Colonialism, Cinema and Revolution

Abstract

CINEMA IS NOT ALWAYS REVOLUTIONARY, BUT REVOLUTION is always cinematic. Countless episodes from revolutionary history have been captured on celluloid for decades and populated with the familiar cast of star-studded and star-spangled ‘great men’ elevated in both Hollywood and the Euro-American mythos: Jeff Daniels as Washington, Nick Nolte as Jefferson, Paul Giamotti as Adams, and so on. This is a cinema, in other words, brimming with land speculators, slave-owners, their legal counsels, faux radicals and rapists. In all their alabaster glory, such vaunted and apparently regal figureheads have been celebrated if not outright worshipped on the silver screen over cinema’s longue durée; their powder-wigged visages regularly plastered on promotional posters in multiplexes and monumentalised in digital monochrome on streaming platforms worldwide. In Hollywood in particular, the visual history of the ‘Age of Revolutions’ unfolds as though it were an unbroken, decades-long tracking shot spanning the history of settler colonialism, Western imperialism and its jingoistic march through twentiethand twenty-first-century cinema – shot in both HD and out of the barrel of a gun. Although films based on the so-called Age of Revolutions are anything but scarce in Hollywood and European cinema, it may come as a surprise for many to learn that the Haitian Revolution is conspicuously absent from the big screen historically as today. Slave Revolt on Screen: The Haitian Revolution in Film and Video Games1 is Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall’s meticulous exploration of the visual legacy of the Haitian Revolution in Hollywood and throughout the Western world, offering a corrective to the decades of cinematic and scholarly neglect of the revolution and its historical import.