Manderlay
02.26.07 (12:44 am) [edit]While I was jotting the previous entry down, the movie Manderlay by Lars Von Trier came back to my mind. What was discussed in the movie was slavery and the damage and the dynamics it caused to people and how the fixation was formed as the way it is. Since then the US has been fatally divided into two different people, blacks, later joined by other minorities as well, as the subjugated and whites to rule, which pretty much sums up the current society and the political state today. This sort of objective contemplation on the historical subject matter often offers us America a cutting edge of criticism and/or views that hold some truth that we often tend to overlook. This movie's also supposed to fall into the category; it does present an interesting observation on the history of slavery in the US as what is perpetuated up to today in the level of perception and reality both of people and how detrimental it has been to human psyche to both parties, the ruling and the ruled. However, the most honest sentiment that I had about the movie was below:
I do not want to hear that from this director. It is always the easiest solution to draw something theoretical and didactic out of what you do not have to take the consequence of. To be short, it is quite useless to see anything interesting or intelligent from someone who does not live the predicament. He, as usual, took a quick look at somewhere he never belonged to nor will he and cut a tiny slice of the essence of what seemed to be the core of America as saying here! This is the structure of their predicament, never forgot to add ‘how silly of them not to recognize this idea like mine so clever and so interesting that I cannot help but showing to these silly people. He almost managed to divert audience's minds from what is always urgent to something sophisticated, logically right but does not really help what is to be helped in the polical discourse in films where racism is still active and practiced or even capitalized, whether you like it or not. How easy could it be for a white Euro director who just passed by, ironically just like his heroine, US to pose a deep and free thinker, who actually would not be affected by the issue and forget once he was done with the production?
The movie is dealing with a remain of slavery that was supposed to be rid of by the time when it was set, 1930. A cross states traveler, the daughter of a gang family, caught the unlawful convention in a plantation and began running it by her new rules without any old convention, just to discover that the plantation was operated by Bla ck leaders of the plantation, who chose to stay slaves for a view based on that they were not ready to be released and seek their own ‘freedom’ out by themselves but deliberately hid that they were voluntarily remained there to anybody outside of a couple of ruling figures. People, once enslaved, are forever slaves, as far as these few clever black leaders in the plantation.
The movie unfolds rather a fable than any realistic or naturalistic movie we could usually find. All the sets it employs here are even less than what a movie can usually do without. So the whole scenes appear to be a theatric set that was filmed. I actually find the method clever and refreshing. If only I could get over this fundamental distrust for this filmmaker.