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Carrol, You wrote, at the start, "No movie can have a radical message unless it is issued in the context of an active [p]olitical movement of The Left. Given such a movie, the movie with the most radical (and anti-racist) context is The Birth of a Nation," which makes ao powerfully visible (as no leftist or explicitly anti-racist movie has ever done or ever could do) the inner logic of what we might call The Second Americvan REpublic, 1876-1970" __________ The problem with your analysis is precisely the one of context. You are reading the context of the 1960s, 70s, into a film that was made in the context of 1915, Woodrow Wilson's explicitly virulent racism, and a nation's self-glorification of its enslavement of people. You are the one missing the context of the movie, and the content in the movie, ascribing to the film itself what would be the value of the most merciless criticism of the film. Essentially, what you are doing is "wishing" a context to the film that simply does not exist. The content of the film does exist. And that content is in no way, shape, or form critical of the racism, terrorism, disenfranchisement practiced by the redemptionists of the South. The movie's original title was "The Clansmen," and it explictly endorsed the KKK attacks on Reconstruction. Now maybe, no maybe about it, you want to make that into a self-criticism of capitalism, but it is not, because there is lacking the most critical component of "self-criticism"-- which is historical consciousness within the film itself. The film is based on a distortion, actual destruction, of history. What you make of the film is exactly parallel to somebody claiming "Mein Kampf" is the greatest exposure of anti-Jewish prejudice ever written. The nonsense is all yours, all the time. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Carrol Cox" <cb...@ilstu.edu> ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
