'Gone with the wind', a racist, old, exaggerated film ... but essential

• Controversy.HBO removes 'Gone with the wind' from its platform after protests considering it racist

Why 'Gone with the Wind' and not, for example, each and every one of Tarzan's grossly racist films that populate the imagination of anyone with 50 years of age? And what to do with one of the most important films in the history of cinema, perhaps the most important, such as 'The Birth of a Nation' , by David W. Griffith, which is not only racist due to carelessness or the sign of the times or by a more or less unfocused interpretation of political correctness, but by simple and pure conviction?

The news, already recurring, is that the highest grossing and, in its own way, beloved movie of all time suffers a new boycott. Or whatever. You know, HBO has just removed from its catalog the production prodigy signed by Victor Fleming (in addition to George Cukor and Sam Wood) under the watchful eye of producer producer David O. Selznick. It does so after John Ridley , not in vain as a screenwriter of '12 years of slavery ', demanded a letter in the 'Los Angeles Times' "for perpetuating the most painful stereotypes for African-Americans." Logically, with the streets of half the world on fire to the cry of 'Black Lives Matter' , the chain has chosen, also she, to sink her knee. In every possible way. And that, at the same time as in Europe, the BBC does the same with the much more modest 'Little Britain ' and for the same reasons: for its portrait of blacks. "Times have changed," has been the whole explanation.

First, the data. The film, aside equidistant or only distant looks, is racist. And it is from the moment it accepts without question the legitimacy that human beings are bought, sold and treated as mere cattle. One step further, the two prominent black characters, played by Hattie McDaniel and Butterfly McQueen, are staunch supporters of their own slavery. It is not so much a description of the supremacist South as a celebration. . In its release, it should be made clear that the film is not about the victims and that slavery as such does not matter "a damn" to the narrative. ' Gone with the Wind' , remember, speaks of Scarlett O'Hara (Miss Scarlet) and Rhett Butler. Of course, on the claudishing stage of a white arcadia sustained by, indeed, slavery, misery and, from her hand, the luxury due to it. The Metro, moreover, did not hesitate is to delete from the script the extremely derogatory word ' nigger ' that covers the original text by Margaret Mitchell. The producer of Jewish origin himself was careful to avoid that any type of lynching received a possible reading in parallel (and positive) to the persecution suffered by the descendants of his ancestors in Nazi Europe at the time.

But it would be unfair not to take into account that any film contemporary to it actually adopted a similar position. All the cinema of the 1930s could be blamed for ignoring issues such as lynching, discrimination or the unfortunate situation in prisons of the entire black population, much of it more than unfairly condemned in a supremacist south. Curiously, the few times that something similar is seen (think of ' Fury ', by Fritz Lang, or 'I am a fugitive ', by Mervyn LeRoy), those who flee from the enraged mass or carry inhuman grief are such actors. little blacks like Spencer Tracy or Paul Muni . Should we therefore ban all cinema from the 1930s? But despite the stupid question, don't answer yet.

HBO has promised that the film will return and it will do so with a prologue that contextualizes everything that today, whether you like it or not, is either controversial or simply inadmissible. "Actually," says Josetxo Cerdán , director of the Spanish Film Archive, "the debate has long been installed at the University. Some time ago, Griffith's films were spoken of as works of the great creator of audiovisual language, regardless of the fact that his cinema justifies lynchings. That cannot be. It must be explained, contextualized. " "What can not be , " he continues, "is that works to hide. The art museums are full of pictures that convey the look voyeur male, but no fabrics are covered. In the film the same. There is no than to ignore the morally objectionable or hide it . " After thinking, Cerdán looks for a Spanish example and finds the most obvious: "Should Raza , a film written by the dictator Franco, disappear ? Obviously not. On the contrary, it must be made public and offered, but making it clear where comes".

Be that as it may, HBO's is a compromise solution, somewhat paternalistic, reminiscent of the recent measure of allowing the publication of the ' Mein Kampf' , but duly noted, prolonged and protected from innocent looks (or not so much) . Wait a minute, is someone comparing one of the greatest expressionist, insane, operatic, surreal, and outrageously bizarre prodigies that camera crane melodrama has given the hallucinated pamphlet of a serial killer? Well, it seems that yes.

It is not convenient to forget, and they are also data, that we are in front of what for a long time was considered by the American Film Institute as the best film in history ahead of the eternal and cultured ' Citizen Kane' and, already put, of the one forced despite everything ' The birth of a nation' . Yes, that was back in the 1970s before Spike Lee dedicated an entire filmography to our miscalculations. But it was, and it was (and still is) for the simple reason that we are writing about the production worthy of 9 Oscars that has raised the most money in all that we have carried out in the 20th and 21st centuries. Correcting inflation, it would have raised almost 1.9 billion dollars today in the United States alone. In tickets, it would be 202 million. Followed by the first 'Star Wars ' ( 'The Star Wars' lifelong) with 178 million viewers. Although these data it is not clear that they speak well or badly of the film.

And since we are about to remember, it is not convenient to overlook what many have not hesitated to point out as the " emancipatory " values of the film. Artistic appreciations aside, the truth is that it is rare to find in Hollywood before the war, when empowerment began to be noticed in the absence of men, a female character like that embodied by Vivien Leigh. Scarlet does not know the term submission, neither before God nor before man. And what about that garlic-breathed Clark Gable whose patron-free cynicism despises flags, sides and hierarchies? Calling the first feminist and the second anarchist sounds exaggerated and out of context, but isn't that what we suffer? And all this, not to mention perhaps the most obvious. For the first time, the work of a black actress was recognized with an Oscar. Of course, let's not forget: at the gala she sat behind everything because of ... black.

Already in 2017 we were talking about the same thing. So Memphis' Orpheum cinema, Tennessee, ended a 34-year tradition and decided to suspend the classic's annual programming (that is) because the owner of the cinema considered the film "to be insensitive towards a large part of the local population" . Then, they were very present in everyone's memory of what happened in Charlottesville, Virginia, where violent clashes took place between groups of white supremacists and protesters who came out to counter their presence. One of the racists hit his 32-year-old activist Heather Heyer with her car and killed her.

Of course, the controversy returned to adopt the same face, tweets and comments as right now. On one hand, African-American writer and commentator Otis Sanford ran to celebrate the resolution. "It is another encouraging sign that attitudes are changing and that racism, hatred and oppression are not welcome in the United States," he said. On the other, the politician and also African-American Herman Cain , pointed to the highest: "Anyone who wants to explain the difference between this and the burning of books, do it." And so.

Recently, we have seen how black filmmakers reused and reread old cultural myths from a new position. Spike Lee reviews the imaginary of 'Gone with the Wind ' in ' ' Infiltrated in the Kkklan 'and what emerges is not so much a complaint as a thoughtful, intelligent and, above all, critical reappropriation. In addition to being amusing in its cruelty. Nate Parker remembers the first time that he was taught parallel film, the expressiveness of the foreground and the first systematization of narrative resources in Griffith's work in film classes, and he did not believe. His response was to remake 'The Birth of a Nation' , which glorified lynching, from the evidence of the crude, from the furious weight of the inadmissible. And finally, the most brilliant of all, Steve McQueen composed '12 years of slavery' of which Ridley is a screenwriter and was successful in drawing the strategies of the impudent and amoral far from the slave paraphernalia of old Hollywood melodrama. What was seen in his film is the history of human exploitation from the evident cruelty of the past to the ' finezza ' of the new times. A man who is sold and treated as merchandise is a slave wearing chains around his ankles or a late-model iPhone tied to his wrist.

In any case, and beyond the furor of the horde, the truth is that, as Cerdán acknowledges, there is consensus in the Academy that it is necessary to arbitrate a model that takes charge of correctly understood political correctness. From that and from the evidence that much of what is acceptable in the past is no longer acceptable. Of that and that the accurate reading of the passage of time through the works, be they teachers or contemptible, has nothing to do with censorship. It is as wrong to see Gone with the Wind as a justification for slavery as to see it obviating the fact that slavery is justified in it.

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