Study Guide for Week 10
Assigned Document
Euzhan Palcy (director). “La Rue
Cases-Nègres” ("Sugar Cane Alley"). 1983.
“La Rue Cases-Nègres” will be screened in Benson Auditorium at 7 pm on
Sunday the 27th. It can also
be screened, in diminished quality, through Sakai; if you have trouble with
Sakai, please email the head of Pitzer AV, Victor Milhon-Martin.
Euzhan Palcy was born in 1957 into a family of modest means in
Martinique. Growing up, she came to love Joseph Zobel's memoir Sugar
Cane Alley (the French title is, “La Rue Cases-Négres”),
which told the story of Zobel's own childhood in Martinique in the 1920s and
1930s. Palcy's
enthusiasm for the book as a child led her to organize her friends to perform
skits based on scenes in the book and left her with the ambition of making a
movie based on the book. As a teenager, Palcy
received a scholarship to study filmmaking in Paris, where—incredibly—she met François Truffaut,
who is by any measure among the most important filmmakers in the history of
world cinema (if you have never seen a Truffaut film, make a point of
screening "Jules and Jim" or "The Last Metro" as soon as
possible). Palcy persuaded Truffaut to
provide partial financial backing, from his own pocket, for her to film “Sugar
Cane Alley,” and, having gained Truffaut’s backing, she then was able to obtain
the additional financing she needed.
This is the film you will be
watching. It was Palcy's first full feature
movie.
Questions
1. The movie depicts Martinique in the
1930s. Identify three physical things that you see in the film that,
on your best judgment, were not produced on Martinique, but must have been
imported. For each item you chose,
briefly support your judgment that the item was not something “local,” and then
discuss where you think the item had been made or cultivated and why.
2. a. Who are Leopold's parents?
b. Thinking about what was said in the course
about racial stratification in Caribbean societies, locate them in the local
racial order. And what about Leopold in
this regard?
c. What can you discern about the
relationship between Leopold’s parents? Are they married?
Explain and support your
answers.
3. a. What sentence does the teacher write on
the board for the students to copy?
b. Discuss the relationship between what this sentence says about the end
of slavery and Médouze's account of what
happened after slavery ended in Martinique and the sentence the teacher writes
on the board.
c. The teacher’s sentence speaks of the “second door” to freedom.
From the evidence of this movie, how widely open was this “second door”?
And to whom?