Posted on 02/26/2006 1:56:28 PM PST by pabianice
Kevin Willmott's ersatz documentary "CSA: The Confederate States of America" is an act of provocation that's sheer genius in its conceptual simplicity. Fairly unoriginal, too. Writers and historians have been penning "what-if" scenarios predicated on the War Between the States going the other way for decades; I recall MacKinley Kantor's "If the South Had Won the Civil War" on my elementary school reading list years ago, and more recent authors such as Harry Turtledove and Roger L. Ransom have addressed the matter as well.
Willmott isn't interested in academic niceties. He wants to make you laugh and hurt at the same time, and then he wants you to think. So his film -- ostensibly a British documentary being aired on a local San Francisco station -- opens with an ad for Confederate Family Insurance, complete with a happy white family, soothing banjo music, and a smiling young African-American slave tending the garden. What follows is nothing less than a satiric takedown of our assumptions about racial progress.
Presented by Spike Lee and constructed as a finely tuned parody of the Ken Burns school of filmmaking (period music, old photos, talking-head experts), "CSA" sketches out a disquieting alternative history of the United States. It begins with the South winning Gettysburg thanks to the appearance of French and British troops alongside the Confederate Army, Europe's intervention having been won with the assistance of diplomat Judah Benjamin. (This prompts Jefferson Davis to later say, "Don't you evah forget, suh, that it was a blood-sucking Jew who saved this country.")
(Excerpt) Read more at boston.com ...
The movie's actually been around for a while. I saw it a year or so ago over in Lawrence. I understand it's been re-edited a bit. I'll have to go see it again.
Ewww, I gotta think about what I'd like to say about Spike Lee before posting.
Did you watch the Trailer?
It's satire.
If the South won, Spike Lee wouldn't exist !
Of course its satire. It's also revolting.
The question now and always will be; Why didn't Lincoln let the Southerners go? The "Yankee" thinks all Southerners are stupid, why keep them around when they don't want to have anything to do with you? Lincoln "killed" 600,000 Americans to keep the South in the Union. Today the South is ridiculed and berated by the Likes of a Joe Conason. Joe, why don't you go to hell and let the South go?
it would be interesting to see what would come of someone doing this question right ,instead of stooping to stupid lowlife stereotypes
Cuz they done went and shot up that thar fort?
I'm Black, Brown or whatever the statuis quo is today and the trailer made me sick and very disgusted it was a slap in the face. I guess their idea of satire is to cause hurt with hate!
That's one of the many reasons I'm an Ex-Masshole
Harry Turtledove is nine volumes into God knows how many books on an alternate history of the Civil War. In his series the south wins the Civil War and wins a rematch in 1881. Then it allies with the British and French in the Great War while the United States allies iteself with Imperial Germany. To make a long story short, the south loses that war and then goes through a period mirroring Nazi Germany. Hyper inflation, the rise to power of a disgruntled former NCO who heads a Nazi-like party, and then the beginning of a second world war. Presently the confederates have just lost an entire army in Pittsburg, and the confederates are rounding up all blacks and exterminating them in concentration camps.
That done right enough for you?
Conason is a bitter and nasty Leftie (sorry for the redundancy...lol) but Conason can't stop berating the South, because we are saving the Union from the democrats.
That "Fort" was still SC state property not yet transfered to the Federal Government when "OCCUPIED" by union troops from Fort Moultrie.. I'd say the "Invasion " started there "
I haven't seen the movie, but I found myself laughing out loud at some of the lines in the article. There's nothing like satire to make a point. I love the way the jokes in the article ransack political correctness.
Try again. The federal government was building the fort, not the state of South Carolina. And it was built on land deeded to the government free and clear by the South Carolina legislature. It was, in every respect, the property of the federal government and the U.S. Army.
Revisionist bump. Spike Lee and Ken Burns? May as well have gotten Howdy Doody to write it. It would be about as truthful and factual...
This prompts Jefferson Davis to later say, "Don't you evah forget, suh, that it was a blood-sucking Jew...
I have not seen this movie but 'blood-sucking Jew' sounds a bit more yankee to me. Perhaps those bastions of inclusion Sherman or Grant....
And yet it had taken posession of it. The fort was being built under the supervision of an army officer. It was being paid for by the federal government. It was, in every resepect, an army project and South Carolina had no say in the matter.
This can be ascertained by documents in the Confederate Relic Room in Columbia SC, as well as remarks (in writing)by Maj. Anderson himself questioning the legitimacy of move to Sumter.
Well I can't speak for the the Confederate Relic Room, but in all my reading on the Southern rebellion, including Sumter, I've never come across anything by Anderson questioning the legitimacy of his move to Sumter. He was, in fact, the person who decided to make the move once Major Buell had told him to act at his own discretion to protect his garrison.
No, in the movie it's sort of an outshoot from the confederate alliance with Adolph Hitler. All the Jews are locked up on Long Island and all the Blacks are property. Each side got what it wanted.
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