Is "Gone With the Wind" a racist film?

Spike Lee made an amazing film about race called “Bamboozled”. I think it’s one of the best movies on race I’ve ever seen. On the DVD, and in other comments he makes which can be found online, some of which can be found at the link below where he additionaly criticizes “Cold Mountain” as being even worse, he clearly believes “Gone With the Wind” to have some racist elements because it romanticizes the old South.
I’ve asked one person about this so far.. and he said “of course it is”… but I argued that it was part of the context of the story, and the way the “help” was potrayed in GWTW is how it was in the Old South. So he said, "Well then, you can make the same argument about “Birth of a Nation”, or “Triumph of the Will” ’.
I myself.. do not know if the question even has an answer…
What do the Mubians think?

some comments by Spike Lee several remarks down:
http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/4297019/ns/today-entertainment/t/spike-lee-has-new-film-many-opinions/

Yes, it is racist as it does romanticise the old South. It is from a white perspective with white protagonists and caricatured black servants- albeit the first black Oscar-winner in the cast. There is no critique from a black perspective; it could have shown the old South from the viewpoint of the enslaved, their suffering and desire for freedom rather than knowing their place. It could have shown the value of their lives beyond revolving round white people. Although it does show some suffering due to war compared with luxurious frivolity, it is a comforting portrait for the masses of white people who went to see it. The South was fighting to keep slavery, yet slavery is portrayed as the normal order of things, potentially contentious aspects pushed aside in favour of grand values and audience-pleasing romance.

I’ve never seen Driving Miss Daisy but Spike Lee has a point: nobody talks about it anymore. Oscars are not the sign of true filmmaking brilliance. The toughest test is that of time. I saw Do The Right Thing in the cinema a couple years ago and after the credits had finished rolling, you could’ve heard a pin drop. The film has lost none of its impact.

On a different note, what the hell is up with that photo? Spike Lee from New York…wearing a Packers jumper?

C’MON, MAN!

I know, everyone should support the Seahawks

Oscars are but a razzmattazz of mediocrity, insularity and ignorance

No, Packers suck, Bears rule. I can’t wait until the Packers pull a Patriots and choke their “perfect” season.

It is, and it’s a boring piece of shit too.

Great for old ladies though.

JOKS, you and this person need to hang out sometime:

Mme Zemiro hates GWTW with a passion

Come to think of it, maybe not. She is actually not half as interesting nor is she as funny in person as she seems on TV. For someone supposedly gifted at improvisation she sure does struggle without a script. She also has the hots for Mads Mikkelsen and worships him like a god. And she wonders why she’s on the shelf.

Seriously though, is GWTW really that “racist”? It’s a product of its time, to be certain, but one could accuse countless films about Aborigines of being “racist” because they romanticise Aboriginal culture. I’m certain that Aboriginal culture has its less-than-flattering points and they didn’t all live in harmony with one another, and the same goes for any other group of indigenous peoples who “lived in serenity” until “Big Bad Whitey” came along. Okay, so films from several decades ago did little to criticise the actions of Whitey and glossed a lot of things over, but when do we say “enough is enough” to the pendulum swinging the other way?

Hyperactive political correctness can muddy the waters of history quite badly and I think that many of the films being made nowadays will fare badly in future years, for trying to pander to strongly too the PC brigade.

Well every single film is racist. Slap Shot, Citizen Kane, Ran, all films, ’cause obviously every film that does not include All cultures and ethnicities must be racist. Taxi Driver is surely racist, Hell, most Scorsese for that matter.

Plus, who cares that it was based on a book.

More than likely we should all stop watching movies, reading books, listening to music, it’s all racist. We should all just hang out at the UN to make sure we are accepting all cultures and ethnicities.

Actually, Hattie McDaniel’s Mammy is much more shrewd than any of her white counterparts in the film. She is one of the few characters (outside Gable’s Butler) who sees Scarlett for who she really is. She speaks her mind and clearly reveals her displeasure at Scarlett’s many shenanigans. If anything, she is a loyal and faithful friend.

Yes..it is romanticized…….there weren’t that many aristocratic slaveholders in the Old South, much less in Georgia alone. The opening scene of the barbecue is an exaggerated viewpoint of how many rich landholders there were. It is the antebellum South as Americanized Camelot. The Civil War is merely a backdrop to the film’s central element…the romance between Rhett and Scarlett.

MOST films in the 1930’s had a racial aspect to them. The roles of African Americans in films were limited to playing domestics and comic relief. This was before the Civil Rights movement, before Rosa Parks refused to sit in the back of a bus and before Martin Luther King, Jr. had a dream. School segregation was still rampant. A film showing the real evil of slavery during the Civil War was not possible in this historical context.

Probably not until Sidney Poitier came along did the role of the African American in films begin to develop and mature.

…and really, when you watch the opening explanatory material about a land of cavaliers and such…a life that is gone with the wind….it’s pretty obvious GWTW isn’t going to be a historical treatise.

WANDERER: Let’s just forget about the racist argument for now. I don’t like the film. It’s a just a big shallow spectacle to me. Yes it’s very well made, technically, but in a generic(for the time) kind of way.

guess i don’t care much for the old Hollywood epics.

“Well every single film is racist. Slap Shot, Citizen Kane, Ran, all films, ’cause obviously every film that does not include All cultures and ethnicities must be racist. Taxi Driver is surely racist, Hell, most Scorsese for that matter”

Yet again, a complete misunderstanding/misrepresentation of the problem, and “straw man” exaggeration

Aaaaaw, so you don’t even like it when Rhett says:

Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn.

Ha, that must be one of the most spoiled endings ever. Does anybody NOT know how the film ends?

I guess Rhett’s line sums up your feelings about the film. Hey, I actually like Giant more than this one, in terms of sprawling epics. As for Clark Gable, I haven’t seen much of him, but I like San Francisco more than GWTW. Everyone talks about the inferno scene in GWTW but it’s not as impressive as the earthquake that hits in San Francisco. If somebody attempted to emulate that (the earthquake) on film these days, it would look like one big computer game. It’s a really great scene—they knew how to do them back in those days.

I do like GWTW (and I was prepared to be offended by it and maybe even not like it) but I shall say that there are lesser known films that are much better.

This is not at all about getting all cultures and ethnicities represented: just reverse the ethnicity in GWTW and see if you still think it’s ok. No doubt the mind boggles at such absurdity

The film, Kenji, is a product of its time and source material. Are there racial elements, of course, considering the times, but that doesn’t make it a racist depiction.

To say the film is racist is " a complete misunderstanding/misrepresentation."

Is Huckleberry Finn a racist novel?

Of course i take into account the era it was made. Not everyone has to follow the flow. I haven’t read Huckleberry Finn since a kid.

Many countries- not just the US- are full of racists who don’t intend to be racist and would be dismayed and shocked to be considered as such. You don’t have to be a member of KKK or the BNP in Britain to be racist. GTWT is not Birth of a Nation, and full of virulent hatred, but it is still racist. Racism can work in more subtle and socially accepted ways.

From memory, Gone With The Wind depicts the black slaves as being content with their lot, provided they were being looked after, and the rebellious ones as trouble makers. is that correct? I haven’t seen in it years and i’m not about to rewatch it either.

I have better things to do with my time, such as posting on Mubi, or picking winners out of my nose.

Wanderer said:

…one could accuse countless films about Aborigines of being “racist” because they romanticise Aboriginal culture. I’m certain that Aboriginal culture has its less-than-flattering points and they didn’t all live in harmony with one another, and the same goes for any other group of indigenous peoples who “lived in serenity” until “Big Bad Whitey” came along.

Kind of off-topic, but if you want a break from this typical failure in depicting native cultures, I strongly recommend Chinua Achebe’s short novel Things Fall Apart.

I agree, ethnicism can be subtle, there is but one race, so by saying racist we are proving racist ourselves by saying there is more than just the human race here on earth, but your claim that a film should have delved deeper into something that moved away from the main plot just to appease some future critics is lunacy.

Taxi Driver depicted a time and place and told a singular story, just as Gone with the Wind, and was certainly stronger in language when describing “races,” yet where is the condemnation?

To say something Should Have been this or that is arrogant on our part, especially when we’re not part of the time when the film was made.

“Taxi Driver depicted a time and place and told a singular story, just as Gone with the Wind, and was certainly stronger in language when describing “races,” yet where is the condemnation?”

Because you aren’t supposed to like most of the characters in Taxi Driver perhaps? Because the milieu of the film is dirty, violent, ugly and cruel, and not the least bit romanticised?

just a thought

Sorry, that just tries to wash things in a another load, Joks.

It is not racist to depict racist behavior. It is racist to endorse racist behavior. Taxi Driver (and Huckleberry Finn for that matter) takes place in racist environments and features racist characters, but they proceed to critique these people and places. Gone With the Wind looks at its time and place with a romantic affection, so while not as offensive as something like Birth of a Nation, there’s an undercurrent of racism throughout.

Sure, Gone With the Wind is problematic in it’s portrayal of race, and should be subject to criticism as such, but to label a film as simple “racist” (or not) is so terribly broadside in that it can include anything from the gross and ugly historical distortions of Birth of a Nation to the sentimental glossing over of the historical realities of the Civil War-era American South in Gone With the Wind, to pretty much any imperfect portrayal of a race. If certainly have no problem with this line of discussion, but let’s not be so broad in our reading of this aspect of the work that we obliterate our own sense of detail and intent in the works.

I for one am a lot more troubled by the idea that the Jim Crow laws of the time prevented McDaniel and McQueen and the other black actors from being able to see their own work on screen at the premiere in Atlanta in December of ’39.

OP lost me when he referred to Bamboozled as a “great film”. I have never seen Gone with the Wind though. It’s a cinematic omission I wear like a badge of pride.

Ari, Doug C called Bamboozled “amazing” and “one of the best movies on race.” He didn’t call it “great.” Just to be fair to Doug C.

As for not seeing GWTW as a point of pride, I can’t say I blame you for that, but I think it is worth seeing at least once. It’s well crafted in the old Hollywood style. But it is basically an apology for Southern heritage. I don’t know how anyone could excuse it as being just a film of its time. Grapes of Wrath, as book and film, was a product of the same time. Part of its purpose, borrowed from its source, is propagandistic, to romanticize and excuse the South’s slavery culture by focusing on the old world gentility of the slavers and glossing over the fact that they kept human beings as their personal property. Of course its main purpose was to make money as epic entertainment.

Haha, maybe I did put a word in his mouth. That seemed to be his connotations though. I certainly watched Bamboolzed in jaw-dropping amazement but not in the ways that Lee intended.

GWTW is just one of those films that everyone has seen that I’ve always resisted seeing. I actually like a lot of Selznick’s works, especially the haunting Portrait of Jennie and his more maligned attempt to follow-up GWTW’s success – the most excellent Duel in the Sun.

I expected it to be boring. It isn’t. It is without a doubt entertaining from beginning to end.

“I don’t know how anyone could excuse it as being just a film of its time. Grapes of Wrath, as book and film, was a product of the same time. "

Well, part of the limitation of approaching Gone With the Wind as strictly a literal statement about the South during the Civil War is that this would obliterate the fact that metaphorically, it was in a significant way a response to its own time (as, obviously, was Grapes of Wrath)—a country that was devastated not by four years of civil war, but by ten years of the Great Depression, a crisis that in some ways began a profound change it the role of women in American culture and the workforce, so one can see Scarlet as a response to this, and as a kind of prototype of modern American feminism.

Now, obvious Mitchell as an artist was not at the same level as Steinbeck, and they grew up and were educated in vastly different settings (Salinas is about as far as you can get away from Atlanta, literally and figuratively), and consequently they had very different political sensibilities, but, despite its problematic treatment of race, an argument can be made (and, in fact, has been made quite frequently) for GWWtW as using the social unrest of the Civil War as a metaphor for the social unrest of the Great Depression.

Don’t quite think you guys know what racism is…