Take note of this December 13 Twitter exchange…
Lo and behold, on December 24, when I wasn’t paying attention, the Esquire website put up “DJANGO UNCHAINED IS A BETTER MOVIE ABOUT SLAVERY THAN LINCOLN” and to be honest with you I couldn’t have picked a more apt know-somethingish pseud twit to write it than Stephen “Bön” Marche, who in fact did. Lulz, as the kids like to say.
Wow. Reading that ESQUIRE piece made me not just want to avoid DJANGO but also stay as far away as possible. (Well, that and QT’s mostly idiotic interview with Henry Louis Gates where he calls John Ford not just a racist but also a evil person, though pointedly does not mention how he stole Ford’s SEARCHERS shot for INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS.)
I think slant kind of said the same thing, but in a less absurd way:
” Unlike the mawkish liberal pandering of this year’s other Civil War-era studio epic, Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, at least Django Unchained’s post-racial leap back into America’s bifurcated past is overloaded enough be plausibly construed as complex. To this end, perhaps the most intriguing, constructive wrinkle in Tarantino’s revisionist fabric is Steven…”
I didn’t really see what was so pander‑y about Lincoln, not that I was overwhelmed by it either.
RIP Harry Carey, Jr. (who I hope didn’t hear about Tarantino’s Ford comments in his final days).
I thought Lincoln was more about legislative politics than race, but what do I know.
It’s a silly argument a fool’s errand to try to stack the two next to each other in terms of what they “say about slavery.” I like Django quite a bit more than Glenn does, but defend it on its merits, not at the expensive of another film (which, I, ahem, still have not yet seen…).
I think the most amazing thing about this piece is it didn’t appear at Breitbart first.
Well who cares, Tarantino is a juvenile philistine who’s not fit to smell the glove. I hear.
I’ms surprised Quentin didn’t cast Tyler Perry as “Broomhilda.”
Someone should tell QT that trying too hard to be outrageous is the surest sign of an asshole. And the only zombie here is the mindless, patently false “John Ford was a racist” accusation, which refuses to die.
I can’t believe the level of lip-service being given to one flippant OPINION shared by Tarantino. I’m not defending what he said (although I think it *might* bear some consideration, and also could add to the themes of Ford’s work that changed as he got older, especially in terms of race…if he really was KKK *inclined*) but really, who cares? I like the fact someone said something unpopular and it’s no reason to boycott DJANGO UNCHAINED.
QT thinks Ford was racist, but one of his favorite movies is “Mandingo,” which seems to be the main inspiration for his new movie. I heard him on NPR yesterday denying that “Django Unchained” is an exploitation film, which seems laughable based on reviews I’ve read (I haven’t seen it yet).
But with QT, you never know if he’s being serious or if he’s just trying to get attention by being outrageous.
“Mandingo” is most definitely NOT a racist movie.
“Mandingo” may not be racist, but it most definitely IS an exploitation movie. Its goal was to titillate audiences with interracial sex, and inflame them with scenes of racial violence.
QT apparently got the idea of “mandingo fighting” from the 1975 movie. It didn’t exist in the real Old South, according to a Slate article.
@George: Read Robin Wood’s “Mandingo: The Vindication of an Abused Masterpiece” and go back and watch the film. You may find your claim of the film’s “goal” to be a misreading.
Will someone please wake me up when the Two Minute Hate of Tarantino is finished…
“Please wake me up when the Two Minute Hate of Tarantino is finished.” Oh, please. I didn’t like his movie, and was disappointed in it. His interview infelicities are irritation/disappointment bonus points, nothing more. But to huff and puff that he’s being made into some kind of martyr is pure bullshit. He is, as the saying goes, a grown-ass man who knows what he’s doing and saying. And his provocations, aside from their distortions, are just transparently pandering. he can butter up “Skip” Gates all he pleases, but, as Armond White or whoever writes his headlines for him rather aptly put it, he’s “Still Not A Brother.” Whatever pushback he gets, it was requested.
Although I haven’t heard of a boycott, which I wouldn’t personally endorse if I had. Although it would be funny to see whether a boycott of “Django” on behalf of outraged John Ford fans would cost the movie one or two thousand dollars worth of box office receipts.
“Oh, please. I didn’t like his movie, and was disappointed in it.”
I had better feelings about the movie than you did, but I’ve got no quarrel with your take. I just find the whole crowd shifting into Two Minute Hate mode to be more than a bit tiresome and misguided. I’m not trying to make him a martyr, but he ain’t suddenly Satan either.
“…but, as Armond White…”
I rest my case.
“Although it would be funny to see whether a boycott of “Django” on behalf of outraged John Ford fans would cost the movie one or two thousand dollars worth of box office receipts.”
Well played!
And Glenn, I do agree with much of your review and your comments about QT’s media management skills, but I was more addressing the fact that all these John Ford fans are outraged by a (possibly) fair claim about a true masters personal life. I mean, Elia Kazan and Roman Polanski deal/dealt with the choices they made in real life, why does Ford get a pass? Or is QT full of shit? Or is Ford a reflection of his times and upbringing? Does it matter? I just like that Tarantino expressed an unpopular opinion rather than sticking with the same olé same olé. Ironically, spike Lee is catching grief for boycotting DJANGO so.…around and around we go.
Also- I apologize in advance for invoking Polanski’s name, please people.…let’s not to that argument here. I beg you!
Don, point taken. I’ll just say that while it’s pretty plain that Ford was a pretty ornery son of a bitch in real-life and that it is entirely probable that said orneryness took a myriad of forms, in terms of anecdotal evidence, the scales tend to tilt more in favor of anti-racist than racist. Then there are the films themselves. Even in something like “Stagecoach,” which is the most blatant in its portrayal of American Indians as faceless marauding Others, there’s more sensitivity and craftiness in the acknowledgement of the slippery terrains of race relations than in almost any other Westerns of the time, as in the stuff with the innkeeper at Apache Wells. Some insist that the characterizations here are wholly negative, but the brinksmanship on display and the tone in which it’s conveyed suggest, at least to this viewer, that it’s not the participants who are perverse, but the situation in which they exist. Similarly, in a picture such as “Fort Apache,” a completely avoidable conflict is brought to a tragic end because of a martinet white commander hell-bent on achieving something like manifest destiny, and so on. Again, all of this is arguable, but it strongly suggests that saying “John Ford put on a Klan hood for D.W. Griffith and he rode…he rode HARD” and being done with it is something like an oversimplification. To say the least.
Tarantino does make one valid point in the Gates interview, about the horrific racism of Thomas Dixon’s novels. As racist as “Birth of a Nation” is, Dixon’s novels “The Clansman” and “The Leopard’s Spots” are even more appalling.
And these were national best-sellers – which means it wasn’t just white Southerners who bought them – and they inspired the first blockbuster movie. This was the country that John Ford grew up in.
My main problem with QT, over the last decade, has been the repetitive nature of his work, the obsessive focus on violent retribution in all his films since “Kill Bill.” He does the “Death Wish”/“Dirty Harry” trick of creating villains so loathsome and irredeemable, the audience will cheer for any brutality the hero inflicts on them.
He creates straw men to be knocked down. What can be more vile than a woman-hating serial killer (Kurt Russell in “Death-Proof”), a Jew-hating Nazi (Waltz in “Basterds”) or a racist plantation owner (DiCaprio in “Django”). As critic David Edelstein said, QT’s “morality” is very lazy. We’re supposed to get off whenever a white slave-owner is blown away in some garish way.
“Or is QT full of shit? Or is Ford a reflection of his times and upbringing? Does it matter?”
I’d say yes, yes and yes. Ford was one of the few golden age directors who actually dealt with race head on in some of his films, and his attitudes toward it clearly evolved and were often complex. QT’s beloved Howard Hawks (whom I’ve often seen referred to as a racist and anti-Semite) rarely addressed the issue at all in his work, so I guess he’s off the hook.
I saw DJANGO today, and liked it a lot. But QT’s comments about Ford are either ill-informed or willfully ignore a significant portion of his work. The man was no Stanley Kramer (in more ways than one, thank God), but I don’t think it’s fair to paint him as an irredeemable racist because he wore Klan robes as a teenage extra in BIRTH OF A NATION andsome of his films have dated depictions of Native Americans. And did NONE of William Witney’s many Westerns have similar depictions? Seems unlikely, but I haven’t seen enough of them to know.
How often does one get a chance to have a relevant reason to pop in a Haysi Fantayzee reference?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSKuxVNBC34
http://www.salon.com/2012/12/26/tarantinos_incoherent_three_hour_bloodbath/
Andrew O’Heir’s hilarious takedown of the “incoherent three-hour bloodbath.”
My favorite line: “Lately Tarantino appears to have drifted into the hipster equivalent of George Lucas-land, where everyone around him agrees with his dumb ideas and nobody dares to observe that the movies are fatally undisciplined and way too long and not really about anything.”
1) On the errors and pandering of LINCOLN:
http://www.thenation.com/blog/171461/trouble-steven-spielbergs-lincoln
Additionally, the mise en scene includes several reverential gazes from black characters toward Lincoln. The film has no awareness of Lincoln’s conflicted attitude toward blacks:
http://www.theroot.com/views/was-lincoln-racist?page=0,0
Also, when Thaddeus Stevens gets into bed with his common-law wife, the two-shot is narrowed down to a close-up on the white character, rendering superfluous the black character who had just shared the screen moments ago.
This simplistic exaltation of Lincoln against the fact of a historical record that is far more complex/conflicted is what causes LINCOLN to pander to its audience.
2) I admit that I have never been a Tarantino fan. INGLORIOUS BASTERDS was the first film of his for which I had any regard. I do find, however, that DJANGO UNCHAINED is a good film. DU avoids the overly fussy/insular feeling his movies have had for me. DU is expansive, providing a viewer space to respond. O’Hehir misses a precision in this film which I had experienced as over-determined and suffocating in QT’s earlier efforts, but I think he is wrong when he avers that Tarantino is just “pretending to raise these so-called questions.” Tarantino does raise the questions and they are anything but so-called.
Also, O’Hehir’s charge of incoherence does not seem right when he is able to lay out clearly how the film does cohere even if it does sprawl – I wonder if the coherence he asks for is actually a request for definitiveness – http://criticallegalthinking.com/2012/02/20/is-history-a-coherent-story/
Glenn’s view that the film is unfocused seems to be one way to experience it, but to me the movie is episodic, not unfocused. By loosening the narrative reins, Tarantino achieves a relaxed coherence where the story he tells is one version offered in dialectic with earlier versions of the same history – and which (in opposition to his earlier films) allows space for a viewer to critique and then construct her own version in response. DU is not an art work that is sealed off from the world, but rather engages it – straddling the border of late modernism and postmodernism in a refreshing way. LINCOLN by contrast is modernist (in its reactionary manifestation), offering up hagiography to be hosannaed. Where DU visualizes how history was written/inflicted on black bodies, LINCOLN mostly keeps black bodies in shadow and off to the side, acknowledging them only to elide them.
Brian Dauth
I like what jbryant has written about Ford and Hawks: according to one of Ford’s biographers, no other Hollywood film-maker in the pre-war era ever raised such controversial subjects as race relations in their films, ever. By contrast, Ford filmed a scene in JUDGE PRIEST where Will Rogers’s character averts a lynching and delivers a passionate protest – this was at a time the violence against African Americans was still horrifically great. The studio simply cut the scene from the film, so Ford later re-made the film for Republic solely for the sake for shooting that scene and including it in the final cut (although this was much later. But see also STEAMBOAT ‘ROUND THE BEND, which has bizarrely cheerful scenes of an innocent (white) man being hanged while there is a carnival gathering nearby- but what Ford was referring to, obliquely, is quite unmistakable.) And his treatment of Native Americans, although hardly consistent, became quite respectful and sympathetic from the 50’s onwards (cf. FORT APACHE, WAGON MASTER)- much more so than Tarantino’s cartoons, anyway.
George, it might interest you that several critics, like Adrian Martin, (but I remember even Fuzzy Bastard bringing this up right here) have spotted the parallels between the narratives of increasingly violent retribution in Tarantino’s films, and the narrative put forth by the Bush Administration to justify the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Even bad cartoons can be political.
Speaking of cartoons, the figure that Tarantino most reminds me of is comic-book creator Frank Miller. Miller’s obsession with violent retribution started before Tarantino directed his first film. (“Sin City” began in 1991, a year before “Reservoir Dogs” was released.)
Miller seems to be Tarantino’s current role model. No wonder QT wanted to direct a scene in the “Sin City” movie.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBKj0W1JylU
In a better world, “Birth of a Nation” would be forgotten, and this much better film from 1915 would be better known.
“Miller seems to be Tarantino’s current role model.”
Even from the heights of his first three features, Tarantino still has a great distance to fall before he matches fedora-fetishist Miller’s aesthetic and ideological decline from libertarian Japanophile to NeoCon xenophobe.
…who made “The Spirit.”
No, I’m grateful Miller’s ‘Spirit’ exists: it reveals the patronizing contempt held by (cinematic) NeoConservatism for the pragmatic optimism of an old liberal Jew like Eisner.
Did you hear Tarantino’s interview on NPR’s “Fresh Air” today? He sort of had a meltdown when Terry Gross asked him if tragedies like Newtown make screen violence less fun for him to watch or stage. He got very terse and quiet.
AFter a long silence, he asked, “What do you mean by ‘the tragedy’?”
He went on to tell Gross he was “annoyed” by her “disrespectful” questions.
I guess O’Heir is right – QT now lives in a bubble where no one asks him tough questions. Except for Spike Lee, no one in the film industry dares to criticize him. And he is shocked and offended when interviewers don’t act like adoring fans.
I just checked out those Ford comments Tarantino made to Gates. It doesn’t make me any less eager to see “Django Unchained”. It doesn’t make me hate Tarantino. It just disappoints me to see a longstanding myth about Ford being perpetuated in the crudest terms by a couple establishment figures…
Thanks Oliver C, for pointing out that Tarantino is in fact nothing at all like Frank Miller. Fucking internet…
I agree with and appreciate much of what ‘D’ said above. I have seen DJANGO UNCHAINED twice, both times with vastly different groups of people made up of family and friends. DU is an excellent story which grew even more for me on a second viewing; those parts which initially seemed forced or unneeded the first go ’round became essential in that second viewing (well, except for the bag thing), a very rare turn of events for me. There is so much character work being laid continuously throughout the film that it might be easy to see it as just aux chatter, and that would be a damned shame.
“the mise en scene includes several reverential gazes from black characters toward Lincoln.”
I would imagine that Lincoln received quite a few reverential gazes from black Americans in his day. The movie certainly doesn’t make it out that blacks universally revered him.
May I say I’m not happy with the way Django has unleashed all the Tarantino hatuhs who seize on its disappointments to jeer that he was never any good. But as a QT admirer, I do wonder why DU features the least interesting, most one-dimensional female character he’s ever written. Kerry Washington spends the movie playing a cipher, and that’s not Kerry Washington’s fault. Normally, Quentin dotes on the gals like few directors this side of Almodovar, but something hung him up here.
The fucking internet, man…
“It just disappoints me to see a longstanding myth about Ford being perpetuated in the crudest terms by a couple establishment figures…”
I think jbryant covered this topic quite well upthread on the previous page.
Wagon Master is one of my Top Ten Films of All-Time, but that doesn’t mean Ford wasn’t also a creature of his times. It’s pretty rare even for quite good folk not to be creatures of their times. I mean, since Lincoln has crept onto this thread, it’s worth remembering that the Great Emancipator himself said some pretty racist things during his life.
In short, one can love Ford without thinking him a sanctified saint. Much as one can love Tarantino without thinking him the second coming of Jesus. (Hell, I think D.W. Griffith was a great filmmaker, occasionally execrable politics aside.)
Now, Katherine Bigelow, following her early Near Dark, Blue Steel, and Point Break triumphs, has been both an abominable filmmaker AND abominable in political terms, which makes her far less defendable. But that’s a whole ‘nother thread, if I remember the rules correctly…
“…in the crudest terms…”
Also, worth remembering that Tarantino’s schtick, ever since the beginning, has been to paint damn EVERYTHING in the crudest possible terms. And it’s been working out pretty damn well.
Some artists work quite exquisitely with broad brush strokes. We need them as much as we need the more subtle folks.
(And I’ve got to thank Quentin’s S&S list for making me go seek out Rolling Thunder. Even more broad brush stroke fun than I’d been expecting.)
I never said Ford was a saint. He certainly wasn’t. I wouldn’t even seek to excuse his faults on the basis that he was a creature of his times. There were plenty of artists in Ford’s era whose record is much cleaner when it comes to the question of racial politics. On the other hand, as Glenn has pointed out, Ford was actually one of the few Hollywood filmmakers of that era to actively confront the realities of racial injustice in his work. As conflicted and compromised as he may have been, he was ultimately more (and more often) anti-racist than he was racist.
But Tarantino didn’t even say Ford was a “creature of his times”. That would be one thing. He said he hates Ford (a dubious claim when he appropriates the last image of “The Searchers” so lovingly in the wedding scene in “Kill Bill”) and that Ford “put on a Klan uniform, and rode to black subjugation.” That’s just bullshit. There’s no two ways about it. And when Tarantino is giving an interview to Henry Louis Gates Jr. for The Root, the artist provocateur excuse doesn’t wash, because the élite forum endows his words with an aura of authority, seriousness and respectability. What little credibility Tarantino had once as a disreputable figure has evaporated at this point. He’s the establishment as much as any other pundit – no better than George Will.
I recently got hold of a copy of George Steiner’s great “The Guns of Navarone meets The Wages of Fear” novel, The Portage from San Cristobal of A.H., where a bunch of vengeful Nazi-hunting Holocaust survivors track down an ancient, half-starved, disease-riddled Adolf Hitler in his hut in a remote corner of the Amazon and try to bring him safely back to stand trial in Israel. It seemed weirdly like a pre-emptive riposte (from 1979 or so) to Tarantino’s vengeful odyssey against the worst people in the world (rapists, Nazis, slavers) and his desire to do Very Bad Things to them.
Finally caught Django, and geez, I thought it was great. Too long, sure, but massively interesting as well as completely fun. I thought it was more about the appeal of narratives of violent retribution than the actual 19th century (I was maybe the only person in the theater who laughed at the ultra-70s zoom over the “1858” title card), but it explored the subject in interesting and constantly evolving ways. And I definitely side with Marche about which movie is truer to the era: though DU is cheerfully fast and loose with historical facts, it’s infinitely truer to the thick, bubbling stew of brutality and intimacy that defined race in 19th century America than Spielberg’s sickening liberal politeness.
Saw “Django Unchained.” I’d rank it with “Jackie Brown” as mid-level Tarantino: better than “Kill Bill” and “Death-Proof,” but not as good as “Reservoir Dogs,” “Pulp Fiction” or “Inglorious Basterds.” It’s not a great film, but it held my attention for all 3 hours.
The film’s violence has been criticized, but the gore is so cartoonishly exaggerated – as in the spaghetti westerns it emulates – I couldn’t take it very seriously, or get offended by it. Like Eastwood’s Man With No Name, Django never misses a shot, while the bad guys – who are supposed to be fearsome killers – can’t hit the side of a barn.
The best acting is done by DiCaprio as the foppish plantation owner, and Samuel L. Jackson as the grinning “house n—-r” who is really in charge. These scenes are transgressive and outrageous, and perversely funny. I don’t think I’ve seen anything so grotesque since “Birth of a Nation.” A lot of the air goes out of the movie when DiCaprio departs. After that, it’s just one bloody gunfight after another.
As for “Django“ ‘s 500 or so uses of the N‑word … The sad fact is: that’s how people talked in 1858. And a lot of people were still talking that way, 100 years later. It would have been unrealistic to have these characters say “black” or “African American,” or even “colored.”
OTOH, some of the dialogue is not true to the period. I doubt anyone in 1858 said, “What’s not to like?”
“Django” can be seen as the anti-“Birth of a Nation,” and the anti-“Gone With the Wind.” Maybe it took a white guy from the South – Tarantino was born in Knoxville, Tennessee – to make a corrective to those earlier films that romanticized the Old South.
http://www.nextmovie.com/blog/quentin-tarantino-revenge-fantasy-his…
Quentin Tarantino’s next 5 historical revenge movies.
Sorry to be necromancing the thread– especially with a number of great pieces and discussions as of late!– but I’ve been thinking about something “D” said on December 31 since, well, December 31, which is this:
“Also, when Thaddeus Stevens gets into bed with his common-law wife, the two-shot is narrowed down to a close-up on the white character, rendering superfluous the black character who had just shared the screen moments ago.”
What I think you’re trying to say here is that the narrowing was motivated, consciously or subconsciously, by a need to push a black character off the screen. That it was in some way a racist gesture. (Please correct me if I’m misreading you.)
I disagree with that idea rather strongly. It seems to me that it is motivated by the scene’s function in the film. Stevens, perhaps the most important character other than Lincoln, has just achieved his life’s work. He is taking a moment to realize that, to bask in it a little, to reflect on it. He has overcome adversity; his compromise– in which he said words that were anathema to him– was not for naught.
This is the quiet scene after the jubilant victory; this is the hero having accomplished what he has strived for. OF COURSE the scene progresses to a tight close-up– the tightest close-up, if I recall correctly, that Stevens has. If the shot stayed wide, it would have far less emotional impact. The tight close-up punctuates the moment. It is the period at the end of the sentence– it is the shot that ends Stevens’s arc and bids him farewell.
This is Hollywood Filmmaking 101, and after all, that’s what Spielberg is good at– well-mounted films that are composed, edited, scored, and directed for maximum emotional impact. I’ll say that there are other kinds of filmmaking that are more interesting to me, but I don’t expect them from Spielberg. What I expect from him is good, classical Hollywood storytelling; I expect every shot and cut to be made with a purpose.
That’s what he did; that’s what the close-up *is*. And I really don’t know what else to say to someone who would read that close-up as something sinister.
Tom: I have no idea of the motivation behind the shot about which I posted. In my writing, I generally do not try to determine motivations since I do not think they can be determined (and when I do go down this path, I alert my readers that I am engaging in speculation). Rather through the practice of close reading, I was trying to situate the shot in the web of meanings, discourses and ideologies in which I experienced it.
The link below is to an article which describes better than I can the passive and stereotypical representation of African-Americans in the film:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/13/opinion/in-spielbergs-lincoln-passive-black-characters.html
Two important quotes:
“… LINCOLN helps perpetuate the notion that African Americans have offered little of substance to their own liberation”
and
“… Stevens literally hands the official copy of the 13th Amendment to Smith, before the two head into bed together — reveals, once again, the film’s determination to see emancipation as a gift from white people to black people, not as a social transformation in which African-Americans themselves played a role.”
It is the enunciation of black passivity found in the film that informs my understanding of the shot we are discussing. You are correct that the shot is – in one aspect – an example of Hollywood 101 filmmaking. But the shot is deployed within the context of a film that elides black agency – which the shot does as well in addition to focusing on the hero – in this case a white man, reinforcing the white agency/black passivity dichotomy the film traffics in.
A spectator can choose to see the shot as an example of Hollywood filmmaking tropes and nothing more. She can also, as I do, look to see how this shot connects to the larger ideological representations in the film. I do not think there is anything sinister in this practice. As stated above, it is just an example of critical close reading.
I see what you’re saying, Mr. D, and what Ms. Masur’s op-ed piece is saying, to a degree.
At the same time– I don’t think the film is really about slavery, but about the passing of the 13th Amendment by the House of Representatives. It is a legislative procedural, set at a time in which the legislature was wholly and sadly white and male. As far as twisting the necessary arms and promising the necessary jobs to get the necessary votes goes, there was not, to my understanding, a whole lot of black agency going on.
If the film was about slavery, and the struggle to end it in the United States, Lincoln, the House, and the 13th Amendment would be just the tail-end of a very long film stretching over hundreds of years. The evil of slavery gives the proceedings its moral urgency, but it’s not *about* the evil of slavery, or the way both whites and blacks worked to end it. It’s about the proceedings themselves– the sausage-making of politics.
It’s like “1776”– up until “Lincoln”, I think, the finest legislative procedural ever made– which is not really about the struggle for American independence, or even the things that pushed (and enticed) its declaration. It’s about the dirty, nasty verbal bloodsport of politics, about compromises and egos, about von Bismarck’s old chestnut (some hundred years before he said it) that politics is the art of what is possible.
I think given its genre, a “critical close reading” of LINCOLN as a film that institutionally elides black agency in the ending of slavery is something of a non-sequitor, really– like faulting Coppola’s excellent MARIE ANTOINETTE for not focusing on the moral outrages that led to the French Revolution. Neither film is “about” these things; is it really kosher to be calling them to task for not being something that were never meant to be?
Compare this to garbage like THE HELP, which pretends to being about the civil rights movement and I think does elide black agency (or at the very least makes it insultingly secondary to white agency).
That’s my two cents anyway.
Yeah, I’m not sure how much black agency there was during the time of the events depicted in LINCOLN. Blacks had no power and no civil rights at the time. It was pretty much up to the whites in power to make the necessary changes. Obviously, I’m simplifying, and don’t mean to imply that all black people were sitting idly by waiting for change. But as Tom Russell points out, LINCOLN covers a very specific set of events in a very specific time frame.