A Horror Unbound

HBO'S POWERFUL SLAVE DOCUMENTARY, UNCHAINED MEMORIES

During the Great Depression, the Federal W Writers Project, among the more precious New Deal enterprises, scored a major point for history by sending a group of interviewers to the Deep South to collect more than 2,000 personal accounts of life in captivity from surviving former slaves. This February, HBO will air Unchained Memories: Readings from the Slave Narratives, in which some of America's most renowned black actors give dramatic readings of excerpts from these extraordinary archives. As the film, illustrated with archival photographs and mostly tolerable re-enactments, cycles through issues of concern to slaves—rapes, whippings, auctions, escape attempts, courting rituals, emancipation—the jarring effect of watching such impeccably groomed stars as Samuel L. Jackson, Vanessa Williams, Oprah Winfrey, and Don Cheadle adopting dialects to describe slavery days in the first person soon fades, and the power of the material and, indeed, of many of the performances accumulates. One is left freshly awed by the sheer volume of calculated cruelties perpetrated by a slave-owning society, and by that society's utter failure, despite its relentless efforts, to diminish the humanity of the people it had claimed as property. (Rating: ★★★)

MICHAEL HOGAN