As a number of recent studies have noted, there has been a kind of amnesia in France regarding Haitian history and slavery in general. It is doubly impressive that the film was made in France. For their part, Haitian directors have focused on more recent historical events in their works (see for instance Raoul Peck’s 2013 masterpiece Assistance mortelle, a devastating indictment of the international response to the 2010 Port-au-Prince earthquake). One film loosely based on the Haitian Revolution, Gillo Pontecorvo’s Burn!, took liberties with Haitian history precisely in positing a white character, played by Marlon Brando, as the puppet-master of the Revolution, rather than suggesting that African slaves planned their revolt. Glover stated that he was unable to get his project financed in the U.S. Even American films that deal more seriously with the violence of slavery (or civil rights struggles) seem to need a white hero, as in Amistad and Mississippi Burning. When European or American directors do portray slavery, they generally minimize its brutality (see for instance the 1939 classic Gone With the Wind, and more recently Frank Wildhorn’s 1999 Broadway musical The Civil War, which reduces slavery’s ills to the separation of spouses who are sold to different plantations). Western filmmakers tend to shy away from subjects like the Haitian Revolution issues of race and slavery remain emotionally fraught long after abolition. On the one hand, it is remarkable that the film was even made. In its shortcomings, I would argue, the movie exemplifies French amnesia about the Haitian Revolution and ambivalence about slavery and colonialism in general.

The violence of slave-owners is almost entirely absent, while that of slave rebels is shown in vivid detail. Though it was well-intentioned and has some positive features, overall it represents a distortion (I would even say a revisionist view) of slavery, as well as of the Haitian Revolution the film implicitly shifts blame from French whites and toward mulattoes, the Spanish and even blacks themselves. In 2012, the French TV station France 2 aired a two-part miniseries on Toussaint, which many hoped would fill this gap. However, the project has run into multiple roadblocks and may never be realized.

The American actor/director Danny Glover has sought to fill this lacuna with an epic production on Toussaint Louverture, the Revolution’s leading general. Yet while numerous films have been made on other revolutions, the Haitian Revolution still suffers from neglect. In recent decades, scholars have paid increasing attention to the Haitian Revolution. Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall California State University, San Marcos

Toussaint Louverture by Philippe Girard