The film is controversial as protests multiply around the world after the death of African-American George Floyd. Directed in 1939 by Victor Fleming, interpreted by Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh, "Gone with the Wind" has been temporarily removed from the American platform HBO Max. This Friday, the Grand Rex, in Paris, removed it from its evening scheduled for June 23 ("Warner Bros tells us it wants to cancel the screening," only comments the room).
While the book has just been reissued, "Gone with the Wind" is denounced for its "racist" statement ... Legitimate accusations according to Régis Dubois, specialist in American and especially African-American cinema (Editor's note: author of "Black Cinema American of the Obama years ", ed. LettMotif) , and Thomas Snégaroff, historian specialist in the United States.
“We seem to discover that Gone with the Wind is racist…, says Régis Dubois. But in this film, the blacks are children who must be domesticated and the slaves, satisfied with their fate, are ready to sacrifice themselves for their masters. There are scenes of great violence for the Afro-descendant spectators. In 1973, the reference book on the image of blacks in American cinema, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies & Bucks , rebelled against the film by Victor Fleming. "
"Not a fad of activists today"
"To say that Gone with the Wind is racist is not a fad of activists today, abounds Thomas Snégaroff. It is a film that denies the violence of slavery. The plot, where we see, for example, the slaves crying when their mistress miscarries, gives the slaves a humanity that the masters completely denied them, because the slaves were then only furniture that one buys and qu 'we sell. "According to the historian, if the film was acclaimed when it was released" in a America nostalgic for segregation, where blacks and whites still lived separated in schools, public transport and the parks of certain states ", his perception has changed over time.
"After his screening at the Cannes Festival in 1968, the film critic Jean-Louis Bory had explained in Le Masque et la plume on France Inter that ' Gone with the Wind was promoting slave values,' notes Thomas Snégaroff. Already, at that time, the film was therefore labeled as racist. The specialist notes in passing that the racism of the novel by Margaret Mitchell, "who came from a segregationist family", had however been watered down when it was transposed to the big screen in order to respect the Hays code, or "censorship code" of American cinema.
"If we don't deconstruct stereotypes, we let them persist"
For Thomas Snégaroff, accompanying "Gone with the Wind" with a warning recalling its context - as HBO Max plans to release the film online - proceeds from the same logic as the commented reissue of "Mein Kampf". "No one would imagine publishing Mein Kampf today as is," notes the historian. Régis Dubois agrees: "Adding to the beginning of Gone with the Wind that this film belongs to another era, where racism was trivialized, it 's just pedagogy. If stereotypes are not deconstructed, they are allowed to continue. However, cinema conveys representations, and therefore ideologies. "
An argument to which Thomas Snégaroff adheres: "The problem of Gone with the Wind is that it is a cultural object which has an ideological aim, wrapped in an ultra-efficient Hollywood apparatus". And faced with those who retort that it would then be necessary to question all the works that represent blacks until the 1970s (at least), the historian argues the exceptional notoriety of the drama of Victor Fleming: "This is not is not just any film: it has won eight Oscars and it is one of the most watched and appreciated feature films in the world, "he recalls.