james.sponge said:
Seriously though why can't they produce a film - about Afro-american character - that does not involve slavery or discrimination? I'm no American but after looking at your film culture I'm having an impression there were no black personalities that excelled in the field of law, medicine, philosophy, physics, politics or diplomacy who are worthy of having a motion picture about them.
Pretty much my thoughts on the subject, and that has a lot to do with the whole "why can't we have more blacks as main characters" argument. You generally can't do it because if you don't show sympathy to, or agree with, these kinds of issues with the character it generally won't be embraced by Black America. If you do, then your limiting yourself mostly to a left wing and minority audience, which doesn't account for anywhere near as much of the population as they would like to have you believe despite how vocal the left tends to be in particular.
To be honest, it seems like we periodically go through phases where people like to go on about how horrible slavery was, bringing out "true" stories like this, or "Amistad", or creating things like "Roots" and "Django" which is always presented as something new and brave, while at the same time trotting out the tired old horse that was "Gone With The Wind" for a white-guilt inspired flogging, before letting it rest for a while and trotting it out again.
Honestly, I kind of await a time when America matures enough to finally handle the subject properly, though I imagine that will take decades, and the maturation of domestic black culture before that can happen. The truth being more or less between "Gone With The Wind" and it's idealistic portrayal, and "12 Years A Slave". At the end of the day not every slave owner was a full time sadist or abuser, after all on a purely pragmatic level it all came down to money, and acting like these movies show towards ones slaves leads to poor morale and all kinds of problems which means less work efficiency and less money. It was neither a bunch of happy to be slaves black people strumming their banjos while doing farm work, or a bunch of sociopaths gleefully trying to create their own version of hell on earth and trying to find excuses to abuse people. Indeed given that your typical plantation was a business, half the crap overseers do in this genere of movies would have probably gotten them hung by the very guys allegedly responsible for it all simply because the environment they created would cost them money. At the end of the day relatively happy and healthy slaves meant more product, which in turn meant more money. A bottom line which is mentioned but rarely brought to the forefront unless used in some offhanded way to justify more abuse which at the end of the day winds up making little sense. In reality you couldn't work your slaves to death and just bring in more while maintaining morale and productivity, not to mention the costs would soon outstrip the profits from the farming. At least "Django" tried to address the problem a bit by having Candy running bloodsports with his slaves, but at the end of the day a lot of it wound up having less to do with American slavery than the idea of gladiatorial games, things like "Spartacus" wound up covering the same basic material a bit better without the political pretensions.
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As far as your comments about Black culture go in the US, there have been some that have excelled to that point. The typical "go to" example is George Washington Carver who did a lot of research with peanuts and whose innovations lead to the development of things like Linolium, Peanut Butter, and other products, many of which we continue to use globally to this day.
That said you ARE correct that the primary achievements of blacks in the US have been in terms of sports/athletics and entertainment. This has also caused a lot of problems within society which people have been trying to address for quite a while. Bill Cosby (who has a PHD in Children's Education) has in the past gone on about it at length, talking about how American black culture is effectively anti-education, to the point of labeling it selling out, a big problem Black America deals with is the perception that being a normal person and fitting into the rank and file of society is wrong, and that it's only right to be part of the top 1% or on the lowest rungs of society, working outside of society to try and get into that top 1% the whole "git rich or die trying" attitude. While it does not apply to ALL blacks, one of the biggest problems is that your typical young black person would rather play Basketball all day and dream about becoming a pro (unlikely) and then turn to becoming a gun thug when that fails, than see work their butts off in school, get a normal job, and maybe excel to become something better if they do well enough. You do wind up seeing blacks doing normal jobs, or even taking academics seriously enough to become doctors, lawyers, etc... but more often than not you'll see blacks ultimately deciding it's better to wind up face down in the ghetto with a gun in their hand, having tried to get ahead that way, than have become a cog in the machine and wound up likely becoming a wage slave like 99% of the population. Something which has gotten to the point where you'll see people literally feed millions upon millions of dollars into inner city schools and ethnic neighborhoods, only to have the students destroy the computers, textbooks, and materials. Getting Black America to assimilate, and embrace the opportunities presented, especially within the educational system, being a huge issue.
I'd also point out that while the specifics aren't the same all around the world, a lot of sociologists who argue about "unintentional racism" will point out that it's not just America that doesn't seem to produce that many exceptional blacks to make movies about (outside of very specific fields), it's arguably the world, and the lack of success has also bred a sort of "beaten dog" mentality from people who don't even want to try. Something that doesn't just apply to blacks, but a lot of those who are minorities in the first world as well.
The basic argument is that if you look around the modern world, almost everything you see came from some white guy in the first world. There ARE exceptions, but things like electricity, phones, cars, planes, etc... you look into them and ultimately at the beginnings you'll find some smiling white dude. While I'd argue the dusky skinned mediterreneans were not white, if you go back even earlier you'll find the basis for a lot of those innovations started with the Greeks and Romans who tend to be viewed as white by the critics (accurately or not) to find anyone with dark skin involved you typically have to go back to Egypt or Babylon and it gets touchy. The overall point being that your typical white guy can't understand how demoralizing this is to someone who isn't white, and thus your guilty of racism through ethnic success without having to do anything. One of the foundations of white guilt and a cornerstone for people who decided to bash whites for being aggressive conquerors as a way for trying to balance the books by saying we're all bastards (or were) but that rarely helps the situation at the end of the day because it acts as a reminder that white dudes probably kicked the butts of the ancestors of some "minority" at some point as well. Phyrric victories like pointing out the Zulu nation actually beat the British military oftentimes don't help when you consider it involved literally throwing tens of thousands of bodies at them until they basically ran out of bullets. Losing several hundred dudes for every one you take out doesn't exactly come across as empowering no matter how you try and spin it.
A BIG exception to this however is from Asia, but that would make this huge post even longer.
At any rate, I'm not saying I entirely subscribe to this theory (though I find it interesting, and to make some good points even, especially when articulated by someone better than myself at this kind of thing). If you think about it though it's not just Americans who don't produce many movies about great black thinkers and pioneers, not many people do when you omit the athletes and entertainers from the mix. There ARE exceptions, and people can probably rattle off a seemingly long list, but then stop and think about how many whites or Asians you can think of in comparison. You can do that with most of those who are minorities in white countries. If you want to get technical you can also tend to bring it down to very specific places and regions (UK, US, Germany, parts of what are now China) where the most global innovations have taken place, but that goes well beyond this point, and can get complicated (which from outside can be seen as "bickering white folks"), after all one can ask who gets to claim Alexander Graham Bell, he was born in Scotland but was pretty much chased out, he did a lot of his research in Canada, but actually completed it in the USA, for business reasons he sent his patents to the UK and USA simultaneously wanting to get patented in the UK first because of the laws there saying a patent couldn't be on file anywhere else, and wanting it protected there, but also wanting a USA patent for business reasons and due to the climate for innovation. Scots, Canadians, Brits, and Americans all claim he was one of theirs and take cultural credit for the phone.
