A LIVING NIGHTMARE
IN ONE OF THE MOST FAMOUS SHOTS IN FILM HISTORY, Gone with the Wind’s Scarlett O’Hara (Vivien Leigh) walks desperately through the carnage of the Civil War in an Atlanta depot searching for Dr. Meade (Harry Davenport). The camera, focused on Scarlett, pulls back farther and farther to reveal an endless landscape of human slaughter. Confederate soldiers lie dead or dying, groaning in misery, as Scarlett traipses through them. Medics carry wounded soldiers through the depot, and then a tattered Confederate battle flag creeps into the frame from the left, waving over the destruction.
It’s such a memorable punctuation to Fleming’s Lost Cause drama that Spike Lee used the scene in the overture to , his 2018 film about a black police officer who works undercover to foil the Ku Klux Klan. It was a nod to the lasting impact that (1939) has had ever since its initial release in shaping how Americans think about race, the Civil War, the institution of slavery, and the Confederacy, and to the cinematic mythology that has simultaneously shaped and reflected such attitudes. and (1915) remain two of the most influential American motion pictures of the 20th century, and anti-racist filmmakers like Lee have been fighting against their iconographic headwind ever since. During a 2018 tribute to his work at SFFILM, Lee observed, “We were taught about D.W. Griffith being the father of cinema, all the innovative things he’d done in cinema that had never been done before, but that’s all we were taught.
