9/12/14
Film Essay
USH
Learning History through Film
Some people say that you cannot learn real historical facts from a movie, but they would be wrong. Sure you can go see a movie that is just meant to be silly and funny and doesn’t really teach you anything at all, but there are also movies that are packed full of amazing information. Like in the two movies: 12 Years a Slave and Glory. These two movies both revolve around slavery and racism. Both of these movies are packed full of cold hard facts and information that can really stick with you throughout the rest of your life.
In the movie Glory, which is about the 54th regiment in the civil war, which was one of the first regiments to allow African American people to fight, has many real life facts about the civil war era. Many African Americans, be it they were free-men or maybe even a few run-away slaves, flocked to sign up for this extraordinary opportunity. In the film there were many doubts about this regiment and people were starting to wonder if it was worth training these men with little to no battle skills, which was exactly what happened all those years ago. All the battles and casualties in the movie match what actually happened almost perfectly. The way some of the higher ranking officials treated the soldiers was in a way that had far less respect than the treatment of white soldiers.
In the movie 12 Years a Slave, a free African American man, with a wife and a family, is captured by two con artists and sold into slavery. Unfortunately, this too happened way too often in the real world before the civil war. This movie has been discussed by thousands of professional critics and historians about its historical accuracy. This movie, which is based on the 12 Years a Slave book, is all first had accounts of what really happened to that man. And who better to hear it from than the man himself? There are plenty of scenes in the movie that are very historically accurate, from the kidnapping, all the slaves packed in the bottom of the boat, the slave auction, the whipping, the field work, and just the plain brutality and meanness of some masters. Even the songs the slaves sing in the fields were actual songs that would have been sung in that time period.
Learning about history can be boring to some students if all they do is read textbooks day in and day out. Watching a good and historically accurate movie is far more interesting and effective than reading a boring old textbook. The emotional scenes in these two movies help you emphasize with the characters and really feel the way they felt all those years ago. Granite there may not be too many of these great movies out in the world today because of the complexity of making a good historical movie without it being a complete bust. The director of one of these movies has so much to consider during the process of making the film, but if it is done right, there is no better way of learning history than from a historically rich and accurate movie.
Sources,
Film Research – Glory and 12 Years a Slave
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| Emotional and physical scars are seen |
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| Emotional final scene of Glory |
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