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The film Unchained Memories: Readings from the Slave Narratives (HBO, 2003) explores and celebrates what it calls the "unique historical record" created by the oral histories of ex-slaves in the southern USA in the 1930s. This essay treats the film, together with the oral histories that comprise its source material, as a memory-site: a discursive space for negotiation between the priorities of public memory and the private memories of individual subjects. Examining the way a documentary film "performs" an oral history archive can illuminate the way oral history itself involves scripting, characterization, interpretation, staging and rehearsal as well as the recording of the past. The commemorative achievement of Unchained Memories is remarkable despite the film's avoidance of direct commentary on race.
During the Great Depression over two thousand interviews were conducted with the last African-Americans able to give a first-hand account of what slavery was like in the years before the Civil War. The film Unchained Memories: Readings from the Slave Narratives (HBO) explores and celebrates what it calls the "unique historical record" created by the oral histories of the ex-slaves. First aired in February, 2003, in time to commemorate Black History Month, the richly layered film styles itself along the lines of traditional documentary. Its backbone is a chronologically ordered narrative of the history of slavery in the US, rooted in major historical events from the Declaration of Independence to the Civil War and Emancipation. Dispassionate voice-over narration by Whoopi Goldberg cites facts and statistics throughout, and a wide range of archival footage and period artifacts support its claims. But conventional theories of documentary film fail to account for the complex questions that arise from Unchained Memories' assertions about memory, identity, and voice. This essay treats the film, together with the oral histories that comprise its source material, as a memory-site, a discursive space where memories are sifted, ordered, and shaped by competing rhetorical demands in an effort to construe relationships among past, present, and future.
The term "memory-site" derives from the work of French historian Pierre Nora, whose "lieux de mémoire" applies more literally to memorials and monuments but provides a useful framework for thinking about any project that seeks to recover and conserve "authentic" memories from the constructed narratives of...