Gone with the wind

Gone with the Wind Reflection

Gone with the Wind is a movie made in 1939 Also with a book published in 1936. The story is
told from Scarlett O’Hara the daughter of a wealthy Georgia plantation owner as she navigates love loss and survival during the different periods of the war before, during and after the war. The movie follows her life from being from the south through the burning of Atlanta and the crash of confederacy and then into the tribulation of reconstruction. During the time when the movie was released it rose to become one of the most popular films ever released and still remains a very moving film. 

This film relates directly to how the history we have learned over in our talking about freedom class because it discusses the civil war and reconstruction from the point of view of a white southern planter class level. It shows the destruction of Atlanta and economic collapse of the plantation system and then the social disruption after the war. This film reflects this narrative and mostly talks about enslaved characters that are portrayed as loyal content. 

My opinion of this movie was both good and bad and I will go into detail why. On one hand I really appreciated this movie Gone With the Wind because it was very technical and cinematic. For a film made and released when it was in production and cinematography, Scarlett O’Hara’s multifaceted character was really fantastic. It also greatly matters historically because it explains to us in detail how white Americans in the 1930s wanted to remember that period in time. Studying  as a primary class of cultural memory rather than as a reliable record makes it more valuable. On the other hand I think that this film is dangerous in that way when it is watched uncritically. This is because it is really entertaining and emotionally engaging, this leads it to shape how generations of Americans have an inaugural picture of the way history played out. They did inaccurately portray slavery in history because it resented slavery as just a background detail and the love story as the main story. 

Overall my opinion about gone with the wind is worth studying but not as a realizable history

resource. It should be approached as a case study in the popularity of the media and can reinforce a comfortable but false version of the past and why it is important to disconnect the movie from the accurate history of what happened. While watching it critically, having those facts in my head of history and the reconstruction makes the movie more valuable in this class because it shows how words and history can be manipulated and twisted. His movie's popularity did real cultural work because it didn't just reflect lost cause ideology it helped share and prove to Americans for generations for years to come. If we only study history through documents and textbooks we miss how much of what people may believe about the past may come from unfactual sources like movies.