Re: [Marxism] Gone With the Wind

[Carrol Cox <cbcox@xxxxxxxxx>]

Jerry Monaco wrote:
> 
>  
> Late in life I made the mistake of going back to school.  It was Law School
> and a majority of the people at the school were young women, mostly white.
> It was a Jewish school so many of the young women I got to know were at
> least culturally Jewish.  I was shocked how many of them said that the only
> "old" movie they "loved" was GWtW.  The blindness to the racism in the movie
> was what was most shocking to me.

I think GWtW is irredeemable slime. It either merely offends _or_
deepens the racism of the audience.

Not so with _Birth of a Nation_. That movie works its racist magic
_only_ on an audience that is already overtly and self-consciously
racist -- as was Woodrow Wilson, who showed the movie in the White House
in the same spirit as the late Pope showed Gibson's slime in the
Vatican.

But for an audience that is _at all_ consciously anti-racist, BofaN can
deepen understanding of the role of racism in u.s. history. In other
words, in the right context, the right audience, and the right critical
guidance Birth of a Nation is one of the most powerful and effective
ANTI-racist films ever made.

But this is something I've argued before. No film or poem or drama is by
itself politically meaningful; rather, the political meaning of a film
or novel or painting is determined not by the film-maker or novelist or
painter but by the audience of that film, novel, painting and by the
political context in which it is viewed.

Carrol

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