When the ten episodes ofUnderground Railroad were sent to the press, Barry Jenkins accompanied them with a text. It reads: “It has not escaped me that about fifty years after the genocide which threatened the future of his ancestors Steven Spielberg realized Schindler’s List, whereas about fifty years after the end of the genocide perpetrated by his ancestors DW Griffith gave us Birth of a nation. ” This suggests the magnitude of the task that the director of Moonlight (Oscar for best film in 2017) was assigned by adapting Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead’s novel (The Paperback, 2017).
The title refers to the network of abolitionists, black and white, which, in the years before the Civil War, had formed to help slaves in southern states escape bondage. On this historical fact, the book and the series have built – each in its own way – an allegory by which the underground network becomes an underground network of railways transporting fugitives across the United States, each station of which offers a different face of oppression and racism, as seen by the protagonist, Cora, played by the South African actress Thuso Mbedu.
After the miniseries Roots (2016), adapted from Alex Haley’s 1977 story, after Twelve Years a Slave (2013), by Steve McQueen, Barry Jenkins’ fresco continues the movement by which the history of slavery returns to those who lived it – slaves and their descendants -, shattering representations that for centuries , the heirs of the masters – from DW Griffith to Margaret Mitchell – had built around this crime.
One month before the launch ofUnderground Railroad, from Los Angeles, Barry Jenkins returned to this titanic shoot, in terms of duration and budget, as well as the historical and political stakes of this adaptation.
You face, from the first episode, the representation of the atrocities committed to perpetuate the institution of slavery. How did you think about this question, what artistic answers did you give to it?
It was the most difficult to resolve. The works speak to each other: there was Roots, in the 1970s, then Gordon Parks adapted Solomon Northup’s story [pour la télévision publique américaine, en 1984], before Steve McQueen did Twelve Years a Slave more recently. All these images constitute a building. Every time someone comes to represent this topic, they widen the space in which their successors will work. My images stand on the shoulders of Steve McQueen’s images.
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