SOURCE: Toplin, Robert Brent. Review of Slaves on Screen, by Natalie Z. Davis. Cineaste 26, no. 3 (summer 2001): 56-7.

In the following review, Toplin suggests that while Slaves on Screen has much to recommend it, Davis at times ignores the fact that films must be entertaining as well as historically accurate.

In this brief but insightful study, historian Natalie Zemon Davis examines five cinematic presentations of slavery by accomplished directors—Stanley Kubrick's Spartacus (1960), Gillo Pontecorvo's Burn! (1968), Tomás Gutiérrez Alea's The Last Supper (1976), Steven Spielberg's Amistad (1997), and Jonathan Demme's Beloved (1999). Comparing the movies' spins on history with the interpretations of professional historians, Davis discovers that scholars and movie artists often ask questions that are “parallel.” We can take film seriously “as a source of valuable and even innovative historical vision,” she says, if we keep in mind principal differences between traditional history and history on the screen.

Davis, retired...