Acclaimed American director Spike Lee had to hold himself back from screaming at the screen when he went to see The Patriot. He has slated the film as Hollywood propaganda, DUNCAN CAMPELL reports.
Spike Lee, the United States’s best-known and most outspoken black film director, has accused the makers of The Patriot, a film about the fight for American independence, of producing a criminally distorted view of history. He has attacked the film for ignoring the issues of slavery and mocked its finale as “laughable”.
Lee’s broadside against the film, which stars Mel Gibson, came in the form of a letter to the Hollywood Reporter, the entertainment industry’s daily. He said that he and his wife had gone to see the film and that he had come out of the cinema “fuming” after having to hold himself back from shouting at the screen.
He wrote that the founding fathers George Washington and Thomas Jefferson owned numerous slaves yet Gibson’s character apparently was not a slaveholder. He called the film “pure, blatant American Hollywood propaganda”.
Lee, the director of Malcolm X, Do the Right Thing and Jungle Fever among others, has often attacked the Hollywood ethos of film-making but rarely in such a specific way.
“When talking about the history of this great country,” he wrote, “one can never forget that America was built upon the genocide of the Native Americans and the enslavement of African people. To say otherwise is criminal.
“DW Griffith was a racist and Leni Riefenstahl a ‘so-called reformed Nazi’ but The Birth of a Nation and Triumph of the Will were made by great film-makers. To have Gibson’s character doing a one-man Iwo Jima broken-field run through the ‘Nazi’-like British with the 13-star American flag held high is laughable.” (Earlier this year, the prestigious director’s prize named after Griffith had its name changed because of his racist views and the fact that The Birth of a Nation had acted as a recruiting agent for the Ku Klux Klan.)
Lee said that he kept wondering where the slaves were and who was picking the cotton. “Where were the Native Americans? Did the two Johns – Ford and Wayne – wipe them out already? Why have the film critics ignored this in their reviews?”
While the film has attracted some criticism for the way in which most of the Britons are portrayed as sadistic child-killers while the American militiamen are saintly, as well as for the violence which involves children using guns on the British troops, Lee’s attack is the first from a leading figure in the industry. It follows attacks from the British about the way the history of World War II is gradually being rewritten to give Americans a more prominent role in key events.