Amistad

Note: This article first appeared in Stud.Jur nr. 5, 2011.

Exposition
            The year is 1840, and we are to be found in the United States of America. The Civil War is 20 years in the future, peanut butter has not yet been invented and some forty slaves of unknown origin are fighting for their freedom in American courts.
            The slaves were brought to the American coastline on the Spanish ship La Amistad. One of the them broke free from his chains and managed to liberate his compatriots. In the following mutiny, the slaves managed to take over the ship; with the loss of the cook, the captain and a few of the slaves. After having been tricked by the surviving Spaniards, they brought the ship to the coast of Long Island, where they were discovered and caught by the American cutter, USCR Washington.
            The following case was complicated and comprised of no less than five different parties, which included the Kingdom of Spain, the surviving Spaniards, the captain and some of the crew Washington and the State of Connecticut (where the case was made) - in addition to the slaves themselves. In a welter of accusations and falsified evidence, and tension between anti- and pro-slavery movements, the slaves were able to win their freedom. But, alas, the President at the time, Martin Van Buren, appealed the case directly to the federal Supreme Court - in fear of the symbolic value the case had acquired.

Brief
            The film is directed by Steven Spielberg - and that is easy to see! When it comes to the production itself, there is little to complain about. It is well filmed and put together nicely. The music is well chosen, and the dialogues are well written and performed by well-trained and capable actors, which includes amongst others Morgan Freeman, Matthew McConaughey and Anthony Hopkins.
            Unfortunately, there are certain elements that pull it a few notches. As in almost every Hollywoodian film "based on true events", the director takes several artistic liberties. This would normally be all-right, but when the proceedings are portrayed as one of the main causes of the American Civil War - two decades before it happened - it gets more than any reviewer with a shred of self-respect can handle. In addition to this, there is little focus on the actual legal disputes (which are quite exceptional), and the procedure itself boils down to an overly pompous game of rhetoric. For an aspiring student of law, this is gets quite difficult to swallow.

Ruling
            The result is good, but could have been much better. A big plus for Anthony Hopkins' inspiring performance. Four out of six stars.

American History X - An Analyse of Blame and Social Decline

                I just saw American History X again - I can hear the end-music in the background as I write this, and I realised that this might actually be one of my favourite films. It might be that I am touched by the cinematography I just witnessed, as it is very well made, but for me, at least in this case, it gives me all the more reason to embrace that feeling. As I said, it is very well made. It is a non-linear film; there is a main dynamic to the film, of course, but it uses retrospectives frequently and varies much in what past it shows. Other than what the film tells, it also varies in the way it tells it. There is a narrator, but he is non-dominant and is only used at certain, as I see it, strategic points, where it gives necessary distance and perspective to what is happening. I find this to be important, as an overuse of a narrator can quickly cause irritation to the viewer. I will use Titanic as an example of this, for the record not one of my favourite films, where I find its use of the story-teller to ruin the dynamic of the story, pulling the public violently away from the scenes they immerse themselves into, as the film is quite adept at invoking emotional attention (as are all Hollywood blockbusters). Other than that, the film fulfils the one criterion I have to recognise a film as important: it takes up (social) issues, in this case, racial hatred, anti-Semitism and social inequality. And I have only one word to describe the way it tells its story and brings forth its message: Powerful. The film is extremely powerful.

                I have two scenes in the film that I like particularly well, and that I believe are very well written. I will not explain the context of the scenes, nor introduce the characters, as I am writing this for people who have already seen the film. The first one is about one and a half hour into it, towards the end of a half-hour long retrospective, telling the story of Derrick’s time in prison. It is where he talks to Sweeney, the principal of Daniel’s school, and where he realises the reality of what his life’s work has been. Now, one would expect a Hollywood film to have the principal give Derrick some sort of speech - preaching the wrongness of what he has been doing, making him see and acknowledge the facts through a faultless argumentation; inspiring him and the audience with him. But it was that sort of thing that got him to where he was in the first place. Inspiring, convincing and persuasive speeches manipulated him to embrace the hatred he was originally happily oblivious to. What reaches Derrick in the end is but a simple question. And by reflecting over it, it forces him to see, and for the first time, regret what he has been doing: “Has anything you’ve done made your life better?” The anger had been consuming him, making him blame everyone and everything for what had happened to him and his family, and forcing him to take his anger out on African Americans and Jews, as were those he was holding his personal vendetta against. In the words of Sweeney, describing himself having gone through a similar situation: “There was a moment when I used to blame everything and everyone for all the pain and suffering and vile things that happened to me; that I saw happen to my people. I used to blame everybody, blame white people, blame society, blame God! I didn’t get no answers because I was asking the wrong questions. You have to ask the right question”.
                The tirade of Sweeney goes well with the main theme of the film, at least with how I see it. It seems to be about who is to be blame for what, following the protagonists through their war against whom and what they choose to blame for their problems. When society is in decline, it is much easier to single out ethnic groups and minorities and blame them, thus having a focus point for all the anger and frustration one might feel. A scapegoat can be useful, but in the end, it helps only  in making us ignore and forget the complexity by which a society really works, making everyone except those in power mere  pawns in the great game of society (though in the end, they too are only products of the same world). The trick is, as I believe it, to break free from the determinism of the game by gaining social and personal conscience, as Derrick does in the scene described in the preceding paragraph. But in the end, can we ever truly be the masters of our own fates? This leads us to my other favourite scene: the last one. In this scene, Daniel is killed by the very same type of blind hatred and violence that he has just gained conscience of and broken free from, but not by the hands of anyone of his former peers. His killer is a black gang-member he stood up to in the beginning of the film by, literally, standing up to him without swaying, without saying anything. All he did was to stare at him until he went away. In a way, he is killed by himself, or by the incarnation of his former self. The black kid is subjugated to the same hate and frustration the Daniel himself used to cultivate, though in his case culminating in him killing another human being for not having showed him the respect and fear he felt he was entitled to, and that he needed to gain the respect of his peers. The killing thus acquires two symbolic meanings: The first one being the “autocide” of Derrick - his symbolic former self having become his bane; the second one being that whatever we do, our fates will always be subjected to the randomness of society.

“Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.” Henry David Thoreau (my italics)