![\"Song\"](\"http:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/11\/Song.jpg\")
<\/a><\/span><\/p>\nAnd the cries come out against it: \u201cIt\u2019s racist.\u201d\u00a0 \u201cIt\u2019s antiquated.\u201d\u00a0 \u201cIt would offend people.\u201d\u00a0 \u201cWe shouldn\u2019t show it in case it does <\/i>offend people.\u201d\u00a0 \u201cIt\u2019s not a great work of art, in part because it\u2019s offensive.\u201d<\/p>\n
I never understand this stuff.\u00a0 It cuts across political barriers, too.\u00a0 Basically, the criterion for banning something is \u201cI don\u2019t like it.\u201d\u00a0 Books, movies, music, you name it, someone wants to ban it.\u00a0 It\u2019s often in the name of \u201cthe children.\u201d\u00a0 We wouldn\u2019t want to expose children<\/i> to this sort of thing, would we?<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s look at what this is, instead of our opinions about it:
\nJames Baskett won an honorary Academy Award for the film.
\nOscar winner Hattie McDaniel appears, the first African-American woman ever to win an Oscar.
\nWalt Disney considered Baskett a discovery, one of the best actors he\u2019d found.
\nThe work with animated characters superimposed over live action is groundbreaking, especially in a color film (this was shot with the three-color Technicolor camera.)
\nIt\u2019s one of the last works of legendary photographer Gregg Toland, the cinematographer of Citizen Kane<\/i>.<\/p>\n
Is there racial stuff it it?\u00a0 Sure.\u00a0 Is it insensitive by modern standards?\u00a0 I have no doubt it is.<\/p>\n
Should parents plop their kids in front of it without explaining it to them first?\u00a0 NO!\u00a0 But that goes for a lot of stuff.\u00a0 The television is not an electronic babysitter,\u00a0 nor is the iPhone or any other device.\u00a0 Sure, there\u2019s a lot of mindless stuff out there that can just be watched, and this isn\u2019t one of them.<\/p>\n
I haven\u2019t seen Song of the South<\/i>.\u00a0 I don\u2019t need to.\u00a0 It should be out there to be seen.\u00a0 If we have to get Leonard Maltin, Whoopi Goldberg, or Bill Cosby to do an introduction, then fine.\u00a0 It should be seen.<\/p>\n
This reminds me of an interchange I had with a friend of mine who I\u2019ll only identify as \u201cChef Carl.\u201d\u00a0 I was asked to come up with a program for Black History Month.\u00a0 OK, I said, let\u2019s show how racism once rocked the movies.\u00a0 Let\u2019s really show it.\u00a0 I had some good examples.\u00a0 They wouldn\u2019t let me do it.\u00a0 The manager of the theater said it would be perceived as insensitive because I\u2019m white.\u00a0 OK.<\/p>\n
So I thought about all the African-American folks I know and thought, \u201cWho\u2019d be the best one to introduce these pictures and explain the history of them?\u201d\u00a0 I thought of Chef Carl.\u00a0 He even agreed to do it.\u00a0 Then the manager came forward and wouldn\u2019t allow Carl to do it either.\u00a0 Why?\u00a0 Well, they were afraid that Carl would be seen as a \u201ctoken black,\u201d which was bad, too.\u00a0 I told Carl about it.\u00a0 I still remember his answer:<\/p>\n
\u201cSo you can\u2019t introduce the movies because you\u2019re white and I can\u2019t introduce them because I\u2019m black.\u201d\u00a0 BINGO.\u00a0 The most accurate response I can imagine.<\/p>\n
It also sparked a resurgence of the KKK in America.\u00a0 There was a lot <\/i>of racist content, and one of the Klansmen is a hero.\u00a0 It was true to the book it was based on, which was also racist.\u00a0 Without even really understanding what he did, DW Griffith made a racially polarizing film in 1915.\u00a0 It was so polarizing that he got death threats and there were Klan rallies that showed the film to whip up support for a new (and very different) Klan.<\/p>\n Griffith (a child of Kentucky) felt so awful about the film\u2019s reception and what it did that he made a followup called Intolerance <\/i>(1916) that made the age-old plea of \u201cWhy can\u2019t we just get along?\u201d\u00a0 Just how racist Griffith himself was is the stuff of much speculation.\u00a0 I can simply state that Madame Sul-Te-Wan (1873-1959) a long-lived African American actress, appeared in Birth of a Nation<\/i>.\u00a0 There\u2019s also a reel of home movies shot at DW Griffith\u2019s funeral in 1948.\u00a0 She\u2019s in that reel, too, crying and needing support from others, the only <\/i>person in the whole reel who seemed to be moved at the occasion.<\/p>\n If DW Griffith was the evil, racist pig that many modern authors make him out to be, then why was Madame Sul-Te-Wan so moved at his funeral?\u00a0 She knew him… we didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n Shouldn\u2019t we see the film for ourselves to find out?\u00a0 Or, if we choose not to, shouldn\u2019t we be free in that choice, too?\u00a0 There have been protests at showings of Birth of a Nation <\/i>even as recently as a few years ago, rife with cries of \u201cIt should be banned!\u201d<\/p>\n No, it shouldn\u2019t.\u00a0 The surest way to perpetuate an idea is to try to stamp it out.\u00a0 I\u2019ll repeat that, and it\u2019s key: The surest way to perpetuate an idea is to try to stamp it out.<\/p>\n Let me give you an example of what I\u2019m saying.\u00a0 When FW Murnau made Nosferatu <\/i>in 1922, he stole it from the novel Dracula<\/i>.\u00a0 Let\u2019s be honest, he stole it.\u00a0 They changed all the names around, but the plot is barefaced and recognizable.\u00a0 The book was very much in copyright and Murnau was sued.\u00a0 The studio lost, and the film was ordered destroyed.\u00a0 All prints, and the negative, too.<\/p>\n Except.<\/p>\n Nosferatu <\/i>became forbidden fruit!\u00a0 Film pirates the world over clamored for \u201cthe last print.\u201d\u00a0 There were a lot of \u201clast prints\u201d saved, duped, and bootlegged.\u00a0 It got way more release in foreign countries than any of other Murnau\u2019s films did.\u00a0 He became a popular director mostly because of the fame of a movie that no one was supposed to see.<\/p>\n So consider Der Januskopf<\/i> (1920).\u00a0 This was another FW Murnau film pirated illegally from a novel and play.\u00a0 In this case it was Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde<\/i> by Robert Louis Stevenson.\u00a0 It became Janus-kopf (Janus head) and the two characters were Dr. Warren and Mr. O\u2019Connor.\u00a0 The dual role was played by Conrad Veidt.\u00a0 Veidt\u2019s butler was played by Bela Lugosi, who was on his way from war-torn Hungary to America.\u00a0 This is one of his few appearances in a German film.<\/p>\n Historically important?\u00a0 You bet.\u00a0 But no one sued over this film, and there was no clamor over its illegal piracy.\u00a0 No one bootlegged the last prints or the negative, which stayed in storage until it rotted.<\/p>\n Two films, one director, both pirated, one forbidden fruit, and one completely legal.\u00a0 The forbidden fruit survived.\u00a0 Stamping out the idea perpetuated it.\u00a0 Today, you can get a version of Nosferatu <\/i>on any street corner, in various versions, cuts, tints, and speeds.<\/p>\n And is that different now?\u00a0 Nope.\u00a0 Song of the South<\/i> is forbidden fruit.\u00a0 It\u2019s out there.\u00a0 As of this writing, there are 85 copies on eBay for sale.\u00a0 Those are just the ones who are brazen enough to post them.<\/p>\n Just 10 copies of Steamboat Willie<\/i> for sale, though.\u00a0 That one… it\u2019s always been available.\u00a0 It\u2019s a landmark Disney picture, the first cartoon with sound, the first big Mickey Mouse picture, and 10 copies.<\/p>\n So is Song of the South <\/i>a great film?\u00a0 I have no idea.\u00a0 I might like it, I might not.\u00a0 I might be offended, and I might not.\u00a0 My advice to Disney is to make it available and therefore control the dialogue about the film.\u00a0 Now it\u2019s forbidden fruit.\u00a0 You can make it a \u201cNever Forget\u201d historical item, which it needs to be.\u00a0 You can also make sure that everyone knows why it\u2019s historically important.<\/p>\n By the way, I don\u2019t want political comments in the comments section or I\u2019ll shut it down.\u00a0 \u201cThose liberals\u201d and \u201cThose Republicans\u201d are equally guilty of censorship, albeit often for different reasons.\u00a0 This isn\u2019t a political forum.\u00a0 It\u2019s a film forum.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I remember a play I was in many years ago.\u00a0 I was playing a Supreme Court Justice in First Monday in October.\u00a0 One of the main questions in it concerns an obscenity case in which the justices are called upon to decide whether a particular porno movie is so obscene that it cannot be shown.\u00a0 … Continue reading “\u201cThat should be banned!\u201d”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"powered_cache_disable_cache":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,207],"tags":[29,159,160,158,118,157],"class_list":["post-525","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dr-films-pocket-rants","category-film","tag-bela-lugosi","tag-birth-of-a-nation","tag-censorship","tag-conrad-veidt","tag-disney","tag-song-of-the-south"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/525","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=525"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/525\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":530,"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/525\/revisions\/530"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=525"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=525"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=525"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/a>There\u2019s a similar uproar with Birth of a Nation <\/i>(1915), which is a DW Griffith film.\u00a0 Birth of a Nation <\/i>changed the world.\u00a0 It was the first time that it was clear that a long, feature-length film could make money and keep making money.\u00a0 It caused the landscape of movies to change.\u00a0 Vaudeville houses switched over to movies.\u00a0 Movie houses changed from flat Nickelodeons to raked, long theaters.\u00a0 Theaters put in extra projectors to make smoother changeovers.\u00a0 It was a big deal, and it made money in the North and South, wherever it played.\u00a0 It\u2019s a good film, it\u2019s a landmark film, and it\u2019s one of the key films in the history of the motion picture.<\/p>\n<\/a>