DVD Talk Forum - Gone With The Wind

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Quote:

Originally Posted by Spiky

I'm trying to figure out how people born in the 1970s or 1980s can be so knowledgeable about a problem that was abolished in the 1860s.

Books. Lectures. Documentaries. Oral histories and family histories. There are still people alive today who knew people who were adults during that era.

http://www.cnn.com/2004/US/South/06/16/civilwar.widow/

Not many though surely?
Its it right to make a comparison with how Japanese audiences reacted in Japan to "Fist of Fury"? (No one commented on what I said).
:)
I'm sure every nation has aspects of its history of which it isnt proud.

Quote:

Originally Posted by natevines

The southern gentlemen weren't fighting for slavery any more than the northern men were fighting against it. Ulysses S. Grant said, "If I thought this war was to abolish slavery, I would resign my commission and offer my sword to the other side". Yet Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson both thought slavery to be evil. In James McPherson's 1997 "For Cause and Comrades", he analyzes primary sources to see why ordinary men, both northern and southern, fought. His conclusions are that 2/3rds of all the men, northern and souther fought for patriotrism. All of the men were probably racists. I have no more respect for the northern fighting man than the southern fighting man. I doubt either really cared about what his side was fighting for.

Whatever the individual motivations of the fighting men -- yes it's true, the majority of Southerners were too poor to own slaves, and many northerners actively protested against the concept of fighting *for* blacks -- the Civil War was fought over slavery and the fact the slave-holding was a cultural and economic cornerstone of Southern culture. Without slaves, wealthy plantation owners didn't have access to wage-free workers they could own, control, and breed. Cheap labor was especially necessary, given the advent of Eli Whitney's cotton gin and the fact that the South was making buttloads of cash on their cotton crop, selling to both Europe and Northern factories. If they had to *pay* workers to work the fields, their magins dropped precipitiously. Slavery drove the Missouri Compromise used to protect southern industry, stating that for every new free state admitted to the union, another had to be admitted as a slave one. Then you get into the whole issue of nullification ordinances, which tested whether or not states could strike down federal laws.. but these were mostly about slavery (in the north AND the south). Slavery became a major issue after the Mexican American war, as the Wilmot Proviso tried to keep slavery out of Texas and California as part of a reparations package to Mexico. The Senate never approved it. Also the

Quote:

Originally Posted by Rad14

I raise the point because although there may not have been anything evil intended when they made the film, the slave part of it (and let's face it, it's a pretty big part) is totally distorted and gives the impression that negroes (who where either clowns, idiots or childlike) where quite happy to live under the whim of white men, and go singing happily off to work!
Why then wasn't the truth shown? or even "off screen"?

As for "especially don't hold it over contemporaries that had nothing to do with it" I never suggested any such thing! and let me make this absolutely clear: I do not hold southern people today guilty for the inhumanity of their forbears at all, or the Germans or anyone else in contemporary times!

Of course movies are famous for not "showing the truth". You mention Braveheart and Rome as examples, and I could mention plenty more, but this is GWTW, the supposedly biggest movie of an era, taken from a best-selling tome, that took years to make and endless studio resources, countless technicians, directors, actors etc, (you get the message) and was reputedly "a story of The Old South". Why then was this most horrendous of episodes, not simply ignored, but distorted beyond belief?

As I mentioned earlier, I am not a Negro, but if I was, I would consider the slave issue in GWTW, at best, a distortion of the truth. But in reality a gross insult to an entire people.

I sometimes think people are either trained or want to be offended...

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kerborus

I sometimes think people are either trained or want to be offended...

This thread is making me think just that.