Slavery on Screen from Havana to Hollywood: A Themed Playlist

Philip Kaisary
Front cover of Philip Kaisary’s From Havana to Hollywood: Slave Resistance in the Cinematic Imaginary (SUNY Press, 2024)

It is an inescapable fact that Hollywood slavery films have established a popular historiography of slavery for a global audience and have played a major role in the generation of public knowledge and opinion about slavery and its inheritance. However, from the earliest days of cinema, Hollywood has promoted, at best, a very partial view of slavery. Black subjectivity, Black points of view, Black voices and stories, and Black historical achievement have all been routinely marginalized or overlooked. In particular, there is a striking lack of films that centre Black resistance to slavery.

While conducting research into the representation of slavery in cinematic history, I discovered that, in contrast to films coming out of the United States, in Cuban cinema there is a tradition of foregrounding Black resistance to slavery. In my recent book, From Havana to Hollywood, I argued that this foregrounding challenges the ways in which slavery has been fundamentally misremembered and misunderstood in North America and Europe. I also argued that the widespread absence of representation of Black agency in Hollywood slavery films should be understood in systemic terms and as an instance of a longstanding aversion to the recognition of historical Black achievement.

This themed playlist showcases four cinematic feature-length films produced in Havana in the 1970s that challenge the longstanding tradition of eliding Black resistance to slavery. It also showcases one atypical Hollywood production that spectacularly subverts the format of the Hollywood ‘swashbuckler’ to stage a dramatic story of Black revolution – Gillo Pontecorvo’s Burn! of 1969.

Featured Image: Evaristo Márquez as José Dolores in Burn! (Gillo Pontecorvo, France/Italy/USA, 1969).

French promotional movie poster for Burn! (aka Queimada)
Burn! (aka Queimada, Gillo Pontecorvo, France/Italy/USA, 1969).

Gillo Pontecorvo’s Burn! is the exception that proves the rule: a Hollywood film that communicates a stunning and radical message of Black insurrection as a liberatory historical force. Burn! narrates a story of slave resistance and revolution on a fictionalized Caribbean island called “Quiemada” that at the outset of the film is a Portuguese slave colony. Midway through the film, Quiemada achieves independence and the first act of the new provisional government (a government of and for the planter class and international capital) is to proclaim the abolition of slavery. However, Burn! contends that expansionist modern capitalist imperialism is the deep causal explanation for the suffering of the oppressed. Fusing the practices of “First,” “Second,” and “Third” Cinema, and bridging “mass” and “high” culture, Burn! insists upon the imperative of anti-imperialist revolutionary social transformation.

Note: For the American and British markets, United Artists (who wished to distance themselves from the film’s politics) cut the film’s running time – against Pontecorvo’s wishes – by around twenty minutes. This results in a regrettable diminution of narrative coherence. For further information and background see: Kaisary, “‘Our First Cry of Freedom’: From Revolution to Liberation in Gillo Pontecorvo’s Burn!” available here: https://doi.org/10.2307/jj.18254246.6 and here: https://www.jstor.org/stable/jj.18254246.6.

Still from La última cena (1976)
La última cena/The Last Supper (Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, Cuba, 1976).

An ironic historical drama of slave revolt and religious hypocrisy set in 1780s Cuba, La última cena was a breakthrough moment in the history of Cuba’s national film institute, the Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos. The film’s plot is based on a single paragraph taken from El Ingenio (The Sugar Mill), a groundbreaking work of scholarship by the Cuban historian Manuel Moreno Fraginals. An aristocratic Havana plantation owner decides one Easter week, in imitation of Christ, to invite twelve of his slaves to sup with him at his dinner table. However, far from mollifying the enslaved workers or reconciling them to their status, the Count’s twelve chosen slaves respond to their master’s antics by organizing an uprising and burning down the sugarcane mill, thereby demonstrating their selfhood and asserting their agency.

Still from Rancheador (1976)

Sergio Giral’s slavery trilogy: El otro Francisco/The Other Francisco (Cuba, 1974), Rancheador/Slave Hunter (Cuba, 1976), and Malualua (Cuba, 1979).

Sergio Giral is one of the greats of Afro-Cuban cinema yet his films have fallen into neglect and are mostly unknown. However, Giral’s slavery trilogy is a glorious and innovative celebration of Black Cuban agency that evidences the centrality of Cuban film to the new Latin American cinema movement that emerged in 1967. In El otro Francisco, sentimental, bourgeois perspectives of slavery and abolition are turned upside down. In Rancheador, the perspectives of various poorer whites — smallholder farmers and slave catchers — are brought to the fore to emphasize the insufficiency of race, when taken in isolation, as an explanation for the social dynamics of oppression in slave holding societies. In Maluala, the strategic and political dilemmas faced by the leaders of Cuba’s maroon communities are emphasized as part of the film’s depiction of the growth of Afro-Cuban consciousness. Foregrounding perspectives that had for long been sidelined, Giral’s trilogy foregrounds Black resistance to slavery and narrates a counter-history of Cuban slavery and abolition.

Philip Kaisary is the 2023–25 Ruth and Mark Phillips Professor of Cultural Mediations and Associate Professor in the Department of Law and Legal Studies, the Department of English Language and Literature, and the Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art, and Culture at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. His publications include From Havana to Hollywood: Slave Resistance in the Cinematic Imaginary (SUNY Press, 2024) and The Haitian Revolution in the Literary Imagination: Radical Horizons, Conservative Constraints (University of Virginia Press, 2014). His current book project, forthcoming with Palgrave Macmillan, is titled, Worlding Law and Literature: A Materialist Critique and Reconstruction.

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