Amazing Grace film accused of 'prettifying' slave trade

As we report today, the new film Amazing Grace, out on March 23, is causing some debate among Britain's black church and community leaders as to whether it "prettifies" the slave trade and reduces the role of black slaves in the abolition movement to a "bit part". Lee Jasper, equalities adviser to Ken Livingstone but speaking as secretary of the Assembly Against Racism, and Richard Reddie, of the CTE 1807 commemoration group "set all free", are among the most vocal critics. I loved the film, and a few tears were trickling down my face at the end. But I can't help but see Lee's point. How can using Iaon Gruffud as the star not "prettify" a film? It's definitely worth seeing, but as Richard Reddie advised me, read a book about it before you go.

Originally, the plan was to give the story a little more space in the paper than it achieved. Here are a couple of nice pieces intended to go with it that got dropped at the last minute.

Times arts reporter Ben Hoyle wrote: Hollywood moguls, publishers and television schedulers can never resist a resonant anniversary and the bicentenary of Parliament’s vote to abolish the slave trade is no exception. In 1807 its impact was felt most keenly in Africa and at sea, where cynical captains would often dump their human cargo overboard rather than pay the fines imposed by the Royal Navy.
But in 2007, it will be marked in bookshops, homes and at the cinema, with Amazing Grace likely to be the biggest moneyspinner.

Bristol Bay, the company behind the film, is owned by Philip Anschultz, the Christian billionaire who also owns the Millenium Dome and David Beckham’s new football club, the LA Galaxy. Another of his production companies, Walden Media, demonstrated with The Lion The Witch and the Wardrobe how targeting schools and religious groups can lift a film’s box office takings. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe took more than £350million worldwide.

For Amazing Grace Walden Media has produced template sermons, school educational materials and church discussion guides to tie in with the film. They come in separate versions tailored to a US or UK audience.Walden Media has also set up The Amazing Change Campaign, a petition to end modern day slavery.

The BBC is marking the anniversary with a series of programmes on BBC Two. Moira Stuart travels to Africa and the Caribbean in search of William Wilberforce, Ms Dynamite investigates the tale of Nanny of the Maroon, a legendary Jamaican slave who became a guerilla leader and Simon Schama presents a series based on his book Rough Crossings. There will also be a three part history of racism on BBC Four.

In bookshops, the scramble for attention has also already begun. First off the mark were Baroness Caroline Cox and Dr John Marks with 'This Immoral Trade', a study of 21st century slavery published in October. Last month then saw a slew of slavery themed publications, including biographies of Wilberforce by Stephen Tomkins and John Pollock, 'Amazing Grace in the Life of William Wilberforce' by John Piper and 'Abolition! The Struggle to Abolish Slavery in the British Empire' by Richard Reddie.

Among other imminent works in the field are Jonathan Aitken’s biography of John Newton, the slaver who wrote the hymn Amazing Grace and his former Conservative Party colleague William Hague, whose own biography of Wilberforce is due out in June.

Times film critic Kevin Maher wrote this: 

It’s not always the case that bigger is better, particularly in Hollywood. Steven Spielberg’s star-studded abolitionist epic Amistad may have captured the big screen slave experience, but it could done with the cogent and persistent argument on display in Michael Apted’s smaller but similar-themed Amazing Grace. Here is a movie that tracks the UK’s original abolitionist cause through the Westminster political machine in unapologetically fine detail.

And yet, without a Spielbergian budget to back-up the production’s grand narrative aims, Amazing Grace sometimes feels slightly limited. While Amistad recreated the slaving reality in far flung locations like San Juan in Puerto Rico, Apted’s modestly budgeted movie was shot in glamorous Gloucester, and has lots of people describing slave plantations instead.

Of course, it’s not the first film to allow production logistics get in the way of a decent location shoot. A cash-strapped Roman Polanski recently produced and shot his own Oliver Twist adaptation in cheap-as-chips Prague instead of pricey London. Danish iconoclast Lars Von Trier has been recreating Middle America in both Sweden and Denmark for years, thanks to his crippling fear of flying. In an age of near limitless cheap travel it seems that traditional film productions, with their large crews, cast and equipment, remain prohibitively cumbersome beasts.

Nonetheless, the lack of recreated slaves scenes occasionally makes the issue of abolition in Amazing Grace seem like a White Man’s burden alone. Without a cast of black faces or black voices to define it, the question of slavery becomes, as it did in Amistad, a vexing moral issue for the white establishment rather than a matter of life or death for those in its grip. “He spoke for those who had could not speak for themselves,” grumbles the trailer’s stentorian voice-over, while star Ioan Gruffud, as abolitionist hero William Wilberforce, frets pensively in the House of Commons.

And yet, as history has shown us, respected UK-based black activists like Ottobah Cugoano, Robert Wedderburn, and Ignatius Sancho were all alive at the time, often published, and perfectly able to use their voices in opposition to slavery – Cugoano was notable, especially, for being the first writer in the English language to entertain the idea that black slaves had the moral duty to resist slavery.
In the end, the film opts for political intrigue and intelligent argument over epic vistas and social realities. Which is more than you usually get at your local multiplex.

Comments

[Emanuel Appel]

a postcript from America

Dear Ruth,

Slavery in ancient Israel and the Bible is an interesting topic discussed in Ask Moses.com.

In general, Jews were enslaved by fellow Jews under two circumstances

1. A thief was instructed to pay twice what he stole. If peniless, he was sold by the courts to pay back the victim.

2. A peniless man sold himself to survive

Foreigners were treated in a different, kinder manner and periodically were set free according to Biblical rules.

Greece and Rome sold people after military campaigns to pay the troops and generals. However, slavery was not a race based condition as the modern northern Europeans made it.

[Emanuel Appel]

a letter from America

Dear Ruth,

Slavery's advantage was to give gainful employment to a large group normally warring on each other and selling each other to Arab Moslem traders. Slavery still exists in parts of the Moslem world.

It is amazing that you have put on the hairshirt since anti slavery philosophies originated within various Christian English elements including Wilberforce and, in America, with the Quakers in Philadelphia.

I don't know what the point you were trying to make re the petty criticism of Phil Anschutz ( a "Christian" businessman, not a Hebe is the real meaning) and Spilbergian budgets. There's good film making and mediocre film making. Eisenstein made "Ivan the Terrible" with a minuscule budget and so was "Breathless."

Regarding Negro criticisms - they will always find something to complain about. Let them make their own film if they don't like white product.