The Farm Film Analysis

In the movies, The Farm: Life inside Angola Prison (a documentary) and Slam! (An independent film), although they are different genres, their sub-themes are very similar. These sub-themes portray the subjects as having deeper meanings in terms of personal history and how people dealt with their problems in and out of the prison system. Although, in recent years the prison industrial complex is new, the idea of pushing minorities into housing and then imprisoning them is not a new idea. However in the Past 100 years, getting into prison was the easy part, however trying to stay out of jail once already been in jail is harder. In both of these movies, portray different individuals and what led them into being in prison in the first place. Through

One of the strongest, recurring themes that were in both films, is the theme that with these institutions music, lyrics, poems, and other writing seem to come out of these negative subjects. The prison system doesn’t discriminate against people who are gifted of sorts in the way of creating such art, and throughout history there had been such happenings in other institutions. In The Farm: Life Inside Angola Prison, throughout the many different scene changes music and writing plays a big important factor and in the film, Slam!, the whole main theme of the film revolves around the main protagonist lyricism. In The Farm, one of its prisoners, Wilbert Rideau, was an editor of the prion magazine called “The Angolite,” in which that magazine won many awards including Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, the American Bar Association 's Silver Gavel Award and a 1981 Sidney Hillman Award. They use their words as a form to express their feelings towards the situations that they are in and this seems like a recurring theme for people in the prison system or any confinement situation. From the cotton field songs, to the convicts leasing sounds, and the eventual prison complex, all revolves around the lyrics of the stories that people existed during these institutions. The songs played an important part of what got them through the situation that they were in, and although they could/would be out of the system, those words would still be there to travel with them. Songs of the convict leasing would turn into jazz and prisons songs would be turned into rap or poems. These transitions of words into something so much more, it made it easier for the tellers to tell their stories in a place where it was more constructive than dealing with drugs and other pressures that they can have. The art of producing a poem, a journal, a rap, a song all takes emotion