In Defense of My Movie, Gods and Generals

Debate about the Civil War movie Gods and Generals had largely subsided when George Ewert, director of the Museum of Mobile, weighed in recently with a scathing review published by the Southern Poverty Law Center. The review nearly cost him his job, as we reported in HNN last week. Members of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, already angry over the museum's exhibits on the Civil War, asked the city council to replace him. The council backed down in the face of public protest, but was his review fair? One person who thinks it wasn't is the movie's director, who asked us for a chance to respond.

When the Soviets took power in Russia, one of the first things they did was to open reeducation camps for adults and brave new schools for children. In these schools Russians were taught to hate their past, to reject their parents, to condemn and even to forget their history. Orthodox Priests, university professors, artists, writers, historians - these were among the first people executed by firing squads. The new leadership was going to rewrite history to prepare Russia for the new Soviet man. In the 1960's, during the Cultural Revolution, China endured a similar convulsion. Chinese were taught that their previous 3,000 year history was a huge mistake, a misguided journey of ignorance and oppression. As an artist and a filmmaker I am perhaps more sensitive than many in recognizing the embryonic murmurings of this pseudo-intellectual menace when it appears in our own society.

The Civil War is at the center of the American experience. It resonates across time. The war's issues persist in semi-resolved tensions. The war's players seem larger than life, its battles and campaigns were of an epic scale. Gore Vidal has called it the American Iliad. Should this filmmaker have indulged in the frozen triumphalist attitude of the victors, who are essentially ourselves as modern day Americans? Or should I have made an honest attempt to return to the actual people and conditions of 1861, when no one knew, and would not know for another four years, who the victors or the vanquished would be? I chose the latter, which meant good guys and bad guys would not be broadcast in advance. The audience would have to sort things out for themselves, scene by scene, character by character. This is a major violation of Hollywood storytelling rules and many movie critics called me to account for it.

People who are set in their ways don't like their cherished assumptions challenged. Especially when these assumptions are no deeper than acquired attitudes, unsupported by any real knowledge. This film challenges on both stylistic and material grounds. Hence the extremely harsh reaction from some quarters. I've always been of the opinion that film is a poor medium for answering complex questions, but an excellent medium for posing them. This film is not content to pander to contemporary expectations or to wallow in some amorphous American triumphalism about the War. It poses hard questions. It takes you by the shoulders and demands that you rethink everything you've ever thought about the War - or in the case of some critics - to think about it for the first time.

What interests me as a filmmaker and chronicler of the Civil War are the hard choices that real people had to make. Our film is populated by characters with divided loyalties and conflicting affections. Each character embodies his own internal struggle - his own personal civil war. The film begins with a quote from George Eliot's  Daniel Deronda, referring to the importance of place, of the local, of the particular. I included this quote because it sets up the central dilemma. Humans by their very nature are attached to place and home. These attachments can be powerful in both constructive and destructive ways.

People are also attached to family and to groups. They can be motivated by ideas and ideals. The characters in  Gods and Generals are not immune to these forces. They are all, to a man and a woman, pulled and pushed by these conflicting allegiances. What may be novel in this film is the revelation of the complex ways in which African-Americans, like their white neighbors, were confronted with their own hard choices.

Some critics have objected to the absence of scenes depicting the most violent excesses of slavery. Such scenes are not in this movie for two reasons. First, the film's main Southern characters, Jackson and Lee, were opposed to slavery, and although products of their time, saw blacks as fellow humans in the eyes of God. For them the War was not about the defense of slavery. Second, this film, perhaps for the first time, captures the perniciousness of the institution of slavery. That is to say, that slavery was not perpetuated by and did not depend on sadists. It persisted in America, as in many other countries in the nineteenth century, because of economics. Because of  cheap labor -- very cheap labor.

In Gods and Generals we meet two Afro-Virginians who, despite being treated with respect and even love by their white masters, still have no confusion whatsoever about their desire to be free. Who among us would want to live in slavery no matter how benign the immediate situation? This unusual cinematic treatment, though historically more typical of the Tidewater and Shenandoah Valley small town relationships among blacks and whites during the War, was misinterpreted by these critics as"glossing over" slavery. Where were the floggings? The rapes? The chains? They obviously missed the point.

In the simplistic moral outrage of their reviews they deprive African-Americans of their full humanity -- and in their own unintended way reveal a bigotry of appearances. They expect nineteenth century blacks to be portrayed in one dimension only. In reality the research shows that blacks, just like their white neighbors, felt conflicting allegiances. Yes, a racial attachment to their fellows held in servitude, but also an affection for the white families with whom their lives were intertwined, and yes, patriotism -- a love of the places in which they lived -- and in many well documented cases, a willingness to defend their country, the South.

In this film"patriotism" metamorphoses from a philosophical abstraction to an organic life force. For many nineteenth-century Southern whites patriotism expressed a love of state and locality that seems strange if not incomprehensible to inhabitants of the new global community. For nineteenth-century Unionists, who found themselves on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line, patriotism constituted a love of the entire country, from Penobscot Bay to the Gulf of Mexico. For African-Americans patriotism could mean all of the above, further leavened with the group identity and group allegiance fostered by slavery in the South and prejudice in the North.

Martha, the domestic slave in the Beale family (a real life-person), has a genuine affection for the white children she has helped rear alongside her own. She is also tied by emotion, tradition and circumstance to the larger community of blacks, whose fate she shares. When Yankee looters come to ransack her home in Fredericksburg she will not let them pass. A few days later, when Yankee soldiers seek to requisition the same home as a hospital, she opens the door and attends to the wounded.

Historians write about the forces of history, about ideology and determinism. Whatever truth there is in such analysis, it is not the place where individuals live out their lives. Ordinary people like you and me and the characters who inhabit this film live their lives day by day, hoping to make the best of it with dignity, hoping to get by -- in the context of this film, hoping to survive. They in their time, like we today, have bonds of affection across racial, religious, sexual, and political divides."To experience the full imaginative appeal of the Civil War," says Robert Penn Warren,"...may be, in fact, the very ritual of being American."

Mr. Ewert, by his own published words, shows he is possessed of a narrow, simplistic view of the American Civil War. Moreover, as a self-proclaimed champion of the brave new south he would like to run a reeducation camp for adults and a brave new school for children so that Alabamians can be taught to hate their past, to reject their ancestors, to condemn and even to forget their history. Most disturbing, from the point of view of a filmmaker and a seeker of the truth,  Mr. Ewert  would like to intimidate anyone who doesn't see the world through his narrow spectacles. Why else would he have sent his provocative and incendiary so-called  review of the film to the Southern Poverty Law Center? Isn't this the organization that exposes Klan members, hate mongers and racists?

Does Mr. Ewert really want to include Ted Turner, a former member of the national board of the NAACP, the actress Donzaleigh Abernathy, who plays the domestic slave Martha, and is the proud daughter of the great Civil Rights leader Ralph Abernathy, and even my humble self in such disreputable company? Does he have any historical memory whatsoever? Does he not know the short distance between such denunciations and the scaffold, the guillotine, the firing squad? Is this the kind of rhetoric one expects from the director of an internationally recognized institution of learning and cultural preservation?

Luckily for me, my self-esteem does not rest on whether or not I have the approbation of such a man.  I have survived thirty years in the film business and take my fair share of criticism and praise. If  Mr. Ewert's comments related only to me they would not be worthy of a response. The reason I have taken the trouble to write this letter is because his comments cause me concern for what indoctrination he may have in store for the children of Alabama. Mr. Ewert has defiantly proclaimed himself as one of the praetorian guards of the rigidly politically correct. I can only hope from afar that his neighbors remember the cruel legacy of the Soviets and Red Guards -- and that as Alabamians and Americans they protect intellectual freedom, the unbiased study of history and the cherished memory of their ancestors.