Zeit-bites: Song of the South
Timing it perfectly with the release of Disney+, Karina Longworth has released a new season of her podcast,
This time, it’s all about Disney’s most controversial (and hidden) film.
I’ll let Longworth, writing on the podcast website, explain: ‘‘The one film promised to remain locked away [from Disney+] is Song of the South, the 1946 animation/live-action hybrid set on a postCivil War plantation.
‘‘What is Song of the South? Why did Disney make it, even amidst protests? And why have they held the actual film from release for the past 30-plus years, while finding other ways to profit off of it?’’
Why indeed. Song of the South, based on the Uncle Remus folk stories of American author
Joel Chandler Harris, centres on a group of characters named Brer Rabbit, Brer Fox and Brer Bear (the ‘‘brer’’ being African-American English for ‘‘brother’’, a dialect of English that’s used throughout the stories and film). They’re widely considered obnoxious caricatures of African-Americans.
That’s not just my do-gooder, modern perspective talking. The film was railed against at the time for being full of nasty stereotypes and the way that, despite being nominally set after emancipation, it seems to portray pre-civil war slavery as a delightful romance lost forever because of the nasty the war.
If you’re old enough, you might remember seeing the film in 1986, when Disney briefly re-released it. But since then, the film has been on lockdown.
Now, Longworth is yanking back the Disney modesty curtain to let in the light and, frankly, I cannot get enough of it.
Her podcasts are the stuff of nerdy film-buff legend and in-depth social histories.
They are deep dives into Hollywood’s first 100 years with films, stars and events given broad, cultural perspectives.
In the past, she’s tackled such thorny topics as Hollywood’s preponderance for Dead Blondes ,to fact-checking Kenneth Anger’s lurid tell-all Hollywood Babylon. She’s also given the 1969 murder of Sharon Tate historical and social context in the excellent series Charles Manson’s Hollywood (a podcast that was almost required listening for anyone wanting to understand Quentin Tarantino’s ode to Tinseltown, Once Upon a Time In Hollywood).
Now she’s turned her piercing eye and dulcet tones on what she describes as ‘‘the most controversial film in the history of Disney animation’’, surely one of Hollywood’s most cringe-worthy stories. Don’t miss it.
Doctor Zhivago’s Lara Antipova.
The Secrets We Kept is divided into two main parts: alternating sections headed East and West that track Pasternak-related events in the then-USSR and corresponding activity in the CIA through the second half of the 1950s.
Pasternak’s novel was a pawn in the Cold War game, and Lara Prescott tells this story in an energetic and readable way, particularly highlighting the roles played by women on both sides of the Iron Curtain.