Gone with the wind received 10 Academy Awards.
Metro Goldwyn Mayer
HBO Max returned the Oscar-winning drama Gone With the Wind from 1939 on Wednesday to put it into service. Now a four and a half minute video introduction with the racist representations of the classic is put into context.
The film presents “Antebellum South as a world of grace and beauty without acknowledging the brutality of the slavery system upon which this world is based,” said Jacqueline Stewart, an African-American cinema expert and TCM presenter, in her video intro on the fact that black-winded slaves depict enslaved blacks as long-standing stereotypes, “as servants who are distinguished by their devotion to their white masters or by their inability”.
“It is not only an important document of Hollywood’s racist practices in the past, but also a permanent work of popular culture that directly points to the racial inequalities that exist in the media and society today,” said Stewart.
The film is accompanied by a 56-minute recording of a TCM panel discussion from April 2019 with the title “Gone with the Wind: A Complicated Legacy”, in which the film is examined in more detail, and a short four-minute documentary about Hattie McDaniel, which is for her role as Mammy won an Oscar in the film. She was the first black actress to win an Oscar.
Two weeks ago, HBO temporarily took Max Gone With the Wind off duty, according to an editorial in the Los Angeles Times written by Academy Award winner John Ridley. He urged HBO Max to stop streaming the film amid global protests against racism and police brutality. The film romanticizes the horrors of slavery and perpetuates stereotypes of the colored.
His call to HBO Max came amid weeks of global protests against racism and police brutality after a white Minneapolis policeman pressed his knee against George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man, for almost nine minutes on May 25, killing him.
When the film was removed, HBO Max said he would return Blown by the wind for the catalog, but that it would be irresponsible to maintain the title without explaining or condemning its racist representations.
“Gone with the wind is a product of its time and shows some of the ethnic and racial prejudices that have unfortunately been commonplace in American society,” said HBO Max, part of WarnerMedia owned by AT&T, in the statement on time . “These racist representations were wrong then and are wrong today.”
The company has a precedent for this type of response. For example, the language of HBO Max’s statement is almost identical to the disclaimers Warner Bros., another WarnerMedia company, presented to certain Looney Tunes Cartoons have been re-released on DVDs or streaming services since 2005.
See also: Black Lives Matter: Movies, TV shows, and books on systemic racism
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