Comparative Analysis Of The Films Pirates Of The Caribbean And Egalité For All

Looking at the Caribbean culture and lifestyle through film allows people to understand the past, however, the content must be viewed with a subjective eye. The films Pirates of the Caribbean at World’s End and PBS’s Egalité both portray different stories, ideals, and representations of this complex society. The Haitian revolution was an amazing event in history and a step in the right direction for oppressed slaves everywhere. Comparing the films and the reading we have done in class, different aspects of society show up in each of them. Each film draws a separate audience of people.

Pirates of the Caribbean appeals to a much larger group of viewers and the significant majority of them watch it for the action and do not try in the slightest to relate it to actual history and real events. Egalité being a documentary, invites historians and people who care about the Haitian Revolution. The film provides fact-based information and recreated scenes to help the viewer gain a better understanding about one of the most under narrated yet most important revolutions of all time. Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian revolution changed Saint Domingue developing the French colony into the nation of Haiti today. The transition of class and levels of society moved from the whites being superior and having all the rights and power to including mixed race citizens and finally the blacks having rights and their freedom for the first time. The former slaves ultimately destroyed their economy after gaining their rights. Having little education and understanding of how trade and the wealth of nations are build many of them only wanted what they needed to survive. If they could grow what they needed to eat and build their own houses, then why would they go back to the hell of working in the sugar cane fields. This lead to Louverture’s downfall, he knew that without the sugar trade, Haiti would fail as a nation. Toussaint understood the value of humanity and accomplished so much for the country before getting taken by the French. Nearly one million black slaves became French citizens because of this revolution.

Connecting the documentary to our class, the film is a perfect addition to the readings and helped me understand the revolution in more clarity. “The material culture of most West Indians in the post-slavery era was dominated by poverty, underdevelopment, and a grossly skewed distribution of wealth”. The effects of not economical producing at the levels countries did when slaves were in use and ruining the trade relations with the major players in Europe and America provide the explanation to the culture. Pirates of the Caribbean is less of a direct connection to what we have learned in class. The society structure and racial inequalities highlight the role of each character throughout the movie. Jack Sparrow is a crowd friendly pirate that attempts to connect the viewer with “wild side” of the Caribbean lifestyle. The smuggler is the historical term that they are trying to portray. “These smugglers and their associates lived peripatetic lives that added wrinkles to the taut Caribbean economic narrative of plantation society and giant merchant houses”. This nearly perfectly describes his character. While the lack of plantation slavery is one of the main societal flaws within the film, the representation of the smuggler is done right. The European soldiers with the British fleet have a very stereotypical connotation. They are in full uniform and constantly taking orders making them all seems perfectly behaved. “For soldiers of color, military service could be empowering and also stifling. Free Blacks and mixed-race individuals claimed honor and privileges through military service”. However, in the movie there was no people of color fighting for the British and overall a complete lack of African immigrants/slaves. Cromwell explains inadvertently the main issues regarding the film Pirates of the Caribbean at World’s End.

The history of the Caribbean is fading. Banalization and erasure of cultures and influential events unfortunately occurs with these small “less important” countries. The two films present the societies in different ways, but neither can explain it in full. “The unearthing of silences, their replacement by mentions of which the historian emphasizes the retrospective significance, requires extra labour and most often a project linked to an interpretation”. The way people tell history is selective, Trouillot says and that goes along with saying that the victor writes history. People need to understand the struggle and stories from both sides of the Haiti revolution, it was a change for both the government and citizens of France and the Caribbean population. Pirates of the Caribbean gives a surface level representation of the classes of people in the eighteenth century. Primarily in Egalité, allows for interested people to see a complete background and the facts surrounding the revolution.

Using the resources provide in class and connecting those with the film, I as a student have gained information and developed an understanding about an important time. Thinking about this going forward in History we can learn from our mistakes and through recording them correctly we hopefully will remember great accomplishment and the resiliency that humans possess to overcome times as awful as they were.