Posted on 10/20/2003 10:45:41 AM PDT by Coleus
10/19/03By RONALD F. MAXWELL
Special to the Register
George Ewert, director of the Museum of Mobile, thinks my movie, "Gods and Generals," "seeks to rewrite the history of the American South, downplaying slavery." Moreover, as a self-proclaimed champion of the brave new South, it appears that he would like to run a re-education camp for adults and a brave new school for children so that Alabamians can be taught to hate their past, to reject their ancestors, and to condemn and even to forget their history.
Most disturbing, from the point of view of a filmmaker and a seeker of the truth, it looks like Mr. Ewert would like to intimidate anyone who doesn't see the Civil War through his narrow simplistic lenses.
Why else would he have sent his provocative and incendiary review of "Gods and Generals" to the Southern Poverty Law Center -- the organization that exposes Klan members, hate mongers and racists?
Does he include Ted Turner, a former member of the national board of the NAACP, the actress Donzaleigh Abernathy, who plays the domestic slave Martha and is the proud daughter of the great civil rights leader Ralph Abernathy, and even my humble self in such disreputable company?
Luckily for me, my self-esteem does not rest on whether I have the approbation of such a man. I have survived 30 years in the film business and have taken my fair share of criticism and praise.
Indeed, if Ewert's comments relat ed only to me, they would not be worthy of a response. The reason I have taken the trouble to write this piece is because his comments cause me concern for what he may wish for the children of Alabama.
We cannot ignore the fact that when the Soviets took power in Russia, they taught Russians to hate their past, to reject their parents, to condemn and even to forget their history. In the 1960s, during its Cultural Revolution, China endured a similar convulsion. Chinese were taught that their 3,000-year history was a huge mistake, a misguided journey of ignorance and oppression.
As an artist and a filmmaker, I am perhaps more sensitive than many in recognizing the embryonic murmurings of this pseudo-intellectual menace when it appears in our own society.
The Civil War is at the center of the American experience. It resonates across time. Its issues persist in semi-resolved tensions. Its players seem larger than life; its battles and campaigns were of an epic scale. Gore Vidal has called it "the American Iliad."
Should I, as a filmmaker, have indulged in the frozen triumphalist attitude of the victors, who are essentially ourselves as modern-day Americans? Or should I have made an honest attempt to return to the actual people and conditions of 1861, when no one knew -- and would not know for another four years -- who the victors or the vanquished would be?
I chose the latter, which meant that good guys and bad guys would not be broadcast in advance. The audience would have to sort things out for themselves, scene by scene, character by character.
What interests me as a filmmaker and chronicler of the war are the hard choices that real people had to make. Our film is populated by characters with divided loyalties and conflicting affections. Each character embodies his own internal struggle, his own personal civil war.
The film begins with a quote from George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, referring to the importance of place, of the local, of the particular. I included this quote because it sets up the central dilemma. Humans by their very nature are attached to place and home. These attachments can be powerful in both constructive and destructive ways.
People are also attached to family and to group. They can be motivated by ideas and ideals.
The characters in "Gods and Generals" are not immune to these forces. They are all, to a man and a woman, pulled and pushed by these conflicting allegiances.
What may be novel in this film is the revelation of the complex ways in which African-Americans, like their white neighbors, were confronted with their own hard choices.
Some critics have objected to the absence of scenes depicting the most violent excesses of slavery. Such scenes are not in this movie for two reasons.
First, the film's main Southern characters, Jackson and Lee, were opposed to slavery, and although products of their time, saw blacks as fellow humans in the eyes of God. For them, the war was not about the defense of slavery.
Second, this film, perhaps for the first time, captures the perniciousness of the institution of slavery -- that is to say, that slavery was not perpetuated by and did not depend on sadists. It persisted in America, as in many other countries in the 19th century, because of economics, because of cheap labor -- very cheap labor.
In "Gods and Generals," we meet two Afro-Virginians who despite being treated with respect and even love by their white masters, still have no confusion whatsoever about their desire to be free. Who among us would want to live in slavery, no matter how benign the immediate situation?
This unusual cinematic treatment, though historically more typical of the Tidewater and Shenandoah Valley small-town relationships among blacks and whites during the war, was misinterpreted by these critics as "glossing over" slavery.
They obviously missed the point. In the simplistic moral outrage of their reviews, they deprive African-Americans of their full humanity -- and in their own unintended way, reveal a bigotry of appearances. They expect 19th century blacks to be portrayed in one dimension only.
In reality, the research shows that blacks, just like their white neighbors, felt conflicting allegiances: yes, a racial attachment to their fellows held in servitude, but also an affection for the white families with whom their lives were intertwined, and yes, patriotism -- a love of the places in which they lived and, in many well-documented cases, a willingness to defend their country, the South.
In this film, "patriotism" metamorphoses from a philosophical abstraction to an organic life force. For many 19th century Southern whites, patriotism expressed a love of state and locality that seems strange if not incomprehensible to inhabitants of the new global community.
For 19th century Unionists, who found themselves on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line, patriotism constituted a love of the entire country, from Penobscot Bay to the Gulf of Mexico.
For African-Americans, patriotism could mean all of the above, further leavened with the group identity and group allegiance fostered by slavery in the South and prejudice in the North.
Martha, the domestic slave in the Beale family of "Gods and Generals," has a genuine affection for the white children she has helped rear alongside her own. She is also tied by emotion, tradition and circumstance to the larger community of blacks, whose fate she shares.
When Yankee looters come to ransack her home in Fredericksburg, she will not let them pass. A few days later, however, when Yankee soldiers seek to requisition the same home as a hospital, she opens the door and attends to the wounded.
Historians write about the forces of history, about ideology and determinism. Whatever truth there is in such analysis, it is not the place where individuals live out their lives.
Ordinary people like you and me and the characters who inhabit "Gods and Generals" live their lives day by day, hoping to make the best of it with dignity, hoping to get by -- in the context of this film, hoping to survive.
They in their time, like we today, have bonds of affection across racial, religious, sexual and political divides.
"Gods and Generals" is not content to pander to contemporary expectations or to wallow in some amorphous American triumphalism about the war. It poses hard questions. It takes you by the shoulders and demands that you rethink everything you've ever thought about the Civil War.
And in the case of some critics, it demands that they think about these things for the first time.
Ronald F. Maxwell is writer, producer and director of the movies "Gettysburg" and "Gods and Generals." Readers can write him at Person to Person Films, 5000 Coldwater Canyon, Sherman Oaks, Calif. 91423, or by e-mail at info@ronmaxwell.com .
A big threat in Today's Schools is the revision of history and the demise of Western Civilization.
We covered the original article (with a link to Ewert's article) here on FR: 'Gods and Generals' ... and an angry Mayor Dow
Kudos to Mr. Maxwell.
It was a superb movie - Lang should win an Oscar for his portrayal of Jackson.
No, it's not, even though you concede that it's part the more most basic, bare outine history of African slavery. Their misbehavior doesn't excuse our own. We should have been better than that. We're the ones who wrote "All men are created equal" in our founding document.
That's not true, if "opposed to slavery" means wanting to do something to bring it to an end.
Second, this film, perhaps for the first time, captures the perniciousness of the institution of slavery -- that is to say, that slavery was not perpetuated by and did not depend on sadists. It persisted in America, as in many other countries in the 19th century, because of economics, because of cheap labor -- very cheap labor.
"Perhaps for the first time" is ridiculous and untrue. Or if true, scandalous, since there's very little about slavery and its economic background in the film.
Ordinary people like you and me and the characters who inhabit "Gods and Generals" live their lives day by day, hoping to make the best of it with dignity, hoping to get by -- in the context of this film, hoping to survive.
Part of the problem with the film is that it had so little to do with "ordinary people," but instead gave us a sterilized picture of the "marble men," Jackson and Lee.
That is plain ridiculous. Lee, at best, was mildly opposed to slavery. Jackson had no problem with it and was, in fact, a slave owner the day he died. The film's deliberately portrayed the men to be something that they were not.
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