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Blind and Black Oedipus King of Thebes, Funny 
The children of Mitchell Brook Primary School:
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It is hard, but we must do it anyway.
I think that audiences would very quickly appreciate the ‘underlying humanity’ aspect of the thing. Each character could have some kind of dice roll for physical characteristics whilst maintaining the characters underlying social programming.
Moustache twirling Eskimo Allied Commanders, Villainous and vain Azteca SS Oberst-Gruppenführer, Drunk and rousing Polynesian Winston Churchill, Embattled and speechifying Nigerian Hitler…
Really it would have to be random though so as not to use any unconscious associations.
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Yeah, but honestly, if people are getting their history from movies, that’s not the best way to go about it, anyway. Since we’ve already Godwinned this thread by bringing up the nazis, just look at the films about the Holocaust. With few exceptions, most of them are pretty sanitized and hollywood-ified. I can only think of a few that give an accurate sense of what the actually event was - bloody, violent, mass murder of millions of human beings and all that means. Films like the Grey Zone or Black Book are closer to reality, I think (even Bent, though it’s much more like a play, than a film), but Schindler’s List is guilty of all the problems with Hollywood films, and that was a widely hailed and popular movie that probably gives people their image of the Holocaust, more than any other movie. It’s not that you can’t tell a historically accurate story via a movie, it’s just that Hollywood (which, let’s face it, still dominates the global marketplace for films) doesn’t often do that.
But going out of your way to make things historically inaccurate, but still true (in the sense of storytelling, not facts) is likely what Hollywood could do best. So, that’s my point. We really shouldn’t get our history from films. Rarely are they accurate, especially when they are recounting the past.
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I think a lot would depend on how it would be handled - I can imagine certain ways of having a cast of a highly racially charged narrative that doesn’t discriminate on colour, as a technique to highlight other aspects of the story - a slave plantation with slaves and masters of no particular race or of reversed race, for example. As a general policy though, I can’t see the point.
Black Book is an interesting story, as it shakes up the comfortable narrative of Nazis as unspeakably evil and the resistance as good, also introducing some intersection to the mix. Where it comes to sanitizing the holocaust, I think La Vita è Bella does that to good effect - the humour forces you to continue to see the lives and dignity of the main characters as vital, even through the dehumanising effects of the internment. The death at the end gets to me in a way other deaths in Schindler’s List don’t, even though you don’t even see it.
What truth would that share? I’m coming to this discussion from the perspective of a translator, although filmmaking and translation do follow different rules. How would you justify the removal of race as an element that was central to the original narrative? What would you replace it with? Why base it on a historical narrative when you could probably make a more engaging fictional narrative with echoes of historical events (Children of Men is fairly diverse, for example)/ Why tell a false colour narrative to challenge assumptions when there are many true colour narratives that could do the same thing and not just rehash stories that we’ve heard too much already?
Must? I doubt it.
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Should I have said ‘it is impossible and yet we must do it’?
I’m not sure I’m missing a reference because I don’t see casting cross-ethnic casts when roles are specifically ethnic as a needed thing.
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This is a good line of thinking. We have to ask why white people are in all the key roles and why our western culture enforces that paradigm. My answer is that it goes back to Greek tragedies, where people went to the open theater for entertainment and escape and the birth of identifying with a character. Which goes back even further to the hero’s journey and the use of myth to drive society.
So, it has two sides. It happens because as a culture we developed it that way to maximize our pleasure as white people. On one hand,we cannot just take away all the white protagonists, or white audiences would cease to derive that same escape and identification factor. But we also can no longer support the extent to which whites are in those roles when most of those roles would be perfectly fine with a non white. So it is a curious thing, isn’t it?
I’m with you on Idris Elba. He’d be great.
Realisation of innate humanity and meditation practice?
I’ll get me coat.
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I’m sorry but if I’m watching a movie about Nazis, for example, if half the cast is Chinese, I’m going to wonder if it is a parody. It’s destroys any suspension of disbelief.
That said, I perfectly agree that the default race for any role in a new production that isn’t replicating a very specific time and place shouldn’t be “white.” It shouldn’t be “Hey, you’re Chinese but the script doesn’t call for a Chinese actor.” It should be “Well, the script doesn’t define any ethnicity and this is a contemporary American urban show, so whatever.”
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Well, maybe not half… 1/6th to 1/7th and they would have to be randomised throughout the cast in order to maintain a fair balance of representation insofar as it pertains to their numeracy in world population figures.
And yes, I agree wholeheartedly with your sentiment concerning modern productions, but I’d like to see that same dynamic re-purposed for period pieces where it is so out of place as to become a narrative device in and of itself.
For example, the script could concern itself with finding the humanity inherent in the characters even though they represent traditionally ‘bad guys’. The difficult mire of motivations and circumstances that propel people to do what can sometimes be waved away as ‘evil’ could be explored in a much more magnified fashion if such a device were employed. One would have a constant reminder of the theme and furthermore a point against which common tropes could be levered to achieve some interesting evocations of underlying human traits.
The incongruity would become an artifice that offset the difficulty in attaching human emotions and motivations to characters that in normal circumstances the audience would have no motivation to attempt to explore. And I’m sure it could be cunningly employed in other fashions along the same lines as I’ve proposed highlighted.
But I really thought that was embedded in the initial suggestion so apologies if I’ve made undue assumption in that respect.
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It’s the MPAA’s influence; one of their key tactics in pursuing their agenda is to minimise the possibility of viewers empathising with folks who are at all ‘weird’. See This Film Has Not Yet Been Rated.
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Except that the modern concept of whiteness is pretty new. I doubt the greeks thought of themselves as white and I’d also argue that our embrace of greek/roman culture as “western” in the modern sense is rather new historically. We’ve “whitened” the greeks into the modern sense.
Why do you think white people can’t enjoy culture that isn’t white?
Yes, Idris Elba for everything!
But I think doing so has the effect of reminding us that movies are entertainment, not historical reenactments. [ETA] But we can also understand truth-telling of a different nature, which is why films can still be valuable cultural things.
I have seen that, and I agree with you about their influence. It’s kind of nuts. More people should be put their films out without a rating and see what happens. If someone big did it, like for the next star wars film, would they not show it across the country? It would be an interesting experiment.
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No I’m just using the word white in a modern sense not saying the cultures are the same from era to era. It’s white as in America white, specifically USA white. Spanish from Spain are white and Irish from Ireland are white and there’s no way any one could say they are the same, or should. The point is that keeping it all white is as stupid as turning it all non white. Yes, whites can appreciate non, and everyone else is forced to appreciate white. I’m explicating why it exists and is such a force.
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