Band of Angels reflection post

      The movie Band of Angels is a film that showed what it was like to be a person of color who is able to pass for white. The main plot point of interest for me was with the character Amantha Starr who was a woman who had gone all of her life believing she was white. However, all of that changed when her father died, and she learned she was biracial. Her father had relations with her mother who was a slave. The movie shows the progression of how Amatha navigates through her identity crisis while being sold into slavery. Her progression in the film is characterized by her having an identity crisis where she learns that she is no longer the woman she thought she was. 

The complexities of this movie show a different black perspective as opposed to Gone With The Wind. Band of Angels shows the black perspective from the eyes of an educated man who is enslaved. While Gone with the Wind focused on the negative stereotypes associated with black people. The point I want to focus on is the fact that Band of Angels gave complex black characters that did not play into any stereotypes of that time period. For example, in the movie when we first meet Rau-Ru we see that he was a complex character who was well spoken and educated, who was still in bondage, but he is not treated as such. I found this interesting, because it is the opposite of how the characters of Gone With The Wind were portrayed. 

The complexity of Rau-Ru was interesting to see how he differed in his disdain for his owner Hamish Bond, while Amantha believes that Hamish treats the slaves fairly, but she has not experienced the life of a slave. Rau-Ru understood being subjected to manual labor and harsh conditions that other slaves dealt with. The other major difference between Amantha and Rau-Ru was that they were both brought into bondage, but one gained a romantic relationship, while the other developed a disdain for their captor.  

In closing, I feel that Band of Angels was a better movie in terms of the complexities of Black characters in the time period of the civil war. The movie Gone With the Wind did not give enough complexities to their black characters and they were all seen as uneducated and simple minded. However, Band of Angels did the opposite and fueled the narrative of complex Black characters for films that would come years later.