The ANNOTICO
Report
Of course 4 Black
GIs didn't win WWII, But Spike Lee
Might like you to think so, in his latest Film.
I am a Fanatic
Obama supporter, who I believe represents a New Generation of Race
Relations, and is focused forward on how we can all Together build a better
Future, (If we can only stop those Greedy Republicans) rather than like
the old generation of Blacks that are mired in past injustices, similar to the
Holocaust Industry that are so mired in the past, that they can not see, or are
willing to do anything about the Slavery/Genocide they deride is NOW
happening in Darfur, Rwanda, etc, etc.
But, I
particularly resent Spike Lee who has historically Negatively Portrayed
Italians, and is so hypocritical to resent SUPPOSED Inaccurate Portrayals of
Blacks, to the point that he uses a cruel Italian Tragedy "The Massacre at
Sant'Anna
di Stazzema, to as he says to bring attention to the unsung role
African-Americans played in WWII.
Well Spike,
"UNSUNG" ???? You would
have been better off using Viet
Nam or even the Iraq War, because, in WWII, was
NOT a good example, since EXTREMELY FEW Blacks served in COMBAT
ROLES.
As a matter of
Fact, of the 405,399 US Military killed in WWII, ONLY
773 Blacks were killed in action (That's two
tenths of one percent - previously reported erroneously as 1.4% of U.S. total.
500,000 Blacks served in NON Combat Roles
Additionally the
92nd Battalion you use as an example had fallen under criticism. http://www.historynet.com/african-american-92nd-infantry-division-fought-in-italy-during-world-war-ii.htm
Spike, you're pride has completely distorted your perspective.
You stand the chance of being as embarrassed as the SUPPOSED Documentary "The Liberators: Fighting on Two Fronts in
WWII" that first aired on November 11, 1993 in a gala
premiere at Harlem's
Apollo Theatre. The film attempted to show that Blacks of the Black 761st
Tank Battalion had liberated Jews from Labor camps at Dachau
and Buchenwald. This claim was challenged by a
14 page Report by the American Jewish Committee, and article in The
New Republic, and contradictory testimony from some of the soldiers, and
the Film was WITHDRAWN. http://members.aol.com/klove01/soldr761.htm
Spike, you’re Singing the
Wrong Tune.
Spike Lee Puts Up a Fight
After knocking
the industry for forgetting black troops the director offers his own take on WWII
Boston Globe
By
Ty Burr, September 21, 2008
TORONTO - ..."Miracle at St.
Anna" - Lee's World War II
movie - is arriving at the Toronto Film Festival, and the director has caught a
6 a.m. flight from New York
to be present at its premiere. The
film is Lee's shot at bringing
attention to the unsung role African-Americans played in the war and in all our
country's conflicts.
It's also, curiously, his attempt at
making an Italian neo-realist film. Like most born directors, Lee sees the
world through two lenses, one labeled "movies," the other
"everything else."
"Miracle,"
which is based on a 2001 novel by James McBride, tells of four members of
the US Army's all-black 92nd
Infantry Division, a.k.a. the "Buffalo Soldiers," as they get
stranded behind enemy lines in Tuscany, Italy, during the fall of 1944. The
film stars Derek Luke, Michael Ealy, Laz Alon so, and Omar Benson
Miller as the GIs, and Valentina Cervi
and Pierfrancesco Favino as
Italian partisans. Its
dramatic climax is the real-life massacre of 560 innocent civilians - mostly
women, children, and the elderly - in the village of Sant'Anna
di Stazzema by a retreating Nazi SS regiment.
It wouldn't be a Spike Lee "joint" without a public
ruckus, of course. At a press conference at the Cannes Film Festival last May,
the director took Clint Eastwood to task for the all-white casting of his WWII
films, saying "Eastwood made two films about Iwo
Jima that ran for more than four hours total, and there was not
one Negro actor on the screen." A predictable media kerfuffle ensued, and
Eastwood rather ingraciously instructed Lee to
"shut his face" in an interview in England's
The Guardian.
Now it's time for Spike to put up. The morning of his
movie's world premiere in Toronto, Lee sat in a Bay Street bistro, rubbed the New York sand out of his
eyes, and warmed to the subject.
Q. Did you watch war films
growing up?
A. I loved
war films. My brothers and I used to watch war films all the time.
Q. Any of them stick with you
in terms of filmmaking?
A. Well, I didn't know I wanted to be a filmmaker when I was a kid!
We were 8, 9 years old, people would be getting shot, killed, blown up - we'd laugh about it. I didn't
know I wanted to be a filmmaker until the summer between my sophomore and
junior years at Morehouse College down in Georgia.
Q. Did you have any awareness
as a child that these movies were all-white?
A. Oh, yeah, because my
father's older brothers drove trucks
in WWII. They were in the Red
Ball Express in Europe: As
Patton's Fifth Army was advancing, it was going so fast, it went beyond the supply
lines. So they organized this group of black drivers to be a constant
caravan to keep Patton's army going.
Food, ammunition, fuel -... [RAA; Spike, 25% were NON Black, it was in
operation 3 months, and they were Truck Drivers, NOT Tank Drivers
!!!!!]. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Ball_Express
Q. There's a movie there.
A. That's
right. There's
a whole lot of movies. Anyway, we knew that. That's
why we were happy to see Jim Brown in "The Dirty Dozen."
Q. Had you been
wanting to make a war movie?
A. Yes! Ever
since I wanted to be a filmmaker. I wanted to make a film in Italy, too, since I began visiting Italy in 1986.
So when I read this great novel by James McBride, it was a gift - now I could
knock out two with one stone.
Q. Did you lean on the book a
lot or do your own research?
A. Any type of film I do, I
try to become a student of that subject matter. We watched a lot of war films
but I think this film has a direct lineage to the postwar Italian neo-realist
movies of [Vittorio] De Sica and Roberto Rossellini.
Films like "Rome, Open City,"
"Miracle in Milan,"
"Shoeshine," "Paisan,"
"Germany Year Zero," "Bellissima,"
films like that. Our pre-production was in Rome, at Cinecitta,
so we got prints of those films. Most people have only seen them on VHS or DVD,
so it was a great opportunity to see the original black-and-white prints.
Q. Did that influence the
movie's look?
A. No, it was more of a
reference point, to let people know that we're
not doing something that's never
been done before. That's the
foundation I wanted to build the film on.
Q. Does the influence of
those films show up in the depiction of the Italians?
A. Oh, yes, I think so. It
definitely shows up in the kid, Matteo [Sciabordi],
who plays Angelo. If you look at all those films I named, one of the elements
is that a key character is usually a child, and you see the effect of a war on
children.
Q. When you were shooting in Tuscany, did you hear
about the reality of WWII?
A. Oh, yes, many people would
come up to us and say they were children during WWII, when the Buffalo Soldiers
liberated their village. We shot in many locations where the events took place.
For instance, the opening battle sequence at the Serchio River, we shot there. And also the
massacre, which took place Aug. 12, 1944, 560 innocent Italian civilians were
slaughtered by the SS sechzehn division. That
scene was shot in the same place. That's
the church; they were executed in front of that church.
Q. How do you shoot a battle
scene so that it's fresh?
A. Well, it's going to be fresh to me because I've never done that before. Also, we understood this
was not going to be the first 45 minutes of "Saving Private Ryan."
This was not the invasion of Normandy.
This is a small battle that took place between the Nazis and the 92nd
division. Yet people still died. I had a great military adviser named Billy Budd, and I looked at a lot of stuff with my
fantastic cinematographer, Matty Libatique.
We sat down, storyboarded it, and shot the hell out of it.
Q. The Eastwood flap: What
did that say to you about how WWII movies are perceived by the media, by Hollywood, and by the
public?
A. Well, I wasn't really thinking about perception. The first thing
I said at Cannes
is that Clint Eastwood is a great filmmaker. And I was just pointing out the
fact that there were no African-American soldiers in that film. Now, there's a United States Marine, ex-Marine, his name's Thomas McFadden. I drove down to San
Diego, put him on tape: He was at Iwo Jima.
He was at the first photo. The pipe they put the flag in they got from him. He
said there was nothing but black soldiers watching that photo get taken. They
were there.
Did any
African-Americans help raise the flag in those two photos? No. But they were on the
island. Was the Army segregated at that time? Yes. But were black and white
soldiers fighting and dying side by side when those Japanese started jumping
out of those holes and tunnels? Yes.
It was not meant
as an attack on Clint Eastwood. It was just stating a fact. Clint Eastwood has
not made every other Hollywood film that has
omitted the contribution of African-American men and women to the war effort. I
think it's a great omission. I'm glad that George Lucas is going to be producing a
film about the Tuskegee Airmen. It starts shooting in the spring and is going
to be called "Red Tails." And there's a lot of other stories, too: There's the Red Ball Express, there was a black tank
division - I think the 761st - that saved Patton's
butt in the Battle
of the Bulge.
The thing about
it, though - these are patriotic movies. It's
easy to pick up a gun and fight for your country when you have your full
rights.
I think it's even more patriotic to be fighting for the red,
white, and blue when you still can't
vote. When there's still
segregation, when there's still Jim
Crow, when you're still being
lynched. It wasn't in the novel, but
that's why I had James McBride write
that flashback scene [in the base camp diner].
Put yourself in
their shoes. You're a young black
man, a young Negro, who has enlisted. The Japanese have bombed Pearl Harbor, United States
declares war on Japan and Germany. You're being shipped to the South, since that's where most of the base camps are. It's a little known fact that thousands and thousands
of German POWs were shipped back to the states to be imprisoned. And many of
them are sent to the South, where they shared the bases with black soldiers. So
you're a black soldier, you believe
in red, white, and blue, you want to help defend this country against fascism.
You look on the other side of the camp and the people you're
being trained to kill have better housing than you, better food, and better
medical care. That's insane. That's completely insane.
There's a key line in this film, a debate between Derek
Luke's character and Michael Ealy's
character, and Luke's character
says, "This is about the future." They might not have thought about
it, but all the stuff that has happened, the black men that have fought in the
Revolutionary War, the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, World War I, World
War II, Dr. King, Rosa Parks, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Jesse
Jackson, Sojourner Truth, W. Dubois, Booker T. Washington - all these things
that happened in the history of this country have made it possible for a person
like Barack Obama to be possibly the next president of the United States of
America. Now this cannot happen in any other country but the good old USA. That's why I think this film fits in with this new vibe
that's in the air......
http://www.boston.com/ae/movies/articles/2008/09/21/spike_lee_puts_up_a_fight/?page=full