Posted on 01/27/2004 6:53:54 AM PST by mhking
When Oscar nominations are announced this morning, the popular Civil War romance-drama "Cold Mountain" is expected to be competing for multiple awards.
If Miramax Films' 155-minute epic, starring Hollywood heavyweights Nicole Kidman, Jude Law and Renée Zellweger and based on Charles Frazier's National Book Award-winning novel, gets a best picture nod, it will surely make aggressive studio chief Harvey Weinstein happy. But some moviegoers who saw "Cold Mountain" won't be smiling.
Erik Todd Dellums, an African-American actor from Washington who has appeared on TV shows such as "Homicide: Life on the Street" and in films like "Doctor Dolittle" with Eddie Murphy, is calling on moviegoers to boycott "Cold Mountain," claiming it's a Civil War film that fails to address the issue of slavery.
"This has less to do with 'Cold Mountain' per se than Hollywood missing another prime opportunity to tell some truth," Dellums said recently by phone from Birmingham, where he's making the indie horror film "Camp D.O.A."
Earlier this month, the San Francisco Chronicle published Dellums' anti-"Cold Mountain" message, and his opinion piece has since appeared on various Internet sites.
Calling the film "a sham, a slap in the face of African-Americans," Dellums wrote that "Cold Mountain" "plays like 'Saving Private Ryan,' another Hollywood epic in which black contributions to history -- namely the Battle of Normandy -- are left out." (The full text of Dellums' statement can be found at www.commondreams.org/views04/0104-06.htm.)
Dellums is not alone. In an opinion piece headlined "A cold, white mountain" in Raleigh's The News & Observer, staff writer Barry Saunders wrote that "all during the movie, I ruminated on our absence from it, even though the main backdrop -- the Civil War -- was ostensibly about us. For black people, the movie, one could conclude, was like having a party thrown in your honor -- and not being invited."
"Cold Mountain" includes appearances by a couple dozen black characters, including several who toil on the farm where Kidman's character lives. Blacks are mentioned in the dialogue, and the main white characters at times voice their displeasure with slavery. But the African-Americans who appear never speak.
Dellums said public reaction to his call for a boycott has been "extraordinary."
"I just sent my thoughts out to a select group of friends and colleagues, and it's gone all over the place, including Germany, France, England," he said. "I find it disheartening and disconcerting to be in a free society and working in an industry that has been stereotyped as liberal and then find the powers in this media are very conservative. They're more concerned with the way a film will play in certain demographics as opposed to telling the truth and just letting the art come through."
He's calling for a boycott, he said, because "we as a people don't have the power to tell them how to change unless we pool our dollars. And I find it humiliating to not allow our history to be told honestly."
So far, it seems apparent Dellums' cry for a "Cold Mountain" boycott has gone mostly unheeded. The film has earned more than $70 million since opening on Christmas Day and will most certainly pass the combined box office of two major Hollywood films in recent years that did focus on slavery -- Denzel Washington's "Glory" (1989), which made $26.8 million, and Steven Spielberg's "Amistad" (1997), which pulled in $44.2 million in North America.
Henry Louis Gates Jr., chairman of Harvard University's department of African and African-American studies, recently saw the movie at the studio's invitation and didn't share Dellums' criticism.
"Certainly we need more films about the African-American experience during the Civil War and about slavery in general," he says, speaking in response to Miramax's request to address the issue. "And I have to confess, it is remarkably difficult for me as an African-American to sympathize with a Confederate soldier. However, it strikes me that 'Cold Mountain' is essentially a love story between two white people who live in a rural area where slavery was not a fundamental aspect of the economy. It's a mistake to think that most white people in the South had slaves. They didn't. So while I understand the criticism, I think we should be directing our efforts toward having films made where slavery was more essential a part of that story."
He adds that the film's box office success might help pave the way for those other sorts of movies to be made.
"Cold Mountain" has faced other issues, too, including another recent boycott call from some in the western North Carolina movie community, since the $80 million film was made in Romania as opposed to the story's main setting, the mountains of North Carolina.
Miramax Executive Vice President of Worldwide Publicity Amanda Lundberg says the studio shot for three weeks on location in North Carolina and Virginia, spending almost $20 million in the United States. But the film needed a location that would guarantee four distinct seasons and also snow -- something that isn't a predictable quantity in the North Carolina mountains. Ultimately, filming entirely in the United States would have cost around $120 million. "It would have been an irresponsible budget, and the movie would not have been made," Lundberg says.
In another spark of controversy, a recent Washington Post story reported the opinions of three University of Virginia professors on the film's historical accuracy.
One, Gary Gallagher, affirmed the film's opening, the depiction of an 1864 battle during the siege of Petersburg, Va. But he also said one of the keys to the battle was the involvement of African-American troops, which is virtually ignored both in Charles Frazier's book and director Anthony Minghella's film.
Another professor, Edward Ayers, said that on the issue of race and slavery, the filmmakers simply "ducked."
While Dellums and others question the film's historical presentation, Gary Moss, an Oscar voter who lives in Atlanta and was a 1989 Academy Award nominee for the short "Gullah Tales," wonders whether "Cold Mountain" is, at its heart, a Civil War movie.
"On one level it's an odyssey story," he said. "And it's also a film about recoiling from modernity. This isn't about the American South so much as it is about the conflict between the power of machinery and human power. The battle involves a massive explosion and mass slaughter like the world has never seen before."
What Jude Law's character does, Moss said, is attempt to flee from the onslaught of modern machinery -- to return to simplicity.
Moss said he understands why some African-Americans would be upset that the film doesn't forthrightly address the issue of slavery.
"But it would be a terrible shame to boycott the movie for that reason," he said. "I don't like criticizing films for what they are not."
Tara Roberts, of Atlanta, publisher of the multicultural women's magazine Fierce, said her reaction to "Cold Mountain" has been, basically, "whatever."
"The racial history of this country is so complex and painful it can be very challenging to even want to step into it," she said. "I decided at some point that I haven't experienced growing up seeing many images of African-Americans in this country in that period. Slavery is a part of what we experienced and has shaped the mindset of a lot of people in this country."
But she said there is much more on her mind.
"I am more interested in telling and hearing broader stories about us as a people," she said. "Our history is huge. . . . As a black woman, I want to make sure the depth of who we are is expressed."
As for "Cold Mountain," she said, "I wasn't interested in it in the first place. I thought it would be treated that way.
"It's the same reason," she said, "I can no longer go to see 'in the 'hood' movies anymore."
If you had ever bothered to read the Constitution, you wouldn't ask such a damn stupid question. Lincoln had no constitutional power to take "property" from people in areas that were loyal. But he had every constitutional power as Commander in Chief to confiscate whatever property he deemed necessary for the war effort in areas in Rebellion. The rebels claimed slaves as property, used slaves as military laborers and relied on slaves to supply food and munitions for their war effort, and Lincon simply said ok, if they are property, I can take them away from you. And he did.
As to your second question, Lincoln said quite clearly that his only objective in the war was to preserve the Union. He said that if it took freeing all the slaves, he would do it. If it took freeing some, he would do that. The north did not go to war to end slavery in the south. The south did go to war because Lincoln promised to stop the expansion of slavery. Stopping expansion would have eventually destroyed the economics of slavery which required constant expansion to both keep slave prices high and to assure that the rapidly growng slave population didn't literally overwhelm the white population of the south. Expansion provided both new slave markets and a safety valve to keep Dixie from turning into a Haite.
BTW "genius", if you bother to read the EP, which you have obviously never done, you will see that many areas in the south that were under union control (i.e. Federal Courts operating) on Jan. 1, 1863 were also exempted. It wasn't just the border states.
Now I suggest you sit down and do some serious reading before you start calling others uneducated. You are making a damn fool of yourself.
And here's a quote that you should read and understand. It is by Robert Toombs an ardent secessionist and future Confederate Secretary of State and Army General speaking at the Georgia Legislature's debate on secession shortly after Lincoln's election in 1860.
In 1790 we had less than eight hundred thousand slaves. Under our mild and humane administration of the system they have increased above four millions. The country has expanded to meet this growing want, and Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Missouri, have received this increasing tide of African labor; before the end of this century, at precisely the same rate of increase, the Africans among us in a subordinate condition will amount to eleven millions of persons. What shall be done with them? We must expand or perish. We are constrained by an inexorable necessity to accept expansion or extermination. Those who tell you that the territorial question is an abstraction, that you can never colonize another territory without the African slavetrade, are both deaf and blind to the history of the last sixty years. All just reasoning, all past history, condemn the fallacy. The North understand it better - they have told us for twenty years that their object was to pen up slavery within its present limits - surround it with a border of free States, and like the scorpion surrounded with fire, they will make it sting itself to death. One thing at least is certain, that whatever may be the effect of your exclusion from the Territories, there is no dispute but that the North mean it, and adopt it as a measure hostile to slavery upon this point. They all agree, they are all unanimous in Congress, in the States, on the rostrum, in the sanctuary - everywhere they declare that slavery shall not go into the Territories. They took up arms to drive it out of Kansas; and Sharpe's rifles were put into the hands of assassins by Abolition preachers to do their work. Are they mistaken? No; they are not. The party put it into their platform at Philadelphia - they have it in the corner-stone of their Chicago platform; Lincoln is on it - pledged to it. Hamlin is on it, and pledged to it; every Abolitionist in the Union, in or out of place, is openly pledged, in some manner, to drive us from the common Territories. This conflict, at least, is irrepressible - it is easily understood -we demand the equal right with the North to go into the common Territories with all of our property, slaves included, and to be there protected in its peaceable enjoyment by the Federal Government, until such Territories may come into the Union as equal States-then we admit them with or without slavery, as the people themselves may decide for themselves. Will you surrender this principle? The day you do this base, unmanly deed, you embrace political degradation and death.
That is what the war was about.
Not according to these gentlemen.
"What was the reason that induced Georgia to take the step of secession? This reason may be summed up in one single proposition. It was a conviction, a deep conviction on the part of Georgia, that a separation from the North-was the only thing that could prevent the abolition of her slavery." -- Speech of Henry Benning to the Virginia Convention
"Gentlemen, I see before me men who have observed all the records of human life, and many, perhaps, who have been chief actors in many of its gravest scenes, and I ask such men if in all their lore of human society they can offer an example like this? South Carolina has 300,000 whites, and 400,000 slaves. These 300,000 whites depend for their whole system of civilization on these 400,000 slaves. Twenty millions of people, with one of the strongest Governments on the face of the earth, decree the extermination of these 400,000 slaves, and then ask, is honor, is interest, is liberty, is right, is justice, is life, worth the struggle?...Gentlemen, I have thus very rapidly endeavored to group before you the causes which have produced the action of the people of South Carolina." -- Speech of John Preston to the Virginia Convention
"History affords no example of a people who changed their government for more just or substantial reasons. Louisiana looks to the formation of a Southern confederacy to preserve the blessings of African slavery, and of the free institutions of the founders of the Federal Union, bequeathed to their posterity." -- Address of George Williamson, Commissioner from Louisiana to the Texas Secession Convention
"But not to be tedious in enumerating the numerous changes for the better, allow me to allude to one other -- though last, not least. The new constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution -- African slavery as it exists amongst us -- the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution." -- Alexander Stephens
But hey, what did they know?
A dollar says he doesn't have a clue about the real meaning of that word.
I saw that last name and wondered. Sure enough, it's Granada Ron Dellums' kid!
Wish I had read that first ( although I suspected it).
Would have saved me lots of reading time.
Oh, please. Go ahead and post your quotes.
Oh, no problem at all. The southern rebellion was not launched to free the slaves, it was started because of what the south saw as a threat to their institution of slavery. Once hostilities were initated at Sumter, the Lincoln Administration saw the war as a fight to preserve the Union, and not to either defend or destroy slavery. And from the Northern point of view the purpose of the war never changed.
Why did the Emancipation Proclamation cover only the south? Because slavery was not unconstitutional, and the President and Congress could not end it by legislation. It took an amendment to the Constitution to end slavery, a process which was started in 1864 and completed in 1865. If you read the Emanicpation Proclamation you would notice that it was issued by President Lincoln, not in his position as president, but in his capacity as Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces and as a war measure necessary for combatting the rebellion. Freeing the slaves removed a source of manpower from the southern war effort, and allowed Union forces to protect slaves seeking protection behind Union lines. Prior to that, legally, Union forces were required to return runaway slaves. You will also note that it did not end slavery, per se. It freed those held in slavery, which had the same effect, but which did not order the end to a legal, Constitutional institution. The Constitution is also why it explicitly excluded areas of the south that had already been liberated by the Union forces, and why it excluded those states not in rebellion. Since they were not in rebellion, the war measure could not apply to them, and slavery could not be ended or the slaves freed.
How's that?
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