Framing the Black Experience: The Film Version of Toni Morrison’s Beloved

Abstract

Beloved (1987) is the Afro-American writer and Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison’s fifth novel. It was adapted to a film, entitled “Beloved,” which was released on 16 October, 1998 in the U. S. A., directed by Jonathan Demme. This paper aims at exploring the relationship between the cinematic text of Beloved with its novelistic form. It explores the way the cinematic text departs from the novel, with thematic implications, and the losses and gains of the cinema as a different medium, being primarily visual, and concerned with space. It also explores the degree to which the medium of the film suits the presentation of the black experience.