Thought-provoking article: "What 'Lincoln' misses and another Civil War film gets right"....
What 'Lincoln' misses and another Civil War film gets rightQUOTE:
(CNN) -- He used the N-word and told racist jokes. He once said African-Americans were inferior to whites. He proposed ending slavery by shipping willing slaves back to Africa.
Meet Abraham Lincoln, "The Great Emancipator" who "freed" the slaves.
That's not the version of Lincoln we get from Steven Spielberg's movie "Lincoln." But there's another film that fills in the historical gaps left by Spielberg and challenges conventional wisdom about Lincoln and the Civil War.
"The Abolitionists" is a PBS American Experience film premièring Tuesday that focuses on the intertwined lives of five abolitionist leaders. These men and women arguably did as much -- maybe even more -- than Lincoln to end slavery, yet few contemporary Americans recognize their names.
Take the time to read this article....very interesting, to say the least.
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and I am not saying that just because my mum was a Brit 
The Irishman, Branagh, certainly had no business doing Henry V.
Maximus was Spanish. Antonio Banderas? 
he gets off on violence for violence sake
All the movies he steals from show.
If you want a better director to like, try David Lynch, an actual artiste'.
Who in every one of his films, shows redemption
btw, his best film is Straight Story starring Richard Farnsworth.
Try that one out.
(though if you like bloody, violent shoot em ups with no redeeming value, I would hesitate to recommend it to you).
BTW- Christoph Waltz in Django is German. (OH MY GOD.)
And tell me, what kind of accent did Brad Pitt have in the ludacrist Inglorious Bastard movie?
James Remar, who was in Django was great on Broadway playing opposite Richard Gere in Bent.
That was a masterpiece.
btw, Atu Essandoh's parents are from Ghana. Doesn't that concern you?
(he is an actor in Django).
and finally, Django is a theft of Spaghetti Westerns, which of course are NOT American born and bred genre'.
(but I assume you knew that.)
Ask questions, critique. This isn't a bank, and you shouldn't let me just sit and make deposits in your head to be regurgitated on a test." Instead, "quite the little rebel." Not dissing the teacher, it took all of us together to mostly kill off John Dewey.
'Course, sometimes resistance is necessary to create heat.
But you keep doin' what you're doin'!
when I was 14 I was given a list of autobiographies; I was to select one, read it and do a book report.....I complained to the teacher that all the authors were white men and could I please do a report on a book written by a black woman? I was fully expecting her to say no but she agreed and told me to find such a book. I did my report on, "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings."
suggests that the movie hypes the crisis aspect. But he says go see the movie, then read a book about Lincoln (presumably his
...written by Annette Gordon-Reed, an African-American professor of law and history (New York Law School, Rutgers).
Best book on Jefferson ever written! And it's written mostly from the point of view of the Hemings family--Sally Hemings, Jefferson's slave wife, her brothers, her extended family, her forebears. Extraordinary research, especially given the difficulties of this research (for instance, Jefferson's white family and descendants tried to erase Sally's memory), but even more wondrous analysis of the cultural situation that the Hemingses and their mixed race 'white' relatives and Jefferson himself were born to and lived.
Gordon-Reed treats them ALL as PEOPLE. This is, really, her main point. She has an amazing understanding of the breadth of complication in human beings. She does not shrink from the evidence that Jefferson LOVED Sally Hemings AND her brothers, and they loved him, and that HE considered them his FAMILY and acted very well towards them, indeed, despite the mind-bogglingly hypocritical and brutal white supremacy culture that they were all born to.
That said--this well-researched and compelling argument of the book, that Jefferson basically loved the Hemingses and they him--Gordon-Reed never lets up on slamming Jefferson for the SYSTEM of slavery, for the anonymous misery of the lives of his OTHER slaves, for the condition of his wife Sally and her brothers AS slaves, and for not doing anything about it all, even after they had lived in Paris in the midst of the Enlightenment, where one of Sally's brothers, James Hemings, had the run of Paris, at Jefferson's leave, and became a master chef, at Jefferson's expense. In Paris, they were free. In Virginia, they were not. And never the twain shall meet--because Jefferson, for all his lofty ideals, would not or could not transform Virginia society. He PREFERRED Parisian society, where slavery was forbidden and equality was real, but he ACCEPTED the "hick" society of Virginia, where owning slaves was the basis of the economy, as unchangeable, at least in his lifetime.
I held out for the whole book, constantly asking the questions, "Did he rape her?" and "Can she really have consented to the relationship?" Because Jefferson has always been a hero of mine, and I wanted to know just how compromised he was. I have the ability to change my mind about historical figures and narratives, as well as current ones, if I encounter convincing evidence that I have been wrong about them. I was LOOKING for evidence on Jefferson, because it is so difficult to reconcile the idealistic and revolutionary man with the slave-owner. And what better tutor could I have than an extremely erudite African-American woman law professor of the 21st century? Annette Gordon-Reed, of the impeccable research and brilliant analysis and compelling narrative!
Well, she taught me about Jefferson all right. She taught me that he was the most amazingly mixed up man that ever was! She put me in his soul, looking at the world with his eyes, and in the souls of his slave wife and her brothers and other family members, looking at the world with their eyes. What an experience!
She convinced me that Thomas Jefferson did NOT rape Sally Hemings (and there is no evidence whatever that he raped others--he seems to have been an exception among white male slaveowners, though he lived in and tolerated a society in which master-slave rape was commonplace). As to her consent to be his wife "without portfolio" so to speak, she consented--she loved him, for sure--but she was young and his literal slave at the beginning of this relationship, so I don't know if their 'common law' marriage would hold up in a court of law today. As the relationship developed, she surely consented to it, and she had the opportunity, in Paris, to leave him and be supported by her master chef brother, who also had the option to leave him. They both could EASILY have walked into a court in Paris and declared themselves free, as MANY slaves from the colonies were doing in Enlightened Paris, and James could easily have made a living there--and Sally could possibly have also done so, on her own, as a seamstress or free servant. She also could have married freely.
They both CHOSE to return to Virginia with Jefferson. By that time, they WERE a family. Jefferson was paying James a salary and would later ASK him to be the White House chef (when James was living in Boston) and reacted to James' refusal like a hurt father toward a stubborn son. (He did not punish him for it in any way.) It is also probable that Sally bargained for Jefferson's promise to free her children.
Please do read this book before you dismiss Thomas Jefferson as a rapist. I am convinced, after reading it, that he was not. We really owe it to the memories of ALL of these people to UNDERSTAND who they really were, the culture that they were born to and that weighed upon them every day, wherever they were, throughout their lives. It's easy enough to condemn people who are caught in cultural traps. It's not so easy to put yourself in their places and really grasp the whole of their lives, and all of the contradictions, pressures, ambivalence, sorrows and desires that characterize human life. God knows we need this kind of understanding today, in our multi-cultural, globalized world.
Jefferson was a man so committed to the Enlightenment that he re-wrote the New Testament, editing out all of its patriarchal nonsense. (It's called "Jefferson's Bible." He was a man with the sensibility to notice and write about the evil effect of slavery on BOTH master and slave! (--in his Virginia chronicles). He was a man who at times felt repulsed by black people and fell in love with one--and treated her well and treated her brothers like sons! He was a man who could see past slavery, to a world without slavery--who put THAT in the Declaration of Independence, but did NOT fight with his fellow slave-owners when they edited it out. He was a man like the dramatic characters Oedipus and Hamlet, living a tragedy, and becoming increasingly aware of the tragedy in the course of his life, and his slave wife Sally was very like Antigone, in some respects--committed to the principle of family--and a bit like Ophelia, although Sally was a lot studier than Ophelia and grew up to be an amazing woman, lost in the shadows of history that did not want to acknowledge her. Gordon-Reed resurrects her, in all her beauty and quiet wisdom, in all her tragedy and magnificence--and she saves Thomas Jefferson from condemnation, in my opinion, just as Sally Hemings would have wished.
That bastard.
In 1860 there was only one way for a Republican to get elected (go ahead and read "Team of Rivals" --and that was to be against slavery spreading to new territories BUT not to want to get rid of slaves in existing territories. That was the party line. A true abolitionist would not have gotten nominated as the Republican candidate as there would be no way he could win the presidency. I suppose the ironic comparison to now is guns. If one of the democrat choices in the next election said they'd completely outlaw gun ownership...would they get nominated? How about the one who said, instead, "We need more gun control laws, but let gun owners keep their guns...."
Lincoln wanted to be elected, and as an ambitious politician, he had to have that point of view at least publicly. So we have him saying this publicly in 1860 to those who he hopes will vote him into the presidency: "I do not wish to be misunderstood upon this subject of slavery in this country. I suppose it may long exist, and perhaps the best way for it to come to an end peaceably is for it to exist for a length of time. But I say that the spread and strengthening and perpetuation of it is an entirely different proposition. There we should in every way resist it as a wrong, treating it as a wrong, with the fixed idea that it must and will come to an end." The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln edited by Roy P. Basler, Volume III, "Speech at Chicago, Illinois" (March 1, 1859), p. 370.
This doesn't mean it's what he actually thought, nor how he came to eventually think by the end of the war. Very like our own president on the subject of gays, a man--a president's views can evolve. And Lincoln started with remarkably evolved views on slavery even if he maintained the party line in public. Here is an argument he wrote up to himself in 1854 (six years before what he said above) against slavery--it's remarkably modern in its views:
"If A. can prove, however conclusively, that he may, of right, enslave B. -- why may not B. snatch the same argument, and prove equally, that he may enslave A?--
You say A. is white, and B. is black. It is color, then; the lighter, having the right to enslave the darker? Take care. By this rule, you are to be slave to the first man you meet, with a fairer skin than your own.
You do not mean color exactly?--You mean the whites are intellectually the superiors of the blacks, and, therefore have the right to enslave them? Take care again. By this rule, you are to be slave to the first man you meet, with an intellect superior to your own.
But, say you, it is a question of interest; and, if you can make it your interest, you have the right to enslave another. Very well. And if he can make it his interest, he has the right to enslave you."
In short, are we really going to take to task anyone born in another time for not acting like the modern, enlightened, 21st century person we want them to act like? I'm sorry, but there are very few real human beings who magically transcended their time and failed to absorb any of the misogynistic or racist or religious bias held by their culture and historical period. I think it better to admire what people did in spite of their inherited prejudices--and that means looking at their entire life not cherry picking only the bad stuff or good stuff for that matter--rather than try to find spotless historical figures that somehow transcended all that (good luck with that!).
