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Photo Exhibit from Nat Turner: A Troublesome
Property Photographer: Eric
Dahan
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Nat Turner’s Second Coming:
Set This House on Fire
Essay
Excerpts by Gerald Peary
(Village
Voice 29 August 2001—4 September 2001)
Nat Turner, A Troublesome Property. Directed and
co-written by Charles Burnett . . . focuses on the insurrection
that led to the violent deaths of perhaps 60 whites from
slave-owner families and of most of the 60 to 80 slaves who
participated.
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slaves not killed immediately were put on trial (before
all-Caucasian juries), and most were hanged, Turner
among them.
The
trio of collaborators on A Troublesome Property—director
Burnett, producer Frank Christopher, and co-screenwriter
Kenneth S. Greenberg—debated for several years how to
frame their dramatized history. Finally they rejected a
Ken Burns-style omniscient voice-over for a postmodern
approach.
Their
movie would not present one definitive "Nat
Turner" but shifting, contradictory
ones—re-creating episodes from Turner's life from six
chosen texts, in which six different actors would play
him |
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One
features a sub-literate, primitive Nat, the way he's
portrayed in Harriet Beecher Stowe's abolitionist novel Dred
(1856); in another, he's the eloquent, articulate leader
put forth in Randolph Edmonds's 1935 agitprop play Nat
Turner.
"We
take the stories we're given as almost etched in
stone," Burnett explains on the set. "Stowe's
Nat is a simple, angelic innocent, so we show him with a
skunk and a mountain lion. In another story, there's the
murderous Nat, so this violent person emerges with a
sword." |
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[William] Styron's
Freudian creation is one of the competing Nats.
"Nat Turner has conformed to all those who consider
him, and been rewritten in the image of people writing
about him," says Styron, who approves of the film's
Rashomon aesthetic. "Even his actual
confession is suspect, taken down when he was imprisoned
by a lawyer, Thomas R. Gray, who had every reason to
twist the words."
Courtly
and approachable, Styron plants himself in a director's
chair, trying to get by in the 97-degree Virginia heat.
Today he will watch the shooting of the horrific scene
that climaxes his novel—the only occasion that Nat
Turner murdered someone. |
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Turner
(today, Virginia stage actor James Opher) chases, stabs, and
bludgeons to death Margaret Whitehead (high schooler Megan
Gallagher), the daughter of a slave owner.
The
novelist got into the deepest trouble from his detractors in
fabricating the steamy encounters pairing Margaret and
Nat.
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"In
the novel, she teases him mercilessly, practically does
a striptease in front of him," Styron says.
"In his confession, Nat admitted this murder, so it
had to be incredibly significant that he chose this
particular person."
Styron
looks on as the camera rolls: Poor Margaret flees down a
country path and trips at a log fence. Coming up behind
her, Nat draws his weapon, and stabs.
"Very
good! Very powerful!" Burnett announces after three
quite chilling takes.
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"I never thought I'd see this scene I dreamed up,"
Styron says, stirred.
* * * * *
It's
after 10 p.m. and 13 hours of shooting when Burnett finally sits
down for a formal interview. He's weary, he hasn't eaten dinner,
and he loathes doing publicity. He's also doubtful about the
prospect of theatrical distribution for A Troublesome
Property. "It's a small film, and it's a major
proposition, a theatrical release. My films are not just for
entertainment's sake."
Postmodernist
relativism notwithstanding, who is Charles Burnett's Nat Turner?
"When I visited Southampton County," he replies in a
roundabout way, ."
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"I
met white people still fighting the Civil War, who say
of Nat, 'He's a murderer!' They can't reconcile that his
men killed women and children who were sleeping. They
identify with the dead whites but not with the rest of
humanity. They don't think about this institution of
slavery that didn't care about human life.
For
his part, Burnett, a famously gentle man, offers an
unequivocal endorsement of Turner. "He's every man
who'd fight for the liberation of others, who realized
the evils of slavery and wanted his people to live in a
normal way. Everyone has inalienable rights, and he, in
a sense, was interpreting the Constitution. Nat Turner
was more American than those whites who denied
him." |
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