Multimedia Collection
Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property
DVD
60 min
2002
E169.12 .N39 2002 DVD
Nat Turner's slave rebellion is a watershed event in America's long and troubled history of slavery and racial conflict. Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property is about the multiple ways in which that moment has been remembered and interpreted by historians, novelists, dramatists, and artists.
The film adopts an innovative approach: interspersing documentary footage and interviews with dramatizations of different versions of the story, using a new actor to represent Nat Turner in each version. As literary critic Henry Louis Gates explains in the film, "There is no Nat Turner back there, whole, to be retrieved. You would have to go and create Nat Turner."
The film evaluates the authenticity of the earliest source, The Confessions of Nat Turner, assembled by a white Virginia lawyer from jailhouse interviews. It then follows through history the controversy over the Nat Turner story. Alvin Poussaint and Ossie Davis recall how Nat Turner became a hero in the Black community. Religious scholar Vincent Harding and legal scholar Martha Minow reflect on the nature of race and memory in America. And finally, the film examines how the publication of William Styron's Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Confessions of Nat Turner, provoked one of the most bitter intellectual race battles of the 1960s.
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