‘Gone With the Wind’ returns to HBO Max with prologue about racist information

“Gone With the Wind” is no more time gone from HBO Max, obtaining been restored to the streaming service’s library with a new prologue about the film’s problematic themes and depictionof the antebellum South.

Jacqueline Stewart, host of TCM’s “Silent Sunday Nights” and a professor in the Section of Cinema and Media Research at the University of Chicago, qualified prospects the 4 ½-moment intro, which starts off with a basic cinematic lesson — recounting the eight Academy Awards (such as for Very best Image) received in 1939 by the “highly anticipated” adaptation of Margaret Mitchell’s novel, as perfectly as its inflation-modified standing as the optimum-grossing movie of all time.

Then, Stewart acknowledges that the film “was not universally praised,” seeing as it “paints the photo of the antebellum South as a ‘romantic, idyllic placing which is tragically been lost to the previous.’”

Stewart notes how producer David O. Selznick certain the NAACP at the time that he was “sensitive to the inner thoughts of minority peoples,” but proceeded to deliver a film that depicts a “world of grace and splendor, without having acknowledging the brutalities of the method of chattel slavery on which this entire world is based.” Stewart suggests that “the treatment method of this earth as a result of the lens of nostalgia denies the horrors of slavery as very well its legacies of racial inequality.”

Stewart concedes that whilst viewing “Gone With the Wind” “can be awkward, even distressing,” “it is essential that vintage Hollywood films are out there to us in their initial form” to “invite viewers to mirror on their have beliefs when observing them now.”

“’Gone With the Wind,’ with its landmark output values, signature scenes and iconic characters has shaped the way generations have pictured slavery and the reconstruction interval that adopted,” she suggests in summary. “It is not only a significant document of Hollywood’s racist practices of the previous, but also an enduring perform of well-liked culture that speaks straight to the racial inequalities that persist in media and culture currently.”