Rated West Indies: The Fugitive Slaves of Liberty 10/10
It's said often of filmed stage plays that they feel like filmed stage plays, generally meaning they take place in limited, confined sets. Little has felt more like a filmed stage play than West Indies: The Fugitive Slaves of Liberty, which takes place almost entirely on the shell of a slave ship which is clearly located in a modern-day warehouse. I say it takes place there, not that it is set there, because it isn't: the ship set stands in for many locations over the course of the film.The story, such that it is, is told almost entirely from the point of view of the white population of the West Indies, who are desperate to encourage its Black populace to relocate to France for reasons I didn't particularly follow but which are very much not in keeping with modern white supremacist immigration policy. It is, nonetheless, very centered on the Black experience of this white narrative. It wanders occasionally into the mode of the musical, with the Black cast performing song and dance numbers that express a feeling and are interspersed amongst the more narrative, expository scenes featuring the colonisers.Thus despite giving the white characters almost the entire narrative, and even the bulk of the character work, West Indies is irrefutably focused on its Black populace and the imprint the colonisation of the isles has left on their culture and history.I went into this knowing very little of the West Indies, apart from its odd presence as a cricketing nation, and came out of it feeling like I had learned nothing and yet understood so much more. Walter Pater once said that “all art constantly aspires towards the condition of music,” and this may be the most musical film I've seen despite not particularly hewing to the genre of the move musical. Its structure, even within its spoken narrative scenes, conveys feeling more than information in a way that is of a distinctly musical quality, drifting through time periods and nations in a way that is somewhat abstract even at its most explicitly expository. I recall a sequence where they simply rattled off a list of all the European nations who entered the region, when they arrived and which nation(s) they claimed for themselves, and despite simply being a dry reading of a list of historical dates it was the presentation that did the most lifting. I'd forgotten all of it almost immediately. It doesn't convey the dates and countries it lists, it conveys a tidal wave of colonial oppression.
