I have no idea what transaction(s) permitted the transformation of the 2000 French film Passage du milieu by Martinique-born Guy Deslauriers into the 2002 HBO English-language television version, The Middle Passage, but in the U.S. what is available on DVD isn’t the real film at all but the HBO-thing that’s being shown to schoolchildren as […]
Daily Archives: December 24, 2009
On July 2, 1839, a slave revolt occurred that is the starting-point of one of Steven Spielberg’s most widely disparaged films, Amistad, whose title is the name of the cargo (not slave) ship transporting 53 Mendians from West Africa, some of them children, from a slave market in Havana, Cuba, to the settlement of Puerto […]
Not having read Marguerite Düras’s novella Dix heures et demie du soir en été, which Düras herself and Jules Dassin, this film’s director, adapted, I cannot say what does or does not go on there; but I don’t see in the film evidence of the infidelity between Paul and Claire that everyone else takes as […]
Dennis Grunes 