Before
moving to this school, I went to Randolph School and even before the middle of
the first quarter, we had already watched two movies in my history class about
slavery. I believe that many teachers
think that when they show a movie in class the students are not paying
attention so they are not learning anything.
Well, obviously if you do not pay attention when watching a movie you
will not get anything out of it. This is
the only way that I agree with teachers when they say they do not want to show a
movie. You cannot force students to pay
attention to the movie, but you cannot force them to take notes or pat
attention when the teacher is lecturing either.
Another argument is that sometimes history gets changed in a movie to
make it more entertaining or appealing to the viewer. Sadly, this does happen, but we can still
learn from the big ideas.
The two movies we watched were Glory and 12 Years a Slave. The
director of Glory, Edward Zwick, said
that his main goal when making this movie was to review history, and that is
exactly what he does. Another movie
about slavery that was popular around this time was Gone With The Wind. He says
that he absolutely was not trying to outdo Gone
With The Wind when making his film.
Like I said before, sometimes history
gets changed when it makes it to Hollywood.
Some inaccuracies in Glory include
some small things, such as when the Confederate fortress was defending the
Charleston Harbor. In the movie, they
were moving north to south, but when it really happened, they went south to
north. It also shows in the movie that
Robert Gould Shaw, played by Matthew Broderick and the main character, was
Governor Andrew’s first choice to command the regiment and that he took the job
right away. In reality, he was not the
governor’s first choice, but when he was offered the position, he hesitated for
a long while before accepting. Probably
the biggest inaccuracy was the way that the 54th Massachusetts was
depicted. It was depicted in the movie
as a regiment made of runaway slaves, but it was mainly made up of free blacks
recruited from New York and Pennsylvania, as well as Massachusetts.
Just like there are historical
inaccuracies in Glory, there are a
few in 12 Years a Slave as well. Steve McQueen, director of 12 Years a Slave, said that his main
reason for making this movie was to tell a story about the time of slaves, but
he did not want to have an obvious character, such as Harriet Tubman or someone
that most people know about. That is why
he chose to tell about Solomon Northup.
Most of the inaccuracies are very small.
In the movie, Solomon has only two children, but he really had
three. While they were on the ship, it
shows one of the slave owners murdering a slave, which did not happen in real
life. There is some controversy over one
thing though, and that is whether he was actually drugged or not before being
sold into slavery. In his book, he
states that he does not remember what happened that night, so he suspects that
he was drugged.
The events and facts that were
twisted or mistook in both of these movies were very minor. We can still see the big picture of what
happened in real life and know that the times were horrible. In Glory,
we can see that there were many black men, slaves or not, fighting for
there freedom and equality. It does not
really matter whether he was first choice or not. We can see in 12 Years a Slave that a free man was tricked into leaving his home and
was sold into slavery. How many kids he
ha does not really matter, just that he has a family. We see that the times were very rough for all
blacks, free or not. Whenever people saw
a black person in these times, they were assumed to be a slave whether they
were one or not. Black people were all
treated awfully and they did not deserve that.
We all deserve our freedom and thankfully, we all have that now.
Sources, Film Research – Glory & 12 Years a Slave
