It is carrying a cargo of Africans who have been sold into slavery in Cuba, taken on board, and chained in the cargo hold of the ship.
Amistad is a 1997 American historical drama film directed by Steven Spielberg, based on the true story of the events in 1839 aboard the slave ship La Amistad, during which Mende tribesmen abducted for the slave trade managed to gain control of their captors' ship off the coast of Cuba, and the international legal battle that followed their capture by the Washington, a U.S. revenue cutter. At the Supreme Court, he makes an impassioned and eloquent plea for their release, and is successful. [1] The lyrics from "Dry Your Tears, Afrika" are from a 1967 poem by French-speaking Ivorian poet Bernard Binlin Dadié. United States Attorney Holabird attacks Cinqué's "tale" of being captured and kept in the slave fortress, and especially questions the throwing of precious cargo overboard. A scene where Cinque sees African violets in John Quincy Adams' greenhouse and is seized with homesickness.
The heart of the film, really, is in Anthony Hopkins' powerful performance as old John Quincy Adams, who speaks for 11 minutes in defense of the defendants, and holds the courtroom (and the audience) spellbound.
The cause is supported by two Boston abolitionists, a former slave named Joadson (Morgan Freeman) and an immigrant named Tappan (Stellan Skarsgard).
| Analysis Of The Film Amistad 1574 Words | 7 Pages. On Rotten Tomatoes, the film received an approval rating of 77% based on reviews from 64 critics, with an average score of 6.9/10. Despite refusing to help when the case was initially presented, Adams agrees to assist with the case. One day, fifty captives were thrown overboard. Analysis Of The Movie ' Amistad ' 960 Words | 4 Pages “Amistad” was released in 1997 on the territory of the United States of America.The historical period, portrayed in the film, is the year of 1839. They are unlucky at first with their defense team, which is led by Roger Baldwin (Matthew McConaughey), a real estate lawyer who bases his case on property law and only slowly comes to see his clients as human beings. After all the slaves are removed from the fortress, Fitzgerald orders the ship's cannon to destroy it. Local abolitionists take up their case and hire a young and inexperienced real estate lawyer to represent them. The two men who bought them are spared, and promise to guide the ship back to Africa. Nigel Hawthorne plays President Martin Van Buren, who is portrayed as a spineless compromiser who wants only to keep the South off his back; the character is played in the same note as his pathetic old George III in “The Madness Of King George,” when more shrewd calculation might have been effective. He speaks no English, but learns a little while in prison, and a translator is found who helps him express his dismay at a legal system that may free him but will not affirm the true nature of the crime against him. Consequently, seeking to make the case more personal, on the advice of former American president (and lawyer) John Quincy Adams, Baldwin and Joadson find James Covey, a former slave who speaks both Mende and English. Susan Wloszczyna of USA Today summed up the feelings of many reviewers when she wrote: "as Spielberg vehicles go, Amistad — part mystery, action thriller, courtroom drama, even culture-clash comedy — lands between the disturbing lyricism of Schindler's List and the storybook artificiality of The Color Purple.
But he (Spielberg) wanted to make a point and I understood that. Amistad filmmakers play directly to the viewers by presenting scenes that induce four specific, albeit basic, emotions: excitement, anger, sadness, and an overarching feeling of progress by the end of the film.
He learns enough of Western civilization to see its contradictions, as in a scene where a fellow captive uses an illustrated Bible to explain how he can identify with Jesus. Slavery itself is not the issue. 1997 film Amistad was birthed during a historical biopic craze of the 1990s. 5 on December 10, 1997. I thought that was a little over-wrought. The film version of Adams' closing speech before the Supreme Court and the court's decision as read by Justice Joseph Story bear no resemblance to the much longer historical versions; they are not even fair summaries. They include a horrifying scene where, with food running low on the ship, the weaker captives are chained together and thrown over the side to drown so that more food will be left for the rest. As the ship is crossing from Cuba to the U.S., Cinque, who was a tribal leader in Africa, leads a mutiny and takes over the ship. Luckily, it is a Northern court, or they would have little chance at all. 3 interactive class activities to energize your online classroom The Lomboko slave fortress is liberated by the Royal Marines under the command of Captain Fitzgerald. Both films are about the ways good men try to work realistically within an evil system to spare a few of its victims. “Give us free!” Cinque cries in a powerful moment in the courtroom, indicating how irrelevant a “not guilty” verdict would be to the real facts of his case. (Since it was the policy of slavery to destroy African families, these scenes are especially poignant.)
We do not need movies to convince us of the evil of slavery and the Holocaust. Ambassador to the Netherlands, 1794–1797, President, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, President, Columbian Institute for the Promotion of Arts and Sciences, Massachusetts Historical Society holdings, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Amistad_(film)&oldid=985404772, Films about Presidents of the United States, United States Declaration of Independence, Album articles lacking alt text for covers, Wikipedia articles with BIBSYS identifiers, Wikipedia articles with CANTIC identifiers, Wikipedia articles with WorldCat-VIAF identifiers, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, Steven Spielberg, Debbie Allen, Colin Wilson. I really did. Much of the story revolves a courtroom drama as lawyers for the slaves seek their freedom and return home.
And another sequence in which the mechanics of the slave trade are examined, as Africans capture members of enemy tribes and sell them to slave traders.
United States Attorney William S. Holabird brings charges of piracy and murder. The case finally gets to the Supreme Court, where John Quincy Adams makes an impassioned and eloquent plea for their release. Matthew McConaughey's character is necessarily unfocused as the defense attorney; he proceeds from moral blindness to a light that surprises no one, and while we are happy for him we are not, under the circumstances, much moved. Ever since Spielberg began “Amistad,” the story has been hyped and hailed as a great untold chapter in American history, an event to put beside Nat Turner's uprising.
The musical score for Amistad was composed by John Williams. It is carrying a cargo of Africans who have been sold into slavery in Cuba, taken on board, and chained in the cargo hold of the ship. The moments of greatest emotion in “Amistad” stand outside the main story. The moral hair-splitting underlying that distinction is truly depraved, but on it depends the defense of Cinque, the leader of the Africans, and his fellow mutineers. David Franzoni's screenplay was based on the 1987 book Mutiny on the Amistad: The Saga of a Slave Revolt and Its Impact on American Abolition, Law, and Diplomacy, by the historian Howard Jones. This legal distinction is not made as clear as it could have been; the international slave trade had been outlawed by treaties by 1839, the year of the landmark Amistad incident, but those who were already slaves remained the property of their masters--as did their children.
Holabird contends that Cinque could have been made a debt slave by his fellow Sierra Leoneans. Two Naval officers, Thomas R. Gedney, and Richard W. Meade, claim them as salvage while the two Spanish navigators, Pedro Montez and Jose Ruiz, produce proof of purchase. But in praising it, I touch on the film's great weakness: It is too much about the law and not enough about the victims. Because of the release of the Africans, Van Buren loses his re-election campaign, and tension builds between the North and the South, which eventually culminate in the Civil War.
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