USA,
1996, 96 min
Shown in 1997
CREDITS
- dir
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Charles Burnett
- prod
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Dennis Stuart Murphy
- scr
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Bill Cain
- cam
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Elliot Davis
- editor
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Dorian Harris
- cast
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Carl Lumbly, Beau Bridges, Lorraine Toussaint, Bill Cobbs, Allison Jones
- source
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The Disney Channel, Production Department, 3800 West Alameda Avenue, Burbank, CA 91505. FAX: 818-0566-1358
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COMMENTS
Charles Burnett in person.
OTHER
In this intense drama of courage and humanity in the face of the brutality of slavery, a plantation slave named Nightjohn (Carl Lumbly) defies the law by teaching another slave, a 12-year-old girl named Sammy (Allison Jones), how to read and write. The only other slave on the plantation who even knows the alphabet had a thumb and forefinger chopped off as punishment. Working with a theme akin to that of Ray Bradbury’s novel (and François Truffaut’s film) Fahrenheit 451—though it’s given a substantially different edge by being set in the past rather than the future—Nightjohn views illiteracy as a central adjunct of slavery. Yet the film isn’t merely a history lesson about people who lived some 165 years ago but a story with immediate relevance. Part of what’s so wonderful about it is its use of fairy-tale feeling to focus on real-life issues, not to evade or obfuscate them. Nightjohn’s ambience is placed at the service of myth—myth that embodies a lucid understanding of both slavery and literacy. Sammy and Nightjohn may sometimes come across as superhuman, but the world they inhabit and seek to change is in no sense fanciful. Director Charles Burnett has been called “the most gifted and important Black filmmaker this country ever had” and Nightjohn, an “emotionally overpowering, almost perfectly realized, wholly accessible triumph.”
—Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader
FACTOID #81
Anjelica Huston was the first recipient of the Piper-Heidsieck Award in 1991. When Huston received the prize from the champagne maker, she joked, “Can I drink it?”
