Reshaping the Past: The Oscillation of Memories of Slavery between Past and Present as Represented in the Original American Miniseries Roots (1977) and its Remake in 2016

Abstract

Representing an atrocious side of the U.S. (United States) history, slavery has always been a sensitive issue whose discussion was steered clear by the Americans. Hollywood, for instance, as an American film industry, treated Blacks as pariahs and eschewed from giving their experience in America its due on the screen for a long time. In fact, anti-Black racism harks back to the period that extends from 1619 to 1865 when Blacks were slaves under the subjugation of the Whites. Once they got their freedom in 1865, they fought heart and soul to be fully integrated into the American society, and they succeeded after the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act in 1964 and 1965, respectively. Blacks’ positions in the American motion picture, hence, changed as well. In 1977, Alex Haley’s Roots: the Saga of an American Family (1976) was adapted into the miniseries Roots that became a smash hit. In 2016, its remake was produced to address the modern generation of the Black Lives Matter era. In this regard, this thesis explores twofold aspects: the production and the reception of the remake. On the one hand, it focuses on the way the new miniseries was modernized with reference to the context. On the other hand, it investigates how the audience received the remake. To this aim, the encoding/decoding model of Stuart Hall and the content analysis method were used not only to extract the embedded messages of the remake through a close look at some aspects of the adopted cinematographic and mise-en-scène techniques but also to analyze the stances of the audience. The results reveal that the producers availed themselves of diverse methods to speed the circulation of the remake that diverges in many instances from its original. Going in tandem with the surrounding racial happenings, the producers implemented intensive violent images, relied on more accurate information than in the original miniseries, and omitted the White’s benevolent side to point up Blacks’ staunch resistance to survive and to be accepted as part ofthe whole but not losing their African heritage, identity and dignity. The susceptibility of the audience to feed his memory by embracing and preserving the past –however horrific it was –to define and understand the present was clearly laid bare as well.