Posted on 06/24/2020 2:59:55 PM PDT by EdnaMode
Gone With the Wind is no longer gone from HBO Max, having been restored to the streaming service’s library with a new prologue about the film’s problematic themes and depictionof the antebellum South.
Jacqueline Stewart, host of TCM’s “Silent Sunday Nights” and a professor in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago, leads the four-and-a-half minute intro, which starts off with a general cinematic lesson — recounting the eight Academy Awards (including for Best Picture) won in 1939 by the “highly anticipated” adaptation of Margaret Mitchell’s novel, as well as its inflation-adjusted standing as the highest grossing movie of all time.
Then, Stewart acknowledges that the film “was not universally praised,” seeing as it “paints the picture of the antebellum South as a ‘romantic, idyllic setting that’s tragically been lost to the past.'”
Stewart notes how producer David O. Selznick assured the NAACP at the time that he was “sensitive to the feelings of minority peoples,” yet proceeded to deliver a film that depicts a “world of grace and beauty, without acknowledging the brutalities of the system of chattel slavery upon which this world is based.” Stewart says that “the treatment of this world through the lens of nostalgia denies the horrors of slavery as well its legacies of racial inequality.”
Stewart concedes that while watching Gone With the Wind “can be uncomfortable, even painful,” “it is important that classic Hollywood films are available to us in their original form” to “invite viewers to reflect on their own beliefs when watching them now.”
“Gone With the Wind, with its landmark production values, signature scenes and iconic characters has shaped the way generations have pictured slavery and the reconstruction period that followed,” she says in conclusion. “It is not only a major document of Hollywood’s racist practices of the past, but also an enduring work of popular culture that speaks directly to the racial inequalities that persist in media and society today.”
Is Stewart’s prologue fair, juxtaposing Gone With the Wind‘s strengths as a piece of cinema with its weaknesses as a portrayal of the antebellum South?
I was just reading in 1776 about Washington’s slave and companion before, during, and beyond the Rev War, Billy Lee and contemplating and speculating about Billy Lee’s thoughts on his status and his relationship with Washington. I bet many whites of the time would have loved to have traded places with Mr. Lee.
Yep, she and Vera Lynn (RIP).
I believe it. After you told me about his eye damage, I looked him up. It was Malcolm McDowell.
Mammy was cool. She reminds me of my English grandma.
Arrogant, narcissistic, hate-filled Left-wing goons know everything.
Just ask them. They’ll tell you.
He played Caligula. A movie that I wish I could wash from my mind.
It may have depicted him as he was but it should have been rated x.
I saw the cleaned-up version and was still shocked
I think people are going to be very sick of black anything very soon.
I've never seen the movie. I think i'll keep it that way.
It also didn’t really depict the horrors of battlefeild injuries either.
Almost as if it is a movie and not a documentary?
I think Glenn Reynolds is the guy who said "Trump's secret power is the ability to convince his enemies to make fools of themselves."
I think this thing is going to blow up in their faces. I think people are indeed going to get sick of all this obsession with black this and black that.
I think they will jump the shark, and I think they will do it before the election.
Good idea
Nicely done.
Margaret Mitchell was born and raised close to Atlanta, GA. Her grandparents all lived through the Civil War and were upper class. He Father was a lawyer. Her grandmother was Margaret’s “expert” in all things connected to the war and the aftermath of the war. As a child of the lingering “reconstruction” in the South I can tell you that the movie is as close to the truth of the conditions as anyone will ever see. Of course the focus was the wealthy slave owners. The majority of whites were poor farmers or field hands along with the blacks. I do know this because I picked cotton with freed slaves. I saw “Gone With The Wind” when I was about 12 years old.
True. Read “The Children of Pride,” a collection of letters written by the Jones family of Georgia. It will make you weep.
Mammy is exactly like my Mammy who dominated my early childhood. She lived in the upstairs of our old rundown house because her menfolk all “went to Detroit” to find jobs during the Great Depression and she was left alone. She watched after us kids while Mom was busy with gardening and canning,etc. Mammy recited the Bible to me. Otherwise I would never have known that God exists. She comforted me when I was frightened and played games with us in front of a huge limestone fireplace and popped corn over the fire. She was my “North Star” and the memory most likely to bring me to tears. Of course I’m racist you know. The Southern world where I grew up I did not know that blacks were mistreated. I didn’t know until someone from the North told me in the 60s that I hated black people and was oppressing them. I sometimes wonder what Mammy would say about the mess going on now. “Jis hesh chil thu Lawd will fix it soon’s He gits here”.
I bought a copy from TCM of the Gary Cooper movie UNCONQUERED, about the Pontiac Conspiracy. They had spiel at the first about the movie being a product of it’s times when Indians were always shown as bad, but they really weren’t that way. Honest. Cross my heart.
Sixty years ago I read THE CONSPIRACY OF PONTIAC by Francis Parkman, and yes, the Indians really were that bad.
In reading THE ROMANCE AND TRAGEDY OF PIONEER LIFE by Augustus Lynch Mason, I found the first school house massacre (Enoch Brown Massacre) took place in those times.
So pay no attention to modern attempts to “reeducate” us about what we learned years ago from non-government education.
The left denies the horrors of slavery to the state as well as their slave owning past.
Department of Cinema and Media Studies. Let that sink in.
Thank goodness I have on DVD and DOWNLOADED from iTunes.
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