Who will take Will Smith’s Oscar if the actor wins it again in 2023 for emancipation? History, slavery, racism, redemption, superstar, United States. Only in the event of an artistic disaster, in a few months we will not stop listening: “Emancipation”, “Emancipation”, “Emancipation” …
Behind many photographs there are perfect stories. Perfect stories that illuminate creative minds and creative minds who, with the help of pens or keyboards, are able to write scripts, as in the case of today. And these scripts sometimes become films.
Clint Eastwood did it with “Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima”, the Coen brothers transferring the work of Eudora Welty a Oh brother! Y Andrea Domenico using the photos with which he usually recognizes himself Marilyn Monroe for blonde. Now it’s up to Fuqua.
photographer stuff
Emancipation, which will be released on December 2 in theaters and on the 9th of the same month on Apple TV +, was born thanks to a series of photographs that were taken William D. McPherson Y Mr. Oliver to the slave peter whippedalso known as peter whipped 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 a lot of vigor) became a symbol, as 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 will play Gordon at 24 frames per second. He will recreate the moment of the historical session. In Emancipation we will see how Fuqua and Bill Collage, the screenwriter, tell the perfect story behind it.
The escape
A few days before Peter’s photograph showed that cameras had arrived to change the course of history, Gordon was a slave to John and Bridget Lyons.
He was one of 40 who worked for them on a plantation eight miles from Louisiana. One of the many whipped by the foreman Bearer of Artayou.
Because of the lashes – which Gordon stopped remembering once he suffered – the slave was confined to bed for two months.
The blows drove him crazy. In pain he tried to shoot all of them (including his wife and her owners) and burned their clothes.
Ten days after this final episode, Gordon escaped from the plantation.
Like the protagonist of Fahrenheit 451, the scourge successfully escaped 40 miles. He hid from some dogs that followed in his tracks, rubbing onions on their bodies after crossing the streams.
At the end of his journey he met the Union soldiers, who welcomed him and, as we already know, photographed him during a medical examination.
After spending three months of Proclamation of emancipation, Peter joined the 19th Union Corps, in Baton Rouge. He went from being subjugated by the slavers to fighting them.
The notice, 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 separatist Confederate states. Many of them, like Gordon, have made their freedom official by fleeing.
Peter’s long-suffering adventure would come and go: During an expedition, Gordon was taken prisoner, bound, beaten and left for dead. But he survived.
His new rise to freedom brought him once again into the Union. He enlisted in the Colored Troops Civil War unit and there, The Liberator claimed, fought as a sergeant in the Corps d’Afrique during the siege of Port Hudson in May 1863.
The film
We don’t know how Fuqua will deal with Peter’s story, although something can be predicted from the intense and dark trailer. Will it be Spielberg-style in Lincoln (where Gordon’s medical exam is read by Abraham’s son)? Maybe how Steve McQueen did in the brutal Oscar-winning 12 Years a Slave?
In early October, Smith and Fuqua attended the first screening of Emancipation at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s annual Legislative Conference. They were part of it along with a group of social impact leaders.
There, at the post-screening conference, the reigning Best Actor Oscar Champion said, “Over the course of my career, I have turned down many films set in slavery. I never wanted to show us this way. And then this picture appeared. And this is not a slavery movie. This is a film about freedom. This is a resilience movie. This is a film about faith ”.
Source: Clarin
