OldSoul : The Help - Black-and-White Struggle With a Rosy Glow

OldSoul

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"The Help"

Black-and-White Struggle With a Rosy Glow

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August 9, 2011 By NELSON GEORGE

The fail-safe response for Hollywood has been to depict racial prejudice in cartoon caricature, a technique that has made the Southern redneck a cinematic bad guy on par with Nazis, Arab terrorists and zombies. By denying the casual, commonplace quality of racial prejudice, and peering into the saddest values of the greatest generation, Hollywood perpetuates an ahistorical vision of how democracy and white supremacy comfortably co-existed.
To protect viewers, sometimes at profound damage to the historical record, white heroes are featured and sometimes concocted for these movies, giving blacks a supporting role in their own struggle for liberation. Films of this stripe are legion, though the most irritating example remains“Mississippi Burning,” in which two F.B.I. agents are at the center of an investigation into the murder of civil rights activists. It was a bitter pill for movement veterans to swallow since the agents’ boss, J. Edgar Hoover, was as vicious an opponent as any Southern Dixiecrat. Though not as egregious, both Rob Reiner’s “Ghosts of Mississippi” and the adaptation of John Grisham’s “A Time to Kill” fit this formula.
The other Hollywood fallback strategy when dealing with the movement (or race-themed film set in any period) is to employ “the Magic Negro,” a character whose function is to serve as a mirror so that the white lead can see himself more clearly, sometimes at the expense of the black character’s life. Sidney Poitier’s selfless convict in “The Defiant Ones” was probably the definitive Magic Negro role, though the formula has survived decades, from Will Smith’s God-like caddy in “The Legend of Bagger Vance”up to Jennifer Hudson’s helpful secretary in “Sex and the City” — just a few incarnations of this timeless saint.

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... the Edmund Pettus Bridge and the National Voting Rights Museum at its base. The infamous Bloody Sunday protest, March 7, 1965, in which several hundred marchers were beaten by state troopers at the bridge is commemorated at the museum, a long one-story building dedicated to “the foot soldiers of the movement,” the husbands and wives, schoolkids and churchgoers who overcame their fear to dramatize their desire for the unimpeded right to vote.
Inside the museum footprints of many of the marchers are captured in concrete, Mann’s Chinese Theater-style, along with garments from that day’s fateful confrontation. There’s a model of a Selma jail cell around the early ’60s, where scores of arrested protesters were crammed together, and black-and-white photographs that document the day’s odd mix of hope and brutality.
Holding the many exhibits together, providing context and testimony, are television screens playing the “Bridge to Freedom” episode of the documentary “Eyes on the Prize,” a monumental 14-hour television series that wove news and documentary footage, photographs and first-person interviews into the most ambitious cinematic narrative of the movement to date. Created by Henry Hampton for PBS, it was shown in two parts in 1987 and 1990, but, unfortunately, because of issues with copyright holders the film only became more widely available beginning in 2006.

The rest: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/14/m...&seid=auto&smid=tw-nytimesarts&pagewanted=all
 

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