Lois Ambash shared a link.
August
30 at 7:29am
How do you feel about this?
Jocelyn Dunphy You know here's the thing:
making any movie part of an annual screening sets it apart. I say cancel the
annual screening but periodically screen it along with any other classic
Hollywood films.
Julia Lagrua You're right, an annual
screening gives it cultural stature. It's just a movie and one that was dated
culturally at the time it was made. The movie, and the book it was based on,
portrayed slavery and the confederacy as a noble cause and white southerners as victims. Well made
movie, big glamorous stars, beautiful costumes and the first oscar winning
performance by a black actor but not a film to admire for it's cultural message.
Patrick McEvoy-Halston Julia Lagrua But to be fair, we
should probably expect for every movie that we really favour before, say, 1960,
to receive the same treatment. There's not a film out there before that date
that matches our expectations for... that aren't compared to contemporary
standards, more patriarchal, that communicate adverse cultural messages. We
have to be careful we're not deliberately shaming the South because we need it
for our own equilibrium--that is, to demonstrate that there's nothing guilty
about us; it's all out there in hillbilly territory. So I say yes, but also
whisk away, say, Vertigo, from "cultural stature," and rather
periodically screen it along with other films, to show that part of what we're
up to isn't to keep ourselves hoisted over the imbeciles in hillbilly country--a
kind of violence itself, so to keep ourselves feeling
stately/statue"y."
Jocelyn Dunphy it's tricky, that's for sure.
Different people even within a culture have different 'tolerances' for racism,
sexism, etc., in film even while we acknowledge the film's historical context.
Makes it all that more difficult to make decisions about where to draw the
line.
Virginia Kelley I don't like any kind of
primitive book-burning impulse but right now this seems necessary so I wouldn't
object.
The intensification of real recognition of our slave history is important, raw feeling is at the surface, it's okay to put this aside for awhile where heralded publication events are concerned.
The intensification of real recognition of our slave history is important, raw feeling is at the surface, it's okay to put this aside for awhile where heralded publication events are concerned.
Vlasis Kalabokas well,that is a good point
Patrick McEvoy-Halston I agree. But there are two
things happenings now: one is Charlottetown, and the other is the
squashed-down, white working class worker. We could de-emphasize "Gone
With the Wind," but perhaps also, to demonstrate fidelity with their
plight/concerns, contemporary films we've recently enjoyed which make the white
working class seem odious; as people we should want to disregard and harm. If
we have a tough time doing that, we should ask ourselves if we still have a
need to hate... somebody, at least, even as we can cloak it so that it is absolutely
invisible to ourselves. If racists reformed themselves so there was nobody out
there for us to hate at all, we should know if this would actually make us feel
ill at ease, because suddenly we can't disown things about ourselves into other
people. Could we really do without our yearly arrival of Oscar-fetted
"Spotlight(s)," with dollops of favour for us and without an ounce of
empathy for the villains?http://www.newyorker.com/.../the-problem-with-the-liberal...http://www.newyorker.com/.../search-challenging-cinema
Celine Adrianna Negrete This is a non-profit
independent movie theatre in a Memphis neighborhood making a decision based on
what their community asked for.
This is not the "soviet union".
Clearly, some of you have no understanding of the film exhibition business, in particular as to how independent non-profit theatres operate.
This is not the "soviet union".
Clearly, some of you have no understanding of the film exhibition business, in particular as to how independent non-profit theatres operate.
Patrick McEvoy-Halston I think you need to fit what
this non-profit independent movie theatre, reacting entirely to what their
community asked for, within the larger contemporary context where icons that
were esteemed in the past are being dismantled, regardless of what a
considerable portion of the population -- the larger community -- thinks:
"you liked Andrew Jackson--tough f*cking luck: he's off the d*mn
bill." If I posted this link, and I gotchaed them by saying, hey, why is
it you easily-upset people can't even handle what a small non-profit, in full
correspondence of its members asked for, has done, I'd feel a bit ashamed, for
I'd of used it as bait to draw in a lot of reasonable people, reacting
reasonably (or, rather, at least understandably), for my orgiastic censure. I
don't reify the constitution, I really don't ultimately care whether George
Washington is forever respected, and would prefer he not be deified, but if I
was beginning to make him a symbol of America's racist past... in an
environment, where some who were esteemed aren't merely losing a bit of their
previous foothold but being cast as objects of shame, I'd know I was imposing
upon a lot of people, thinking I knew better than them. It might be FOR the
better, and I might be better, more considerate, more evolved, but I'm not
exactly going at things with therapeutic niceness but rather casting people
whom I don't really like all that much, completely astray.
Mark Schaffer Interestly enough, this film
and the book depicts the end of the Confederacy and the subsequent end of
slavery in the country.
Marianne
Roken http://www.salon.com/.../gone-with-the-wind-dropped-from.../
Laura-Jean
Kelly Oh great you found
it! Thanks!
Julia
Lagrua Excellent article.
Laura-Jean
Kelly Be great if everyone
on this thread will read it
Marianne
Roken It is a good article.
It makes the point, more cogently than I, that the movie is revisionist
history, yet it is also "an uncontested cinematic achievement based on its
artistic merits alone."
Patrick
McEvoy-Halston It is a very timid
article, guys, saying all the right things. Plays to various galleries. The
artistic merits of the film surely have been contested, so why is this argued,
if not to flatter some, and appease some rising apprehensiveness even amongst Salonistas that comes
from reading the article--your populist tastes are awesome, and film-snobs are
bad? Why end the article saying, things that were once popular don't always
last, but never quietly? Is this 'cause always true, or because that's how we
like to drift away from what we read: that nothing has to be settled just now?
Why suggest that Charlottetown means the film needs to hid for awhile, when our
larger situation is the one the film represents: people surviving with verve
when their worlds are turned upside down. Isn't that why the Depression
audience connected to it? And what era are we in? Are we bringing up the film
now because we're toying with the adverse step of perhaps, en total, "Bill
Cosby" banning it, or because unconsciously we're registering that it has
more relevant appeal than ever?
Laura-Jean
Kelly Salonistas now hehe.
Hey check out the next article posted...has a bit more to it.
Patrick
McEvoy-Halston Laura-Jean Kelly Okay. Done.
Ellen
Geller I don't agree. It is
a great movie.
Elizabeth
Blakeslee Ann Hornaday,
Washington Post Film Critic, makes an excellent case for the theatrer making
the showing of GWTW part of a series of films showing other looks at the period
and slavery. https://www.washingtonpost.com/.../77f6752a-8e52-11e7...
Patrick
McEvoy-Halston What I'd like to read
from an article is a willingness TO ban things outright, if the situation
called for it... a lack of trepidation to cast off, if called for. If I don't
sense this within a reviewer then I'm never sure whether when they say
they'recontextualing and offering an adult, mature response, if what they're
actually doing is working around what they're psychologically unprepared for: a
good argument for making much of what they've been attracted to and felt social
esteem in having mastered, suddenly be rendered useless. (I think perhaps also
I sense people sensing we're all being drawn into a vortex, and hoping to keep
their Obama years of tiptoeing around the edge kept going as long as possible,
for it's the environment in which they've lived well and prospered.) I've read
my Milton and registered its art, but also read critiques by some who've done
so and decided... the art doesn't balance out the abhorent... cast aside, now,
and felt there was nothing ill-considered and immature about their response.
What I like about Frederick Crews's new book about Freud is for example that I
sense this willingness... no fear in surveying the life of someone considered
great, and whom he spent years in mastering, saying, "no, if you picked up
Freud and knew immediately there was something fraudulent about him, despite
your ignorance you're a step ahead of where I was most of my life... and I'm
glad you weren't waylaid by his considerable art in thinking and writing."
I say this myself AS a Freudian... but also as someone who senses and respects
personal strength, rather than (perhaps?) playing to widespread conventions of
what "mature" behaviour is--let's negotiate, not cast aside; let's
show the bad so we know it within ourselves -- to keep your own well-situated
societal hoist intact. (Would honesty with ourselves ever mean being honest
about how apparently little daring is required these days for a lot of people
like this reviewer to explore the troubled legacies of times past? What would
be harder for her: knowing even more about how awful slavery was, or admitting
that there have been times when professions that were full of esteem were
cast-off rather abruptly, and art history could become one of them, and
rightly, for it being about tethering oneself, finding oneself within,
regressive times? [I'm also left to wonder how many people who supposedly are
arguing for awareness of their own conflicted nature, have ever felt their way
into Hitler and found correspondance... or do they just do what's couth) If the
new temperament is to abolish and never turn back, rather than mature-minded
they will be made to seem passé, temperamentally rigid, panicky at change,
implastic.
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