Warning: Undefined variable $num in /home/shroutdo/public_html/courses/wp-content/plugins/single-categories/single_categories.php on line 126

Warning: Undefined variable $posts_num in /home/shroutdo/public_html/courses/wp-content/plugins/single-categories/single_categories.php on line 127

By admin

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/sites/default/files/2013/03/retrieval.jpg

Last night I watched the film The Retrieval, primarily because the director, Chris Eska, won an Independent Spirit Award a Film Independent “Someone to Watch” nomination. I didn’t want to miss the chance to see fresh, pioneering film, since I’m so regularly let down by big-budget Hollywood productions. I was pleasantly surprised to discover many connections between the film and our studies of Antebellum American history and communication.

Compared to the historically inaccurate, flashy, and pithy pilot episode of “Sleepy Hollow” that I watched and reviewed in my earlier blog post, The Retrieval strives for historical accuracy. The plot features an adolescent, free African American boy named Will, who is paid a bounty to retrieve an adult slave named Nate who has left his plantation; along the way they form a close bond.

The story takes place during the Civil War, and during the movie we encounter death in various situations. Will encounters a field littered with dead soldiers, and later, his campsite becomes a battleground overnight. Also, Nate kills at least three people in hand-to-hand combat.

Due to the relatively tiny budget of the film (only $40,000!), the various representations of death struck me as far more realistic than the dramatized, stylized deaths in movies such as The Avengers or even historical films such as Glory. In The Retrieval, the deaths are unaccompanied by any provocative music or flashy special effects. Instead, each death is sudden and visceral, and very raw, and we see every moment of the act.

I connected this to Cordelia’s blog post about the way death is communicated in our contemporary media. She argues that future generations will look back at today’s film and “laugh at the implausibility and unrealistic aspects of it,” referring specifically to the use of dramatic music and scene splicing. She compares this to our ability to see the flaws and lack of realism in Civil War-era photographs. I would argue that The Retrieval‘s portrayal of death is far more honest than photographs of death from the 1860’s, and goes farther than most of today’s films in communicating death without glorification or censorship.

Image source: http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/sites/default/files/2013/03/retrieval.jpg