Much of the most important part of the film Emancipation (available on Apple TV+) by Antoine Fuqua, spends time reconstructing a historical moment. The director’s camera meticulously watches as a slave shows his scars to a camera.
In the middle of the 18th century, photography was a novelty, a fairground event. But this time, he pierced the veil of the historical. So the director gives it an air of an extraordinary, unrepeatable event. He shows, almost with careful surgical precision, the way history is constructed.
Gordon (played by a solid Will Smith), called “Peter” to protect his identity, knows that his body is evidence. That each scar that crosses his back is a fact that covers many others. But that is also a deep and painful story of a community. His, that of a country, those of hundreds of men under arms who died daily on the battlefield. So Fuqua allows this unique moment, which would shake up American culture, to become something more.
In fact, much of Emancipation, is a reflection on the horrors that human beings commit against themselves. Of that historical brutality that genocides and wars sustain as a demonstration of a teepee of realistic evil. But moving away from a good part of the films related to slavery, Fuqua analyzes violence from the search for redemption.
Emancipation
Emancipation is a reflection on the horrors that human beings commit against themselves. Of that historical brutality that genocides and wars sustain as a demonstration of a teepee of realistic evil. But moving away from a good part of the films related to slavery, Antoine Fuqua analyzes violence from the search for redemption. Like the image that would amaze and move the world, Emancipation is a narrative that seeks to uphold the premise that the future can be rewritten. That, in fact, it can be sustained and threaded through completely unknown spaces until it shows something completely new.
Like the image that would amaze and move the world, Emancipation is a narrative that seeks to uphold the premise that the future can be rewritten. That, in fact, it can be sustained and threaded through completely unknown spaces until it shows something completely new.
A mysterious story that holds a powerful journey
Both in Fuqua’s film and in the real story, the question of testimony and facing the truth is paramount. In fact, in one of the most powerful lines of the film, it is evident that the intention of the plot is to remember. Make it clear why the photo of “Failed Peter” is of profound importance to the future.
At the same time, why the film recalls an almost forgotten fact in an unprecedented historical record. Both films are reconstructed and linked to support the perception of good and evil. For Fuqua, American morality is of considerable importance. So much so that a good part of the dialogues are destined to remember in retrospect why photography is a historical milestone. Emancipación is based on slavery and, of course, explores its pain.
A witness to a terrible event
But it does not do so in the general idea of a greater event. It focuses on a man who suffered the horrors, on the disturbing idea of the hundreds of victims who were never recognized. Will Smith’s Gordon is a careful version of the American conscience. At the same time, of the solitary responsibility that each man and woman has to face violence. “I want the whole world to know what happened” the character repeats more than once. He does it, moreover, with the powerful feeling of turning his own story into a testimony of incalculable value.
So that Emancipation, tries to become the movie version of “Whipped Peter.” Of the inevitable and increasingly harsh memory, about a type of perverse perception about the race capable of leaving wounds in an entire country. Photography builds a hero, it also allows Gordon to be a witness. Little by little, as his story is told in amazingly dark and uncomfortable scenes, it is clear that Fuqua wants the viewer to ask questions.
That questions nature about the goodness and objective of his character. He does it by putting him at the center of the story, by holding what he hopes to narrate on his shoulders. Just like the photograph of “Flogged Peter”, Will Smith’s character is a man who knows his story, he has the weight of silences. A version of the brutality that nobody tackled until then. Out of sheer hopelessness.
A document, a film, unanswered questions
In 1863, two photographers did the unimaginable in a North America torn apart by civil war. They took a survivor of slave violence and photographed the story told by his scars. Emancipation it takes that fact and turns it into a crack in the American narrative about its own sins. As the same argument makes clear, until then, there were few visual testimonies about what happened in labor camps.
But the figure of the former slave Gordon, who unequivocally showed the mistreatment to which slaves were subjected, baffled the world. Emancipation he wants that bewilderment to be a perpetual look at time. A broad conception about the identity of the North American towards the brutality of a historical legacy. Something that he achieves with patience and a powerful pulse that transforms it into a tough, uncomfortable film, but also into a brilliant narrative exercise on pain.