Having seen Gangs of New York recently, I found myself surprised at how many reviewers seemed to give a cliched, aesthetically uninteresting movie a pass because of its attempt to fashion a revisionist liberal history of the nation’s and New York’s origins. (A.O. Scott, whose reviews I generally like, is offender number one here). So while I could go on about the film’s faults, but maybe it’s more interesting to talk about the historiographic project. For one, I do think it’s interesting to make a Civil War epic where the North-South battle is not the prime concern. That said, I felt a certain shock in the movie when the Matthew Brady battlefield photographs appear in sepia tone. They seem so much at odds with the lush, cold surfaces and blue-orange contrasts of the cinematography. It was like the film desperately wanted indexical markers of history, to make history something beyond the confines of the narrative, and it almost succeeded when the conscription riots threatened (unsuccessfully) to displace the revenge-of-the-son subplot. But the attempts at a different kind of historicity for the historical epic just frustrated me (and I think a lot of viewers) by making me want more.
This ultimately strikes me as the fault of the film more than an inaccurate or whitewashed history. Seth Gitell in the Phoenix makes the latter complaint: “While you wouldn’t know it from the movie, which underplays the draft riots’ racial aspect, almost 100 people were killed in the violence, most of them free blacks, who were lynched or beaten to death.” Maybe I’m too generous a viewer, but I did know it from the movie, which clearly showed brutality against black men and the racist motivations of the mob. The larger problem is that the movie seems to have black men (who are not even characters really) around simply as indexes of a thematic point, but it is unable to depict their subjectivity. Similarly, as social categories, women in general, the Chinese immigrants and the bourgeoisie are simply cartoon cut-outs. I realize that films need to make some selection and to limit the number of narrative strands. Still, even a shot here or there could communicate a lot. That is, if one actually puts thought and imagination into the shot composition.
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