ABSTRACT
Chronicling several generations of an enslaved family, Roots was, in 1977, one of the most watched television programs of all time worldwide. Its less remarkable remake in 2016 has prompted critics to debate the present and future of cinematic slavery. This chapter theorizes a schematic for appreciating Belle in its historically international context, a context of ongoing debate among filmmakers about their craft. It categorizes movies not simply according to their historical moment, but also more heuristically according to how their narrative and cinematic form encodes a political and critical orientation. Black filmmakers in the United States, Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean responded to mainstream cinema. The Pan-Africanist method of poetically layering history is a very different narrative strategy from history's displacement, which is the strategy of both Hollywood and evangelical cinema in the 1990s and 2000s.
