raghu wrote: > Django absolutely does NOT stress the slaves' resistance to their > oppression, quite the opposite; it showed just how difficult it was to even > conceive of violent rebellion. The movie has been much criticized on these > grounds - how most of the slaves portrayed in the movie were passive, but > given the oppressive reality of the slavery regime, how could it be > otherwise?
Here's what I wrote: "Historically, Django stresses the indomitable, relentless resistance to slavery by relatively isolated individual blacks". *Relatively isolated individual* cases of resistance against slavery in the South must have been myriad to the point of becoming a pattern. "Relatively isolated," because individual run away stories like the one stylized in the movie are unintelligible without a broader base of support by those slaves that appeared to be "passive." Or, if you prefer, there was a whole range of degrees of passivity. The fact is that slavery ended. I'm no historian, but I find it extremely hard to believe that a widespread form of exploitation, with deep historical roots, has ever ended or will ever end but as the essential result of *struggles* that render it ineffectual. Yes, slavery ended because it was an institution incompatible with the further (capitalist) development of U.S. society, the end of slavery cleared the social territory for the development of capitalist exploitation, etc. but the enlightened self interest of the capitalists, their perceived need to introduce a more up-to-date form of exploitation, insofar as it translated into actions, was at best ancillary. In fact, that enlightenment, the understanding by some capitalists (by those with the least vested interest in preserving slavery) that business as usual had failed was itself a byproduct of these struggles. The reason why slavery was proved to be incompatible (i.e. too costly, too wasteful) with modern U.S. capitalism was precisely that *resistance*. If black slaves in the U.S. South (in the Caribbean, etc.) had been passive in the face of their exploitation, then the capitalists would have seen no need to update the form of exploitation. Now, this is not to say that their class struggles had a coherence, organization, or self understanding that would have led them to -- say -- building some sort of early socialism in the U.S. This is obvious to me. We cannot measure this class struggle with the same standards we use to evaluate 21st century class struggles. Why do I feel the need to argue this point? Because we (the oppressed) sell ourselves rather short. IMO, one of the most significant episodes in the movie was the conversation Django had with Dr. Shultz, when Django confessed that he had tried to escape with his wife, Broomhilda. Shultz, who appears here as a sort of unwitting organic intellectual of the anti-slavery struggle, then tells Django his version of the song of the Nibelungs. (I'm perfectly ignorant of historic German and Scandinavian literature, but I would not be surprised if the poem hadn't been itself the stylized chronic of some class struggle.) Shultz pauses at a point and describes how Siegfried acted to rescue Broomhilda: Hell fire did not scare him, the dragon did not scare him. Siegfried was *not afraid* of the obstacles and pressed on. After this episode, Django -- who was already a hardened man conscious of his own strength -- gained a much grander sense of his power, and that showed in the rest of the movie. In my book, without having watched Pulp Fiction or Kill Bill or most other Tarantino movies, the signature of good art is the ability to move people emotionally in the direction of action, be it the creation of something, the realization of some design, or the struggle to overcome some obstacle. This scene (and many others) was emotionally moving like few others I've seen in film, and that made it (to me at least) very effective as a work of art. Not being afraid of hellfire or dragons guarding the status quo, hellfire and dragons pretty much lodged in our own minds (Marx to Ruge: "the inner difficulties are more formidable than the external ones") -- that to me is the perfect motto to start a year. On the other hand, the Spielberg/Day-Lewis' rendition of Lincoln's character: Again, I'm no historian, but the film (aimed at dramatizing Lincoln's personal approach, short-distance politicking, etc. against a grander but not well defined background) is in no way inconsistent with what one gathers in Marx's assessment of Lincoln (http://bit.ly/VhgQXd). Fwiw, I find that assessment to contain a lot of distilled wisdom, often missing in recent, more detailed and perhaps better documented works. I'm open to updating my views on the matter, but Marx has proved to be an exceptional, robust *contemporary* observer of the U.S. civil war. And that's most I can say about that film. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
