Are historical epics such as Amistad dishonest, or do they convey human truths that textbooks cannot? Stuart Jeffries and Simon Hattenstone report
The historians are sharpening their quills. Academic bile is flying in all directions. And newspaper columnists are ransacking the good ship Amistad. We’ve seen it plenty of times before. In fact, we see it every time a historical film is made.
From DW Griffith’s 1916 movie Intolerance through Gone with the Wind to Oliver Stone’s febrile historical narratives, right up to Disney’s dalliances with Hercules and Pocahontas, movies, especially Hollywood movies, have been portrayed as unreliable guides to the past.
Amistad, the new Steven Spielberg film, is about a mutiny of African slaves on the eponymous ship off the Cuban coast. The Amistad was eventually captured by an American naval ship off Connecticut and the Africans were imprisoned. Their demand to be freed and returned to their homelands subsequently went through three trials, culminating in a hearing at the United States Supreme Court.
The historian Simon Schama, writing in the New Yorker, takes Spielberg to task for misunderstanding what the Amistad incident was actually about. The climactic moment of the film comes when Anthony Hopkins, as ex- president John Quincy Adams, tells the supreme court: “We have come to understand that who we are is who we were.” A trumpet sounds over Adams’s rhetoric, and in the US at least, as Schama says, “hearts around the theatre swell like popcorn”. For Adams’s appeal here is to the founding fathers’ assertion of the liberty and equality of all mankind.
“As a clinching argument about the legality of treating the Africans as slaves or free men, this makes no sense,” Schama argues, “not least because the case turned neither on the morality nor on the legality of slavery in America, but on the slave trade on the high seas.”
And, to add insult to historical injury, Adams’s speech actually took eight hours, spread over two days (during which time one of the most odious judges died in his sleep), rather than the five minutes of damp-eyed oration he’s allotted in the film.
Amistad’s great obfuscation, historically, is to somehow imply that slavery disappeared with the triumph of the Amistad case, complete with Southern rednecks holding up their hands and admitting that they were wrong all along.
Once again, it seems, the facts haven’t been allowed to stand in the way of a good story. But, then, has history ever been an objective science? Thomas Macaulay once said that history was a compound of poetry and philosophy. As Schama points out, from its beginning, history writing has been a work of imaginative recreation.
Even Thucydides put imagined words into Pericles’s mouth for his funeral oration. And Herodotus used sources indiscriminately and mingled myth and ritual in his discursive narratives.
Is what these historians have done so very far removed from the great historical movies; say, Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers, which puts fictional characters in real events?
For its part, Spielberg’s Amistad takes liberties with the past, not only by trimming Adams’s speech and mawkishly manipulating its rhetoric, but by creating a composite anti-slavery campaigner, played by Morgan Freeman, and by selecting some aspects from the Amistad story and ignoring others. The question surely is, are such decisions justified?
Movies to do with slavery are only slightly more common than hens’ teeth, and so a good one would be a wonderful and perhaps edifying thing. After all, as a Washington Post editorial suggested: “Like it or not, more and more Americans learn much of their history from movies and television … These images form our collective images of times past … Amistad is introducing millions to a powerful chapter that was not taught in most classrooms.”
The film has been accompanied by a study guide that has been distributed to US high schools. This proved too much for some historians. Columbia professor Eric Foner, writing in the New York Times, for example, angrily condemned the information being supplied to schoolkids: “The study guide erases the distinction between fact and fabrication, urging students, for example, to study the film’s composite character [the Morgan Freeman character] rather than real African-Americans on whom he is based.”
He added: “The learning kit claims that the supreme court’s decision to free the Africans aboard the Amistad was a ‘turning point in the struggle to end slavery in the US’.
The truth is that the Amistad case revolved around the Atlantic slave trade – outlawed by international treaty long before 1840 – and had nothing to do with slavery. In the study guide, students are not told that in the 19th century it was perfectly possible to condemn the importation of slaves from Africa while simultaneously defending slavery and the flourishing slave trade in America.”
Ken Loach, a director who is regularly attacked for conflating historical incidents and inserting fictional characters, argues: “It’s important to be accurate but not to dwell on that academic accuracy because it kills the film. Historical reconstructions have academic accuracy but they become waxwork films.”
And yet Loach’s films have been attacked for their inaccuracies, chiefly by people who disagree with his politics. “With Hidden Agenda, the London Times ran a piece slagging me off for confusing fact and fiction, and waxing eloquent about the responsibilities of film-makers.
In the same week, Reversal of Fortune, the film about Claus von Blow, came out and they completely forgot to mention that it was a real event, with real people speaking words they never spoke in rooms that they had never been in – completely confusing fact and fiction. But because they had no political quarrel with it, they didn’t mention it. So there’s a hidden agenda in the way people discuss historical re- creations.”
But the factual sniping can prove very destructive to film-makers. Neil Jordan, for one. “I don’t think I’ll make another historical film, not after Michael Collins [his biopic of the Irish republican hero],” he says. “Even before the film was made, there were quotes from historians – with their own agendas of course – saying it was a despicable distortion.”
For Michael Wood, professor of English at Princeton and the author of America In The Movies, accuracy, obviously never sufficient for great art, may not even be necessary or desirable. He says: “If something is inaccurate, one should ask what’s the effect of the inaccuracy. Smaller inaccuracies can serve larger truths.
“Clearly it’s good to get things right, but people who complain about inaccuracies normally have an agenda. They argue ‘facts speak for themselves’. But those tend to be conservative claims – the facts are conservative until proved otherwise.”
As Wood says, the notion that film-makers should merely be concerned with getting the facts straight may be inimical to art, but it’s one that has proved remarkably effective for conservative critics seeking to take apart liberal or left-wing historical movies. Pull the thread of a minor factual faux pas, and the whole edifice falls apart.
“I like it when a movie-maker has an angle and it’s made perfectly clear. A film shouldn’t just confirm our prejudices, it should test us in a way,” says Wood.
Schama argues that Amistad fails to test us for exactly this reason – because it plays to our prejudices. The protagonists have views and even speech patterns very like ours today, and Schama despairs at Spielberg’s inability to admit “the otherness of the past, its obstinate unfamiliarity, the integrity of its remoteness”.
Instead, he says, the film nosedives into ancestor-worship by making those ancestors too like us.
Schama has a point. Many film-makers don’t even attempt to distinguish past from present. Indeed, they try to convince us the past is the present because they believe that’s the only way they can get an audience interested.
In James Cameron’s Titanic, Kate Winslet gives a Nosey Parker the finger – historically daft, but definitely a crowd- pleaser.
Wood concedes that it’s rather sad “if we can’t possibly interest ourselves in any story that is not relevant to us. It’s like saying we’re not interested in people unless they’re members of the family.”
But as he and Jordan and Loach are quick to point out, the relationship between past and present is more complex than Schama would have it. The past is no longer a different country, and history is no longer the Gradgrindian consensus of facts, facts, facts. Past and present are inseparable, not just for the film-maker but also for the audience.
Take Ireland, for example, Jordan says. “That issue is fought out daily in the media, academic circles and on telly … So when you make a movie about the war of independence 70 years earlier, you can’t help but get involved in the contemporary crossfire.”
Or, as Ken Loach puts it: “The only reason to make a historical film is because it illuminates the present.”