While Hollywood ignored stories of Black resistance, Cuban filmmakers celebrated Black power

In recent years, there has been an increased push for more diversity and representation on our entertainment screens. The #OscarsSoWhite campaign of 2015 and the enduring social justice movement it generated increased public awareness of the longstanding problematic issues of discrimination and exclusion in Hollywood.

The movement drew needed attention to Hollywood as an insular industry characterized by institutionalized racism and entrenched disparities. Nearly a decade later some progress has been made, but race, class and gender remain sources of inequality in Hollywood.

Hollywood’s depictions of slavery are emblematic of the persistence of this problem. Although Hollywood has produced several notable films on slavery, more often than not, these films reveal partial and biased views.

For example, one of the world’s first slavery films dating from 1903, is an adaptation of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 anti-slavery novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In that film, Black people are portrayed by white actors in blackface and slaves are seen dancing at a slave auction.

In general, Black points of view, Black voices and Black historical achievement have been marginalized or overlooked in Hollywood. And in particular, there is a notable lack of films that centre Black resistance to slavery. From overt anti-Black racism in slavery films dating from the earlier part of the 20th century, to a deep-seated and enduring aversion to depicting Black resistance, Hollywood has always lived in a fantasyland when it comes to Black history.

While conducting research into the history of the representation of slavery in cinematic history, I learned that, in contrast to films coming out of the United States, Cuban cinema depicted a very different Black history and culture. Starting in the 1970s, Cuban filmmakers told stories to revalorize Black history and culture.

Black representation in Cuban cinema

Following the Cuban Revolution of 1953–1959, a film industry grew that sought to construct an assertive and representative picture of Black Cuban history and culture, including the history of Black resistance to slavery, which had long been overlooked and misrepresented.

Initially, this work took the form of documentary films that profiled the African roots of Cuban music, a form of cultural expression saturated with a sensibility of resistance. Then, in the 1970s, this work blossomed into a series of feature-length films.

Some examples include the 1976 film La última cena (The Last Supper) by Cuba’s most feted filmmaker, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea. The film is an ironic historical drama of slave revolt and religious hypocrisy set in 1780s Cuba.

A still from the film La última cena (1976), by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea. (Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos)

An aristocratic Havana plantation owner decides one Easter week, in imitation of Christ, to invite 12 of his slaves to sup with him at his dinner table. However, far from mollifying the enslaved workers or reconciling them to their status, the count’s 12 chosen slaves respond to their master’s antics by organizing an uprising and burning down the sugarcane mill, thereby demonstrating their selfhood and asserting their agency.

A trilogy of films by one of Cuba’s most underappreciated filmmakers, Afro-Cuban director, Sergio Giral: El otro Francisco (The Other Francisco, 1974), Rancheador (The Slave Hunter, 1976), and Maluala (1979) are also worthy of note. Giral’s trilogy has been regarded as a “welcome tonic to the cloying melodrama of American period films like Gone with the Wind” that erased Black agency as part of their romantic sanitization of slavery.

In El otro Francisco, sentimental, bourgeois perspectives of slavery and abolition are turned upside down. In Rancheador, the perspectives of various poorer whites — smallholder farmers and slave catchers — are brought to the fore to emphasize the insufficiency of race, when taken in isolation, as an explanation for the social dynamics of oppression in slave holding societies.

In Maluala, the strategic and political dilemmas faced by the leaders of Cuba’s maroon communities are emphasized as part of the film’s depiction of the growth of Afro-Cuban consciousness. By foregrounding perspectives that had been sidelined, Giral’s trilogy recovers the history of slave resistance and narrates a counter-history of Cuban slavery and abolition.

Hollywood’s historical inaccuracies

Meanwhile, in the U.S., slavery films have established a popular historiography of slavery for a global audience and have also exerted influence on those in positions of power. One of the most notorious slavery films of all time, D.W. Griffith’s grotesquely racist The Birth of a Nation of 1915, was the first film to be screened in the White House as well as the first film to be projected for the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court and the members of the United States Congress.

It projected flagrant historical inaccuracies, including the perception that the slave-holding American South had been a rural idyll where a noble, chivalrous and pious culture had flourished. The U.S. president of the day, Woodrow Wilson, was among the many millions duped by the film’s depictions; on viewing the film he remarked, “It is like writing history with lightning, and my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.”

The regressive impact of Griffith’s film on American and global public conversations about race should not be underestimated.

Adaptation of a slave narrative

Since The Birth of a Nation, Hollywood has produced several acclaimed movies about slavery in the U.S., but it took nearly a century before the first cinematic adaptation of a slave narrative would appear — Steve McQueen’s celebrated triple Oscar winner 12 Years a Slave of 2013.

Lauded by some critics as “the greatest feature film ever made about American slavery,” 12 Years a Slave received a special screening at the United Nations’ New York headquarters and undeniably represents a significant moment in the history of slavery on screen.

A trailer for ‘12 Years a Slave.’

Nevertheless, and notwithstanding the film’s progressive aspirations, McQueen’s adaptation inadvertently gave new life to sentimental ways of apprehending the history of slavery. The accounts of Black resistance that are present in the source material on which the film was based, Solomon Northup’s 1853 narrative, Twelve Years a Slave, are omitted and the film overlooks the attention paid in the original to slavery as a social and economic system.

For example, the 1853 narrative carefully noted the inadequacy of explaining the evil of slavery by leveling blame at individuals: “It is not the fault of the slaveholder that he is cruel, so much as it is the fault of the system under which he lives.” However, as I argue in my book, McQueen’s adaptation emphasizes the cruelty of individuals. With this focus, the film could be seen as tracing the atrocities of slavery to individuals’ cruelty.

Contemporary debates over slavery, race and racism continue to take place in a public sphere that has been shaped in part by cinematic films produced in Hollywood that have always perpetuated potent fantasies and misunderstandings about slavery.

Cuban cinematic treatments of slavery have sought to correct the record. They celebrate Black power and remind us of the extraordinary efforts of countless Black men and women throughout the history of transatlantic slavery to resist their enslavement.