Overly Strong Ties

    All in all I really enjoyed the movie. I wouldn't have thought that Oprah Winfrey is such a good actress. The one big weakness of the movie is that it tries too hard to follow the novel, a strategy which ultimately fails. I certainly liked the way flashback techniques were used to display glimpses of the ex-slaves' past. Techniques like these should have been used throughout the movie and not only in the first half hour. This would have helped to condense the plot and loosen the overly strong ties to the novel.

Kai Thomsen

Oprah Show as Appetizer and Mediator!

   Although I did not have the opportunity to see the movie, I want to comments on the excerpts and studio discussion presented in the Oprah Winfrey Show [two-part broadcast in Germany, April 1999]. I had the pictures from those excerpts in mind as well as the comments on the film and novel while I read the book. The show thus helped me to understand the novel better, as I thought that it was sometimes very hard to read. Many passages became clearer and I remembered from the show what Toni Morrison wanted to express in some difficult sections.

   In the end I really liked the book and found it interesting that Toni Morrison wrote about a former slave who is haunted by her past. I don't remember having read anything about the horrors the slaves went through after they had escaped to freedom - the fear of being re-captured or the fear that one of their children might have to suffer the degradation of slavery. In Morrison's Beloved Sethe as a young woman has to live with this fear. She killed her child knowing that even death would be better than being enslaved. But despite her certainty about this, she is haunted by her conscience and the ghost of her dead child, long after Emancipation.

   What I'm still feeling unsure about is whether Beloved actually appeared. For me the events of the novel which took place after Beloved returned could also have happened only in Sethe's mind as a projection of her conscience and fantasy. But this thesis would be difficult to prove as all the other characters are able to see and talk to Beloved, too. Can't we see the ghostly Beloved as both - figment of Sethe's imagination and flesh-and-blood?

Ilke Bewerunge

Oprah, Thandie, and the Soundtrack:
Competition for the Novel

   When I first saw Oprah Winfrey in her talkshow on tm3 praising "her" new film Beloved, I could not imagine this to be a clever adaptation of Toni Morrison's novel. I had been reading the book with as much enthusiasm and fun as horror and disgust, and was therefore quite sceptical about whether the film, starring Oprah as Sethe, could really compete with Morrison's novel.

   However, I have to admit that after the first quarter of an hour of the film at the latest, I was totally absorbed by it - and quite surprised how close to the novel it was. And despite my prior prejudice toward the acting of 'Oprah the Great,' she did a good job and portrayed Sethe's character quite realistically and true to Morrison's conception throughout the film.

   Two things particularly impressed me: Firstly, the acting of Thandie Newton as 'Beloved' fully represented the image that I remembered from reading about the haunting daughter - so beautiful from the outside, and so needful and eventually evil inwardly. Secondly, I was deeply impressed by the music of the film. I really believe that the ingenious mixture of rural African rhythms with traditional and modern tunes created the overall completeness and cohesion of the film. I could not resist buying the soundtrack and it has been my favourite "musical companion" throughout the summer.

   On the other hand I can imagine that the film is in parts confusing and hard to understand for those who have not read the book. And a three-hour film might deter the one or the other from watching it. Nevertheless, I think it's definitely worth giving Beloved a try.

Christina Ortmann

Beloved: A Moving Movie

   There is a big difference between knowing the novel Beloved by Toni Morrison and sitting in the movie theater unprepared when you are watching this film. For a spectator who has not read the book, the action seems at first to be quite confusing; he wonders what the ghostly appearances are about, who the two boys running away from home are, and what might have caused the family's social isolation and their neighbors' hostility. Later, towards the middle of the movie, he will have gathered enough information to guess what it is all about.

   But if you have read the book you will appreciate the authenticity of the film. Hardly any of the action has been changed, and only a few items have been omitted (which was absolutely necessary, for otherwise the movie would last the whole night).

   But regardless whether you have read the book before or not - this is an extremely moving movie anyway. We really experience "fear and pity" and cannot help identifying with the protagonists; we suffer and hope with them; we share their struggle to make their escape "up from slavery" (which were shown in this film as well as in the novel more truthfully than in Booker T. Washington's book).

   One of the reasons why the movie is emotionally overwhelming can be found in the actors' artistic achievement. This goes especially for Oprah Winfrey: She is mostly known as a quick-witted, well-styled, most highly-paid TV moderator who always comes up with the right answers and reacts with professional smoothness and well-studied spontaneity. But in her role as Sethe we get to know somebody totally different: The smoothness has gone, and we feel that Oprah is a human being of flesh and blood and succeeds in convincingly creating Sethe for us so that we really feel her passion and perseverance.

   This might not only be due to Oprah Winfrey's ability as an actress, but also to the fact that she did not spend her youth "on the sunny side of the street." We thus get to know another facet of this outstanding woman who is a professonal in whatever she does; but is never without warmth. This is already reason enough to make watching this movie worthwhile.

   There is always something that can be criticized; here it is the ghost scenes that are overdone: the "poltergeist" rumbles around too much and too noisily (with less effort the effect would have been greater). Of course neither the book nor the movie can answer the old question: Do ghosts really exist, or do we create them in our minds? Don't they perhaps just represent our unresolved problems, our traumatic experiences that we have not sufficiently dealt with, and our bad conscience and guilt feelings?

   But both, novel as well as film, do tell us that in some cases we might need to be haunted by seemingly unreal specters in order to be led back to reality: The ghosts of the past force us to deal at last with what we have tried to keep hidden deeply within. Thus we are given a new chance to find our way back to the human community and above all to ourselves. - The film ends with the perception that the most precious thing we have is us.

Annemarie Goez