Celluloid Chains: Slavery in the Americas through Film

Featuring a variety of disciplinary perspectives and analytical approaches, Celluloid Chains is the most comprehensive volume to date on films about slavery. This collection examines works from not only the United States but elsewhere in the Americas, and it attests to slavery’s continuing importance as a source of immense fascination for filmmakers and their audiences.

Each of the book’s fifteen original essays focuses on a particular film that directly treats the enslavement of Africans and their descendants in the New World. Beginning with an essay on the Cuban film El otro Francisco (1975), Sergio Giral’s reworking of a nineteenth-century abolitionist novel, the book proceeds to examine such works as the landmark miniseries Roots (1977), which sparked intense controversy over its authenticity; Werner Herzog’s Cobra Verde (1987), which raises questions about what constitutes a slavery film; Guy Deslauriers’s Passage du milieu (1999), a documentary-style reconstruction of what Africans experienced during the Middle Passage; and Steve McQueen’s Oscar-winning 12 Years a Slave (2013), which embodies the tensions between faithfully adapting a nineteenth-century slave narrative and bending it for modern purposes.

Films about slavery have shown a special power to portray the worst and best of humanity, and Celluloid Chains is an essential guide to this important genre.

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Celluloid Chains: Slavery in the Americas through Film

Featuring a variety of disciplinary perspectives and analytical approaches, Celluloid Chains is the most comprehensive volume to date on films about slavery. This collection examines works from not only the United States but elsewhere in the Americas, and it attests to slavery’s continuing importance as a source of immense fascination for filmmakers and their audiences.

Each of the book’s fifteen original essays focuses on a particular film that directly treats the enslavement of Africans and their descendants in the New World. Beginning with an essay on the Cuban film El otro Francisco (1975), Sergio Giral’s reworking of a nineteenth-century abolitionist novel, the book proceeds to examine such works as the landmark miniseries Roots (1977), which sparked intense controversy over its authenticity; Werner Herzog’s Cobra Verde (1987), which raises questions about what constitutes a slavery film; Guy Deslauriers’s Passage du milieu (1999), a documentary-style reconstruction of what Africans experienced during the Middle Passage; and Steve McQueen’s Oscar-winning 12 Years a Slave (2013), which embodies the tensions between faithfully adapting a nineteenth-century slave narrative and bending it for modern purposes.

Films about slavery have shown a special power to portray the worst and best of humanity, and Celluloid Chains is an essential guide to this important genre.

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Celluloid Chains: Slavery in the Americas through Film

Celluloid Chains: Slavery in the Americas through Film

Celluloid Chains: Slavery in the Americas through Film

Celluloid Chains: Slavery in the Americas through Film

Overview

Featuring a variety of disciplinary perspectives and analytical approaches, Celluloid Chains is the most comprehensive volume to date on films about slavery. This collection examines works from not only the United States but elsewhere in the Americas, and it attests to slavery’s continuing importance as a source of immense fascination for filmmakers and their audiences.

Each of the book’s fifteen original essays focuses on a particular film that directly treats the enslavement of Africans and their descendants in the New World. Beginning with an essay on the Cuban film El otro Francisco (1975), Sergio Giral’s reworking of a nineteenth-century abolitionist novel, the book proceeds to examine such works as the landmark miniseries Roots (1977), which sparked intense controversy over its authenticity; Werner Herzog’s Cobra Verde (1987), which raises questions about what constitutes a slavery film; Guy Deslauriers’s Passage du milieu (1999), a documentary-style reconstruction of what Africans experienced during the Middle Passage; and Steve McQueen’s Oscar-winning 12 Years a Slave (2013), which embodies the tensions between faithfully adapting a nineteenth-century slave narrative and bending it for modern purposes.

Films about slavery have shown a special power to portray the worst and best of humanity, and Celluloid Chains is an essential guide to this important genre.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9798895272176
Publisher: University of Tennessee Press
Publication date: 10/25/2026
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 372
File size: 3 MB
Age Range: 3 Months to 18 Years

About the Author

RUDYARD J. ALCOCER holds the Forrest and Patsy Shumway Chair of Excellence in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He is the author of Time Travel in the Latin American and Caribbean Imagination: Re-reading History.

KRISTEN BLOCK is an associate professor of history at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She is the author of Ordinary Lives in the Early Caribbean: Religion, Colonial Competition, and the Politics of Profit. 

DAWN DUKE is an associate professor of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She is the author of Literary Passion, Ideological Commitment: Toward a Legacy of Afro-Cuban and Afro-Brazilian Women Writers.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction

The Broken Mirror of Memory: Reflections on the Power of Slavery Films Rudyard J. Alcocer ix

Slavery In Service Of The Revolution In Sergio Giral's El otro Francisco Julia C. Paulk 1

Roots: The Re-making of Africa and Slavery in the American Mind Robert J. Norrell 24

Inheriting Chains: Lighting Effects in Humberto Solás's Cecilia Haley Osborn 40

Afro-Peruvian Cimarrones: Raiding the Archives and Articulating Race Rachel Sarah O'Toole 59

Exoticization, Mestiçagem, and Brazilian National Consciousness in Carlos Diegues's Quilombo Ignacio López-Calvo 83

Of Slavery and Humanity: Focus, Metaphor, and Truth in Werner Herzog's Cobra Verde Rudyard J. Alcocer 104

Unshackling the Ocean: Screening Trauma and Memory in Guy Deslauriers's Passage du milieu ∼ The Middle Passage Anny Dominique Curtius 121

Mulattos and the Challenges of the Third Space in Roble de Olor/ Scent of Oak Mamadou Badiane 147

(Dis)Figuring the Plantation: Discourses of Slave Space in Lars von Trier's Manderlay Edward R. Piñuelas 163

Exploring the Ugly Truth: Cinema of Integration, Slavery, and the Poetics of Beauty in El cimarrón Nemesio Gil Mirerza González-Vélez 180

Case départ: Slavery in Martinique through the Lens of Comedy Gladys M. Francis 198

Django Unchained: Slavery and Corrective Authenticity in the Southern Dexter Gabriel 222

Telling the Tula Slave Revolt: A Creolizing Affair with Neo-Colonial Implications Daniel Arbino 242

This Film Called My Back: Black Pain and Painful History in 12 Years a Slave Janell Hobson 262

Exposed on Film: The (Un) Promised Land of Nova Scotia in the Miniseries The Book of Negroes Emily Allen Williams 277

Conclusion

On Film, Historiography, and Teaching the "Experience" of Slavery Kristen Block 299

Appendix Additional Films about Slavery 311

Contributors 319

Index 325

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