The image of the dead Emmett Till went around the world at the time. The 14-year-old, who lived in Chicago with his single mother, was brutally killed by racists while visiting relatives in a small Mississippi town in August 1955. His mother decided to show her dead boy publicly: she gave Jet Magazine, which catered to an African-American readership, exclusive rights to the images of the mutilated corpse.
The publication made national headlines. For the first time since the war in which black men (including Emmett’s father, who died in Europe) fought for their country, the magnitude of racial hatred in America has been confronted by the general public.
Let the whole world see what they did to my boy.
Mamie Till-Mobley, mother of Emmett Till
The director Chinonye Chukwu does not show the dead boy head-on in her drama “Till – Kampf um die Truth”. You only ever see his body cut or from an oblique perspective. The image of the mutilated Emmett Till is well known, it provided the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), founded in 1909, with enormous growth. For this reason alone there is no reason for a camera to gloat over the sight again.
The term “Black Trauma Porn” has recently been used in connection with Hollywood’s fixation on the African-American story of suffering. Images play an important role in the confrontation with American racism – from slavery (most recently in the Will Smith film “Emancipation” via the creation of the famous photograph “Scourged Back” from 1863) to lynching photography to the deaths of the civil rights movement . Cinema has often made use of these images, whether recreated or fictionalized.
representability of violence
Chukwu never serves this curiosity, the question of presentability plays no role in “Till”. The director, who also wrote the screenplay, filmed the boy’s story; most importantly, she made a film about Till’s mother, Mamie, who became an activist after Emmett’s murder. Already in the first shot – mother and son are on their way to go shopping in a department store – the mine Mamies (Danielle Deadwyler) darkens in gloomy foreboding. Racism was also widespread in the north of the USA in the 1950s. When shopping, the black woman and the cheeky boy are given suspicious looks.
“Till” describes a social climate in the 1950s that was very different in the north and south of the USA. Played by the phenomenal Jalyn Hall, Emmett was raised by his mother, who is the first black woman to work for the US Federal Aviation Administration, to know that no one could challenge his place in society.
Sadness, anger – and pride
This carelessness is to be his undoing when he visits his uncle and his cousins, whom the white people in Mississippi hardly dare to look at. A white girl (Haley Bennett) falsely accuses Emmett of molestation, a mere allegation that was enough to earn a death sentence in the southern states.
“Let the whole world see what they did to my boy,” Mamie Till-Mobley said at the time to explain why she released the pictures for publication. Danielle Deadwyler combines sadness, anger and pride in the role in an admirably nuanced play that never trivializes the film. Mamie is a hero in some ways (she’s repeatedly told so), but the heroic doesn’t translate into a cinematic pose in Deadwyler, despite her brightly colored costumes. Chukwu manages to turn the true story of a brutal murder into a film about life.
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