Gone With the Wind
On Monday, September 12th, 2022, my Talking About Freedom class met up in High Point University's Extraordinaire Cinema. We all got settled into the seats and eventually started watching Gone with the Wind. The movie started, and we could already tell how the scene was set. There were men dressed in formal suits and women in puffy dresses. Automatically, this leads to the understanding that it's set in the 1800s.
In the 1800s slavery was still active, and a big thing in the South. How the characters spoke pushed the idea that the story was happening in the South. We also saw that there were slaves working in the opening scene. We then came to further understand that it was set before slavery was abolished in the first official scene. A black woman, who goes by the name Mammy, came into the frame. We could tell that she was dressed in servant clothes. Meaning, there was a high chance that she was enslaved. Even without audio clues to what events were happening, visually we could already gain a vague understanding of the setting.
Throughout the film, I noticed that white people were the primary focus. There weren't many times where the camera focused on the black cast, compared to how the white cast was focused on. The lead-most roles were also white people, so we already understood whose perspective the film was from.
As the film went on, the mistreatment of black people at the time wasn't stark compared to how it has been mentioned historically. The most we saw was the lead character, Scarlett, slapping Prissy when she didn't do something she was supposed to do. But even this was watered down by how Scarlett had slapped Ashley early in the film.
The way the black people were behaving seemed unfitting too. Since they were enslaved, you would have thought they would have taken their work more seriously and not have spoken back to their enslavers. This didn't seem to be the case. They seemed more comfortable talking to their enslavers than would be historically accurate. It didn't seem to fit that Prissy acted one way the whole time we knew her, and then got slapped for acting the same as she always had. This is one part of the film I didn't like; it made the black people seem like they weren't hurting or in a bad position. As if they were okay with how things were and weren't getting mistreated.
In fact, the terms "slave" or "slavery" wasn't even mentioned as much as one may think it would be. Especially considering how it was set in the mid 1800s, around the time of the civil war.
Some highlights of the film that I liked was the lighting. I was interested in how they used shadows to play out a scene. I also like how they used lighting with color. Specifically, when they were capturing the fire reflected off the characters' faces.
Overall, I believe that Gone with the Wind is an eye-catching movie that may even be considered ahead of its time in terms of directing, lighting, and camera angles.
Sources:
Gone with the Wind (1939)
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