Black Images In Film Movie Review Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Black Images In Film - Movie Review Example The film deconstructs the image of the black man and the idea of the slave that is the added burden of his image (that Griffith actually justifies using Woodrow Wilson's writings in "A History of the American People". La ltima cena reveals the Calibn theme (the Hegelian master-slave ideology), colonizer and colonized binary, which is mainly influenced by the Cuban poet Roberto Fernndez Retamar's 1971 essay on Cuban revolutionary aesthetics, entitled 'Caliban'. Apart from that Caliban is an important symbol for postcolonial Cuba, since it gives a voice to the slave and allows an inversion of gaze where the "Other" finally speaks in his own language, desperately usurped by the master. Caliban was the name of the half-man half-fish in Shakespeare's "Tempest", a direct metaphor of the anthropological 'cannibals', that served as a landmark discourse for justifying the colonial rule which aimed at civilizing the savages, mainly the African Americans or the blacks. Thus the Calibn theme is of particular historical interest within the Latin America cinema of the seventies, where it was seen as symbolic of colonialism and enslavement.3 However, unlike 'The Seventh Seal', which looks Christian on the surfa ce but is actually existential, 'The Last Supper' has an existential approach for grappling at Christian salvation through an anatomy of slavery. Thus, when an enlightened and pious aristocrat (a White) attempts to celebrate the Last Supper with his slaves, the hideous relationship between the class system and the religious establishment is made to question. The film explore and adopt an experimental approach to the problem of historical truth. Alea's black comedy, La ultima cena achieve an allegorical quality which becomes a distinctive trait of the entire movement: the ability to speak of subjects on more than one level at the same time, of the present while talking of the past, for example, or of politics while talking of religion. At the same time, the exploration of these themes quickly left the aesthetic of neorealism behind, as directors and cinematographers sought to create a visual style, which matched the legendary qualities of the subject matter. The Last Supper is a caus tic, anti-religious social satire and role-playing gets drunkenly out of hand, the result is a slave rebellion -- and it is time for property ownership to reassert its place of precedence in the scheme of things. During Holy Week at the end of the eighteenth century, a count visits his Havana sugar mill on a day a slave has run away. The count tells his cruel overseer, Don Manuel, to pick 12 slaves who will be guests at the count's table. Don Manuel objects, but to no avail. The twelfth guest is the recaptured runaway. During the dinner, using religious analogies, the count lectures his guests on the perfect happiness possible in slavery. They in turn tell stories and make requests. He promises no work on Good Friday, but he leaves early that morning and Don Manuel rousts the slaves for a long day cutting cane. They rebel. Which side will the count take D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915) has been defined as a domestic melodrama; a landmark epic that originally was originally called The Clansman.. What makes the