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Slave Revolt on Screen: The Haitian Revolution in Film and Video Games by Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall (review)

2022; Volume: 28; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/jhs.2022.a901953

2333-7311

Michael Drexler,

Vietnamese History and Culture Studies

Reviewed by: Slave Revolt on Screen: The Haitian Revolution in Film and Video Games by Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall Michael J. Drexler Slave Revolt on Screen: The Haitian Revolution in Film and Video Games. By Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2021. ISBN: 9781496833105. 348 pp. $30 paperback. In her remarkable book Slave Revolt on Screen: The Haitian Revolution in Film and Video Games, Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall asks a seemingly simple question: why has the story of the self-emancipation of the Haitian people—perhaps the greatest story of a willingness to fight to the death to achieve liberation—not [End Page 251] been told, or been told only poorly, in the medium best equipped to represent epic events to mass audiences? After all, with topics from sagas of the ancient world to those other great eighteenth-century revolutions in France and in the British colonies in North America, the film industry has regularly taken up the task. A corollary question then arises: why, among the several films that do intersect with Haitian history, are depictions of the Revolution and early independence years so bland and misleading? And a third question ensues: what does a successful representation of the Haitian Revolution entail? As Goldstein Sepinwall herself notes, film critics may be dissatisfied with her study’s evaluative criteria, which primarily query standards of historiographic representation, or what she calls failures of narration. These include efforts that “dehumanize the revolutionaries or sanitize colonialism” or “overemphasize French ideas in the Haitian Revolution” (10) and thus privilege content over form. In one sense, the author’s blunt instruments yield unsurprising, if depressing conclusions. Well-resourced Hollywood and its European avatars have protected squeamish, primarily white audiences from facing righteous Black freedom struggles that succeeded through exercising violence against primarily white forces of oppression. Fortunately, this is but the beginning of Goldstein Sepinwall’s study, which is organized into three parts. Part 1 surveys the lackluster or outright offensive forays into representing the Revolution by mainstream North American and European filmmakers and production companies. Part 2 chronicles the underresourced, politically challenging circumstances in which Haitians have themselves struggled to tell their own stories on the big screen. And Part 3 examines a new frontier in telling history to the masses, the production of video games, recovering an amazing record of attempts to use this relatively new media by those most willing to embrace the Haitian Revolution’s grandest vision of liberation. While Part 2 may lack surprise—big-budget studios used Haiti as a seemingly empty tropical backdrop for trendy adventure and romance cinema and eschewed revolutionary themes that did not center on white heroism—Goldstein Sepinwall provides intrigue. Though Haiti generated interest among US moviegoers amid the nineteen-year military occupation (1915–1934), early efforts to allegorize the nation’s revolutionary history made only marginal improvements over sensationalized and racist zombie thrillers. Films like The Emperor Jones (1933), starring Paul Robeson, and Burn! (1969), featuring Marlon Brando, repeated negative tropes and remained ambivalent at best about the prospects of Black sovereignty after freedom from white rule. It is important to note that neither film, while inspired by Haitian history, was actually set in the country. This makes [End Page 252] the release of Lydia Bailey in 1952, which premiered in Port-au-Prince, a significant event. And here is where Goldstein Sepinwall’s intervention really begins. She pays meticulous attention to the process of creating this big-budget film: from the adaptation of the novel on which it was based, through several rewrites and changes in focus, to production itself. In doing so, she presents a deeply historicized account. We learn about the taste for films about Haiti during and after the US Occupation, but we also explore the Cold War–era censorship from the Production Code Administration and political pressure from the House Un-American Affairs Committee (HUAC). That Lydia Bailey got made at all, beset as it was by post-WWII anti-communist sentiment and preferences in Hollywood that moved away from “message films” associated with social justice projects, amazes despite the film’s shortcomings. According to Goldstein Sepinwall, this nearly forgotten film “showed that foreign filmmakers could imagine Haitians...