Introduction
Harriet remains to be a flash et informative film. The film grabs a historical reality and takes it beyond the imagination of a canvas of old-fashioned stories of adventure. The movie attempts to cover all the other basics of a life lived b Tubman, not forgetting her escapades to Philadelphus in 1849. Besides, there is an incorporation of Tubman’s missions that took her back to the states that enslaved people in the South. Tubman is estimated to have successfully saved around 65 enslaved people over the 13 expeditions she conducted. The film focuses on enslaved people’s lives and how a single woman saved them. The whole movie has flaws that will be critiqued in the essay for the viewer to understand the setting and themes better.
The Main Focus Attributed to The Film through Themes
The story itself appears to be inspired b the imaginative southern Gothic flairs borrowed from the 997’s Lemmon directed film. The characters in the movie seem to have a great love for the golden sunsets, south pastoral landscapes, and the masses of bright shining stars they could witness every evening. Besides, the Northern Rivers that flow to Philadelphia were seen as guidance to holiness and a source of hope for every enslaved person. Tubman says, “The hole in my head just makes God’s voice clearer” (The Potter’s House West Las Vegas, 2021, 55:24) which is a sign of his trauma as a slave child. He mentions that his whole slave life almost caused him head damage.
Religious devotions created better memories for Lemmon since it was a source of her devotion as an enslaved child. Slave songs were a way of communicating with the plantation workers by Tubman. The songs kept invoking the gospel of tradition, which wanted a call and a possible response b action. The films appear to expose the atrocities of slavery, and the director, together with the co-writer, focused on the solidarity and liberation of the people. The director and the film writers did not give much attention to the trauma, pain, and humiliation enslaved people encountered. It is a norm for historical films to have a great dwelling in miser and stale, but the director of Harriet had to give a blind eye to that.
The film’s main strength is telling Tubman’s story in a new, straightforward way without pity or making it a sermon. “I have heard their groans and sighs and seen their tears, and I would give every drop of blood in my veins to free them.” (Bell. 2020, 179). The film remains an essential aspect in the history of slavery since the whole plot proved to be educating the generations about the struggles that the forefathers went through. One can say that the film glorifies a specific race more than another. In a broader view, the film is proof and an open to what Harriet was going through to save the people that were enslaved, who were both blacks and whites.
The journey taken b Harriet does not lead her to freedom until her family gets what she wants to have as freedom. Harriet’s sacrifice makes her one of the outstanding people who can save a generation from tribulation. The film appears to have a broad view of what slavery had for the affected people (Bell. 2020). The life of an enslaved person was not as regular as one would think since the free slaves would still be brought back to their masters. The black enslavers would still play a role in catching and bringing back black and white slaves. Harriet has uncountable traits of old-school biopics, manifesting through epic speeches, soaring orchestral scores, crowd-moving moments, and unmoved heroism.
The chases in the film are suspenseful, while the violence witnessed is restrained. The pain from enslavement appears in the face of characters like Erivo and the scared bodies of other people Harriet help have their freedom (Bell. 2020). There is a fullness of disappointment on the faces of the masters and their minions, which implies their need to have the enslaved people back. The real pain and sorrow suggest the pain and forcefully gained freedom from the enslaversAs mentioned by Tubman; “I grew up like a neglected weed — ignorant of liberty, having no experience of it. Then I was not happy or contented…” (The Potter’s House West Las Vegas, 2021, 1:36). Besides, the whole film depicts a society where some races never had privileges and rights that would guarantee their freedom.
The Inaccuracy Between Film and the Historical Record
Harriet remains one of the most powerful stories and films respected in American and black history. As much as it was beautifully written, the story diminishes in its strength and importance to characters that never had significance historically (Bell. 2020). Besides, the story and the film lost taste when there was relevance given to less essential characters who never existed for entertainment purposes or had an influence on the whole story. There cannot be a problem in twisting the truth to entertain the audience. The audience needs a good story to engage them and inform them of the truth about the slave life. If the audience needs facts, they should watch documentaries or read historical books.
The main problem arises when the historical inaccuracies negatively portray a group of people, specifically the blacks that appear in the movie about black lives. After going through the whole film, I think the black slave catchers were a conventional figure in the American civil war. The truth is that there were none of them in this. White enslavers were not comfortable with the uprising of African Americans. Therefore, the chance of a white enslaver giving the Black American gun to go out and catch enslaved people running away with the possibility of them turning against slavery was nearly impossible (Bell. 2020). The slave catchers were only white men since they were the only trusted humans in the civil war. The fact is that there were more white women in slave catching as compared to the blacks.
The film adds some taste of the stigma the black community had been trying to weed out from among them and their masters. The violent black men. The stigma was used to try and normalize diverse aspects of slavery, proving that everyone had a role to play in one way or the other (Bell. 2020). This remains a fact to the point there is a feeling that reflecting on the past should remain to be the representation of the anomalies in the present aspect. Harriet echoes a rare action and makes it appear normal. The film and the writer did an outstanding work b making everything stand out from the historical accounts of the truths of American slavery.
In as much as cinema can be faulted for not being accurate on historical accounts, t remains a tremendous power holder that effectively transmits information. A dramatized film is an implication of change and transformation. Time sometimes has to be squeezed, resulting in the loss and creation of some characters. Lemmon plays freely with the dates on which events occur in the film. Tubman had a history of letting enslaved people free on the Underground Railroad before the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was passed. The law allowed runaway slaves to be recaptured and taken back to the South, where the enslavers lived. Based on the facts, the slave escape routes got established in 1850 after the act’s passage. Tubman did not take action to escape until 1849.
Conclusion
Finally, like another biopic, Harriet appears to be an analyzed version of slave life. The movie focuses mainly on the time that Tubman was a heroine b escaping the end of the days of the Underground Railroad. The whole action of heroinism compressed a decade into a two-hour film that created an engaging, dramatic and entertaining audience while meeting their demand. The enslaved people in Harriet had no freedom or right to get what anyone would have wanted. White prejudice made life hard for any black that tried to fight for the rights of the enslaved people. One would think that only blacks were enslaved, but the fact remains that all races served in the capacity of enslaved persons.
References
Bell. (2020). Harriet. New York History, 100(3), 172–173. https://doi.org/10.1353/nyh.2020.0021
The Potter’s House West Las Vegas (2021). Harriet. Baltimore, MD. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16AbnfOlU3E&ab_channel=ThePotter%27sHouseWestLasVegas
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