a guideline to your film review (American lit I homework #1)

A Guideline to Your Film Review

American Literature I 10/15/08
Teaching Assistant: Yuan-yang Wang (王遠洋)

This guideline intends to help you develop the film review of Amistad (1997). The topics offering here are NOT necessary for you to follow, and you can definitely come up with your own ideas about the film. Please submit your film review of 1-2 pages (Times New Roman 12, 1.5 space) to me by noon in week 7 (10/29). The grading of this film review is 5%. Plagiarism of any form will not be allowed. The topics are as follows:

1. Civilization and Its Atrocities

While Cinqué tells his story to Baldwin, film viewers realize that he is brutally caught by African men by a net. Even though he wants to offer to share his harvest with them to exchange his freedom, African men still take him to Lomboko and placed him on Teçora. Why African men do this kind of atrocity to his native people? Houston A. Baker, professor of Afro-American literature and culture at Vanderbilt University, provides us a possible answer, 〝...in the first chapter of [The Life of Olaudah Equiano] when the author notes that the Africans' desire for products of industry (e.g., firearms) often occasioned intertribal wars designed to produce slaves as objects of barter in the transatlantic slave trade〞 (17). Therefore, African men in the film probably catch Cinqué to get some material stuff. However, African American critic Martin Kilson reminds us that what they received by bartering from Western civilization are 〝as frivolous as beads for adornment〞 (46). Discuss the negative perspectives of the so-called civilization by the filmic representation of slavery in Amistad.

2. Music and Dancing as Resistance

Timothy Corrigan in A Short Guide to Writing about Film urges film viewers to 〝listen to the movies〞 (69). What sound do you hear in Amistad? Why Steven Spielberg puts African music and dancing in some particular scenes? For example, when one of the Mende dies, his countrymen refuse to give his body to those Christians but keep it in their own ceremony. Consider the contrast between the Christian chanting and the African ceremony. Or, when Baldwin tells Cinqué that the judge of the Amistad case is replaced, he is so furious that he starts to dance in front of a campfire. African music and dancing, in Baker's words, are the roots of Afro-American expression which expresses 〝sense of who they are〞 (181). Music and dancing affirms their African roots and identity of human being instead of nonhuman slavery. Discuss the two scenes mentioning above or other scenes engaging the cultural form of African music and dancing to elaborate Africans' resistance to the white people in Amistad.

3. The Paradox of The Declaration of Independence

Adams is a key character in the film. According to Natalie Zemon Davis, professor of history at Princeton University, Adams's analogy between American Revolutionary leader Patrick Henry and Cinqué reminds the Supreme Court that all men are created equal (78). Both Henry and Cinqué struggle for their rights to be a free individual, but Cinqué is cruelly treated as a slave. Adams quotes lots of lines in Thomas Jefferson's The Declaration of Independence such as 〝every man has a right to life and liberty.〞 Focus on the very last scene of Anthony Hopkin's Adams delivering his speech about the Amistad case to the Supreme Court and discuss the role of The Declaration of Independence in Amistad.

4. Analyzing the Characters in Amistad

Discuss one of the characters, or compare and contrast any two of the characters from Amistad and relate your analysis to the issues that you try to elucidate in the film.

References:

Baker, Houston. A. The Journey Back: Issues in Black Literature and Criticism. Chicago: The U of Chicago P, 1980.
Corrigan, Timothy. A Short Guide to Writing about Film. 3rd ed. New York: Longman, 1998.
Davis, Natalie Zemon. Slaves on Screen: Film and Historical Vision. Massachusetts: Harvard UP, 2000.
Kilson, Martin, and Addison Gayle. 〝The Black Aesthetic.〞 Black World 24 (1974): 30-48.
Lee, Yu-cheng. 〝From the Black Aesthetic to Black Cultural Studies: An Interview with Houston A. Baker.〞 Tamkang Review 28 (1998): 169-93.

Film Review Websites:
http://www.mrqe.com/
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/frontpage