of history and our thought about it in visual imagery and filmic discourse.’’ Which is to say, according to White at least, that there is no reason to believe the discipline of filmmaking cannot explore the past with as much rigor as the discipline of
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history does. In fact, he argues, the medium of film offers opportunities to expand historians’ notions of ‘‘realistic’’ representation.8 For members of a profession with tendencies to use visual images as mere illustrations of already predicated knowledge rather than as sources of their own kind of knowledge, historical films are useful reminders that what our eyes can see is as compelling and central to understanding the past as what they can read. If the goal of rendering an auction scene, in scholarship or on film, is to help our audience to imagine the profound sense of vulnerability felt by slaves, is showing a nearly naked body (in arguably its most vulnerable state) really that much of a mistake? This is an especially salient question given the extent to which historians have used historical films as teaching tools, employing them as either windows onto the past or as windows onto how we (should or should not) talk about the past. A filmmaker’s choice, whether an historian would have made it or not, is nonetheless a very useful point of discussion for our students, and one that can yield deeper insights than simply making the ‘‘right’’ choice in accordance with the prevailing historical scholarship and documented evidence. Moreover, it may be helpful to historians to take lessons from the way filmmakers conceive of telling stories. Which ‘‘scenes’’ do we wish to have stand out in our own work? How do we ensure that they grab our readers’ attention, propel our stories forward, and stay on message? At the same time that I am asking that historians take the work of filmmakers on its own terms, however, I am also reminded of historian Ira Berlin’s review of Edward Zwick’s 1989 film Glory, in which he asserts the need for filmmakers to apply ‘‘the same standards of historical validity to cinematic reconstructions of the past that are applied to other historical genres.’’ Here, Berlin is referring to Zwick’s choice to tell the story of the all-black 54th regiment by relying on ‘‘plausibility rather than the regiment’s authentic past,’’ depicting the group’s white colonel (Robert Gould Shaw, played by Matthew Broderick) as a master disciplinarian who, in dramatic fashion, infused his soldiers with a discipline they were sorely lacking. In fact, the historical record shows that the men who enlisted in the 54th were former members of militia units rather than runaway slaves (as they are in the film), many of whom had already developed the necessary political consciousness and discipline to carry them through battle. In short, the true story of the 54th, while perhaps less thrilling from a cinematic perspective (since it does not privilege the transformative power of the commander over his difficult charges), nonetheless tells an important story about African Americans’ professional and political lives during the Civil War.9 The lesson for filmmakers, then, is to recognize that it will never be enough to simply employ historians as behind-the-scenes consultants and on-screen experts if they fail to recognize what historians have long known: that the stories we are often most obligated to tell are the ones that make up in depth what they lack in drama.
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White, ‘‘Historiography and Historiophoty.’’ Berlin, ‘‘Glory Be,’’ 148.
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REFERENCES Alford, Terry. Prince Among Slaves: The True Story of an African Prince Sold into Slavery in the South. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977. Barry, Boubacar, and Charlotte Quinn (translator). ‘‘Guinea Journals: Journeys into Guinea-Conakry during the Sierra Leone Phase, 1800–1821.’’ African Studies Review 24, no. 4 (1981): 181. Berlin, Ira. ‘‘Glory Be.’’ Radical History Review 53 (1992): 141–8. Brown, William W. The Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave. Boston, MA: Anti-Slavery Office, 1848. Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, Inc., 1845. Ferguson, Moira, ed. The History of Mary Prince: A West Indian Slave. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Johnson, Walter. Soul by Soul: Inside the Antebellum Slave Market. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. Northrup, Solomon. Twelve Years a Slave. New York: Miller, Orton & Mulligan, 1855. Rosenstone, Robert A. Visions of the Past: The Challenge of Film to Our Idea of History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995. —. ‘‘History in Images/History in Words: Reflections on the Possibility of Really Putting History onto Film.’’ American Historical Review 93, no. 5 (1988): 1173–18. White, Hayden. ‘‘Historiography and Historiophoty.’’ American Historical Review 93, no. 5 (1988): 1193–9.