Behind many photographs are hidden perfect stories. Perfect stories that illuminate creative minds and creative minds that, with the help of pens or keyboards, are capable of writing scripts, as is the case today. And these scripts are sometimes made into movies. This is the case of Emancipation (Emancipation).
Clint Eastwood did it with “Raising the flag on Iwo Jima”, the Coen brothers transferring the work of Eudora Welty a O Brother! y Andrew Dominik using the photos with which one usually recognizes Marilyn Monroe for Blonde. recently was El turno by Antoine Fuqua.
photographers stuff
Emancipation, which was released on December 2 in theaters and on Apple TV+ on the 9th of that month, was born thanks to a series of photographs that were taken William D. McPherson y Mr. Oliver to the slave Whipped Peteralso know as whipped peter or simply Gordon.
In the most famous of these images published in 1863 by The Independent Peter is seen from behind with a huge keloid scar on the back of his torso.
The photograph (which has plenty of forcefulness) became a symbol, since it was used by the abolitionist movement during the American Civil War as graphic and irrefutable proof of the ferocious punishments to which slaves were subjected.
Will Smith is Gordon at 24 frames per second. And he recreates the moment of the historic session. In Emancipation we see how Fuqua and Bill Collage, the screenwriter, tell the perfect story behind.
The escape
A handful of days before Peter’s photograph showed that the cameras had arrived to change the course of history, Gordon was a slave to John y Bridget Lyons.
He was one of 40 who worked for them on a 8-mile plantation in Louisiana. One of the many whipped by the foreman Artayou Carrier.
Because of the lashes – which Gordon stopped remembering once suffered – the slave ended up spending two months in bed.
The blows drove him crazy. Out of pain he tried to shoot them all (his wife and masters included) and burned his clothes.
Ten days after this final episode, Gordon escaped from the plantation.
Like the protagonist of Fahrenheit 451, the whipped man successfully fled for 64 kilometers. He was hiding from some dogs that followed his trail, rubbing onions all over his body after crossing streams.
At the end of his journey, he met the Union military, who welcomed him and, as we already know, took photos of him during a medical examination.
Three months after the Emancipation Proclamation, Peter joined the XIX Corps of the Union, in Baton Rouge. He went from being subdued by slavers to fighting against them.
The Proclamation, issued by Abraham Lincoln On the first day of 1863, he freed more than 3.5 million enslaved African Americans from their masters in the secessionist Confederate states. Many of them, like Gordon, formalized his freedom by running away.
Peter’s long-suffering adventure would have a twist: on an expedition, Gordon was taken prisoner, tied up, beaten, and left for dead. But he survived.
His new rise to freedom brought him once more to the Union. He enlisted in the Civil War unit of the Colored Troops and there, The Liberator claimed, he fought as a sergeant in the Corps d’Afrique during the siege of Port Hudson in May 1863.
The movie
Yes, Emancipation narrates the journey of a flogged Peter in search of salvation for himself and his family.
In the awards season at the beginning of the year it did not go as expected: it was not nominated for the Oscars or the Golden Globes or any other renowned awards. She only received 3 nominations at the Image Awards.
In early October 2022, Smith and Fuqua were at the first screening of Emancipation at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s Annual Legislative Conference. They were part of it together with a group of social impact leaders.
There, at the post-screening conference, the defending Oscar winner for Best Actor said: “Throughout my career, I have turned down many movies set in slavery. I never wanted to show us like this. And then this image appeared. And this is not a movie about slavery. This is a movie about freedom. This is a movie about resilience. This is a movie about faith.”
2023-06-04 20:23:50
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