The Underground Railroad : Slavery saga hits screens
Two influential Black creators combine as Moonlight director Barry Jenkins transforms Colson Whitehead s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel into a powerful TV series.
The novel and the TV series play on the fantasy that the Underground Railroad was an actual train network
The 19th-century network of secret routes and safe houses that was developed in the US to help enslaved African-Americans escape to free states or Canada was referred to as the Underground Railroad.
Those who guided the enslaved people were known as conductors, while hiding places such as private homes, churches and schoolhouses were stations, safe houses or depots. The people organizing these locations were stationmasters.
A major event in the history of television, something that won’t be an easy watch for Amazon Prime subscribers this summer but demands to be appreciated, admired, and studied.
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In Barry Jenkinsâs reimagining of Colson Whiteheadâs popular novel âThe Underground Railroad,â it is as if the land speaks. In the light of high noon, cotton fields are menacingly fecund, owing to the work of the enslaved laborers who stand painfully erect among the crop, like stalks themselves. At night, a path leading somewhereâwhether to freedom or execution, we donât knowâpulses with death. We have known Jenkins, the director of âMoonlight,â as a portraitist. Here, working again with his longtime collaborator, the cinematographer James Laxton, he is a virtuosic landscape artist. With âThe Underground Railroad,â a compositional achievementâpictorial and psychologicalâJenkins has done for the antebellum South what J. M. W. Turner did for the sea.
The images in Amazon’s “The Underground Railroad” will remain in my mind’s eye and, I believe, the collective unconscious of all who see them long after the final credits roll.