New York (AFP)

The film "Gone with the Wind", qualified by some historians as revisionist, was withdrawn from the streaming platform HBO Max, in the midst of a protest against racism and police violence targeting blacks in the United States.

The river feature film (3:58) released in 1939 is considered by many academics to be the most ambitious and effective instrument of Southern revisionism.

He notably presents a romantic version of the South and a very watered-down vision of slavery, with in particular domestic staff depicted as satisfied with their lot and treated as ordinary employees.

This reinterpretation of a dark period in American history is the work of highly organized movements in the former Confederate States, which set out to present the South before the American Civil War in a presentable light.

Fundamentally, the ideology of the "Lost Cause" maintained that the Southern States had fought for their political independence, threatened by the North, and not for the maintenance of slavery, which is a historical untruth.

If in gross figures, "Avengers: Endgame", is the film which brought in the most revenues in the history of cinema, with 2.8 billion dollars, "Gone With the Wind", its American title, remains in the lead after taking inflation into account, with $ 3.44 billion.

"+ Gone with the Wind + is the product of its time and depicts the racist prejudices that were common in American society," a spokesman for HBO Max told AFP on Tuesday to explain the withdrawal of the feature film to the 8 Oscars.

For HBO Max, to keep this film in its catalog "without explanation and denunciation of this representation would have been irresponsible".

The platform plans to put the film back online but with contextualization to re-situate the work in its time.

The film will be shown in its entirety, because to do otherwise would be to "act as if these prejudices never existed", said the spokesman.

Launched at the end of May, the platform of the WarnerMedia group (subsidiary of the cable operator AT&T) HBO Max poses as a competitor to the streaming giants, primarily Netflix, with a catalog very supplied with series and films.

The film is still available on other platforms, including rental on Amazon.

© 2020 AFP